A New Awakening, Part 16

I have in this ongoing series been investigating the wisdom of myth as it informs what I call a potential "new awakening" of spirituality in our society. I take as one of my main reference points the book and PBS television series The Power of Myth, in which, during the mid-1980s, Bill Moyers interviewed at great length the scholar of comparative mythology Joseph Campbell.

Diane Rehm of NPR

President Obama, before leaving on his recent tour of Africa, gave an address laying out new administrative policies to address climate change. The World Bank similarly called for concrete steps to combat global warming. I heard one reporter, Ruth Marcus, speaking on the Diane Rehm show on National Public Radio, call Obama's plans "the sleeper story of the week" — in view of Supreme Court decisions affirming gay marital rights but casting a shadow over minority voting rights, and of the Senate's passage of a comprehensive immigration bill.

Granted that gay rights, the voting rights of ethnic minorities, and immigration are issues of the first rank, why does the environment rate below them in prominence? Why does having the president finally sign on to controversial, long-awaited climate initiatives deserve a "sleeper" designation? Why is the environment always number eleven on the top ten list of urgent areas of political concern?

Is this "the environment"?
Where are we humans?

There are all sorts of contributory reasons, but I think the root cause is revealed by a careful scrutiny of the word "environment." The word suggests that the world is neatly divided into two parts: us, and everything around us. Everything other than us is "the environment," meaning something that is akin to a house that we live in, but are not of. We can modify our house at will to suit our likes and dislikes, or we can let the whole thing fall down around us if we want. After all, a house is just a thing.

Our instrumentalist view of the world is, however, just an illusion fostered by our religious orientation, Joseph Campbell tells Bill Moyers in The Power of Myth. They are discussing the ubiquity of snakes and serpents in various cultures' creation myths. In other cultures, Campbell says, the serpent represents “immortal energy and consciousness engaged in the field of time, constantly throwing off death and being born again.” The serpent in those cultures does not betoken evil.

But that changes in the Genesis account of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden:

Genesis 3:1: "Now the serpent was more subtil
than any beast of the field which
the LORD God had made."

“MOYERS: In the Christian story the serpent is the seducer.

“CAMPBELL: That amounts to a refusal to affirm life. In the biblical tradition we have inherited, life is corrupt, and every natural impulse is sinful unless it has been circumcised or baptized. The serpent was the one who brought sin into the world. And the woman was the one who handed the apple to man. This identification of the woman with sin, of the serpent with sin, and thus of life with sin, is the twist that has been given to the whole story in the biblical myth and doctrine of the Fall. ... The idea in the biblical tradition of the Fall is that nature as we know it is corrupt, sex in itself is corrupt, and the female as the epitome of sex is a corrupter.”

Our culture has, of late, done a great deal to X-out the traditional ideas that sex is corrupt and that women, temptresses all, are corrupters of men. But the Genesis idea that nature itself has been corrupted by Original Sin continues to encourage us to treat the natural world as a somehow tainted thing that we can legitimately scorn and at the same time exploit.

But this view of nature inherently distorts our understanding of who we are and what our life is all about, in Campbell's view. We as a species spring, via evolution, from what we now characterize as "the environment." Campbell says that the Garden of Eden, in a myth-aware view, symbolizes a state of being that is prior to the splitting of a primordial, eternal, timeless unity into a series of pairs of opposites: man and woman, life and death, good and evil, and so on. Thus do we live in a world where everything has its opposite. In our world of time, and of death following life, says Campbell, “the essence of life is this eating of itself! Life lives on lives ... .”

Chief Seattle
of the Duwamish Indians

The spirituality of cultures outside the orbit of the Book of Genesis, Campbell tells Moyers, encourages “the reconciliation of mind to [these] conditions of life.” Genesis, though, points us as Peoples of the Book — as Jews, Christians, and Muslims — toward a life outside this temporal world. It is a longed-for life, but it is one in which we can no longer say, along with Chief Seattle:

“The perfumed flowers are our sisters. The bear, the deer, the great eagle, these are our brothers. The rocky crests, the juices in the meadow, the body heat of the pony, and man, all belong to the same family.”

If this world is not our true home, all of what Chief Seattle wrote is nonsense. But if our true home is right here in this Earthly Kingdom, we had better find ways of inflecting our traditional religions toward the urgency of saving and preserving our "environment." And that isn't going to happen, I don't believe, unless and until there is a new awakening of myth-aware spirituality in the land.

A New Awakening, Part 15

I have in this ongoing series been investigating the wisdom of myth as it informs what I call a potential "new awakening" of spirituality in our society. I take as one of my main reference points the book and PBS television series The Power of Myth, in which, during the mid-1980s, Bill Moyers interviewed at great length the scholar of comparative mythology Joseph Campbell.

What will it take to have a new awakening of spirituality — a devotion to a newly hatched myth of the society of the entire planet, precisely as the late Joseph Campbell envisioned?

Chief Seattle
of the Duwamish

To me, the answer is clear — or, rather, I see it intellectually, even if I don't yet live it spiritually. The answer is set forth eloquently in the famous letter the Indian chief Seattle wrote to the U.S. Government as a reply to its offer to purchase the land in the Pacific Northwest long lived on by the chief and his tribe of Native Americans, the Duwamish. Campbell reads that letter to Bill Moyers in The Power of Myth, having first stated, “Chief Seattle was one of the last spokesmen of the Paleolithic moral order.”

I take that to mean that we moderns of European descent have to cast our minds all the way back to the Stone Age — Old, not New — to locate our Old World ancestors who thought like Chief Seattle.

The Central Pacific's engine Jupiter
and the Union Pacific's engine No. 119
meet on May 10, 1869,  at Promontory Summit, Utah.

Seattle wrote his letter to the white man's government in about 1852, seventeen years before the first transcontinental railroad was completed and the hegemony of white men in North America was there and then cemented into place. But Chief Seattle, even if we weren't listening, had informed us:

We are part of the earth and it is part of us. The perfumed flowers are our sisters. The bear, the deer, the great eagle, these are our brothers. The rocky crests, the juices in the meadow, the body heat of the pony, and man, all belong to the same family.

Later in the letter, in these words, he elaborated:

Will you teach your children what we have taught our children? That the earth is our mother? What befalls the earth befalls all the sons of the earth.

This we know: the earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the earth. All things are connected like the blood that unites us all. Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.

One thing we know: our god is also your god. The earth is precious to him and to harm the earth is to heap contempt on its creator.

And finally:

As we are part of the land, you too are part of the land. This earth is precious to us. It is also precious to you. One thing we know: there is only one God. No man, be he Red Man or White Man, can be apart. We are brothers after all.

Thomas Harrison Matteson,
The Last of the Race, 1847

His key points are accordingly: that all of us are brothers (and sisters), the whole world round; that no people's God is more true than any other people's God; that there is a single web of life on this Earth that unites all people and natural things and makes them all sacred; and that if we despoil the Earth, we defile ourselves.

Well, we have despoiled the Earth. Look at any belching smokestack and say otherwise. Concomitantly, we have spiritually defiled ourselves: to wit, only a minority of us seem to care all that much about the despoliation of the planet.

I'm not even sure how much I myself really care.

How  too much CO₂
enters the atmosphere

After all, I look at that belching smokestack and imagine the coal that is being burned so that I personally can have the electricity I need to charge my iPad and run the computer I'm using to write this with. It bothers me that the CO₂ in the coal-fired smoke warms the planet and endangers Chief Seattle's (and our) delicate "web of life," a web in which my own life is but one single strand.

It bothers me, yes ... but it doesn't bother me enough.

I know intellectually that every part of nature connects to every other sacred part, but the reason that I don't know it spiritually is that I don't have — we don't yet have — a myth of the whole planet that informs us of that fact, deep in the marrow of our bones.

A New Awakening, Part 14

I have in this ongoing series been investigating the wisdom of myth as it informs what I call a potential "new awakening" of spirituality in our society. I take as one of my main reference points the book and PBS television series The Power of Myth, in which, during the mid-1980s, Bill Moyers interviewed at great length the scholar of comparative mythology Joseph Campbell.

Joseph Campbell tells Bill Moyers in The Power of Myth that a new mythology is needed today. Even Campbell doesn't know what precisely it will be:

“You can’t predict what a myth is going to be any more than you can predict what you’re going to dream tonight. Myths and dreams come from the same place. They come from realizations of some kind that have then to find expression in symbolic form.”

Planet Earth

Still, the broad outlines of what that new myth will be are plain. It will be, Campbell says, a mythology of the whole planet:

“And what it will have to deal with will be exactly what all myths have dealt with — the maturation of the individual, from dependency through adulthood, through maturity, and then to the exit; and then how to relate to this society and how to relate this society to the world of nature and the cosmos. That’s what the myths have all talked about, and what this one’s got to talk about. But the society that it’s got to talk about is the society of the planet. And until that gets going, you don’t have anything.”

"The society of the planet" is something of which Campbell's prognosticated mythic conception was dealt a near-mortal blow when al-Qaeda hijacked American jets and crashed them into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York on 9/11/2001.

New Amsterdam in 1664

Campbell's view that there is a planet-encompassing society a-forming, one which will be accompanied by an appropriate planet-wide mythos, is cosmopolitan — as cosmopolitan as New York City has historically been, actually and symbolically, since a Dutch colony called New Amsterdam was founded as a trading center on Manhattan Island in 1625.

I'd say we today remain collectively unmoored, spiritually speaking, so long as we don't yet have a myth of the whole planet serving to anchor us in a symbol-rich narrative of who we are today.

The headlines on this particular day find President Obama in Europe attending a summit of G-8 leaders at which they wish to discuss new trade agreements to promote mutual prosperity. They will likely find themselves distracted by scuffles over such matters as the two-year-old civil war in Syria, with its attendant spillover of refugees and angst into neighboring countries, including Greece as a portal into a wider Europe; the looming problem of global warming and climate change, which no one seems able to find the political will to address substantively; and other issues such as what to do about the lingering economic woes in Europe and the United States.

Ground Zero

At home, Obama is still wrestling, so far unsuccessfully, with how to fulfill his promise to close the prison for suspected Islamist terrorists at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. We quite understandably fear the rise of Islamism in today's world, which is our basic context for understanding recent events in Syria, in Libya, in Egypt, in Iran, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Bosnia. It is hard to dream big enough to generate a new mythos as long as we are haunted by the spectre of Ground Zero, no?

Islamism is not — repeat, not — representative of Islam, the great religion of which it is a demonic parody. Yet Islam is an Abrahamic religion rooted in the same prehistory that gave us the Hebrew and Christian scriptures. Campbell says of that scripture that it — unfortunately, if we need to radically change mythic course today — saddled us with a "biblical condemnation of nature”:

“God is separate from nature, and nature is condemned of God. It’s right there in Genesis: we are to be the masters of the world.”

If Biblical myth is holding us back today, what's the antidote? Campbell tells Moyers:

“But if you will think of ourselves as coming out of the earth, rather than having been thrown in here from somewhere else, you see that we are the earth, we are the consciousness of the earth. These are the eyes of the earth. And this is the voice of the earth.”

Gaia in Greek Mythology

Science has told us, Moyers mentions, of the Gaia Principle. Campbell calls it the notion of “the whole planet as an organism.” Gaia (pronounced GUY-uh or GAY-uh) was the Greek goddess of the Earth. The Gaia Principle is the somewhat controversial scientific hypothesis that all things on Earth, living or nonliving, are interconnected in such a way as to (says Wikipedia) form “a self-regulating, complex system that contributes to maintaining the conditions for life on the planet.” So when we humans get too big for our britches and start polluting the atmosphere with carbon dioxide, the oceans respond by taking up carbon and becoming more acidic — which is fine for some sea creatures but very bad for coral reefs.

If we see ourselves as "masters of the world," do we care about the odd coral reef here and there? We ought to. We are suffering from a spiritual "vitamin deficiency." We can't regain full health until we dream our new myth.

Yet we can't do that while the civilized world is fighting off jihadists at every turning, killers wedded to a twisted version of the old scriptural mythos that seems to nominate a singular, beloved-of-God "us" and an infidel "them," where the "them" must be stamped out by any means whatever. Jihadists insist on being "masters of the world" on their own bloody terms.

Meanwhile, Gaia herself is in huge trouble, climate-wise. Stay tuned for more fallout from that ...

Theology of Catholic Environmentalism, Part 3

In parts 1 and 2 of this Theology of Catholic Environmentalism series, I've challenged the claim made by Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum that President Obama's environ­mental policies stem from a "phony theology," one that amounts to a "worldview that elevates the Earth above man." Instead, I show that the teachings and theology of the Catholic Church — Santorum is a Catholic, as am I, though President Obama is not — form a sound basis for environmental concern.

The late Pope John Paul II was considered a conservative in his approach to Catholic teachings. Yet his 1991 encyclical Centesimus Annus abhors "the senseless destruction of the natural environment" and the fact that man "can make arbitrary use of the earth, subjecting it without restraint to his will, as though it did not have its own requisites and a prior God-given purpose, which man can indeed develop but must not betray." I take this as prime evidence that environmentalism can be entirely consistent with conservative Catholic faith.

What has become of our (in John Paul II's words from the encyclical) "wonder in the presence of being and of the beauty which enables one to see in visible things the message of the invisible God who created them"? One answer to that question lies at the heart of the argument made by the Thomas Berry, an ordained Passionist monk who died at age 94 in 2009, in such books as The Dream of the Earth. I have talked at length about this book by Berry in my The Dream of the Earth series of posts. Herein I'll look at the roots of Berry's thought in the Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas, written 1265–1274.

Berry writes:

This [awareness that the present economic system is too devastating to the natural fruitfulness of the earth to long supply human needs] is not a socialism on the national scale, nor is it an international socialism, it is a planetary socialism. It is a socialism based on the Summa Theologica of Saint Thomas, wherein he deals with the diversity of creatures. Beyond planetary socialism he proposes an ultimate universal socialism where he says that because the divine goodness "could not be adequately represented by one creature alone, he produced many and diverse creatures, and what was wanting in one in the representation of divine goodness might be supplied by another. For goodness, which in God is simple and uniform, in creatures is manifold and divided; and hence the whole universe together participates in divine goodness more perfectly, and represents it better than any single creature whatever." (p. 79)

Berry is referring to the question "Whether the multitude and distinction of things come from God?" that Aquinas takes up, in the First Part of his Summa, in the context of "Question 47. The distinction of things in general." Given that we believe that God is One, how can we reconcile with this belief the idea that the One God created the world (see Genesis chapter 1) as a "multitude and distinction of things"? Add to this the notion that He made one world, not many, and that within this world not all things are created equal and are found to exist across a variable range of "goodness," and you get a theological puzzle.

St. Thomas Aquinas
(1225-1274)

Aquinas shows in this regard that "the universe would not be perfect if only one grade of goodness were found in things." That is, it is not only possible but necessary for there to be distinctions of goodness in the creation made by God to reflect His perfect goodness. Only in that way, as Berry says, could "that what was wanting to one in the representation of the divine goodness [in the created world] might be supplied by another. For goodness, which in God is simple and uniform, in creatures is manifold and divided and hence the whole universe together participates the divine goodness more perfectly, and represents it better than any single creature whatever."

What, then, is "goodness"? It is whatever points toward the Supreme Good, i.e., God. To St. Thomas Aquinas, according to this discussion of the "good" in The Catholic Encyclopedia — see under "Scholastic Doctrine" — "God, the Supreme Being and the source of all other being is consequently the Supreme Good, and the goodness of creatures results from the diffusion of His goodness." The profusion of living creatures and of nonliving creations — our world's manifest diversity — reflects the "diffusion" of our Creator God's fundamental goodness into this world.

Today's Catholic theology is anchored in that of St. Thomas Aquinas, whom Pope Pius V in 1567 proclaimed a Doctor of the Church. So it is not only acceptable but entirely appropriate for Catholics to honor creation in its entirety — the "less good" creatures as well as the greater — even in the face of accusations of "elevating the Earth above man."

Theology of Catholic Environmentalism, Part 2

In Part 1 of this series, I set out to show that it is by no means "phony theology" to millions of Catholics such as I — and GOP presidential contender Rick Santorum also, who has used that phrase in advancing a markedly different view — to say that our Church teaches us (among all the many things it has to say) to have due concern for the natural environment.

In what way can the Catholic Church justify human environmental concern?

Ideas Drawn from Catholicism, by Fr. Richard P. McBrien

Father Richard P. McBrien's large compendium of the Catholic faith, Catholicism, contains an overview of the Church's thought concerning the environment.

In McBrien's chapter on "Foundations of Christian Morality," in his section on "The Relationship [of the Faithful] with the World: Stewardship," the author refers to (p. 948) the same words from Pope John Paul II's 1991 encyclical Centesimus Annus that I picked up on in Part 1 of this series, saying that the pope:

... refers ... to the "senseless destruction of the natural environment," rooted in the erroneous belief that we "can make arbitrary use of the earth, subjecting it without restraint to [our] will as though it did not have its own requisites and a prior God-given purpose, which humankind can develop but must not betray" ... . 

The pope reflects Catholicism's essentially sacramental vision when he deplores the human desire "to possess things" and our concomitant lack of an "aesthetic attitude that is born of wonder in the presence of being and of the beauty which enables one to see in visible things the message of the invisible God who created them. In this regard, humanity today must be conscious of its duties and obligations toward future generations" ... .

"Catholicism's essentially sacramental vision"? What does this phrase mean? In Catholic belief (according to McBrien's glossary) a "sacrament" is "a visible sign of God's invisible presence." In Catholic doctrine there are seven official sacraments — Baptism, Confirmation, Eucharist, Penance (a.k.a. "confession"), Marriage, Holy Orders (by which bishops, priests, and deacons are ordained), and the Anointing of the Sick (formerly, Extreme Unction; popularly, "last rites"). These seven sacraments shape the life of the Church and all its faithful. In addition, there is the broader "principle of sacramentality":

The fundamentally Catholic notion that all reality is potentially and in fact the bearer of God's presence and the instrument of divine action on our behalf.

Accordingly, there are "grace-bearing signs, e.g., holy water, a crucifix" that are duly called "sacramental." Officially, these do not "so fully express the nature of the Church as a [full-fledged] sacrament does," as they do not "carry the guarantee of grace associated with the seven sacraments."

We Catholics, then, are extremely sacramentally oriented.

Nature and Grace

Notice, above, the use of the words "nature" and "grace." The "nature of the Church" per se is clearly crucial to this discussion. So, too, is the Catholic idea of "grace" — and, by extension, the "nature" of the human person.

To understand what "grace" means to a Catholic, it is necessary to think broadly and comprehensively about ... well, about the nature of "nature." Fr. McBrien says in his section on "The Problem of Nature and Grace" (pp. 180-184) that, specifically, we need to inquire into human nature, for the Church has it that our God-given human nature must be, and is, "radically open to, and capable of receiving, grace" (p. 181).

What, then, is grace? According to Fr. McBrien, it's:

... essentially God's self-communication to us, and, secondarily, the effect(s) of that self-communication. (p. 180)

Our human existence "apart from God's self-communication and [its] divinizing effect(s)" can be thought of as, subject to further qualification, our basic "nature." We start out with an inbuilt need to receive God's self-revelation, and there is fundamentally that within us that is intrinsically capable of responding in the affirmative to it. That is our  basic "nature." God's "grace" lies in the fact that He does freely provide to us the self-communication that we can then freely accept ... or not.

There are, then, certain "grace-bearing signs" of God's self-communication. Some specific ones, such as holy water or a crucifix, are found in every Catholic Church or household. A fair question is: can we consider the whole of creation itself to be a "grace-bearing sign"?

A fair answer is: If creation — by which can be meant, variously, the world, the planet, the galaxy, the universe, the cosmos — can be experienced in a way that draws us toward Christ, it can be a sign of God's self-communicating grace. McBrien:

All creation is oriented toward the Covenant between God and the People of God, and the Covenant, in turn, toward the New Covenant grounded in the incarnation of the Son of God in Jesus Christ. The human community and the entire world in which the human community exists is oriented toward Christ and is sustained by him. ... There is no creation except in view of Christ. There is no Covenant except in view of Christ. There is no human existence, therefore, except in view of Christ and of our New Covenant in Christ. (pp. 181-182)

If it is so that "the entire world in which the human community exists is oriented toward Christ and is sustained by him," then the entire world may well be said to reveal to us God's offer of self-communicating grace.

Thomas Aquinas on Grace and Human Nature

Importantly, says Fr. McBrien, "Grace supposes the nature of the human person" (p. 182). This "Thomistic axiom" derives from the teachings of St. Thomas Aquinas in his Summa Theologica, written 1265–1274. Fr. McBrien says this about the axiom (p. 176):

Drawing upon Aristotle's notion of the final goal (telos) as determinative of all natures, Aquinas concluded that grace is absolutely necessary to human nature because, without it, the human person cannot achieve his or her end, namely, union with God. ...

 It was Aquinas who gave us the axiom, "Grace builds on human nature." Grace elevates and transforms human nature ... 

Clearly, God's creation itself can be an agent of this transformation. So creation — that which God has made — speaks to us of the nature of God Himself.

What Will Become of Creation?

I've just shown that our "final goal" as human persons — or, in Aristotle's Greek, our telos — is said by the Church to be "union with God." What about the telos of the rest of the created order? According to some Catholic thinkers, it, too, is divine union. The rest of creation, too, can be expected to be "divinized" at the end of time, according to this line of Catholic thought.

Along these lines, Fr. McBrien makes reference to (p. 184):

... recent theological efforts, stimulated by a dialogue with the natural sciences and the environmental movement, [which] are focusing more directly on the cosmos as the wider context for a theology of grace, emphasizing God's relationship with, and presence to, all forms of life on earth, in this universe, and beyond into the whole created order [by which I think McBrien means the cosmos per se: the universe in its sheer knowability].

Fr. McBrien continues:

One thinks here of the work of Thomas Berry (for example, Befriending the Earth: Theology of Reconciliation Between Humans and the Earth ... ). A similar approach is taken, but within an explicitly Christological framework, by Australian Catholic theologian Denis Edwards (Jesus and the Cosmos ... ).

Full disclosure: Denis Edwards and the late Thomas Berry are two theologians who have written from the theological left within the Catholic Church. I talk about another book by Berry, The Dream of the Earth, in this earlier series of posts. In my next post in this series, I'll have more to say about how Berry interprets the teachings of Thomas Aquinas. For now, here's a foretaste:

This [awareness that the present economic system is too devastating to the natural fruitfulness of the earth to long supply human needs] is not a socialism on the national scale, nor is it an international socialism, it is a planetary socialism. It is a socialism based on the Summa Theologica of Saint Thomas, wherein he deals with the diversity of creatures. Beyond planetary socialism he proposes an ultimate universal socialism where he says that because the divine goodness "could not be adequately represented by one creature alone, he produced many and diverse creatures, and what was wanting in one in the representation of divine goodness might be supplied by another. For goodness, which in God is simple and uniform, in creatures is manifold and divided; and hence the whole universe together participates in divine goodness more perfectly, and represents it better than any single creature whatever."

Whether or not we can accordingly infer that the manifold goodness of the world's biological diversity is "bound for glory" and is going to participate in our human telos of divine union, the teachings of Aquinas about the magnificent diversity of God's creatures should nevertheless give us pause.

Is Pope John Paul II right in saying we have "duties and obligations toward future generations," as concerns the natural world? Is there a "wonder in the presence of being and of the beauty which enables one to see in visible things the message of the invisible God who created them"? Then we as good Catholics need to tread lightly over, not trample, the earth and its ecological sustainability.

This is not a "worldview that elevates the Earth above man," as Rick Santorum has claimed. It is a worldview that insists on the sanctity of the Earth as a vessel of grace.

Theology of Catholic Environmentalism, Part 1

Rick Santorum
on Face the Nation

GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum, who is a fellow Catholic, recently spoke out nationally on CBS's Face the Nation against President Barack Obama’s stated climate concerns, claiming they expose the president's “phony theology.” According to this post at ThinkProgress Green, Santorum said on the CBS Sunday morning program that Obama's acceptance of climate scientists' warnings about the danger of global warming is a "worldview that elevates the Earth above man."

Santorum's full quote is:

When you have a worldview that elevates the Earth above man and says that we can’t take those resources because we’re going to harm the Earth; by things that frankly are just not scientifically proven, for example, the politicization of the whole global warming debate — this is all an attempt to, you know, to centralize power and to give more power to the government.

I object to what Santorum said on factual grounds as well as on practical grounds, but most importantly I dissent from him on theological grounds.

Re: my objections on factual grounds, see Global Warming Real After All, Says Former Scientific Skeptic to learn why even scientists who have been climate skeptics are coming around to the view that man-made global warming is not a bogeyman concocted by liberals as an excuse to give the government more power.

As for practical considerations, consider for example the ultra-deep Texas Drought of 2011. It was, I believe, an example of "global weirding," in which global warming is causing major changes in normal weather patterns. Some regions are getting heavier floods, others deeper droughts, others vanishing snowpacks and ice sheets, and yet others hurricanes and tropical storms in greater quantity and severity than ever before. Whatever God one believes in — if any — one would be foolish to ignore the practical problems climate change will pose for us all.

Basics of a Theology of Catholic Environmentalism

But I want to talk now mostly about the theology of climate change and environmental concern.

First of all, let me admit that many environmentalists often seem to "elevate the earth above man." I think the debate, though, is truly about the relationship that humankind has, or ought to have, with the earth — where "the earth" is taken to be synonymous with "nature" in general. My interest is in what Catholic theology has to say about this relationship. It is a relationship that depends, first and foremost, on humankind's relationship with our Creator, God, since God made the natural world and (through biological evolution) us.

Right away I want to register my skepticism that "elevating the earth above man" is really the aim of most environmentalists, as Santorum seems to suggest. Rather, my belief is that they — we — want to keep man's dominion over nature from turning into a disaster for both nature and man. That requires us to revolutionize our present stance with respect to nature, it is true. But it does not require us to elevate nature above legitimate human concerns. And it does not require us to replace standard religious doctrine with "phony theology."

As I begin investigating Catholic ideas about our proper relationship to nature, I hope to find support for my idea that it contradicts our basic theological commitments as Catholics if we ignore, sidestep, or minimize pressing environmental concerns. In particular, I'm hoping to discover through this inquiry that our Church's doctrine, with its customary grounding in natural law à la the Summa Theologica of Thomas Aquinas, furnishes a solid basis for a truly Catholic environmentalism.

However, before turning to Aquinas, I'd like to examine the basics.

Catechism of the Catholic Church and the Holy Bible

I'll start with the Catechism of the Catholic Church. Under the heading "Respect for the Integrity of Creation" we find:

2415 The seventh commandment ["You shall not steal"] enjoins respect for the integrity of creation. Animals, like plants and inanimate beings, are by nature destined for the common good of past, present, and future humanity.[194] Use of the mineral, vegetable, and animal resources of the universe cannot be divorced from respect for moral imperatives. Man's dominion over inanimate and other living beings granted by the Creator is not absolute; it is limited by concern for the quality of life of his neighbor, including generations to come; it requires a religious respect for the integrity of creation.[195]

Footnote 194 refers to Genesis 1:28-31 in the Holy Bible. For the sake of context, I'll cite those verses preceded by the previous pair:

26 

Then God said: Let us make human beings in our image, after our likeness. Let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, the tame animals, all the wild animals, and all the creatures that crawl on the earth. 

27 

God created mankind in his image;
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them. 

28 

God blessed them and God said to them: Be fertile and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it. Have dominion over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, and all the living things that crawl on the earth. 

29 

God also said: See, I give you every seed-bearing plant on all the earth and every tree that has seed-bearing fruit on it to be your food; 

30 

and to all the wild animals, all the birds of the air, and all the living creatures that crawl on the earth, I give all the green plants for food. And so it happened. 

31 

God looked at everything he had made, and found it very good. Evening came, and morning followed—the sixth day.

(This citation is from The New American Bible, Revised Edition, online here at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops website.)

"Being fertile." "Multiplying." "Filling the earth." "Subduing" it. "Having dominion" over it. It is here in scripture that these well-known divine commands are laid down. Clearly, humankind is given certain rights and responsibilities as the stewards of creation.

This, then, is not the same as viewing humanity as immersed in and indistinguishable from the natural order. Words like "subdue" and "dominion" make clear that other living things are not our equals. They are not at all the brother and sister creatures that some spiritual outlooks other than the Judeo-Christian may posit.

Yet, as the passage from the Catechism shows, there is a high level of respect due from us to other living things and toward nature. We have moral imperatives here, and our right of dominion is "limited by concern for the quality of life of [our] neighbor, including generations to come." If we abuse the gifts of nature, we harm our "neighbor," our posterity, and by extension our own selves.

Centesimus Annus

Footnote 198 of the Catechism passage refers to Centesimus Annus, Latin for "Hundredth Year," an encyclical written by Pope John Paul II in 1991 on the hundredth anniversary of Rerum Novarum. (The latter means "Of New Things." It is an encyclical written by Pope Leo XIII and issued on May 15, 1891.)

According to Wikipedia, Centesimus Annus "specifically examined contemporaneous political and economic issues" — most notably by presenting "a refutation of Marxist/communist ideology and a condemnation of the dictatorial regimes that practiced it" — and it "also expound[ed] on issues of social and economic justice."

John Paul II used Centesimus Annus to object to the rampant consumerism he abhorred in capitalist societies. In the passage cited by the Catechism footnote, he continued that thought by saying:

37. Equally worrying is the ecological question which accompanies the problem of consumerism and which is closely connected to it. In his desire to have and to enjoy rather than to be and to grow, man consumes the resources of the earth and his own life in an excessive and disordered way. At the root of the senseless destruction of the natural environment lies an anthropological error, which unfortunately is widespread in our day. Man, who discovers his capacity to transform and in a certain sense create the world through his own work, forgets that this is always based on God's prior and original gift of the things that are. Man thinks that he can make arbitrary use of the earth, subjecting it without restraint to his will, as though it did not have its own requisites and a prior God-given purpose, which man can indeed develop but must not betray. Instead of carrying out his role as a co-operator with God in the work of creation, man sets himself up in place of God and thus ends up provoking a rebellion on the part of nature, which is more tyrannized than governed by him. 

In all this, one notes first the poverty or narrowness of man's outlook, motivated as he is by a desire to possess things rather than to relate them to the truth, and lacking that disinterested, unselfish and aesthetic attitude that is born of wonder in the presence of being and of the beauty which enables one to see in visible things the message of the invisible God who created them. In this regard, humanity today must be conscious of its duties and obligations towards future generations. 

38. In addition to the irrational destruction of the natural environment, we must also mention the more serious destruction of the human environment, something which is by no means receiving the attention it deserves. Although people are rightly worried — though much less than they should be — about preserving the natural habitats of the various animal species threatened with extinction, because they realize that each of these species makes its particular contribution to the balance of nature in general, too little effort is made to safeguard the moral conditions for an authentic "human ecology". Not only has God given the earth to man, who must use it with respect for the original good purpose for which it was given to him, but man too is God's gift to man. He must therefore respect the natural and moral structure with which he has been endowed. In this context, mention should be made of the serious problems of modern urbanization, of the need for urban planning which is concerned with how people are to live, and of the attention which should be given to a "social ecology" of work. 

Man receives from God his essential dignity and with it the capacity to transcend every social order so as to move towards truth and goodness. But he is also conditioned by the social structure in which he lives, by the education he has received and by his environment. These elements can either help or hinder his living in accordance with the truth. The decisions which create a human environment can give rise to specific structures of sin which impede the full realization of those who are in any way oppressed by them. To destroy such structures and replace them with more authentic forms of living in community is a task which demands courage and patience.

(Underlined phrases above reflect italics in the original document.)

Environmentalists will generally agree with the late John Paul II that each of us typically "consumes the resources of the earth ... in an excessive and disordered way." We simply mustn't, says John Paul II, "make arbitrary use of the earth" in that way, because in doing so we traduce "God's prior and original gift of the things that are."

When this distinguished pope says, "Instead of carrying out his role as a co-operator with God in the work of creation, man sets himself up in place of God and thus ends up provoking a rebellion on the part of nature, which is more tyrannized than governed by him," he sounds like a radical environmentalist. This impression is augmented by his insistence on a "human ecology" which includes, he says, the need to offset the ravages of modern urbanization via urban planning. It also includes due concern for the "social ecology" of work.

Therein, possibly, lies a problem for the theology of Catholic environmentalism. "Work" includes, first and foremost in a modern capitalist economy like ours, what we do for a living: our jobs. Our jobs, many of them, help produce and deliver economic goods and services to feed our consumerist inclinations.

If we are to construct a "human environment" which would satisfy the ideals of Centesimus Annus, one thing we must do is to stop destroying and exhausting the "resources of the earth" — we must, in today's phrase, "go green." But doing so threatens our gross domestic product and our jobs. Car engines, to take one fairly recent example, once used carburetors. Today's engines use fuel injection, by virtue of which they burn less fuel. The switchover, which thankfully has already taken place, put people who made carburetors out of work. The GDP no longer includes carburetor production.

There are a lot of switchovers like that still to come, though, if we go green.

If "the truth" is that we need to go green, our being wedded to jobs and ingrained consumption patterns that "hinder [our] living in accordance with the truth" is a tall hurdle we'll need to leap. Yes, indeed, Your Late Holiness, there's no getting around it: "To destroy such structures and replace them with more authentic forms of living in community is a task which demands courage and patience."

One aspect of the courage that is needed is for us Catholics, Rick Santorum included, to accept that due concern for climate change is anything but "phony theology." In no way does it "elevate the Earth above man." In no way do we, if we are good Catholics, have the right to look the other way as humankind impoverishes Mother Nature.