Ecology

BRUCE FOLTZ

Etiologies of environmental crisis often indict Christianity for privileging divine transcendence at the expense of God’s immanence in nature, leaving the world bereft of divine presence and vulnerable to human exploitation. And if human beings are created “in the image of God” (Gen. 1.27), they too would possess this transcen­dent, extra-worldly status, encouraging an “arrogant” and even “violent” attitude toward nature (White 1973). But this alle­gation, anticipated in the 19th century by Feuerbach and Nietzsche, overlooks deep divergences between Eastern and Western Christianity, long predating the Great Schism of 1054. For as British historian Steven Runciman has shown, there are from the beginning striking differences between East and West in cultural values, sociopolitical realities, and even differing theological capacities of the Greek and Latin languages (Runciman 2005: 8). More­over, the first and most influential scholar to blame Christianity for environmental crisis, historian Lynn White Jr., emphasized that his criticisms applied only to the Latin West, noting that “in the Greek East, nature was conceived primarily as a symbolic sys­tem through which God speaks to men.... This view of nature was essentially artistic rather than scientific” (White 1973: 88). Finally, it was within Western Christendom that the technologies generating environ­mental problems were fashioned and perfected. So it may be important to under­stand how the different views and sensibil­ities of the Christian East – more poetic than logical, more liturgical and sacramen­tal than juridical, better characterized by the Byzantine dome bringing heaven down to earth than by the Gothic spires pointing away from earth toward heaven – support a different, and perhaps more salutary, understanding of creation than Western Christianity.

BYZANTINE THEOLOGY AND SPIRITUALITY

Orthodoxy’s understanding of the natural environment must be sought in relation to its spirituality, rather than through its theology taken as a self-sufficient enter­prise. For as is often noted, the thought of the Eastern Church is so deeply rooted in ascetic practice and spiritual vision that it is best characterized as “mystical theology” (Lossky 1991). Only the theologian drawing upon first-hand experience of theological realities is recognized as authentic, in contrast to those merely demonstrating scholarly erudition or intellectual achieve­ment. Hence the otherwise surprising state­ment of the contemporary Elder Aimilianos of Mount Athos that “through a life of prayer and participation in the mysteries of the Church, each one of us may become a theologian” (Aimilianos 2009). Nor does the Orthodox East recognize the distinction between “laity” and “religious” that came to prevail in Latin Christianity: the robust spirituality pursued by monastics does not follow from a division of labor, but rather serves as the exemplar to which all should aspire, in whatever degree may be possible. Most of its great theologians have been monastics, typically choosing to sur­round themselves with wilderness rather than cultured cloisters, and it was in the deserts of Egypt and the Sinai, of Palestine and Syria, and the wild highlands of the Cappadocian Plateau, that the roots of Orthodox spirituality and its distinctive relation to the natural environment were established in the 4th and 5th centuries. It was, for example, in the rugged mountains of Egypt’s Eastern Desert, near the Red Sea, that the celebrated exchange with St. Anthony the Great, the first great Chris­tian monastic, gave us (long before Galileo, and for very different reasons) the powerful image of nature as a book: “A certain phi­losopher asked St. Anthony: ‘Father, how can you be happy when you are deprived of the consolation of books?’ Anthony replied. ‘My book, O philosopher, is the nature of created things, and any time I want to read the words of God, the book is before me’” (Merton 1961: 62). Less well known is an exhortation cited in the Philokalia, where St. Anthony explains what it takes to “read the words of God” in nature: “let us purify our mind [nous], for I believe that when the nous is completely pure and is in its natural state, it sees more clearly... since the Lord reveals things to it” (Palmer et al. I: 194; italics added). For Orthodox spirituality and the­ology, then, askesis (spiritual discipline, “asceticism” in the broadest sense) and a life that sees and understands creation in a divine light are inseparable. As put by Evagrius, and others afterwards, the prac­tice of the virtues and the purification (katharsis) of mind or consciousness (nous) prepares the soul for a certain illu­mination (theoria) by means of divine grace, i.e., allows us to see nature differently, more truly – permits the “contemplation of the divine in nature” (Palmer et al. I: 57, 61f.). “The soul’s apprehension of the nature of things changes in accordance with its own inner state,” states 11th- century Byzantine monk and mystic Niketas Stethatos, and only if our cognitive faculties once again operate naturally, i.e., “according to nature,” will we grasp “the inner essence” of things “as they are according to nature”; only to the natural, ascetically purified soul will the “natural beauty [of things] exalt it to an understand­ing of their Maker” (Palmer et al. IV: 92; italics added).

DIVINE ESSENCE AND DIVINE ENERGIES

Only subsequently, then, does theological reflection emerge to articulate and clarify this noetic seeing. And the most important intellectual resource in Eastern Orthodoxy for understanding this kind of seeing (theoria) is the critical distinction between divine essence or substance (ousia) and divine energy or activity (energeia), since it elucidates how we can apprehend this divine light in nature at all. For does Scripture not enjoin that no one can see God and live? (Ex. 33.20; Jn. 1.18). The Byzantine East, however, understands this inaccessibility as referring to the divine Essence, what God is in himself, God as God understands himself, the very sub­stance or beingness (ousia) of God; and more emphatically than the Christian West, it affirms that no creature (human or angelic) can comprehend or apprehend the divine essence, either in this life or the next. It remains radically transcendent, profoundly and eternally mysterious. But meanwhile, Orthodoxy also maintains that the divine energies or activities (energeiai) surround us everywhere at all times, perme­ating all creation, accessible in all things to those prepared to receive them. This distinction, then, revealed within its spiri­tual practice, long remaining unknown in the Latin West, and ultimately rejected by the Scholastics, has allowed the East to preserve divine transcendence more per­fectly than the West, while encouraging the experience of radical immanence of God in nature, without risking pantheistic implica­tions; for it is the divine energies (which being God, are nevertheless uncreated) that can be encountered, never the divine essence. The mystical experience of God in nature, then, the encounter with radical immanence that issues from a powerful sacramental sensibility, is not only tolerated in the Orthodox East, but regarded as salutary and even normative. To the purified heart, it is believed, created nature speaks everywhere of its Creator, not as an inferred conclusion, but as a living intuition.

LOGOI OF CREATION AND CONTEMPLATION OF NATURE (THEORIA PHYSIKE)

The second concept vital to Orthodoxy’s understanding of the natural world con­cerns the logos or inner principle unique to every created being, each mirroring in its own way the Eternal Logos through whom all things are created. These logoi are not forms or ideas (eide) in the Platonic sense, for both Plato and Aristotle understand such forms as universals, applicable to many things in general, but not to any one in particular. And Western European thought has consistently ratified the Platonic claim that what is intelligible in a particular being is just its form, i.e., some­thing general or universal, with the corol­lary that whatever is unique and singular is unintelligible, apart from some additional universal concept that would render it comprehensible. This has led to an increas­ing divergence between poetic discourse, always inclining toward the local and par­ticular – the universal as embodied in this time and place, in this particular individual being – and the conceptual discourses of the sciences, which seek knowledge only within universal laws, i.e., abstractions that bring to our lived experience of the world a reductionist predilection threatening to betray what it seeks to comprehend. In contrast, the Byzantine understanding maintains that every leaf and twig, every breeze that caresses the skin or bites the cheek, expresses something particular yet intelligible and eternal, a logos that manifests something unique and un­repeatable about the Eternal Logos who for Christian experience is Christ himself, the Son of the Father. Logos in Greek is something said, an audible “word” or “saying” or “meaning,” and each logos embodies in one moment of creation something that God himself has willed to say, a singular iteration of the Word “by Whom all things were made,” according to Nicea.

This concept of the logoi of creation is best developed in St. Maximos the Con­fessor, a 7th-century monk who comple­ted an unsurpassed synthesis of Byzantine thought. Maximos maintained that the logoi correspond to what he calls theoria physike – the “natural contemplation,” or purified and perspicacious “seeing,” of the logoi embodied in nature. Thus, as the environmental movement in America was inaugurated by poets and writers and artists, and only later embraced by scien­tists, it is possible that figures such as Thoreau and Muir, both deeply religious, while critical of how Western Christianity regarded creation, expounded a spiritual perspective analogous to the Christian East, indigenous advocates of theoria physike. Nor should this “natural contemplation” be seen as something exotic or specialized, but as St. Athanasius argued in Against the Hellenes, simply as moving toward a restored reception of that original revelation through which the Creator has sought to remind us of himself, by means of the beauty of the kosmos (Athanasius 1999). The logoi, then, as Eastern Christians, and perhaps also certain environmental writers have sug­gested, are themselves what St. Anthony called “the word of God in nature,” the intended objects of theoria physike, i.e., of our simple contemplation of the divine energies at work in the natural world around us.

COSMIC REDEMPTION, THE ICONICITY OF CREATION, AND THE PRIESTHOOD OF HUMANITY

Byzantine thought and spirituality speak to present-day realities of ecological disorder differently from the cybernetic model (which, parallel to modern political thought since Hobbes and Machiavelli, is based upon the concept of control; Greek: kyberne, “to steer”) which the science of ecology generally employs in its ecosystemic ontology of nature. For the Orthodox, con­cern is with our lived relation to the cosmic dimensions of the Fall, maintaining the teaching of the ancient church that human sinfulness has disordered and distorted not only our own human reality, but also the kosmos, or “manifestly beautiful order” that silently surrounds it, an intuition acquiring new plausibility with the impending threat of global climate change. Thus, a tension between two seemingly contradictory understandings is discernable. On the one hand, the created world is God’s first reve­lation, fashioned and ordered so that its beauty would recall us everywhere to its Creator, as St. Athanasius insisted. But at the same time, creation is disordered through the same human fall from divine grace that prevents us from apprehending what St. Isaac of Syria called “the glory of God hidden in creatures.” Orthodoxy understands creation as a cosmic liturgy, as reflected in the poetry and iconography of the church celebrating earth and heaven alike as participants in God’s great salvific deeds. Christ is both born and resurrected within the earth which “offers itself” to him, i.e., within caves; his baptism blesses and sanctifies not only the Jordan river, but simultaneously all of nature; at his trium­phal entry into Jerusalem, the very stones of the earth strain to cry out in joy; at his death the heavens darken and the earth rends itself. On the other hand, nature for the most part does not (as the Byzantine icon is fashioned to do) open up for us a view to divine realities at all, but rather serves as a great, idolatrous mirror of our own desires, as St. Athanasius argued. Spiritual practice and ascetic purification, then, reconcile this dichotomy, not through a conceptual synthesis but as a task to be undertaken by each believer. This sacra­mental undertaking, in turn, is thought possible only because through his incarna­tion and resurrection Christ has already joined together heaven and earth, visible and invisible, reinstituting the cosmic priesthood to which humanity was origi­nally ordained, and which it once exercised naively and prophetically, when Adam and Eve walked and spoke with God in the cool of the evening, enjoying the “primordial proximity to all existence, when we still nestled close to the life of nature” (Florensky 2002: 134). Nor has it been overlooked by contemporary Orthodox theologians that an “ecological asceticism,” entailing not only spiritual purification but also simplified lifestyle, is needed if a sustainable environment is to be possible in the future (Zizioulas 1996).

It is increasingly recognized that Ortho­dox theology and spirituality may offer a deeper, more critical approach to environ­mental issues than analyses oriented pri­marily by the positive sciences, which even in their framing of the issues, exhibit a “naturalistic” bias, regarding humanity as just one animal species among others, inhabiting neither the oikonomos (shared world) nor the kosmos (ordered universe), but merely its own specific “ecological” niche, just as the common tick blindly inhabits its environment of mammalian blood, to use the favored example of German biologist Jakob von Uexkull, who coined the term “environment” (Umwelt). In the 20th century, Russian thinkers like Florensky and Bulgakov developed, somewhat controversially, the notion of Divine Sophia (based upon the Old Testa­ment Wisdom Books, as well as Slavonic liturgical and iconographical practice) to further elucidate the experience of divine immanence within the created world. In contemporary Greek theology, Yannaras and Zizioulas have articulated an embodied understanding of “person” that radically embraces the creaturely, relational element of human existence, while the Romanian theologian Dumitru Staniloae has empha­sized (following Maximos) the deeply cosmic elements of Christian theology. The Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I, through environmental writings and eco­logical initiatives, has earned worldwide acclaim and the designation of “Green Patriarch.” Thus, if the current environ­mental crisis is less a problem for formal ethics than a crisis of lived ethos, then the solution may ultimately lie not in new con­ceptual schemata, nor even less in techno­logical fixes, but in the lives of believers who, finding God in all things, manifest a certain comportment toward creation, a gentle and merciful attitude suggested in the West primarily by St. Francis, but in the East perennially embodied in holy men and women since the early desert fathers (St. Zosima of Palestine with his lion, St. Seraphim of Russia with his bear, St. Innocent of Alaska with his eagle, Elder Paisius of Greece with his snakes) that might save not only the created order, but ourselves as well. In the resonant words of St. Isaac of Syria:

An elder was once asked, “What is a compassionate heart?” He replied: “It is a heart on fire for the whole of creation, for humanity, for the birds, for the animals, for demons and for all that exists. At the recollection and at the sight of them such a person’s eyes overflow with tears owing to the vehemence of the compassion which grips his heart.... This is why he constantly offers up prayers full of tears, even for the irrational animals and for the enemies of truth, even for those who harm him.... He even prays for the reptiles as a result of the great compassion which is poured out beyond measure – after the likeness of God – in his heart.” (Isaac of Syria 1989: 29)

SEE ALSO: Deification; Ethics; St. Gregory Palamas (1296–1359); St. Maximos the Con­fessor (580–662); Soteriology.

REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS

Aimilianos of Simonopetra (2009) The Way of the Spirit: Reflections on Life in God, trans. M. Simonopetrites. Athens: Indiktos.

Athanasius (1999) Against the Heathen, trans. A. Robertson, in P. Schaff and H. Wace (eds.) Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 4: Atha­nasius: Select Works and Letters, 2nd series. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, pp. 4–30.

Chryssavgis, J. (1999) Beyond the Shattered Image. Minneapolis: Light and Life.

Chryssavgis, J. (2000) “The World of the Icon and Creation: An Orthodox Perspective on Ecology and Pneumatology,” in D. Hessel and R. Ruether (eds.) Christianity and Ecology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Chryssavgis, J. (ed.) (2009) Cosmic Grace, Humble Prayer: The Ecological Vision of the Green Patriarch Bartholomew I. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.

Clement, O. (1993) “The Glory of God Hidden in His Creatures,” in The Roots of Christian Mysticism. Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, pp. 213–29.

Florensky, P. (1997) The Pillar and Ground of the Truth: An Essay in Orthodox Theodicy in Twelve Letters, trans. B. Jakim. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Florensky, P. (2002) Beyond Vision: Essays on the Perception of Art, ed. N. Misler. London: Reaktion Books.

Foltz, B. V. (2001) “Nature Godly and Beautiful: The Iconic Earth,” Research in Phenomenology 31, 1: 113–55.

Foltz, B. V (2006) “The Resurrection of Nature: Environmental Metaphysics in Sergei Bulgakov’s Philosophy of Economy,” Philosophy and Theology 18, 1: 121–41.

Isaac of Syria (1989) Daily Readings with St. Isaac of Syria, trans. S. Brock, ed. A. M. Allchin. Springfield, IL: Templegate.

Keselopoulos, A. G. (2001) Manand the Environment: A Study of St. Symeon the New Theologian. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press.

Lossky, V. (1991) The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press.

Merton, T. (ed.) (1961) The Wisdom of the Desert: Sayings from the Desert Fathers of the Fourth Century. New York: New Directions.

Palmer, G. E. H., Sherrard, P., and Ware, K. (trans.) (1979–95) The Philokalia, compiled by St. Nikodimos of the Holy Mountain and St. Makarios of Corinth, vols. 1–4. London: Faber and Faber.

Runciman, S. (2005) The Eastern Schism: A Study of the Papacy and the Eastern Churches During the XIth and XIIth Centuries. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock.

Sherrard, P. (1992) Human Image, World Image: The Death and Resurrection of Sacred Cosmology. Ipswich: Golgonooza Press.

Staniloae, D. (2000) The Experience of God: Orthodox Dogmatic Theology, Vol. 2: The World: Creation and Deification, trans. I. Ionita and R. Barringer. Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press.

Theokritoff, E. (2009) Living in God’s Creation: Orthodox Perspectives on Ecology. Yonkers, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press.

Thunberg, L. (1995) Microcosm and Mediator: The Theological Anthropology of Maximus the Confessor. Chicago: Open Court.

Vasileios, Archimandrite (1996) Ecology and Monasticism, trans. C. Kokenes. Montreal: Alexander Press.

White, L., Jr. (1973) “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis,” in The Dynamo and Virgin Reconsidered: Essays in the Dynamism of Western Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Yannaras, C. (2007) Person and Eros, trans. N. Russell. Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press.

Zizioulas, J. (1989–90) “Preserving God’s Creation: Three Lectures on Theology and Ecology,” King’s Theological Review 12: 1–5, 41–5; 13: 1–5.

Zizioulas, J. (1996) “Ecological Asceticism: A Cultural Revolution,” United Nations Environment Program, Our Planet 7, 6.