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What
did Christianity tell people about their relations with the
environment? Christianity inherited from Judaism not only a concept of
time as nonrepetitive and linear but also a striking story of creation.
By gradual stages a loving and all-powerful God had created light and
darkness, the heavenly bodies, the earth and all its plants, animals,
birds, and fishes. Finally, God had created Adam and, as an
afterthought, Eve to keep man from being lonely. Man named all the
animals, thus establishing his dominance over them. God planned all of
this explicitly for man's benefit and rule: no item in the physical
creation had any purpose save to serve man’s purposes. And,
although man’s body is made of clay, he is not simply part of
nature: he is made in God's image.
Especially
in its Western form, Christianity is the most anthropocentric religion
the world has seen. As early as the 2nd century, both Tertullian and
Saint Irenaeus of Lyons were insisting that when God shaped Adam he was
foreshadowing the image of the incarnate Christ, the Second Adam. Man
shares, in great measure, God's transcendence of nature. Christianity,
in absolute contrast to ancient paganism and Asia’s religions
(except, perhaps, Zorastrianism), not only established a dualism of man
and nature but also insisted that it is God's will that man exploit
nature for his proper ends.
In
Antiquity every tree, every spring, every stream, every hill had its
own genius loci, its guardian spirit. These spirits
were accessible to men, but were very unlike men; centaurs, fauns, and
mermaids show their ambivalence. Before one cut a tree, mined a
mountain, or dammed a brook, it was important to placate the spirit in
charge of that particular situation, and to keep it placated. By
destroying pagan animism, Christianity made it possible to exploit
nature in a mood of indifference to the feelings of natural objects.
It
is often said that for animism the Church substituted the cult of
saints. True; but the cult of saints is functionally quite different
from animism. The saint is not in natural objects; he may have special
shrines, but his citizenship is in heaven. The spirits in natural
objects, which formerly had protected nature from man, evaporated.
Man’s effective monopoly on spirit in this world was
confirmed, and the old inhibitions to the exploitation of nature
crumbled.
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Even
when we try to bring religious influence to bear on these issues, we
find that our religious traditions have little relevance to what is
happening. Our Western religions exist in a different world, a world of
covenant relations with the divine, a world little concerned with the
natural environment or with the Earth community. Our sacred community
is seen primarily as one concerned with human-divine relations, with
little attraction toward a shared community existence within the larger
world of the living. Our iconoclasm is such that we can hardly think of
ourselves within a multi-species community or consider that this
community of the natural world is the primary locus for the meeting of
the divine and the human.
One
study done at YaleUniversity found that the more extensively people
participate in religious activities, the less likely they are to be
concerned with the natural world. The pathos of the human, described so
extensively in the prophetic writings, seems to exhaust our religious
energies. Religious attention is directed toward moral conduct, social
injustice, pietistic practices, and interior meditation experiences.
[In
Antiquity] the human experienced itself in integral relationship with
the surrounding forces of the universe. Human activities were modelled
on the functioning of the larger community of life. Everything
possessed its own life principle, its own subjective mode of
self-expression. Humans and animals and plants and all natural
phenomena were integral within the larger community. There was no
‘it’ in our sense of the word. Every being and
every phenomenon was experienced as a ‘thou’.
To
alter this primordial sense of continuity throughout the universe seems
to have been the basic purpose of biblical revelation. Within the
biblical context, the continuity of divine presence with the natural
world was altered by establishing the divine as a transcendent
personality creating a world entirely distinct from itself. In
addition, the continuity of the divine with the human was altered by
the establishment of a covenant relationship based on a juridic model.
The continuity between the human community and the natural world was
altered by identifying the human as a spiritual being in contrast to
all other beings. Only the human really belonged to the sacred
community of the redeemed. The previous sense of a multi-species
community was diminished.
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