Book list

Two books that changed my life and the way I think about and act in the world:

Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Emil Frankl

Creative Disobedience by Dorothee Soelle (previously titled in English “Beyond Mere Obedience”)

St Francis of Assisi

The second of the two sections I had to cut out from the afore mentioned paper. Here I refuted White’s statement that St Francis of Assisi represent a viable alternative to the dominant Western Christian attitude towards nature.

                White’s posited Christian alternative to what he perceives to be the dominant, and ecologically detrimental, Western Christian attitude toward nature, St Francis of Assisi, does not represent the hope for a modern environmentally-conscious Christianity that White supposes. While Francis’ life is remarkable in the history of Western Christianity for his loving all creation equally, the environmentalism of St Francis (if indeed that term can be applied, since our modern concern for ecological balance and species survival was not present in Francis’ thought) is far from sufficient to address the concerns of the world today. The sentiment that creation, from the lowliest animal to the very Sun, exists in a fraternity of the love of God, and that all God’s creations are symbols of Him, such as is evident in St Francis’ Canticle of the Creatures, while suitable as a vehicle for spiritual development, does not translate into positive action. St Francis’ attitude more closely resembles that of White’s preferred model of sainthood: the contemplative Eastern[1] Christian Saint.[2]

                However, the problems facing the world today cannot be stopped by the pleasant inaction of the contemplative Saint. Though it is possible that had the larger Western Christian tradition adopted St Francis’ attitude toward the natural world, we would not be in the ecological crisis in which we find ourselves.[3] However, the damage, regardless of its cause, is done, and an attitude of action,[4] framed within a new paradigm for Christian thought, is necessary if we are to hope to un-do that damage.

 

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[1] White uses the terms “Greek,” or the “Greek East,” in contradistinction to “Latin,” or the “Latin West,” however this nomenclature is imprecise, and fails to cover the diversity of Eastern Orthodoxy (the communion to which White presumably refers, whether he means to exclude Eastern Catholicism, Oriental Orthodoxy, and other Eastern Christianities is uncertain)

[2] White, Roots, 1206

[3] Justly so, it is possible that we would also not enjoy the standard of living nor level of technological advancement that we do today

[4] The quality of Western models of Sainthood which White decries; White, Roots, 1206

Medieval neo-Platonic monism

I wrote a paper last semester called “Detriment and Responsibility: The Culpability of Christianity for the World’s Ecological Crisis and the Way Forward.” It was for my course on Philosophy of Religion, on the topic of Religion and Ecology. Specifically, I was responding to the seminal 1967 paper by historian Lynn White: The Historical Roots of our Ecologic Crisis. White’s thesis is, in brief, that Christianity is responsible for the environmental (his word is “ecologic”) crisis facing the world today, because Christianity inherently seperates humanity from nature. I argued against this view. Due to page limitations, there were two section which were more excurses than integral parts of my argument, so I thought I would share those two exerpts. This is the first.

It would be a mistake to assert that the dualism which White argues is the very source of the problem is present in all Western Christian thought. In fact, attempting to reconcile Christian theology with the revered categories of ancient Greek philosophy, the greatest minds of the Western Middle Ages posited a decidedly monistic relation of God to creation.[1] Drawing principally upon the categories of neo-Platonic metaphysics, and thus also on the assumptions of Plato’s monistic naturalism, such figures as Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Pseudo-Dionysius, and Nicholas of Cusa posited an ontology in which creation is spun out of the very stuff of God.[2]

Augustine soliloquizes to God in the Confessions: “[t]herefore, Thou spakest, and they [heaven, earth, the air, and the waters] were made, and in Thy Word[3] Thou madest them.”[4] To Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, “[a]ll things derive in hierarchical order from the Supre-Divine Godhead.”[5] Thus all of creation descends from the highest and most exalted height of God to the lowest material things, but never vitiating in substance. Thomas Aquinas, though attempting to operate within an Aristotelian framework, was Platonic in his interpretations. Thomas rationalizes cause as the First Cause, and thus the solution to the problem of causality that without an external cause the causal chain of creation would necessarily ad infinitum.[6] For Nicolas of Cusa, God contained within Himself all the “multiplicity of creation.”[7] Thus God both contains and transcends His creation.[8] This consubstantiality of God and creation is the very dialectical opposite of the dualism of God and creation that White argues was promulgated by medieval Christianity, even more so than a “nature as sacred” belief system, which is assumed to be the system of belief that White feels Christianity supplanted.[9]

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[1] John H. Gay, “Four Medieval Views of Creation,” Harvard Theological Review LVI (1963) 272.

[2] Ibid.

[3] The Word of God, second person of the Trinity

[4] Robert Maynard Hutchins ed., Edward Bouverie Pusey, trans., Great Books of the Western World: Augustine: The Confessions (Toronto: University of Chicago Press, 1952), 90.

[5] Gay, “Views,” 255.

[6] Gay, “Views,” 259-262.

[7] Gay, “Views,” 267.

[8] The similarity to modern panen-theism should not be overlooked.

[9] For under a “nature as sacred” belief system, the natural world can represent the divine, be home to the divine, and parts of it may even be themselves divine, but is Platonic monism then all creation, from humanity to the natural world to the stuff of the stars themselves, is made up ultimately of the very substance of the divine, and there is no material division between God and creation.

A thought on Hume

The short-coming of Hume’s arguments regarding human knowledge of the natural world lies in his confounding abstract concepts relating to properties of objects, such as taste and smell, with the objects themselves. The objects of human sense perception are not “things” which constitute integral aspects of objects; odour is not a part of an apple. Odour is the interpretation by the mind/brain of one possessing sense perception of physical properties of apples. The apple does not actually posses an “odour,” rather the apple’s cells stimulate the different sensory receptors in the nose, and those stimulations are interpreted by the human brain/mind as a sense perception called “smell.”