The Travail of Nature

...A further basic but undiscussed issue is whether changing religious ideas and sensibilities are a cause or effect of changing ways of treating nature...

...The problems which I have with the book have to do with the larger issues which are presupposed but not adequately discussed...

...Santmire is generally convincing in his detailed readings of authors...

...It was guilty, according to White, of creating an attitude toward nature which over the long haul has made it impossible for humankind to live in balance with nature...

...As recently as late in the nineteenth century, Norwegian immigrant farmers in northern Iowa sowed with their heads bared out of a sense of reverence for what they were doing...

...He seems to equate a tendency toward world denial with the spirit of modern industrial capitalism...

...Santmire argues a somewhat different, but not totally contrary thesis: that the Christian theological tradition contains an ambiguous ecological promise...

...So what we have here is a book that does well what it does, but which leaves the most basic questions still to be addressed...

...The most basic issue has to do with the very definition of the problem...

...Texts on subduing the earth were taken to imply nothing more than the already achieved agricultural revolution and the ability to sail the Mediterranean...

...White found in Francis of Assisi an exception and an alternative, but this did not exonerate mainstream Christianity...

...The agricultural revolution took place ten thousand years ago, and with it went the possibility of living in passive harmony with nature...

...Christians did this for over a millennium, and at the end of that time were no nearer creating these things than they were at the beginning...

...The first of these leads almost almost inevitably to a nature-denying spirituality...

...Also, it is anything but clear that the problem is rooted in the view that humankind is the apex of creation...

...For there is simply no way, short of radical cultural lobotomy, that the human community can abandon its role of manipulator and exploiter of nature...

...Its only purpose is to serve human ends...

...The tragedy is that we have gone too much the way of the fourth Gospel, too little the way of Paul and Irenaeus...

...He is a careful reader of Irenaeus, Augustine, and many others, and he works with a sophisticated grasp of the issues in Pauline scholarship...

...What led small groups of Western Europeans to evolve an approach to nature that gave us, in complex interrelationship, the capitalist world economy, the scientific and industrial revolutions, plus a set of religious and broadly cultural revolutions, and indeed the ecological crisis...

...Because of the quality of what Santmire does do in this book, I hope that he will continue his work and address these more basic issues...

...But it seems to me that the problem is not that humans developed an extraordinary way of looking at things and have subsequently run amok...

...And though something of this tradition was picked up by the great Reformers, it has been sadly without advocates in more recent theology...

...I think that most of us would agree that the changes are most plausibly explained by changes in the way in which sowing is done and the images and metaphors that are reinforced by this way of doing things...

...whereas all they have in common is that neither involves a kind of nature mysticism...

...What precisely were the attitudes which led to the present ecological crisis...

...Perhaps misled here by the previous discussion, Santmire proceeds as though this were altogether obvious...

...JAMES F. McCUE teaches the history of theology at the University of Iowa...

...Scholars from many historical subdisciplines have been considering these questions since at least the beginning of the century, and we are still far from consensus...

...And this nature-obliterating spirituality is partly responsible for the ecological crisis because it does not protect nature by investing it with a value and integrity of its own...

...PATRICK JORDAN is an assistant editor of Commonweal...

...Santmire differs from White in arguing that St...

...It is possible to live with an an-thropocentric (in the sense that humankind is the center of creation) theology, with the idea that humans are to subdue nature, with a spiritualizing theology that at least implicitly leaves nature out of its eschatology, without creating an environmental crisis, modern capitalism, or nuclear weapons...

...His thesis is that there are present in early Christian writing three basic metaphors: the metaphors of ascent, of fecundity, and of migration to the promised land...

...Santmire then suggests ways in which this forgotten perspective might be reintegrated into contemporary theology...

...And it is assumed that it was the nature-denying tendency in Christianity that led to an unrestrained exploitation of nature...

...I share Santmire's view that the ecological issue is one of the central issues of our time...

...The last leads almost inevitably to a Christian vision which incorporates nature as something of ultimate significance before God...

...Francis was not an isolated phenomenon within the Christian tradition, but part of a stream that runs back through, among others, Augustine, Irenaeus, and Paul...

...It would seem much more the case that we are threatened by a view of things that can not even take humankind seriously, a view that in principle is unable to take seriously the human community as a whole or in its future development...

...The claim, which runs through the entire 4 October 1985: 539 Commonweal: 540 book, that there can be no satisfactory anthropocentric ecological ethic is, it seems to me, pernicious despite its surface attractiveness...

...we cannot even imagine what that would mean...

...Indeed the whole notion of "harmony with nature" requires serious inspection...

...Santmire does a good job of tracing Christian ideas on the place of nature in the ultimate disposition of things...

...Unfortunately, because Santmire conceives of the problem primarily in terms DANIEL CALLAHAN is the director of The Hastings Center (Institute of Society, Ethics, and the Life Sciences) in New York...

...that there are parts of the tradition that provide the resources for a rich theology of nature that would lead in a direction quite different from the one identified by White, but that at the same time there are important elements in the tradition that lead just where White said...

...Their descendants, still largely pious Lutherans, no longer approach matters this way...

...And these emphases are to be found not only in post-New Testament Christian writing: they distinguish the fourth Gospel and Hebrews from Paul and Colossians and Ephesians...

...and it is White who provides the point of departure for Santmire's study...

...Everything is reduced to an interplay among metaphors that were developed in classical form very early in Christian history...

...An-thropocentrism, the banishing of deities from field and forest, the alleged human lordship over all other creatures, all played their role...

...But this does not lead to a satisfactory answer to the question of the significance of Christian doctrine for the development of the peculiarly modern ecological problem...

...Rather, human beings have carried over attitudes that were "natural" in a time when human power over against the environment was altogether trivial to a time when our capacity to change that environment in irreversible and incalculable ways increases exponentially...

...James McCue IN 1967, Lynn White published a brief article in Science, "The Historical Roots "of Our Ecological Crisis," in which he argued that "orthodox Christian arrogance toward nature" played a major role in the genesis of the contemporary environmental crisis...

...bette S. WEIDMAN edited White on Red: Images of the American Indian (Kennikat...

...Santmire works out his position with great care and in considerable detail...

...There is an evident concern to get matters straight...

...One might wish to register a for-the-most-part a-greement...

...But is it...

...Also, he clearly writes as someone to whom the Christian tradition is of great importance...

...The second can go either way, in conjunction with either of the others...

...Though many others discussed this issue it was really White who put it on the intellectual map...

...It is just possible that Origenist theology was a key factor, but this is anything but obvious and cannot be merely asserted...

...What would be meant by it...

...of the conflict between world/nature denying and world/nature affirming versions of Christianity, he never actually looks closely at the times and the people in which this portentous novum was developing...

...and it seems highly doubtful that the change has come about because of changes in the theology taught in the seminaries serving this area...

...We cannot leave nature as God created it...