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The Burden of Guilt and the Imperative of Reform: Pope Francis and Patriarch Bartholomew Take Up the Challenge of Re-Spiritualizing Christianity in the Anthropocene Age

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 May 2017

Kevin Mongrain
Kevin Mongrain*
Affiliation:
Duquesne University
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Abstract

This article discusses the pro-environmental theology of two contemporary Christian leaders. The first is the current ecumenical patriarch of Constantinople, Bartholomew I. The second is Roman Catholicism's Pope Francis. Both leaders seek to support members of their respective churches who are working to protect the environment, and also to speak globally across cultural and religious lines. Both Bartholomew and Francis believe the crisis of climate change has deep roots in modern culture's anthropocentric ethos, and hence there must be an “apocalypse” or an unveiling of this ethos as a betrayal not only of nature but also of God the Creator. Contrary to some religious environmentalists, therefore, both Bartholomew and Francis are careful to distinguish cosmocentric theology (pantheism and animism) and theocentric cosmology (monotheism centered on the Incarnation of the Trinity in creation). Francis in particular aims for a retrieval of Saint Francis of Assisi's relationship to the natural world as it was expressed by Saint Bonaventure, and later developed by Saint Ignatius of Loyola into a discipline (ascesis) of learning to see all created things as expressions of God's glory. In rivalry with the ascesis of modern capitalism, which could be described as “disciplined avarice in action,” Bartholomew and Francis advocate the classical monastic-Franciscan-Ignatian spiritual ethos of “disciplined contemplation in action.”

Keywords

Pope FrancisPatriarch BartholomewMax WeberLaudato Si’environmentalismcreationAnthropoceneclimate change
Type
Articles
Information
Horizons , Volume 44 , Issue 1 , June 2017 , pp. 80 - 107
Copyright
Copyright © College Theology Society 2017 

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References

1 White, Lynn Jr., “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis,” Science 155, no. 3767 (March 1967): 1203–7Google Scholar. This essay was first given in lecture format on December 26, 1966, at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. See also the revised 1974 reprint: White, , “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis [with discussion of St. Francis; reprint, 1967],” in Ecology and Religion in History (New York: Harper & Row, 1974)Google Scholar. The original essay can also be found at http://science.sciencemag.org/content/155/3767/1203. A reformatted reprint can be found at http://www.zbi.ee/~kalevi/lwhite.htm.

2 White, “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis,” 1205.

3 Ibid., 1205–7.

4 Ibid., 1205–6.

5 See the book series The Religions of the World and Ecology, from the Center for the Study of World Religions, Harvard Divinity School, published by Harvard University Press in 1997–2004 and edited by Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim. See also the recent scholarship on the field of religion and ecology in the peer-reviewed academic journal Worldviews: Global Religions, Culture, and Ecology, ed. Chapple, Christopher Key. See too the encyclopedia The Spirit of Sustainability, ed. Jenkins, Willis (Great Barrington, MA: Berkshire Publishing Group, 2009)Google Scholar; and Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature, ed. Taylor, Bron Raymond (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2008)Google Scholar. Taylor also led the effort to form the International Society for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture, which was established in 2006 and began publishing the quarterly Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture in 2007. I am indebted for many of the secondary references in the following three paragraphs to the research in the fine unpublished paper by Steven Bouma-Prediger, “Is Christianity to Blame? The Ecological Complaint against Christianity,” presented at Hope College Creation Care Conference, Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, October 30–31, 2009, http://apps.sebts.edu/chapel/chapelMessages.cfm?filter_semesterid=0&filter_sortdirection=ASC&Page=49.

6 The philosopher Martin Schönfeld expresses a typical criticism: “White overstates his point. Blaming Christianity for environmental decline is akin to blaming parents for the deeds of children. This may be correct as long as offspring remain in parental custody, but it makes little sense when children come of age. Science and technology no longer answered to religious authority when they joined forces in the Industrial Revolution and spawned the ecological crisis.” Schönfeld, Martin, “The Future of Faith: Climate Change and the Future of Religions,” in Religion in Environmental and Climate Change: Suffering, Values, Lifestyles, ed. Gerten, Dieter and Bergmann, Sigurd (New York: Continuum, 2012), 154Google Scholar. The perspective that Christianity is part of the solution, not the cause of problem, also finds expression in the teachings of a consortium of two hundred American scientists who are also Evangelical Christians; see “Evangelical Scientists Call for Climate Action,” Sojourners, July 10. 2013; their letter to the US Congress, which in no way holds the Christian tradition responsible for climate change, but which cites the Bible as if it is unequivocally in favor of proenvironmental stands, can be found at https://sojo.net/sites/default/files/Evangelical%20Scientists%20Initiative%20Letter.pdf.

7 See, for example, James Nash, who speaks for many Christians when he writes, “It will not do to draw a neat distinction between Christianity and Christendom, between the faith itself and perversions of it by its practitioners. That distinction may be formally or logically true, as I agree, but it is facile and unconvincing when applied to history. We cannot so easily distinguish between the faith and the faithful. The fact is that Christianity—as interpreted and affirmed by billions of its adherents over the centuries and in official doctrines and theological exegeses—has been ecologically tainted… . The bottom line is that Christianity itself cannot escape an indictment for ecological negligence and abuse.” Nash, James, Loving Nature: Ecological Integrity and Christian Responsibility (Nashville: Abingdon, 1991), 72Google Scholar.

8 Berry, Wendell, Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community (New York: Pantheon, 1993), 94–96 Google Scholar. See also Robert Booth Fowler's helpful survey, The Greening of Protestant Thought (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995)Google Scholar.

9 For example, the environmental philosopher Max Oelschlaeger declared, “The roots of my prejudice against religion… grew out of my reading of Lynn White's famous essay blaming Judeo-Christianity for the environmental crisis.” Oelschlaeger, Max, Caring for Creation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 2Google Scholar.

10 Toynbee, Arnold, “The Religious Background of the Present Environmental Crisis,” in Ecology and Religion in History, ed. Spring, David and Spring, Eileen (New York: Harper and Row, 1974), 146Google Scholar.

11 John Passmore writes, “Christianity has encouraged man to think of himself as nature's absolute master, for whom everything that exists was designed.” Passmore, John, Man's Responsibility for Nature (New York: Scribner's, 1974), 12–13 Google Scholar. The feminist Christian theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether makes a similar argument in New Women/New Earth (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), 195Google Scholar.

12 See, for example, Nash, Roderick, The Rights of Nature (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 90Google Scholar; Stegner, Wallace, Marking the Sparrow's Fall (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1999), 121Google Scholar; and McHarg, Ian, “The Place of Nature in the City of Man,” in Western Man and Environmental Ethics, ed. Barbour, Ian (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1973), 174–75Google Scholar.

13 The full Bacon quote runs as follows: “My only earthly wish is … to stretch the deplorably narrow limits of man's dominion over the universe to their promised bounds … [nature will be] bound into service, hounded in her wanderings and put on the rack and tortured for her secrets.” Aside from whether Bacon himself really wrote this line, it has been taken by many to express well a Christian philosophical view of nature.

14 For some examples, see the survey of new “dark green religions” in Taylor, Bron, Dark Green Religion: Nature Spirituality and the Planetary Future (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009)Google Scholar. A manifesto of this perspective is Starhawk's The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Goddess (1979; New York: HarperCollins, 1999)Google Scholar.

15 Cooper, John W., Panentheism: The Other God of the Philosophers—From Plato to the Present (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2006)Google Scholar. This reinvention of Christianity has been clearly articulated and performed by Philip Clayton and Arthur Peacocke in their book In Whom We Live and Move and Have Our Being: Panentheistic Reflections on God's Presence in a Scientific World (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2004)Google Scholar. See also Crosby, Donald A., A Religion of Nature (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002)Google Scholar.

16 Fairly or not, this school of thought is associated with van Buren, Paul M. and his book The Secular Meaning of the Gospel Based on an Analysis of Its Language (New York: Macmillan, 1966)Google Scholar. Often Gabriel Vahanian and Thomas J. J. Altizer and other “death of God” theologians are associated with this perspective. For a discussion of this school, see Bauman, Whitney A., “Destabilizing Religion: The Death of God, a Viable Agnosticism, and the Embrace of Polydoxy,” chap. 3 in Religion and Ecology: Developing a Planetary Ethic (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 63–84 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 White, “The Historical Roots of our Ecologic Crisis,” 1206.

18 Ibid., 1207.

19 See, for example, the work of the Forum on Religion and Ecology at Yale (http://fore.yale.edu). Mary Evelyn Tucker, who with John Grim leads this group, has written several important books. See her Ecology and Religion (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2014). See also Tucker, Mary Evelyn and Grim, John, eds., Living Cosmology: Christian Responses to Journey of the Universe (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2016)Google Scholar.

20 In the realm of Catholic theology specifically, several Roman Catholic authors have challenged White's thesis and the many permutations of it presented by his defenders. See Schaefer, Jame, Theological Foundations for Environmental Ethics: Reconstructing Patristic and Medieval Concepts (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2009)Google Scholar; Schaefer, , Confronting the Climate Crisis: Catholic Theological Perspectives (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2011)Google Scholar; Winwright, Tobias L., Green Discipleship: Catholic Theological Ethics and the Environment (Winona, MN: Anselm Academic Christian Brothers Publications, 2011)Google Scholar; Schaefer, Jame and Winwright, Tobias, eds., Environmental Justice and Climate Change: Assessing Pope Benedict XVI's Ecological Vision for the Catholic Church in the United States (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2013)Google Scholar; Biviano, Erin Lothes, Inspired Sustainability: Planting Seeds for Action (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2016)Google Scholar. Interested readers might also consult the work of the Catholic Climate Covenant, http://www.catholicclimatecovenant.org.

21 Jamieson, Dale, Reason in a Dark Time: Why the Struggle against Climate Change Failed—And What It Means for Our Future (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 185–88Google Scholar.

22 A bibliography and links to the patriarch's publications, speeches, addresses, and other documents can be found at https:// www.patriarchate.org/publications. Bartholomew's most focused, full-length discussion of environmental issues can be found in his two books, On Earth as in Heaven: Ecological Vision and Initiatives of Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, ed. Chryssavgis, John (New York: Fordham University Press, 2011)Google Scholar, and In the World, Yet Not of the World: Social and Global Initiatives of Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, ed. Chryssavgis, John and Barroso, Jos Manuel (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009)Google Scholar. A collection of his speeches, letters, and other writings on the environment from 1991 to 2007 can be found in Cosmic Grace, Humble Prayer: The Ecological Vision of the Green Patriarch Bartholomew, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2009)Google Scholar.

23 See, for example, Theokritoff, Elizabeth, Living in God's Creation: Orthodox Perspectives on Ecology (New York: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 2009)Google Scholar. See also the collection of essays in Chryssavgis, John and Foltz, Bruce V., eds., Toward an Ecology of Transfiguration: Orthodox Christian Perspectives on Environment, Nature, and Creation (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013)Google Scholar.

24 Patriarch Bartholomew, On Earth as in Heaven, 211.

25 See Patriarch Bartholomew, “Creation Care and Ecological Justice: Reflections by Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew,” an address given at The Oxford Union, November 4, 2015, https://www.patriarchate.org/-/creation-care-and-ecological-justice-reflections-by-ecumenical-patriarch-bartholomew?inheritRedirect=true&redirect=%2Faddresses. In 2013 at the Conference of the Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, Bartholomew said, “Scientists talk of ‘tipping points’ and ‘abrupt climate change.’ Political leaders talk of the ‘challenges’ that lie ahead. Scripture speaks of human crisis and God's forgiving grace. All three make it clear that the time will come when we must face consequences; the time will come when it is simply too late.” “Patriarch Bartholomew Urges Leaders to Act Now on Climate Change,” November 15, 2013, http://zenit.org/articles/patriarch-bartholomew-urges-leaders-to-act-now-on-climate-chang/.

26 Patriarch Bartholomew, On Earth as in Heaven, 211.

27 Ibid., 140.

28 Ibid., 99.

29 Ibid., 123.

30 Ibid., 26, 55, 61, 97, 168, 302, 313.

31 Ibid., 178.

32 Ibid., 171.

33 Pope Francis, Encyclical, Laudato Si’ (On Care for Our Common Home), May 24, 2015, §§23–25, http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/papa-francesco_20150524_enciclica-laudato-si.html. Francis states, “It is true that there are other factors (such as volcanic activity, variations in the earth's orbit and axis, the solar cycle), yet a number of scientific studies indicate that most global warming in recent decades is due to the great concentration of greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide, methane, nitrogen oxides and others) released mainly as a result of human activity” (23).

34 Francis’ remarks about collective human “suicide” came on November 30, 2015, during a press conference aboard his papal plane en route to Rome. In reply to a question about what was at stake in the upcoming climate change conference in Paris, Francis said, “I am not sure, but I can say to you ‘now or never.’ Every year the problems are getting worse. We are at the limits. If I may use a strong word I would say that we are at the limits of suicide.”

35 See also LS §§53, 70, 117 and the “Christian Prayer in Union with Creation” in §246. On creation as one of the “least,” Francis writes, “Every creature is thus the object of the Father's tenderness, who gives it its place in the world. Even the fleeting life of the least of beings is the object of his love, and in its few seconds of existence, God enfolds it with his affection” (LS §77).

36 See Patriarch Bartholomew, On Earth as in Heaven, 52, 61, 74, 125, 132, 201, 213; also LS §§9, 218.

37 Patriarch Bartholomew, On Earth as in Heaven, 12.

38 This is the opinion of the American editorialist David Brooks. He writes, “Pope Francis is a wonderful example of how to be a truly good person. But if we had followed his line of analysis, neither the Asian economic miracle nor the technology-based American energy revolution would have happened. There'd be no awareness that though industrialization can lead to catastrophic pollution in the short term (China), over the long haul both people and nature are better off with technological progress, growth and regulated affluence. The innocence of the dove has to be accompanied by the wisdom of the serpent—the awareness that programs based on the purity of the heart backfire; the irony that the best social programs harvest the low but steady motivations of people as they actually are.” See David Brooks, “Fracking and the Franciscans,” New York Times, June 23, 2015, www.nytimes.com/2015/06/23/opinion/fracking-and-the-franciscans.html.

39 Weber, Max, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Baehr, Peter and Wells, Gordon C. (New York: Penguin Classics, 2002), 66–122 Google Scholar (pt. 2, “The Practical Ethics of the Ascetic Branches of Protestantism,” chap. 4, “The Religious Foundations of Worldly Asceticism,” and chap. 5, “Asceticism and the Spirit of Capitalism”).

40 Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 120–21, emphasis in the original.

41 Patriarch Bartholomew, Cosmic Grace, Humble Prayer, 107; On Earth as in Heaven, 290; emphasis in the original.

42 Patriarch Bartholomew, Cosmic Grace, Humble Prayer, 108.

43 Ibid., 360. Also in this text he writes, “Now, this voluntary ascetical life is not required only of the hermits or monastics. It is also demanded of all Orthodox Christians, according to the measure of balance” (298).

44 Patriarch Bartholomew, Cosmic Grace, Humble Prayer, 328–29, emphasis in the original. See also his On Earth as in Heaven, 97, 195.

45 Patriarch Bartholomew, Cosmic Grace, Humble Prayer, 146. Bartholomew only quotes part of this passage. The remainder of it goes like this: “And when once you perceive this, will thenceforward grow every day to a fuller understanding of it: until you come at last to love the whole world with a love that will then be all-embracing and universal.” Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Garnett, Constance (New York: Macmillan, 1922), 339Google Scholar.

46 Patriarch Bartholomew, On Earth as in Heaven, 201; Cosmic Grace, Humble Prayer, 297.

47 Patriarch Bartholomew, Cosmic Grace, Humble Prayer, 28, 222, 297, 329, 360; On Earth as in Heaven, 97, 201, 213.

48 Patriarch Bartholomew, Cosmic Grace, Humble Prayer, 298; On Earth as in Heaven, 202.

49 For example, see Bartholomew's discussion of hesychasm in Conversations with Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I, ed. Olivier Clément and trans. Paul Meyendorff (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1997), 220. See also 23, 133, 201, 219–24.

50 Indeed, this is why the Orthodox Christian collection of monastic texts on Hesychast spirituality written between the fifth and the fifteenth centuries is titled The Philokalia. Isaac the Syrian, one of the saints Bartholomew quotes most frequently, is cited several times in The Philokalia. This collection of texts was also well known to Dostoyevsky and the nineteenth-century Russian monks who inspired the character of Zosima in Brothers Karamazov.

51 See Purfield, Brian, “Traditions of Spiritual Guidance: Bonaventure and Ignatius—Kindred Spirits?,” The Way 32 (1992): 143–50Google Scholar.

52 Itinerarium Mentis in Deum, ed. and trans. Boehner, Philotheus and Hayes, Zachary (St. Bonaventure, NY: Franciscan Institute Publications, 2003), 39–72 Google Scholar.

53 In the Itinerarium Bonaventure makes his debts to Dionysius explicit: see the Boehner and Hayes edition and translation, 39, 73.

54 “Saint John of the Cross taught that all the goodness present in the realities and experiences of this world ‘is present in God eminently and infinitely, or more properly, in each of these sublime realities is God.’ This is not because the finite things of this world are really divine, but because the mystic experiences the intimate connection between God and all beings, and thus feels that ‘all things are God.’ Standing awestruck before a mountain, he or she cannot separate this experience from God, and perceives that the interior awe being lived has to be entrusted to the Lord: ‘Mountains have heights and they are plentiful, vast, beautiful, graceful, bright and fragrant. These mountains are what my Beloved is to me. Lonely valleys are quiet, pleasant, cool, shady and flowing with fresh water; in the variety of their groves and in the sweet song of the birds, they afford abundant recreation and delight to the senses, and in their solitude and silence, they refresh us and give rest. These valleys are what my Beloved is to me’” (LS §234).

55 In the remainder of this passage Francis writes, “A constant flood of new consumer goods can baffle the heart and prevent us from cherishing each thing and each moment. To be serenely present to each reality, however small it may be, opens us to much greater horizons of understanding and personal fulfilment. Christian spirituality proposes a growth marked by moderation and the capacity to be happy with little. It is a return to that simplicity which allows us to stop and appreciate the small things, to be grateful for the opportunities which life affords us, to be spiritually detached from what we possess, and not to succumb to sadness for what we lack. This implies avoiding the dynamic of dominion and the mere accumulation of pleasures” (LS §222).

56 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, God's Grandeur, and Other Poems, edited by Crofts, Thomas (New York: Dover Publishing, Inc., 1995), 15Google Scholar.

57 Faulkner, William, Absalom, Absalom! (New York: Vintage International/Random House, 1990), 193Google Scholar.

58 Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 121.