“Where is the life we have lost in living; where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge; where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” — T. S. Eliot
These three poignant questions, penned by T. S. Eliot over a half-century ago, point us directly at the problem of the Christian view of the Creation as we face the new millennium. The Christian conscience has lost its ancient wisdom, and needs to recover it, as an essential and indispensable part of its life.
Many people today are calling for modem religion, and specifically Christianity, to be re-imbedded in the cosmos, so that religion might become a real force in providing the ethical and spiritual energy for the critical task of reversing the degradation of the Earth. A study of the roots of the living Christian tradition reveals that the sense of ’embeddedness’ in Creation was a very real part of the overall experience of the religion. The early Church, especially in its Greek or Eastern half, but also in the West, transmitted a fully ‘cosmic’ faith.
The great saints and sages of the early Church, in their writings, implicitly recognize a fundamental truth, as expressed by G. K. Chesterton: “Religion is not the church a man goes to but the cosmos he lives in.” Chesterton also observed pointedly that “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult, and left untried.” [1] The point of this observation applies as much to the role of Christianity in relinking the Christian to Creation as it does to the more individualistic concerns relative to the salvation of the soul. Indeed, taken to its fullest meaning, the cosmic dimension so characteristic of Eastern Christianity implies that the salvation of the Christian’s soul is directly linked to the manner in which he or she responds to Creation. Far from being ‘anthropocentric’, the Orthodox Christian Tradition, throughout its 2,000 year history presents a world-view that is ‘theoanthropocosmic’ [2]
If this ‘God-, Man- and Cosmos-centered’ world-view was so central to the early Church, how did we lose sight of it? While it is not the purpose of this article to rehearse the question of how Western religion got itself divorced from the cosmos, we cannot avoid touching upon it, however briefly.
The root of the ecological crisis, according to Philip Sherrard, is ultimately theological. More specifically, it is a theological interpretation of the relationship between God and Creation that separates the created order from the Divine reality in such a way as to remove from Creation all spiritual value and leave only material processes and ‘resources’ to be exploited.
The path towards the recovering of the integrity of Creation has been laid out in a number of significant statements from the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, of which the following is a good example:
“We must recognize the failure of all anthropocentric ideologies, which have created in men and women of this century a spiritual void and an existential insecurity, and have led many people to seek salvation in new religious and para-religious movements, sects, or nearly idolatrous attachments to the material values of this world. Similar are the dangers for the survival of the natural environment. The careless and self-indulgent use of material creation by man, with the help of scientific and technological progress, has already started to cause irreparable destruction to the natural environment. The Orthodox Church, not being able to remain passive in the face of such destruction, invites through us, all the Orthodox, to dedicate the first day of September of each year, the day of the beginning of the ecclesiastical year, to the offering of prayers and supplications for the preservation of God’s creation and the adoption of the attitude to nature involved in the Eucharist and ascetic tradition of the Church. “[3]
(1.) G. K. Chesterton, What’s Wrong With The World, Chapter 5, 1910.
(2.) A term coined by Philip Sherrard. See Human Image. World Image (Ipswich: Golgonooza Press, 1992), Ch. 7.
(3.) Excerpt from the Message of the Primate of the Orthodox Church Regarding she Church’s Position on the Protection of the Natural Environment, Phanar, Sunday of Orthodoxy, 15 March 1992.
~Adapted from Vincent Rossi, Sacred Cosmology in the Christian Tradition, taken from Business Life (http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2465/is_1_30/ai_59520591/?tag=content;col1). Vincent Rossi is an Eastern Orthodox theologian and environmentalist, and founder of Epiphany Journal, a quarterly on traditional Christian spirituality. He is an Associate of World Stewardship Institute in Santa Rosa, California.
