“Man’s Divorce from Nature”
What I wish to suggest is a way to recover the lost cosmic dimension of religion by showing how it might be found again in the Christian tradition. What must be recovered above all is the vision — not only that religion needs to be imbedded in the cosmos, but also that the world is imbedded in God. For it is this loss that inevitably led to the separation of religion from the natural order. In the words of Philip Sherrard:
“There is a relationship of interdependence, interpenetration, and reciprocity between God, Man, and Creation; and it is the loss by the Christian consciousness of awareness of the full significance of this relationship that is a basic cause of today’s ecological crisis. Correspondingly, if the Christian Church is to offer a positive response to the challenge of this crisis, it can only be through reaffirmation of the full significance of this relationship.” [1]
If the root of this alienation of human nature from the natural order is theological, its tragic fruit has penetrated deeply into all aspects of modem society — political, economic, social, cultural and individual. But it is extremely difficult not to envisage even positive activities in terms that remain separating, alienating and abstracting.
By the term ‘environment’ we usually mean ‘the natural world’, or, to use religious language, ‘Creation.’ But if we look critically at the word ‘environment’, we will sense a certain abstract quality to it. It separates human nature from non-human nature, and turns non-human nature into an abstraction — something which we believe can be manipulated and controlled for our purposes.
Even with the best of intentions, we have created and are sustaining, a division between the natural world and ourselves — a division that is at the very root of all environmental problems.
As Wendell Berry, poet, essayist and farmer, writes:
“Abstraction, of course, is what is wrong. The evil of the industrial economy (capitalist or communist) is the abstractness inherent in its procedures – its inability to distinguish one place or person or creature from another.
The right scale in work gives power to affection. When one works beyond the reach of one’s love for the place one is working in and for the creatures one is working with and among, then destruction inevitably results. An adequate local culture, among other things, keeps work within the reach of love.
The question before us, then, is an extremely difficult one: How do we begin to remake …what will preserve our part of the world while we use it? We are talking not just about a kind of knowledge that involves affection but also about a kind of knowledge that comes from or with affection — knowledge… that is unavailable to anyone in the form of ‘information’.”
[1] Philip Sherrard, Human Image. World Image (Ipswich: Golgonooza Press, 1992), p. 243.
~Adapted from Vincent Rossi, Sacred Cosmology in the Christian Tradition, 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.
The Cosmos as Scripture: Scripture as a Cosmos
“Creation is a bible whose letters and syllables are the particular aspects of all creatures and whose words are the more universal aspects of creation. Conversely, Scripture is like a cosmos constituted of heaven and earth and things in between; that is, the ethical, the natural, and the theological dimension.”
~Saint Maximos the Confessor (580-662), Ambiguum 10, PG 91. 1128-1129a
