By Paul Kingsnorth
This is a transcript (lightly edited) of a talk by the award-winning novelist and Anglo-Irish Orthodox Christian Paul Kingsnorth at Bucknell University in Fall 2024. His talk addresses the relationship between Christianity and nature, and the title specifically invokes an obscured phrase in the U.S. Declaration of Independence. The late Orthodox Christian bioethicist Herman Tristram Engelhardt glossed a statement by St. Basil the Great to suggest that natural law in Orthodox Christianity is the spark of God’s love in the human heart. Kingsnorth’s talk was generously funded by the Open Discourse Coalition and sponsored by the Bucknell Orthodox Christian community.
***
I’m going to try and talk about the relationship between Christianity and nature and what it is and maybe what it should be and maybe what some people say it is and it isn’t. I’m speaking as a Christian who is also a nature lover, quite a recent Christian, but a very long-standing nature lover.
For most of my life, I didn’t know what that relationship was either. When I was a young boy, I was a great nature lover. I’ve been a great nature lover all my life. I grew up in a suburb in England, in London, in other parts of the country, a very ordinary, suburban, urban kind of place. But my dad used to take me on long walks up in the mountains in the 1980s. Back in those days, going into the mountains was really going into the mountains because there was no GPS and you couldn’t phone home from the top of the hills. So once you went up there, you were really up there.
I had experiences in these places that were quite profound, just sitting on hills and looking over the sunset and trudging across the moors and camping by the lakes. I felt something that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. A lot of people who go into the wilds know what that’s like. It felt like there was some power in the place, something in the natural world, but I didn’t know what it was, and I didn’t have any names for it.
William Wordsworth wrote about it in one of his famous poems. I think it was The Prelude. He talked about emotion and a spirit that impels all thinking things, all objects of all thought, and rolls through all things. When I discovered Wordsworth at about the age of 16, I thought this guy is saying something about what I felt, but I didn’t know what it was. I felt then that nothing humans could build could ever come close to the wonder and the mystery of the natural world, and I still think that’s true now. All of that led me, when I was older, when I went to college, into the life of an activist. I became a green activist in the early 90s before anyone knew what climate change was.
There was a big movement back in England in those days to stop new roads being built through the forests and through the landscapes and sometimes through the towns as well. The government said they were putting together the biggest road-building scheme since the Romans. They were very proud of themselves.
So, a lot of people, including me, tried to stop them from doing that. We built treehouses up in the trees so they couldn’t knock them down, put tunnels underneath the ground so they couldn’t move the earth-moving machinery across it, locked ourselves to things.
I spent 10 years also doing this kind of thing— activism, writing, working for NGOs, running magazines, writing books—because this feeling that I’d had when I was young for the natural world, whatever the feeling was, was something that made me feel I ought to protect it because it was giving me something I didn’t really know how to put into words. It seemed clear as well, the more you looked at what we were doing to the Earth, that you could see what direction the society was going in. It was clear even then that we were going forward into a world in which industrial humanity has ravaged much of the wild Earth and tamed the rest of it and shaped the whole of nature to its ends. Soon we were going to remake the whole Earth down to the last nanoparticle just so that it would suit our desires, which we now call needs, of course. This new world of ours was going to be globalized, uniform, interconnected, digitized, hyper-real, totally human, all about us.
I wanted to know then, and I still sometimes want to know now, what was the reason for this? Not all cultures have lived like this. In fact, our culture, I would say, in the modern world, is uniquely destructive. But what’s going on? What was the underlying reason for all of this? What was the cause of it? Was it capitalism? Was it industrialism? Was it modernity? Was it civilization itself? What was going on?
The real question that, I suppose, really gripped me was why is the West apparently so destructive? And come to that, what is this West we’re talking about anyway? Why do we even use this word “the West”? What does it mean?
Medieval historian Christopher Dawson offered an answer to that question in a book called Religion and the Rise of Western Culture just after World War II. He wrote this: “There has never been any unitary organization of Western culture apart from that of the Christian Church, which provided a principle of social unity behind the ever-changing pattern of Western culture. There was a living faith which gave Europe a certain sense of spiritual community in spite of all the conflicts and divisions and social schisms that marked its history.”
What Dawson’s saying there is that the only reason we talk about this thing called “the West” at all is that the Western Church, that means the Roman Church, is the thing that gave it its culture. Dawson says something else as well. He says this: “The West is different from other civilizations because its religious ideal has not been the worship of timeless and changeless perfection, but a spirit that strives to incorporate itself in humanity and change the world. The other great cultures realized their synthesis between religion and life and then maintained their sacred order, but in the West, the changing of the world became an integral part of its cultural ideal.”
So, this culture of ours, this West, this thing that I used to be campaigning against because it was trashing the Earth, seemed, according to Dawson—who, by the way, was a Christian—to be the product of this Western faith, Christianity.
Now back then there was one heavyweight backer for this idea and there still is one. And there was another medieval historian called Lynn Townsend White Jr., an American historian. In 1966, White gave a lecture to the American Association for the Advancement of Science and it was called “The Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis.” And White’s argument is still influential today even and perhaps especially amongst people who haven’t read it. And the argument was controversial, it was stark, and it was very clear about the force which had made Western culture so ecologically destructive, which, White argued, was not science or technology or greed or capitalism or selfishness. It was Christianity. And the reason why was simple. The Christian creation story gave humanity the central role in the entire universe. And the Christian God empowered his favorite species to dominate and subdue everything else that lived. And from this instruction, from this metaphysics, if you like, everything else follows, including the blind faith in historical progress that every faction of our political spectrum has in this post-Christian society.
Post-Christian incidentally was a notion that White was having none of. He wrote, “We continue to live today as we have lived for 1700 years, very largely in a context of Christian axioms.”
So here’s how White tells the creation story according to Christianity. He says, by gradual stages, a loving and all-powerful God had created light and darkness, the heavenly bodies, the earth and all its plants, animals, birds, and fishes. Finally, God had created Adam and, as an afterthought, Eve, to keep man from being lonely. Man named all the animals, thus establishing his dominance over them. God planned all of this explicitly for man’s benefit and rule. No item in the physical creation had any purpose, save to serve man’s purposes. And although man’s body is made of clay, he’s not simply part of nature. He’s made in God’s image.
This story, said White, meant that especially in its Western form, Christianity is the most anthropocentric religion the world has ever seen. He summarized his case like this, “Viewed historically, modern science is an extrapolation of natural theology and modern technology is at least partly to be explained as an occidental voluntary realization of the Christian dogma of man’s transcendence, of and rightful mastery over nature. But as we now recognize somewhat over a century ago, science and technology joined to give mankind powers which to judge by many of the ecological effects are out of control. If so, Christianity bears a huge burden of guilt.”
Now this, to a young environmental activist, is an appealing argument to an older Christian. It’s an appalling one. But here’s the thing. White gives us a get out clause. In his paper he wrote as a Christian, also an American Protestant actually, but also as a serious historian. And he knew, as both defenders and antagonists of Christianity today sometimes forget, that Christianity is not just something that happened in this place called “the West.” In fact, quite a lot of other parts of the world were Christian before the West was. Western Christianity is actually a particular form of the faith. And in addressing this fact, White says this, “Christianity is a complex faith and its consequences differ in differing contexts. What I’ve said may well apply to the Medieval West, where in fact technology made spectacular advances. But in the Greek East, a highly civilized realm of equal Christian devotion, there seems to have been no marked technological innovation after the late seventh century when Greek fire was invented, the key to this contrast, he goes on, may perhaps be found in a difference in the tonality of piety, which students of comparative theology find between the Greek and the Latin churches. The Greeks believed that sin was intellectual blindness, and that salvation was found in illumination orthodoxy, that is, clear thinking. The Latins on the other hand felt that sin was a moral evil and that salvation was to be found in right conduct.”
Then White said something really interesting. He said, “These two strands of faith, the Latin and the Greek, produce different kinds of Christian. The Greek saint contemplates. The Western Saint acts. The implications of Christianity for the conquest of nature, would emerge more easily in the Western atmosphere.”
Now the problem White has, of course, is that as soon as he says that he undermines his own argument because suddenly with this caveat it’s not Christianity which is destroying the world at all, but something called the Western atmosphere elsewhere in his lecture,
White puts it like this, “In the early church and always in the Greek East, nature was conceived primarily as a symbolic system through which God speaks to men. The end is a sermon to sluggards, rising flames are a symbol of the soul’s aspiration.”
The view of nature was essentially artistic rather than scientific. While Byzantium preserved and copied great numbers of ancient Greek scientific texts, science as we conceive it could scarcely flourish in such an atmosphere. Now if that’s true, then it cannot also be true that Christianity per se is the problem. It seems to be according to White, anyway, the Western interpretation of it, which is at fault. He goes on, he says, “in the Latin West, by the early 13th century, natural theology was following a very different bent. It was ceasing to be the decoding of the physical symbols of God’s communication with man and was becoming the effort to understand God’s mind by discovering how his creation operates, which is the beginnings of the scientific worldview.”
Now this isn’t the place to lay out the distinctions between what White calls Occidental and Oriental Christianity, that of East and the West since the two split apart in 1054 in what was called “the Great Schism.” Not that I’d be qualified to do it anyway, but while White generalizes and simplifies a bit with his suggestion that the West acts while the East contemplates, he’s also onto something, the same thing actually that Christopher Dawson was onto. And as I said, both of these men are historians and both are Christians as well.
So what’s he onto? Maybe he’s onto something that might hold the key to how Christians could react to the crisis of nature that we have kicked off. But first, let’s go back to the beginning and let’s hear a different version of the creation story to the one that Lynn White’s offered. And let’s see if this version has a different message to give us about who we’re supposed to be in relationship to the rest of God’s creation.
Now the story starting in the book of Genesis begins with this simple understanding; God created us to be vegan gardeners. He just did, it’s right in there. God created us to be vegan gardeners, and He puts us in a thing called paradise, which is an interesting word. What does it mean? The earliest gardens that have been discovered by archeologists in the Middle East, which is the cradle of the civilization that we now live in, were walled, walled gardens. And these gardens were walled not to keep animals out, but to keep animals in, to keep in the animals that you wanted and the trees you wanted and the crops you wanted. And these gardens had a name in Persian, which in Hebrew, and then in Greek, and ultimately English became the name Paradise. Paradise is a walled garden.
So here we are in this garden and we’re put here to tend and keep it. And in this garden everything can see everything else according to the Book of Genesis. And it’s all in communion. Nothing eats anything else. We don’t eat the animals, they don’t eat us. And we’re so close to God that we can see him “walking in the garden in the cool of the evening.” That’s a picture of communion with everything, creation and creator and everything’s holy.
And the word holy comes from an old English word, an Anglo-Saxon word halig. Halig means whole. Holy means whole. Nothing is broken apart. And it says in Genesis, “God formed man out of dust from the ground and breathed in his face the breath of life. And man became a living soul.” So a human being is soil, plus the breath of God, which is such a great image. And the word humus by the way, meaning the matter of soil. Humus has the same etymology, the same root as the word humility, the word humble. And Adam, the name Adam is a pun on the Hebrew word adama, which also means soil, where soil press the breath of God.
And in this garden there are these two trees going at the center of this Paradise, the center of this walled garden, the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. And “if you eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil,” says God to Adam and Eve, “you will die by death,” which is an interesting phrase. God does not say, “if you eat of this tree, I will kill you.” He says, “you’ll die by death. You will introduce death into creation,” because at the moment everything is in communion, everything is halig, everything is whole, until you choose to explore good and evil, which is something you’re not yet ready for.
Humans incidentally are created last in the book of Genesis, which, Darwinian evolution also suggests is the case. Interestingly, we are the youngest things there. We’re not ready for this knowledge yet, so we don’t eat from that. But of course there’s another presence in the garden. We read, “the serpent was more cunning than all the wild animals the Lord God made on the earth. And the serpent said to the woman, you shall not die by death. For God knows in the day you eat from it, your eyes will be opened and you will be like God’s knowing good and evil. So she took its fruit and ate.” So we choose the knowledge of good and evil because we want to be like gods. We don’t want to be here in communion with God and the rest of creation. We don’t want to tend and keep the garden which is God, which is what God put us there to do. We don’t want to be vegan gardeners. We want to be gods. And that’s the oldest story of all the rebellion against God.
What’s the consequence? The consequence is the communion is broken. There is no more holiness, death enters creation. And God says this to Adam. God says, “cursed is the ground in your labors, in toil you shall eat from it all the days of your life, both thorns and thistles, which will bring forth for you and you shall eat the herb of the field. In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread until you return to the ground from which you were taken.” So we’re expelled from this paradise and there’s an angel with a flaming sword that’s put at the gate so we can’t get back in again. And now everything is death. We are going to die. Everything else is going to die. We have to hunt and kill the animals. They hunt and kill us. Adam has to farm, Eve has to spin. Back-breaking toil is the price of living without God. There’s a war with nature. Creation itself is sickened by this choice. And we can’t go home anymore. We can’t get back into the garden. We have to stay here in this broken world.
And by the time we get to chapter four of Genesis, we meet Cain. Cain is the first murderer. He’s also the builder of the first civilization, the first tiller of soil, the first one to really bend nature to his ends. And later we meet his grandson, Tubal-cain. Tubal-cain is the first Smith, the first metal worker. He makes the first weapons. So, it doesn’t take very long before we start building cities. We start building weapons, we start building armies. We start breaking the soil—as soon as we are ejected from this place of communion. What are we trying to do? We’re trying to escape from nature, because nature has been sickened too. We have to escape from it now—it’s sort of parasitic wasps and man-eating tigers. We have to protect ourselves. So we start trying to create our own version of the paradise. We start trying to rebuild the wall garden. We start trying to create. That’s what we want to be.
Remember we want to be like gods. How can a human being create? By using technology. That’s what we do to create—the only thing we can do. So we start to do that. We start to try and remake Eden in our own image. We try to climb up again with the Tower of Babel as we would later to do with pyramids and rockets and skyscrapers and drones and jumbo jets. We’re trying to get build our way back up to heaven, having being cast out of it and we’re still doing it.
And the latest iteration of the Tower of Babel is the internet, AI, and nuclear weapons. So what does this story tell us? What does this version of the creation story tell us? It’s a different story to the one that Lynn White has. This story tells us it’s not that the Christian understanding of creation and humanity is at fault. It’s not that God’s intention is at fault.
The fault comes from our rebellion against it. God’s intention was for us to be vegan gardeners in a paradise, for us to be in communion with all living things, for us only to eat from the tree when we were ready, for us to apprentice ourselves to him. But we rebelled against that. We decided to take God’s role for ourselves and that’s why we are here. So the fault comes from the rebellion, a very contemporary, very anti-ecological resistance to living in communion with the rest of creation.
So in this story, it’s not Christianity that destroys the earth, it’s the human rebellion against God, which is the story that opens the very first book of the Bible and runs through the whole of it. What happens at the end of the Bible? God arrives on earth in human form. And what do we do? We torture and kill Him. We’re still at it. We can’t bear it. The Orthodox theologian, Elizabeth Theokritoff in her book, “Living in God’s Creation”, uses the teachings of the Orthodox Saint Maximus the Confessor to challenge Lynn White’s central claim that Christianity is anthropocentric, or in other words, human centered. She writes, “Man didn’t move around God as his own principle in the way that he was naturally created to do.” She quotes Maximus as writing, “but in a matter in a manner contrary to nature, he moved around the things below him over which he’d been appointed by God to rule.” Now that rule was not the kind of exploitative abuse that White had in mind, but rather this order that God gives man right at the beginning of the Book of Genesis to tend and keep the garden. That’s our role in creation: to tend and keep the garden, to be gardeners. But we didn’t do it. We chose to circle around what was lower than us rather than what was above us.
“Man can never be the ultimate center of creation,” she writes, “he is rather intended to be a focal point through which God’s purpose can be achieved.” And that in turn is the human purpose to bring everything into union with its Creator,” she writes. Humanity is supposed to unite what is divided, but most of the time we do the opposite. We divide things even further, but that’s our choice. It’s not God’s choice. It’s only once God is removed from the picture of the universe that humanity can be at its center. Because in the Christian story, and in fact in every other religious story I’ve ever come across anywhere on earth, God or the gods are at the center. The divine is always at the center of the culture. Not people—God or the gods, however you approach that. It’s only once you take God out, you can put yourself in at the center.
And that is what Adam and Eve did in the garden. So in a very real sense, you could say the original sin was anthropocentric. It was human centeredness, this desire to be gods. And this leads us directly into where we are now. It leads us into the modern project. The throne at the heart of our culture, which was once inhabited by God, once inhabited by Christ, is now inhabited by the self, inhabited by us. And our materialistic, scientistic society is going all in on the project to conquer the stars and build new intelligences and defeat death—where we’re going very quickly.
And notice something about everything that we’re trying to do. Now all of these projects—live forever, conquer the stars, terraform Mars, conquer the earth, manage everything, understand everything, break things apart at the nano level—all of these things are things that only God can do. We’re still following the orders of the serpent. Remember: to be as God’s knowing good and evil and we ought to know where it leads because Bible tells us about a thousand times. The tower is always brought down, towers are always brought down. And you read that all the way through the Christian Bible.
So here’s a quote from the book of Hosea where we hear about the consequences of turning away from God and into the self. “There is no faithfulness or kindness and no knowledge of God in the land. Therefore, the land mourns and all who dwell in it languish and also the beasts of the field and the birds of the air and even the fish of the sea are taken away.”
So, there’s an explicit connection between a society that turns away from God and the sickening of nature. And that’s what happened as we are told as a result of this original fall. Our turning away from God and our attempting to be gods doesn’t just sicken our souls, it sickens the whole of creation. So what might be the way out now if you’re a Christian or what might be the way out for Christianity if we assume that White is wrong? It’s common to hear in response to the widespread spread concern about climate change and destruction of the forest and the poisoning of the season, the long litany of horrible things that are happening at the moment. It’s common to hear that we need a kind of ecotheology or a new ecos spirituality, or maybe we need to make Christianity more shamanic or more pagan. And the environmental movement I was part of for a long time contains within it both a Christian morality and a sort of vague new-agey earth-centered spirituality, which aims to challenge anthropocentrism. It tends to offer up mainly platitudes in the kind of cultural appropriation. A pick and mixed spirituality—choose your own faith.
I know this because I tried it for years. I was a Zen Buddhist for a long time. I even ended up as a Wiccan priest, worshiping a great goddess. But somehow, none of it really clicked even at the time, because it didn’t seem like it was true. I was making it all up, you were encouraged to make it all up. You choose your own gods, you choose your own faith. And Christians in the West today often tend to join in with this. We tend to take our cues from the green movement and begin trying to make remake the Christian faith in the image of modern environmentalism, which means the Christians buy into the Whitean idea that Christianity is flawed at root and needs to be redesigned for the age of climate change. But the argument is a dead end. It makes no sense even on its own terms.
If Christianity really is flawed at root, then it shouldn’t be reformed. It should be junk. Because if it’s flawed at root, it isn’t true. So, you shouldn’t waste your time with it. But if it’s not flawed, which is to say, if the central claims it makes about the incarnation and the resurrection of Christ and who He was, if those are true, you don’t need a new theology at this stage in history, 2000 years later. You just need to actually, probably properly apply the
existing one.
And if we are behaving as gods and if the destruction of the earth is the result of our behaving as gods, then maybe we need to learn how to stop doing that. And what would that mean? Well, I’ve come to believe that the answers that you need in response to that question already exist in the Christian tradition. But I think that in the West they’ve been obscured by wrong turns and by the coming of the juggernaut of modernity, which is at root, a theological weapon wielded against religion in general and Christianity in particular. But if you clear away all the errors the West has made; its dissent into political Christianity, moralistic Christianity, all the sort of thickets of confusion and division, you can see that the Christian tradition teaches us a lot about our true place in the natural world, and, contains many examples of how to live it.
To find those examples today, I’ve found it useful to take two different paths. Firstly, to go east to where the Eastern Orthodox church has preserved or inspired traditions that we’ve forgotten in the West. And secondly, to go back to a time when our own spiritual ancestors in early Christianity in the West still knew these things.
And we may find after a long pilgrimage that both of these paths lead to the same place, and the place they lead to is what we might call a “sacramental approach” to creation. What does that mean? It means looking at nature the way we used to look at it in the garden, the way we were made to look at it, remembering its original beauty, which is to be restored at the second coming of Christ.
Elizabeth Theokritoff uses this phrase a lot in her book, “The Sacramental Approach to Creation.” She says that the sacraments of the church reveal something fundamental about the way in which we go about our daily lives. And what they reveal is that matter or physical matter can be consecrated to the service of God, which has always been the Christian claim right to the beginning: holy water, holy unction, bread and wine, oil, all of these are matter physical objects, natural things, which through consecration are not so much changed miraculously into other things as restored to their original holy state. Remember what holy means? It means whole. So a sacramental approach to things restores them to the original wholeness that we broke, that we forgot, that we walked away from because we are too busy trying to be God ourself.
So creation was said to be holy before humans broke it. And Christ himself was said to be the Word which was spoken to created. So this is not a new idea, this is not a modern ecotheology. Many of the fathers of the church have said similar things in their own ways. Saint Maximus the Confessor says this, “we know God not in his essence, but through the magnificence of his creation and the action of his providence, which shows us as in a mirror, a reflection of his goodness, his wisdom, and his infinite power.”
A more contemporary saint, Joseph the Cave Dweller, Joseph the Hesychast, who only died in the 1990s, spoke from his own experience about the presence of God in creation. He spent many years living as a hermit in a cave on Mount Athos in Greece, he says this, “God is everywhere. There’s no place where he cannot be found within and without. Above and below, wherever you turn, all things cry out: God. We live and move in him. We breathe
God, we eat God, we clothe ourselves in God. All things praise and bless God. The whole creation cries out all things living all in unanimous speak with wonder and glorify the Creator.”
So the energy of God in the words of an Orthodox prayer is everywhere present and filling all things. And all of that invites us to remember the holy nature, the whole nature of creation as it’s supposed to be. And Theokritoff puts it like this, “A sacramental approach to the world doesn’t try to take us either forward or back to an earthly paradise. It invites us to place our hope neither in technological advances, nor in a return to a golden age of harmony with nature. The church looks to the ultimate transfiguration of all things, and we serve this end by conforming ourselves to God’s will.”
So what does that look like? Again, we don’t need to invent new answers because we can look to the way that Christian saints in particular, and also just ordinary Christians have lived. And when we do that, you can see that the notion of nature being infused with the sacred nature itself being a sacramental thing, it’s not just something you find in indigenous cultures, it’s something you find in ancient Christianity and you still see it today. I’ve seen it personally on Mount Athos. I’ve seen it in Romania, I’ve heard of it in the Orthodox communities of Alaska. And if you look at some of the saints of the Western past, you can see it there as well.
It’s our tradition too. So I live in Ireland. I come from England, but I live in Ireland. And there are many, many examples of this. One of my favorite examples from Ireland is a saint called Colman mac Duagh, who actually lived in a cave for seven years, not very far from where I live now. And he became so one with his surroundings that he almost returned to the state that humans were in in Eden. This is a very common story. He befriended the creatures and they befriended him.
And the best story about Saint Coleman is he, he trained three creatures. He’d befriended a cockerel, a mouse, and a fly, and he gave them all jobs to do. The job of the Cockrell was to wake him up very early to pray. The job of the moth was to bite him on the ear if he didn’t wake up to pray. And the job of the fly was to walk along the lines of the Bible in the darkness so he could see them. A useful thing to have.
There are a lot of stories like this from the early Christian centuries. There’s a Saint Kevin of Glendalough from Ireland, very famous story about him who is praying one day standing in the shape of a cross with his arms out like this. He’s standing with his arm out the window of his cell because his cell is so small and a black bird lands in his hand and starts making a nest. And Kevin stays there until the birds, till the eggs are laid and hatch and the babies fly off. All sorts of stories like this.
Over in England on the island of Lindisfarne, Saint Cuthbert lives on a tiny island called Inner Farne away from the monastery for so long that everything becomes at one with him. He walks into the sea to pray in the sea all night long and pray, and then he would come onto the beach and the sea otters would come out of the sea and dry him with their fur and the eagles will bring him fish. And when Cuthbert once caught a raven stealing thatch from the roof, he scolded it and it brought back a lot of extra thatch the next day to repair it. And this theme, by the way, of people being fed by birds, Christian saints being fed by birds, goes right back to the beginning of the Christian tradition. St. Paul of Thebes, who was the first of the desert fathers in the fourth century was said to have been fed by birds.
Francis of Assisi, St. Benedict, countless others have these relationships and other
relationships too. Saint Seraphim of Sarov, 18th century Russia, famously makes friends with a bear. If you ever see an icon of St. Seraphim, it’s always got a bear in it. Saint Wihtburh of England used a milk deer for sustenance and Kevin did that too. Patron Saint of America, Saint Herman of Alaska was deeply at one with the forest that he lived in.
So what’s going on here? Well, the standard historical answer, the secular answer would be that the people writing saints’ lives at attribute all these impossible miracles to them to talk up their holiness. But the ongoing repetition of this one little motif, this wilderness saint becoming so holy, so whole, remember, that the rest of nature isn’t afraid of him, is universal, right there, right from the beginning of the Christian tradition. And Bishop Athanasius explains what’s happening like this; he says, “when human beings reach the state that they become a repository of God’s grace, then animals instinctively recognize that as the state of the first humans prior to the fall. Friendship is reestablished between humans and the rest of nature. In such a state, even the wild beasts cannot harm you. So it’s an amazing claim, but it’s a very common one in the Orthodox Church and we’ve seen examples of it in our lifetime. What Athanasius is saying that through their lives of asceticism, the purging of their passions and their union with God, these holy people get
back to the state, almost back to the state that humans were actually created to be in.
And as I say, saints like Joseph the Hesychast, Paisios of Athos, Saint Porphyrios of Greece. These people died a few decades ago. They were doing it in front of people who’ve lived today and who saw it happen. But these aren’t just myths.
Now most of us are probably never going to be saints, certainly not me. But the point is that that state is reachable and that actually is the Christian understanding of what the relationship with nature should be. And that then, seems to me is also the Christian answer to the ecological crisis, which is a return to the sacramental understanding of creation, which lies in a kind of asceticism that limits our wants and gives us a love for all of God’s creatures.
Saint Isaac the Syrian asks, “what is a merciful heart? It’s a heart on fire for the whole of creation, for humanity, for the birds, for the animals, for demons, for all that exists.” So let’s return just at the end of the talk to our friend Lynn White. Was he right to say that Christianity was at the root of the modern world’s destruction of creation? I suggest not—in fact. Quite the opposite. Christianity has taught from the beginning that man’s self-love is the original sin and that it always leads to his and the creation’s destruction.
It’s not following that teaching that’s wrecked the oceans and the soils and the climate systems. It’s ignoring it. We were created to live in a garden. Lynn White did not understand the sacramental view of creation, which he can probably be forgiven for, given that many modern Christians don’t seem to understand it either, but it is there and we can find it. White claimed in his lecture that to a Christian, a tree can be no more than a physical fact. But another modern saint, Amphilochios of Patmo disagreed. He said, “he who does not love trees, does not love Christ.”
Amphilochios was a priest in Greece. And when farmers used to come to him for confession, instead of giving them prostrations to do or prayers to say he would give them trees to plant, he would say, if you want to do penance, go and plant 10 trees in your field. That I think is the Christian attitude to nature.
So I’m going to end with a short extract from an Irish poet, a 10th century Irish poet from an anonymous Christian hermit. Now, as I said, I live in Ireland. I spend far too much of my time tramping around ancient Irish holy sites, around holy wells, and old hermits’ caves. The country is full of them because the early Irish saints tried to live the way that the desert fathers of Egypt lived. They called it the green martyrdom. You’d go out into the wild and you would fight the devil, you would search for God and you would strip everything away so that you could return to that edenic state. They used to call island, the island of saints and scholars. In the first five centuries of islands existence, there were 3000 saints created by this particular way of life. And you can’t go to an island or a cave or a forest now without finding some remnant of where a hermit used to live.
And this is a short extract from a 10th century Irish poem called the Hermit’s Hut. And it paints to me anyway, a beautiful picture of what the true Christian attitude towards creation ought to be and how maybe we could reawaken it.
I have a hut in the wood, no one knows it, but my Lord.
An ash tree on this side, a hazel on the other, a great tree on a mound and closes it,
the concealing tresses of a green trunk you which upholds the sky.
There is the place, the green wall of an oak against the storm.
An excellent spring, a cup of noble water to drink, water cresses sprout, yew berries, ivy bushes as big as a man.
Tame swine lie down around it.
Goats, boars, wild swine, grazing deer, a badges brood, swarms of bees, beetles,
soft music of the world, a gentle humming, wild geese, ducks.
And shortly before all hallows; music of the dark torrent.
A beautiful pine makes music to me that is not hired.
Though I sing to Christ, I fare no worse than you do.
Lovely, isn’t it?