Th us far I have highlighted examples of various forms of biogeochemical dynamism.
But do these authors worry that humans may seriously, even irreparably, disrupt these complex interactions? As with their concerns about pest eradication eff orts, and more broadly in their anxiety about population stability, they are aware of potential problems. Th e former will yield to wiser agriculture, while the latter must rely on natural checks—MacCulloch, however, posits that the elevation of coral islands may be God’s way of creating new land for a growing human population. 42 Th e general tone, however, is of stability and sustainability. Th ey write to reassure: the world was well arranged and properly functioning. In the seventeenth century, natural theology (at least in England) had been an antidote to the antinomians’ eff orts to claim millenarian narratives—whether of a wearing out of the world or of its progressive evolution toward a glorious end. Th eir emphasis on stability is part of what diverts the natural theologians from evolution: for Paley, the checks and balances to populations were precisely what prevented extinction.
MacCulloch, however, both geologist and social critic, did see irreversible environmental change (and a record of extinctions) as features of the Earth’s history.
He writes of deforestation:
Man commences by occupying the lower and more convenient lands, and, blinded by his ignorance or his avarice, destroys what he scarcely knows how to renew, while it is indispensable to his existence. Th e utter and merciless destruction of the forests is his fi rst movement; and had it not been for the mountain, sometimes also for the marsh, defying his endeavours, or refusing him an adequate return of wealth for his labours, not only would many parts of the world have been utterly denuded of wood, but we might also imagine a time when his increasing numbers would almost exterminate the forests of the earth. Has not the mountain, the parent of the water, the source of the soil, been also appointed as the nurse and the guardian of wood? 43
43 Ibid., 1.163.
41 MacCulloch, Proofs and Illustrations of the Attributes of God, 1.405–8, 3.45.
42 Ibid., 1.499.
Ecotheology before Ecology and Environmentalism 37
MacCulloch understood this as a tragic outcome of human free will: the God who
“permits man to range widely through the great fi eld of wickedness, folly, and self-destruction” also decreed “Th us far shall thou go and no further, lest he destroy the very system on which his existence and destinies depend, … [and] defeat the purposes of his Creator.” 44
Conclusion
I have suggested that common home matters do have deep cultural roots in natural theology, a body of refl ection about how to contemplate worldly existence and in doing so seek responsible personhood. I have suggested too that we should look to it in seeking the prehistory of both the environmental sciences and environmental consciousness:
that is where these things lived before they gained their modern identities.
But do, or could, those roots yield contemporary fruits?
As well as giving some sense of the substance of pre-Darwinian natural theology, I have hoped to convey something of its several fl avors, of the relation of author to reader.
Th is varies. MacCulloch is analytical, but Paley and particularly Sturm are conversational and sometimes refl ective: they want to talk about what they think may be bothering us.
Let me contrast their approach with what I take to be the prevailing contemporary disciplinary approach to addressing “common home” issues. In the latter, the domain of “nature” unproblematically belongs to the natural sciences; one goes to the science faculty to study it. But within the fragmented university, knowing is separate from valuing and from acting. When it comes to killing or destroying things, one might need to cross the campus to fi nd some appropriate domain of applied ethics. But even were it not the case that ethicists diff er, one’s actual acting in the world would be a matter of one’s freely chosen identity, or whatever it is that occupies the interstices not covered by scientist or ethicist.
Compare that with the approach of these natural theologians. Sturm, Paley, and MacCulloch are hardly uninterested or dismissive of science (all, for example, considered the new knowledge of plant–animal gas exchanges). At issue is not acceptance but interpretation. Th e natural theologians are disrespectful of any narrowly disciplinary limits of knowledge, however. Th e foundation of their interpretation is integrative—not merely of the scientifi c domains integrated in ecology (or better, a comprehensive biogeochemical science)—but the integration of these with other forms of human sciences, which include theological inquiry. Th ey inherit that premise from the monism of monotheism: an assumption that all comes from and makes sense in terms of one God warrants the expectation that everything does relate to everything else. Th ey share this presumption with more naturalistic forms of monism, including those underlying comprehensive environmental sciences. Th e stakes diff er, however.
For the scientist, explanation will be primary; for the natural theologian, defending God’s competence was key. Th eir antithesis was an “all is random and meaningless”
view that led, they thought, to amorality and apathy.
44 Ibid.
Th at integration privileges the standpoint of the inquiring, world-altering, and meaning-seeking human whose business will be creating some “common home,”
however well or poorly the knowledge-transmitting institutions of the day may support that quest. Th at person’s immediate concern is not so much “what is,” but
“what shall I do on the basis of what I think about what is.” It will involve a squaring of science and of ethics with experience, situation, and the manifold aspects of identity and obligation. 45
Th at cosmological project of juggling self, good, and the world until they fall into line is not in fact so radical or foreign an undertaking. In many ways it mirrors the actual concerns of environmental sciences and environmental movements. Th us, however oft en professional ecologists defend their discipline as just another basic science, normative issues of how the world should be pervade its history and usually underwrite its labors. Notions of better or worse states of nature are hard to escape;
terms like “biodiversity” function equally as descriptors and commandments. 46 What diff ers from the heyday of the natural theologians is the disintegration of disciplinization. Th e contest for authority among disciplines has left little authority to the persons who will be the authors of the “common home.”
Selected Bibliography
Paley , William . Natural Th eology . In Th e Works of William Paley, D.D., New Edition in One Volume . Philadelphia : Crissy and Markley , n.d.
Stoll , Mark . “ Creating Ecology: Protestants and the Moral Community of Creation .” In
Religion and the New Ecology: Environmental Responsibility in a World of Flux , (ed.) David Lodge and Christopher Hamlin , 53–72 . Notre Dame, IN : University of Notre Dame Press , 2006 .
Tilley , Terrence . Th e Evils of Th eodicy . Washington, DC : Georgetown University Press , 1991 .
Toulmin , Stephen . Th e Return to Cosmology: Postmodern Science and the Th eology of Nature . Berkeley : University of California Press , 1982 .
White , Lynn , Jr. “ Th e Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis .” Science 155 . 3767 ( 1967 ):
1203–7 .
45 For these themes with regard to Paley, see Niall O’Flaherty , “ Th e Rhetorical Strategy of William
Paley’s Natural Th eology (1802): Part 2, William Paley’s Natural Th eology and the Challenge of Atheism ,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 41 . 2 ( 2010 ): 128–37 .
46 On biographical and sociological links, see Stoll , “ Creating Ecology ,” in Faith in Nature:
Environmentalism as Religious Quest , (ed.) Th omas Dunlap ( Seattle : University of Washington Press , 2005 ).
Humility is still a human virtue.
— Henry David Th oreau 1 Romanticism glorifi ed—we now say “romanticized”—the lives of so-called “common men” close to nature. Wordsworth wrote in the “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads that the subjects of his poems were “incidents and situations from common life” and that he wanted to “describe them … as far as was possible in a selection of language really used by men.” In this, he sought to give voice to common people, in the belief that those in “humble and rustic life” express the virtue that exists in plain language, simple feeling, rural occupations, and natural forms. 2 But there is a paradox at the center of representing the virtues of simplicity in this way. In identifying their subjects as simple and virtuous, pastoral authors implicitly contrast them with their more complex, vicious counterparts. 3 Descriptions of country people as “simple” and “plain” are meant