Christopher Hamlin
1 Lynn White , Jr. , “ Th e Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis ,” Science 155 . 3767 ( 1967 ): 1203–7 . Th e
foremost chronicler of White’s impact has been Elspeth Whitney , “ Lynn White, Ecotheology, and History ,” Environmental Ethics 15 . 2 ( 1993 ): 151–69 ; Whitney , “ Changing Metaphors and Concepts of Nature ,” in Religion and the New Ecology: Environmental Responsibility in a World in Flux , (eds.) David Lodge and Christopher Hamlin ( Notre Dame, IN : University of Notre Dame Press , 2004 ), 26–52 ; Whitney , “ Th e Lynn White Th esis: Reception and Legacy ,” Environmental Ethics 35 ( 2013 ): 3130–1 .
to do his historical homework, he was probably accurately refl ecting the mainstream Christianity of his day, at least in America.
Mid-century Christianity’s sphere of authority refl ected a division of intellectual labor that had taken place during the nineteenth century. At the beginning of that century, many theologians still understood themselves as authorities over the character and vicissitudes of the cosmos, at least in broad terms. By its end, most did not. Th ese had become the territory of scientifi c disciplines; whatever comprehensive explanation they off ered was likely naturalistic, if not emphatically materialistic, and disconnected from any clear transcendent moral explanation of the sort that might guide human interactions with nature. In America, at the time of White’s writing, authority respecting these interactions came from diff use remnants of romanticism and the frontier ethos, progressivist resource management, and the outdoor recreation community. 2 No distinct institution sanctioned systematic personal inquiry into human accountability for (and equally to) nature. Elsewhere, the authority came from other cultural resources, but the result was much the same.
My depiction of a division, of course, assumes a prior unity. If so, it was hardly an uncomplicated one. First, in the Abrahamic religions, the legacy of the Creation as a designed entity to and for which both God and humans are accountable is complicated by a series of subsequent events: by the Fall, by the drowning of the world and the resulting new covenant, by the giving of laws, and ultimately by the Christian dispensation. 3 Of these, the Fall has been the most important touchstone in thinking about accountability from and to nature. Not only has the Augustinian sense of living in a fallen world created ambivalence toward the world we experience, it also has raised the cognitive problem of distinguishing the created from the fallen, a matter Peter Harrison has extensively explored. 4
Beyond this quasi-paleontological problem of tying particular aspects of the world we experience to particular layers of Biblical history lies the broader problem of how God governs. Only when we know that can we know what “nature” is or whether there is even need at all for that ambiguous term (or for that other ambiguous, “God”).
Some have regarded God as immediately and entirely responsible in the creation and sustaining of the cosmos, and thus in everything that has ever taken place. Others held that nature, while created (at least in part), was eff ectively self-acting. Hence, most of what has occurred in the cosmos was the determined result of interacting material entities whose properties God was in some sense responsible for, but over which He no longer exercised direct supervision. Th at such diff erent positions could be included under one roof is extraordinary, given their contrasting implications with regard to accountability. In the former position, known in various contexts as “voluntarism”
or “occasionalism,” there is eff ectively no nature. In the latter “intellectualist” or
2 Stephen Fox , Th e American Conservation Movement: John Muir and His Legacy ( Madison : University
of Wisconsin Press , 1981 ).
3 My focus is on the history of Western Christianity. Other Abrahamic heritages—represented in
Judaism, orthodox Christianity, and Islam—are suffi ciently distinct that it is impossible to explore them here.
4 Peter Harrison , Th e Fall of Man and the Foundations of Science ( Cambridge : Cambridge University
Press , 2007 ).
Ecotheology before Ecology and Environmentalism 27
“Platonist” position (though these terms are admittedly problematic), nature’s doings do not necessarily have anything to do with any human’s relation with the divine. 5 Usually, quiet compromises have been the rule. One is that God governs actively, but usually lawfully, with occasional suspensions of laws recognizable as miracles. Another has been to represent the Creation more as arranging than creating per se. But any simple dichotomy between primary and secondary causation is likely to miss much, and consistency is rare. More common are dual creation models, where later and more specifi c aspects of creation are fi t into earlier more general aspects. Th e Hexamaeral homilies of the physics-minded St. Basil of Caeserea off er a good example, and Kant develops the problem more generally in the Critique on Judgment . 6
Much of this compromising refl ects the work of the post-Nicene fathers, most strikingly Arnobius, the Cappadocians, Lactantius, and, later, Augustine, who were concerned with the problem of how to respond to a pantheistic pagan religion and philosophy in which divine accountability was a prominent concern. 7 Th eir results were generally successful. For much of the time, religious writers and thinkers, and presumably the laity who looked to them for authoritative answers, could eff ectively take the world for granted: either all was God’s direct will in which case there was no basis for quibbling, or it refl ected a domain in which God chose not to be (or even could not be) actively engaged. 8 Questions arose only when the world seemed particularly unsatisfactory, as in the arrival of a pestilence or in the trials of a Job. 9
By the early modern period, the well-known argument from design (what may be called empirical or aposteriori natural theology) provided systemic reassurance that, whatever the actual mechanics of divine management might be, nature was the main showpiece of God’s work—and, accordingly, a test case for discussions of divine accountability.
Usually, design arguments are seen as attempts to prove God’s existence.
Philosophers have found them wanting. Hume critiqued their circularity, noting that they cannot function as proofs until there is already agreement on what sort of God is to be proved, while Kant noted the limitations of humankind’s understanding of the infi nite and ushered in an era of transcendent theology, which largely bypassed the details of human experience of nature. 10 But many theologians needed no convincing.
5 Antony Flew , God and Philosophy ( New York : Harcourt, Brace, and Co ., 1966 ) ; Eugene Klaaren ,
Religious Origins of Modern Science: Belief in Creation in Seventeenth Century Th ought ( Grand Rapids : Eerdmans , 1977 ).
Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Th ought from Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century ( Berkeley : University of California Press , 1969 ).
For a wide range of reasons—triviality, inadequacy, impiety, and distraction from the more immediate matters of salvation—orthodox theologians were oft en dismissive.
Recent theologians and historians have largely concurred. Karl Barth, representing the reformed tradition, is oft en singled out as the most vehement critic—the design arguments of puny humans pretending to reason for God reeked of arrogance. 11 Within a Catholic framework, the historian Michael Buckley arrived at a complementary view, noting the lack of Christology in natural theology and its seamless relation to Enlightenment rationalism. 12 In similar fashion, the literary historian Colin Jager saw this form of natural theology as the leading edge of a secularization that fragmented human experience into the disciplines that characterize modernity. 13
Indeed, by the end of the nineteenth century, theology had itself become a discipline, just like the discipline-bound sciences of nature. But the emerging distribution of inquiries to disciplines left untenanted a large domain of seminal, if perhaps unanswerable, questions, those “why” questions regarding the incomprehensible ways of the world whose tentative answers aff ect our engagement with it: what we perceive as normal or as pathological, what we admire or revile, and equally how we practice responsible living in a “common home.”
Th at vacant domain is evident in the curious bifurcation of “cosmology” in the modern Western world. As used by anthropologists, the term refers to the ethnographic (descriptive) study of what is largely a normative domain—how humans of some other culture (i.e., one that does not train anthropologists) think the cosmos works and how they should fi t into it. Applied to our culture, the term refers to the descriptive and analytical study of a domain of astrophysics. 14 (Th eologians, notes one of our editors, hope to bridge this gap, studying their own cosmologies from within.)
Or consider the fate of “theodicy,” a term coined by Leibniz in 1710 to refer to the problem of justifi cation, applied particularly to the question of how an omniscient, omnipotent, and benevolent god could allow evil. Th en and now human-nature interactions were central parts of such inquiries—we ask “why” of great storms, droughts, epidemics, and pestilences, or scarcities and maldistributions of needed resources. Or more specifi cally, “Would the good God allow humans to overrun the world and dangerously destabilize the world’s climate?” Yet in a 1791 essay “On the Failure of All Attempted [and, by insinuation, all future] Philosophical Th eodicies,”
Kant advised his fellow philosophers to give up the project. 15 He saw no way to justify
13 Colin Jager , Th e Book of God: Secularization and Design in the Romantic Era ( Philadelphia : University
of Pennsylvania Press , 2007 ).
14 Stephen Toulmin , Th e Return to Cosmology: Postmodern Science and the Th eology of Nature
( Berkeley : University of California Press , 1982 ).
15 Immanuel Kant , “ On the Failure of All Attempted Philosophical Th eodicies ,” in Kant on History and
Religion , (ed.) Michel Despland ( Montreal : McGill-Queen’s University Press , 1973 ), 283–97 .
11 John Dillenberger , Protestant Th ought and Natural Science: A Historical Interpretation ( Notre Dame,
IN : University of Notre Dame Press , 1988 ) . Th ere have been recent protests that Barth’s hostility does not adequately represent the reformed tradition. See Susan Schreiner , Th eater of His Glory:
Nature and Natural Order in the Th ought of John Calvin ( Durham, NC : Labyrinth , 1991 ) ; Michael Sudduth , Th e Reformed Objection to Natural Th eology ( Burlington, VT : Ashgate , 2009 ) .
12 Michael Buckley , At the Origins of Modern Atheism ( New Haven : Yale University Press , 1987 ).
Ecotheology before Ecology and Environmentalism 29
the justifi cations. Two centuries later, theodicy has largely been banished from the academy, existing only as an outlier of the philosophy of religion, and even there sometimes despised as an insult to the human experience of suff ering. 16 Yet, however easily they may be dismissed as “adolescent,” these “why” questions are still asked, and some philosophers are beginning to recognize that they have been more central than conventional accounts of the history of philosophy acknowledge. 17 Th e asking and answering occurs either as a private matter or one on which self-appointed authorities pontifi cate. Th e insoluble problem of natural evil lives on in pastoral settings too.
A pastor in a hospital setting, for example, will oft en hear an appeal for cosmic explanation. Even though there may be no convincing answer, simply to acknowledge the validity of the question will itself be important. Such unaccredited answering matters: not only is it an important part of moral identity—thus guilt about personal carbon budgets may be among our private responses to the problem of theodicy—but it also carries enormous political power, far more perhaps than accredited answering.
Th e hope that science, more broadly diff used, can (and should) displace demands that the cosmos be meaningful is both naive and counterproductive in addressing
“common home” issues. It relies on a category error—the assertion that nonnormative forms of inquiry, concerned with objectively delineating the workings of the world, will be applicable to the normative and subjective problem of determining the meaning of each person’s own situatedness. It fails to acknowledge that it is the quest for meanings—these private (and communal) reconciliations with reality—that animate those “home”-making actions that comprise the public’s response to environmental conditions. And it is counterproductive, too, in its arrogance: my own experience, echoed by other teachers of environmental matters, is that however great their shock value, the facts-fi rst approaches of “inconvenient truths” oft en engender bewilderment and despair (or denial and distrust), largely because they are insuffi ciently person-centered, existential.
Here, however, my concern is with an empirical error: the belief that no critical, non-facile body of discussion exists that unites these public and private, objective and subjective, descriptive and normative, phenomenal and noumenal (or numinous) domains of inquiry. For some time, historians of science have denied any inherent opposition between science and religion. Plainly false for most of history, such a claim emerges only in the late nineteenth-century university politics. 18 But, particularly for recent science, we have rarely gone further to explore how far theodicy- or cosmology-based inquiries underpin inquiries into the world’s workings. Th e environmental sciences, comprehensive in scope and oft en linked to public sensibility and public action, are an ideal case.
16 Terrence Tilley , Th e Evils of Th eodicy ( Washington, DC : Georgetown University Press , 1991 ).
17 Susan Neiman , Evil in Modern Th ought: An Alternative History of Philosophy ( Princeton : Princeton
University Press , 2002 ) . See also “Holiday in Hellmouth,” Th e New Yorker , June 9, 2008. Online: http://
www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/06/09/holiday-in-hellmouth (accessed September 20, 2016).
18 Ronald Numbers , Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths about Science and Religion ( Cambridge, MA :
Harvard University Press , 2009 ).
A literature search not tied to recent terms—“environment” and “ecology”—reveals the deep roots of “common home” issues in natural theology. 19 Th ese have been neglected, partly because the arguments of natural theology have been mischaracterized as having to do with God’s existence rather than with the divine attributes evident in the biogeochemical functioning of the cosmos (the issues of cosmology and theodicy);
and partly because of the entanglement of natural theology in the legacy of Charles Darwin. Th ere it is oft en depicted not as one of several frameworks that organized his inquiries but as the “theory” he refuted in positing evolution by natural selection. 20 Since Darwin is also oft en credited with a foundational role in the emergence of ecology, 21 this exclusion of natural theology from his achievement has further alienated it from narratives of scientifi c progress. Mistakenly confl ated with “Creationism,” it is taken as the antithesis of any rigorous environmental science, a denial of natural dynamism, and naive wishful thinking.
In the remainder of this chapter, I highlight a few “common home” themes taken from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Protestant natural theology in the works of three authors. One, William Paley (1743–1805), is the common target in the Darwin literature. Oft en his Natural Th eology (1802) is made to stand in for natural theology in general (which was in fact a diverse literary enterprise and not properly a theory at all). Darwin, however, credited the work in helping frame his enquiries into the origin of species. 22 Th e others are more obscure. Christoph Christian Sturm’s (1740–1786) 1772 devotional almanac, Betrachtungen über die Werke Gottes im Reiche der Natur und der Vorsehung auf alle Tage des Jahres (or Refl ections on the Works of God in Nature for Each Day of the Year ), was a digest of Lutheran natural theology but a best seller in many languages and across many confessions in the fi rst third of the nineteenth century. Now forgotten, Sturm was at least as popular as Paley. Last is John MacCulloch (1773–1835), an iconoclastic physician-geologist, author of a three-volume 1800-page
22 Charles Darwin , Autobiography , (ed.) Nora Barlow , vol. 29 of Th e Works of Charles Darwin ( London :
William Pickering , 1989 ), 101 ; see also 120.
19 Here I follow Udo Krolzik, who notes fi ve anticipations of ecology in natural theology: a concern
with research into detail, a concern with large-scale connections, the displacement of deductive approaches by experiment and observation, the emphasis on the unity of nature among all its variety, and the emphasis on harmony and balance in nature. Udo Krolzik , “ Das Physikotheologische Naturverständnis und Sein Einfl uß Auf Das Naturwissenschaft liche Denken Im 18. Jahrhundert ,”
Medizinhistorisches Journal 15 . 1/2 ( 1980 ): 90–102 ; Krolzik , Säkularisierung der Natur: Providentia-Dei-Lehre und Naturverständnis der Frühaufk lärung ( Neukirchen-Vluyn : Neukirchener Verlag des Erziehungsvereins , 1988 ).
21 With the exception of Frank Egerton, many historians have been uneasy with recognizing
precedents before Spencer and Darwin. Th us, compare Joel Hagen , Th e Entangled Bank: Th e Origins
Ecotheology before Ecology and Environmentalism 31
Proofs and Illustrations of the Attributes of God, from the Facts and Laws of the Physical Universe , complete by 1830. It is by far the most sophisticated work of general natural theology in the decade before Charles Darwin began his serious theorizing. Darwin was one of his few readers—but only, evidently, of parts of volume one. 23
None of these authors was a lightweight. Sturm ended his career as high pastor in Hamburg, Paley has been called the most important English philosopher of his era, and the polymath MacCulloch produced the fi rst geological map of Scotland and is known as the founder of malariology. 24 While each writes “natural theology,” their works diff er signifi cantly. Sturm’s is pastoral, existential, and oft en doxological. Paley is argumentative, anticipating criticisms to natural theology, suggesting responses to them. MacCulloch is inductive. His “God” is an under-defi ned entity whose attributes are to be inferred from a critical review of contemporary science. As to relations among these authors, Sturm was among Paley’s many sources; MacCulloch is critical of Paley-style natural theology.
Before examining them, one more issue needs addressing: natural theology’s alleged anthropocentrism, which led White to blame the Judeo-Christian heritage for the “ecologic crisis.” If indeed natural theology can be seen merely as an ideological exercise to fi nd cosmic vindication for whatever ethnic, national, gender, class, or religious identity a writer represents, we need not take it seriously. It can be. One need only point to the early parts of Genesis. One could pluck passages from each of these authors that would support such a view. Yet they would be atypical. And we need to read them in terms of the world these writers (and their presumed readers) understood and experienced, one of plagues, pestilences, fl oods, and storms, and in which the Fall was a far more immediate touchstone than the heady optimism of Genesis 1. Allusions to a world created for humans are oft en less commands to world-making than eff orts to include some partial goods among plentiful evils. For usually, the writer’s main concern is simply to assure the reader that world is being looked aft er, no matter what is happening in it. Oft en, and particularly in Germany, the Book of Job (particularly its penultimate chapters) was more immediate than the Creation. Th ere, speaking from the whirlwind, Jehovah taxes Job with a series of rhetorical questions whose collective implication is biocentric; the world evidently does not exist to meet Job’s needs. 25 Natural theologians must accept such challenges: their chief antithesis is a devil-may-care apathy; a view that one need not act and there is nothing to invest hope in because there is no meaning and nothing matters. Th is for them is the essence of irreligion. 26
I shall touch on four issues in this essay, all anticipations of later public issues of ecotheological importance: biodiversity, human population limits, cyclicity, and anthropogenic destabilization.
Biodiversity
Why do species exist? Generally, existence (Creation) is reason enough. Questions
Why do species exist? Generally, existence (Creation) is reason enough. Questions