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I
The
development of ecological awareness and sensitivity in the last years has
led to the use of various models of speaking about the relation of the
human being to nature. The prevailing one among these models is that of
steward: the human being is the steward of creation. This terminology has
become widespread not only among secular but also among religious
ecologists, especially among the latter. We encounter it in almost every
reference to the ecological problem by theologians. The idea of
stewardship is a useful one mainly from the point of view of what it
intends to exclude, namely that the human being is the lord and proprietor
of creation. Such an understanding of the human being as a proprietor of
creation found support in modern times mainly in two areas: the
anthropology of the Enlightenment, and Western, particularly Protestant,
theology.
The
Enlightenment found its typical representatives in this respect in such
thinkers as Descartes, Francis Bacon and even Kant. In the words of
Descartes, the development of science would make the human beings .maîtres
et possesseurs de la nature., while Francis Bacon in an almost brutal way
invites humanity to treat nature as its ‘slave’. Kant, on the other
hand, understood humanity’s relationship to nature as that of a
‘judge’ whose function is to exercise rational and moral judgement on
nature, directing it in accordance with what the human being considers to
be right or wrong, good or bad for it.
Protestant
theology, on the other hand, particularly in its Calvinist tradition, did
its best to exploit the Biblical verse ‘Subdue and have dominion over
the earth’ (Gen. 1:28) in order to promote, directly or indirectly,
capitalist views of work and economy, as Max Weber has demonstrated so
clearly. Without such religious ideas the appearance of the ecological
crisis would probably be difficult to explain historically.
Now, the
replacement of the model of proprietor and possessor with that of steward
of creation may be useful in order to exclude the undoubtedly unacceptable
view that the human being is the lord of creation or may behave as such a
lord. Ecologists recognised this and adopted the model of stewardship.
However, a closer examination of this model would reveal to us its
limitations and disadvantages from the ecological viewpoint. Thus, (a)
Stewardship implies a managerial approach to nature. The Greek word
oikonomos which stands behind the notion of steward points to the capacity
of the human being to ‘manage’ a given ‘property’ and make
‘use’ of it, albeit within the limits of what has been ‘entrusted’
to humanity. In this sense stewardship resembles what the English mean by
the function of a ‘trustee’. A utilitarian implication in the relation
of the human being to nature seems to underlie this model. Equally
significant is the underlying conception of nature as a ‘thing’ and an
‘object’ to be managed, arranged, re-arranged, distributed etc. by the
human being. (b) Stewardship suggests a conservatist attitude to nature.
The steward is the ‘guardian’ of what is given to him or her, called
to conserve it, albeit, as we have just noted, while managing it. This
conservatist approach to our relation to nature seems to overlook two
important truths. On the one hand, the human being is not called only to
‘guard’ but also to ‘cultivate’ nature, i.e. to improve its
capacities and help it grow and bring forth fruit. On the other hand,
human intervention has already reached such proportions that it would be
unrealistic and futile to speak of sheer conservation of the environment.
Certain parts of the environment may still be capable of conservation, but
other parts have undergone irrevocable changes, and any attempt to
preserve them would be unrealistic, and in some cases even undesirable.
Thus, the
idea of stewardship, much as it is useful to indicate our objection to the
view that the human being is the lord and proprietor of creation – a
view that accounts historically to a considerable degree for the
appearance of the ecological crisis – has its own limitations and would
appear to be problematic from the ecological point of view. It may be,
therefore, necessary to complement it with another model, namely with what
we may describe as the priest of creation. Such a model seems to emerge
naturally from the Patristic and liturgical tradition of the Orthodox
Church, but its existential meaning is universal. The word ‘Priest’
forms part of the religious language and for this reason it may appear to
have a significance limited only to religious people. We shall try to sow
that this is not so. But in order to do that we must first clarify our
anthropological presuppositions. We cannot tackle the idea of what Man –
in the sense of anthropos, i.e. both male and female – is. (From now on
we shall use the word ‘man’ in this sense, and not in its ordinary
sexist usage.)
II
What is the
being that we call ‘man’? It is not only theology that tries to answer
this question, but also science and philosophy. Although each of these
three disciplines has something different to say, they cannot but have
also something common about this matter. Otherwise there would be no
common ground and, therefore, no possibility of a dialogue between them.
For science
– and for biology in particular – the human being is very closely
connected with what we call animals; he or she is another animal. This
view has prevailed in biology ever since Darwin produced his theory of
evolution. Although this may sound rather disturbing to theologians, we
must bear in mind, as we will see later on, that it is important for all
of us to remember this connection of the human being with the rest of the
animals. Biology approaches the human being as another animal with higher
qualities than those of the rest of the animals, but with many things in
common, including intelligence and consciousness. Attributes such as these
used to be attached exclusively to human beings in the past. But for
biological scientists today, the human being is, in a certain sense,
basically an animal.
Philosophy
tries to give a different view of the human being. Although it admits that
the human being is an animal, it distinguishes it from the animals in one
important way. In the past, philosophers made this distinction by saying
that humans were specially characterized by intelligence or rationality.
However, ever since Darwin showed that intelligence can also be found in
other animals, and that the difference is a matter of degree and not of
kind, philosophy no longer insists on rationality as the special
characteristic of man.
The
difference seems now to lie in the fact that whereas the animals adjust to
the given world – and sometimes they manage that very well, much better
than the human being – the human being wants to create its own world, to
use the existing world in order to make something specifically human out
of it. This is why the human being produces tools of its own, which are
used in order to exploit nature. But more significantly, it treats nature
as a raw material from which it creates new realities, as is evident
particularly in the case of art. Only the human being can see a tree, for
example, and make another tree out of that, a tree which is ‘his’ or
‘her’ tree, bearing the personal seal of the person who painted it.
Thus it is creativity that characterizes the human being, and this we
cannot find in the animals. Man is a creative being. This is very
important, as we will see later, for ecology as well.
In his
attempt to be creative and to create his own world, man is normally
frustrated, because he tends and wishes to create, as God does, out of
nothing, and to be fully free from what is given to him as his
environment, his ‘world.’ It is because the human being has this
tendency to use the natural world for his own purposes that he can be both
good and bad for creation. The human being can exploit creation in such a
way as to subject it to himself, and in this way make the natural
environment suffer under his dominion.
All this
indicates that what distinguishes the human being from the animals is
freedom expressed as creativity, as the free creation of something new.
There are two ideas here to remember which will be very important for our
subject. The first we draw from biological science, and that is that the
human being is organically and inseparably linked with the natural world,
particularly with the animals. The second is that although he is united
with the rest of creation, man tends to rise above creation and make use
of it in a free way, either by creating something new or sometimes by
simply destroying what is ‘given’ to him.
With these
thoughts from science and philosophy in mind, let us now ask what theology
thinks the human being is. For theology, the human being is not only
related to the rest of creation, but also to another factor, which science
does not want to introduce, while philosophy sometimes does, but very
often does not – namely, God. For theology, God is crucial in order to
know what the human being is. The human being must emerge as something
different, as a different identity with regard to the animals, with regard
to the rest of creation, and also with regard to God. Thus man is a link
between God and the world. This is what is expressed in theological terms
through the idea of the ‘image and likeness of God.’
In the
Bible, when man was created, God said: ‘Let us now create man in our
image and likeness.’ What does that mean? What does it mean that the
human being is an image of God? This has been discussed throughout the
centuries, and I will not bother you with all this complex discussion.
Instead, I will simply mention that one of the elements that the Fathers
saw as expressing this ‘image of God’ in man is rationality (logos),
that man is a logikon zōon (‘rational living being’), and that it
is through his rationality that he reflects the being of God in creation.
However, logos or ‘rationality’ had a particular meaning at that time,
and it had mainly to do with the capacity of the human being to collect
what is diversified and even fragmented in this world and make a unified
and harmonious world (cosmos) out of that. Rationality was not, as it came
to be understood later, simply a capacity to reason with one’s mind.
Instead, as the ancient Greeks thought of logos, it is man’s capacity to
achieve the unity of the world and to make a cosmos out of it. Man has the
capacity to unite the world.
There is
also another element that was stressed by the Fathers as expressing the
‘image of God.’ This is what Gregory of Nyssa calls the autexousion
– the freedom of the human being. The animals do not have a logos in the
sense of acquiring a universal grasp of reality, nor the freedom from the
laws of nature; whereas the human being has to some extent both of these
things, and that is very important for him in order to be, as we shall
see, the priest of creation. Another aspect of the image of God in man –
or rather, another aspect of what man is or represents for theology,
particularly Orthodox and Patristic theology – is that man is the
‘prince of creation’, and the microcosm of the whole of creation. One
of the Fathers who wrote in the seventh century, St Maximus the Confessor,
developed this idea in particular, namely that in the human being we have
the whole world present, a sort of microcosm of the whole universe.
Because the human being has this organic link with creation and at the
same time the drive to unite creation and to be free from the laws of
nature, he can act as the ‘priest of creation’.
III
The priest
is the one who freely and, as himself an organic part of it, takes the
world in his hands to refer it to God, and who, in return, brings God’s
blessing to what he refers to God. Through this act, creation is brought
into communion with God himself. This is the essence of priesthood, and it
is only the human being who can do it, namely, unite the world in his
hands in order to refer it to God, so that it can be united with God and
thus saved and fulfilled. This is so because, as we said earlier, only the
human being is united with creation while being able to transcend it
through freedom.
This role of
the human being, as the priest of creation, is absolutely necessary for
creation itself, because without this reference of creation to God the
whole created universe will die. It will die because it is a finite
universe, as most scientists accept today. This is theologically a very
fundamental belief, since the world was not always there, but came into
being at some point and, for this reason, will ‘naturally’ have an end
and come into non-being one day.
Therefore,
the only way to protect the world from its finitude which is inherent in
its nature, is to bring it into relation with God. This is because God is
the only infinite, immortal being, and it is only by relating to him that
the world can overcome its natural finitude and its natural mortality.
In other
words, when God created the world finite, and therefore subject by nature
to death and mortality, he wanted this world to live forever and to be
united with him – that is, to be in communion with him. It is precisely
for this reason that God created the human being. This underlines the
significance of man as the priest of creation, who would unite the world
and relate it to God so that it may live forever. Now, the human being did
not perform this function, and here lies for theology the root of the
ecological problem. The human being was tempted to make himself the
ultimate point of reference, i.e. God. By replacing God with himself –
that is, a finite created being – man condemned the world to finitude,
mortality, decay and death. In other words, the human being rejected his
role as the priest of creation by making himself God in creation.
This is what
we call in theology the ‘fall of man.’ When this occurred, God did not
want the world to die and brought about a way of restoring this lost
communion between himself and creation. The incarnation of the Son of God
was precisely about this. Christ is the one who came in order to do what
Adam did not do: to be the priest of creation. Through his death and
resurrection, Christ aimed precisely at this unity and communion of the
whole of creation with God, at the reference of creation back to God
again. It is for this reason that Christ is called the ‘second Adam’,
or the ‘last Adam’, and that his work is seen as the
‘recapitulation’ (anakefalaiosis) of all that exists, i.e. of the
entire creation.
Now it is
this role, which Christ performed personally through his cross and
resurrection, that he assigned to his Church, which is his Body. The
Church is there precisely in order to act as the priest of creation who
unites the world and refers it back to God, bringing it into communion
with him. This takes place in the Church particularly through the
sacraments.
The meaning
of the sacraments, for example that of baptism, is that through it the
attitude of the fallen Adam is reversed. Man dies as to his claim to be
God in creation, and instead recognises God as its Lord. Through the path
of asceticism, the Church educates man to sacrifice his own will, his
self-centredness, and subject himself freely to the will of God, thus
showing that man has reversed the attitude of the first Adam. Finally,
through the Eucharist, the Church proclaims and realises precisely this
priestly function of humanity. The Eucharist consists in taking elements
from the natural world, the bread and the wine which represent the created
material world, and bringing them into the hands of the human being, the
hands of Christ who is the man par excellence and the priest of creation,
in order to refer them to God.
At this
point, it is important to remember – especially those of us who belong
to the Orthodox Church and are familiar with the Orthodox Liturgy – that
the central point in our Liturgy is when the priest exclaims: ‘Thine of
thine own we offer unto Thee’. This means precisely that the world, the
creation, is recognised as belonging to God, and is referred back to him.
It is precisely the reversal of Adam’s attitude, who took the world as
his own and referred it to himself. In the Eucharist, the Church does
precisely the opposite: the world belongs to God and we refer it back to
its Creator through the priestly action of Christ as the real and true
man, who is the head of the Body of the Church.
IV
Let us now
look briefly at the ecological significance of all this.
1. The
understanding of the human being as priest rather than steward of creation
means that the role of man in creation is neither passive
(conservationist) nor managerial, i.e. ‘economic’ (the notion of
‘economy’ is deeply linked with that of management, i.e. the idea of
arranging things according to and for the sake of expediency, not only in
political but also in ecclesiastical language). The human being is related
to nature not functionally, as the idea of stewardship would suggest, but
ontologically: by being the steward of creation the human being relates to
nature by what he does, whereas by being the priest of creation he relates
to nature by what he is. The implications of this distinction are very
significant. In the case of stewardship our attitude to nature is
determined by ethics and morality: if we destroy nature we disobey and
transgress a certain law, we become immoral and unethical. In the case of
priesthood, in destroying nature we simply cease to be, the consequences
of ecological sin are not moral but existential. Ecology is in this way a
matter of our esse, not of our bene esse. Our ecological concern becomes
in this way far more powerful and efficient than in employing the model of
stewardship.
2. The idea
of priest of creation gives to ecology a cultural dimension. The word
culture must be taken in its deepest meaning, which is the elevation of an
otherwise transitory and ephemeral entity to something of lasting and even
eternal value. When an artist creates, he or she wishes to bring about
something of eternal value and significance. The priest is in this sense
an artist: he takes the material world in his hands (the bread and the
wine, for example, in the case of the Eucharist, which are perishable by
nature) and lifts it up to acquire eternal divine meaning. In such an
approach the entire raison d.être of ecology undergoes a profound change.
We do not ask people to respect the environment simply for negative
reasons, such as the fear of destruction etc. – this would be an ecology
based on fear. We ask people to take a positive view of ecology, something
like an attitude of love towards nature. As priests rather than stewards
we embrace nature instead of managing it, and although this may sound
romantic and sentimental, its deeper meaning is, as we stated above,
ontological, since this ‘embracing’ of nature amounts to our very
being, to our existence.
3. Such a
cultural dimension of ecology implies that the protection of nature is not
contrary to the development of nature. The human being is the priest of
creation in the sense that the material world he takes in his hands is
transformed into something better than what it is naturally. Nature must
be improved through human intervention; it is not to be preserved as it
is. In the Eucharist we do not offer to God simply grain or wheat and
grapes, but bread and wine, i.e. natural elements developed and
transformed through the human labour, in our hands. Ecology is not
preservation but development. The model of priest is in this sense far
more suggestive and rich than that of steward. It does not, however, bring
us back to the model of proprietor, since in the case of priesthood the
development of nature through the intermediary of the human hands does not
end up with the human being and its interests, but is referred to God.
Ecology and
development have always been, as we all know, two terms that require some
kind of reconciliation. (There is always the fear among developing
countries that ecology has been ‘invented’ as a means of keeping them
underdeveloped). This is indeed the case if the development of nature has
as its ultimate purpose the satisfaction of human needs. But in a priestly
approach to nature we develop it not in order to satisfy our needs as
human beings, but because nature itself stands in need of development
through us in order to fulfil its own being and acquire a meaning which it
would not otherwise have. In other words, there is a development of nature
which treats it as raw material for production and distribution, and there
is a development which treats nature as an entity that must be developed
for its own sake. In the latter case, although the human being is not
passive, simply preserving or sustaining nature, he is developing nature
with respect for its, and not his, interests, taking care of its fragility
and its ‘groaning in travail’, to remember St Paul’s moving
expression in Romans 8.
V
I have
tried to describe the model of priest of creation in its ecological
significance. I hope I have shown some of the advantages that this model
may have for ecology compared with other models, especially that of
stewardship. I am fully aware of the fact that the way things are going
with regard to ecology none of these models would save us. I nevertheless
think that the moralistic approach to the ecological problems expressed
through such words as ‘responsibility’ etc. has to be complemented
with a cultural approach. Our ecological crisis is due not so much to a
wrong ethic as to a bad ethos; it is a cultural problem. In our Western
culture we did everything to de-sacralise life, to fill our societies with
legislators, moralists and thinkers, and undermined the fact that the
human being is also, or rather primarily, a liturgical being, faced from
the moment of birth with a world that he or she must treat either as a
sacred gift or as raw material for exploitation and use. We are all born
priests, and unless we remain so throughout our lives we are bound to
suffer the ecological consequences we are now experiencing. We must allow
the idea of priest of creation to re-enter our culture and affect our
ethos. For, as we said in our previous symposium last year, an ethic which
is not rooted in ethos is of little use to ecology.
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