Environmental Thought - Robin Attfield

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taking eggs from her nest, or ones that he omits, such as the teaching of Proverbs 12 that ‘the righteous man regardeth the life of his beast’, and the opening of Psalm 24: ‘The Earth is the Lord’s, and the fulness thereof’ (consciously echoed in I Corinthians 10:26 in the New Testament), which implies that humanity does not own the Earth, but is answerable to its creator.

      The Old Testament also re-emphasizes the goodness of creation, not only in Genesis 1:31, but also in Song of Solomon 2, with its celebration of spring, and in Proverbs 8:22–31, where the wisdom of God is represented as God’s agent in creation, ‘rejoicing before him always, rejoicing in his inhabited world and in the sons of men’. This theme is developed in the intertestamental book, Wisdom of Solomon, which stresses that God is well satisfied with his creation (1:13–16). Elsewhere in the Old Testament, and not least in the writings of the prophets (see Isaiah 55), the fertility of the land is standardly treated as a token of divine favour, while the rivers ‘clap their hands’ and ‘the hills sing together for joy’ in praise of God (Psalm 98). (This theme of nature praising God was taken up later by St Francis; see the later part of this chapter.)

      Glacken often writes of God in Judaeo-Christian theology as not being immanent in the world. In the Bible, God is certainly the world’s transcendent creator, but, despite Glacken’s comment, God is often represented as also omnipresent. Psalm 139, for example, expresses the impossibility of escaping from God’s presence, while, in the New Testament, Paul, speaking at Athens, proclaims that, in God, ‘we live and move and have our being’ (Acts 17:28). Thus, in the Bible as a whole, God is both the world’s transcendent creator and immanent in the world as well. This combination of beliefs has proved important for subsequent attitudes to the Earth and its multiple inhabitants.

       The New Testament and the Christian message

      Thus Paul suggests that many of these people had failed to see God’s works in nature, clear as they were: ‘Ever since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely his eternal power and deity, have been clearly perceived in the things that have been made’ (Romans 1:20). Likewise in Acts, Paul and Barnabas affirm that, even in past generations, ‘he did not leave himself without witnesses, for he did good and gave you from heaven rains and fruitful seasons, satisfying your hearts with food and gladness’ (Acts 14:17; Glacken 1967: 161). These passages were later used to supply arguments for God’s existence based on nature and its order.

      Jesus too assumed God’s existence and care, but used common experience to express this. ‘Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow … And yet I say unto you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these’ (Matthew 6:28–29). The ‘fowls of the air’ are treated similarly in the same passage, with the rider that people are more valuable than they are (Matthew 6:26). But even this rider presupposes that the birds and the flowers have an independent value of their own, a stance nowadays known as ‘biocentrism’, which is compatible with the belief that people, with their ampler capacities, are of greater value. (Biocentrism need not imply that all creatures are of like value. For an elucidation of biocentrism, see Chapter 2.)

      Problem passages from the gospels, about Jesus sending the Gadarene swine to their deaths (Mark 5:11–14) and cursing a barren fig-tree (Mark 11:12–14), were taken by Augustine to indicate that refraining from killing animals and destroying trees is ‘the height of superstition’ (Passmore 1974: 111–12). But this passage tells us far more about Augustine and his polemical powers (directed against contemporary opponents) than about Jesus. Stephen Clark suggests that the narrative about the Gadarene swine may have originated in a parable, rather than as a historical event (1977: 196), while Luke 13:6–9 records a parable that could easily have been transformed into the story about the cursing of the fig-trees in Mark. (For other examples of New Testament narratives probably originating in parables, see Attfield 1991 [1983]: 30.) These problem passages, then, need not constitute obstacles to Jesus holding the biocentric attitudes shown in the passage about the birds of the air and the lilies of the field (Matthew 6:26–29), and suggested also by his consorting with the wild beasts in the wilderness (Mark 1:13), which is an echo of the behaviour associated in the Old Testament with the Messiah. (Biocentrism is discussed in greater detail in the next chapter.)

      Lynn White (1967) has claimed that Christianity is ‘the most anthropocentric religion the world has seen’. ‘Anthropocentrism’ is variously used to mean either the view that everything exists for the sake of human interests (teleological anthropocentrism), or the view that the criterion of moral rightness is fostering human interests alone (normative anthropocentrism). White may intend both of these, but qualifies his claim with ‘in its Western form’, thus referring in the first instance to two millennia of Christianity in the West. However, it is appropriate to remark at this stage that, despite occasional anthropocentric biblical passages (e.g., Paul’s stance on oxen at 1 Corinthians 9:9), the Old Testament is clearly incompatible with anthropocentrism in both of these senses (see Psalm 104, Proverbs 12:10 and Job 38–41), and that the overall message of the New Testament is, in this regard, no different. I will, however, return to White’s claims in the section below on the Middle Ages, to which they most directly refer.

       Early Christianity

      Some of the Church Fathers have been cited as sources of inspiration by modern environmentalists. The theologian Paul Santmire, for example, finds a neglected but ecologically promising motif in the second-century Christian theologian Irenaeus, who wrote of the whole cosmos being renewed in the end times: ‘The whole creation shall, according to God’s will, obtain a vast increase, that it may bring forth fruits such as Isaiah declares (30:25–26)’; indeed, it ‘is full of goodness, harmony, beauty, and life at all times’ (Santmire 1985: 43). And then there is Chrysostom’s teaching (in the fourth century) about the beasts – ‘Surely we ought to show them great kindness and gentleness for many reasons, but above all because they are of the same origin as ourselves’ – which has been cited with approbation by C. W. Hume (1957: 26) and Andrew Linzey (1976: 103). Basil the Great (c. 331–79 CE) prayed for ‘the humble beasts who bear with us the heat and burden of the day’ (Passmore 1974: 198), suggesting that the attitudes of the book of Proverbs persisted into the patristic period. However, others, such as Origen (third century CE), seem to have adhered to a more anthropocentric stance, holding that the creator has made everything to serve rational beings (Glacken 1967: 185–6).

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