Environmental Thought - Robin Attfield

Скачать книгу

frequent literary form among early Christians was that of commentaries on the six days of creation, each bearing the name of ‘Hexaemeron’. This tradition was pioneered by the first-century CE Jewish writer Philo (Glacken 1967: 187–9); its most celebrated exponent was Basil the Great, whose work became known in the West through the Latin hexaemeron of Ambrose, which was based on it. Basil’s work was praised many centuries later by von Humboldt in Cosmos, his major work of the early nineteenth century(Glacken 1967: 177: for von Humboldt, see Chapter 2).

      One passage of Basil’s work illustrates well the theme of an unfinished Earth which God has yet to complete with the aid of human farming and arboriculture: ‘For the proper and natural adornment of the earth is its completion: corn waving in the valleys – meadows green with grass and rich with many-coloured flowers – fertile glades and hill-tops shaded by forests’ (Glacken 1967: 192). Phrases from this sentence about the completion of God’s creation were echoed to convey much the same message more than a thousand years later by the English naturalist John Ray (1627–1705). Such passages give the lie to the once-popular claim that early and medieval Christians lacked an awareness of natural beauty.

      Augustine (354–430) too wrote a hexaemeron. Although, as we have seen, he adhered to a kind of anthropocentrist theology (everything being made, in his view, either for human benefit or for the glorification of God), he importantly countered aspects of Origen’s degraded view of creation (see Santmire 1985), holding that life on Earth and the beauties of nature are not to be despised because they are low in the scale of being (Glacken 1967: 196). (For the great chain of being, see the subsection above on Aristotle and Theophrastus.) For Augustine, indeed, God is immanent in the world, and also transcends it (Santmire 1985: 208; Peacocke 2007: 22; Attfield 2016: 96). Rather surprisingly, in view of his usual reputation, Augustine also praises the achievements of human art and invention (agriculture and navigation included), and was one of many to argue to God from the beauties of the world.

      Despite the fallen nature of humanity, human beings participate fully in the order of creation (Glacken 1967: 200), an order that retains its created goodness, and can, as in the passage cited, serve as a profound source of wonder.

      Augustine also continued the tradition, present already in Chrysostom, of comparing nature to a great book, and one which, as he wrote, even the unlettered can read (Glacken 1967: 204). Reflection on nature as one of God’s two books (the other being the revelation as conveyed in the Bible) has echoed down the centuries, being taken up (for example) in the seventeenth century by Francis Bacon (1561–1626) and Galileo (1564–1642), and in the nineteenth by the American naturalist John Muir (1838–1914). Those who could understand this book could at least begin to experience wonder, and to feel awe before its creator. This sense of awe and wonder has proved to be (as in Muir’s case) one of the central springs of modern environmentalism.

      This is the period from the fall of the Roman Empire in the West to 1500 and the dawn of the modern period. It includes the centuries which were at one time known as the ‘Dark Ages’, but which turn out to have been a period of considerable agricultural and technological development. It is also the period in which Christianity reached lands outside the Roman Empire, and returned to lands overrun by non-Christian invaders after the Romans withdrew. Many of those commemorated as saints, such as Patrick, Brendon, Columba and Cuthbert, played leading roles in this latter process. Several of these saints also enjoyed friendly and cooperative relations with wild animals, in the tradition of St Antony, the third-century founder of living as a hermit, in his case in the Egyptian ‘inner desert’ (Bratton 1988; Coates 1998: 55).

       Saints and beasts, monks and farming

      The successors of St Antony spread his ideas and practices, and tales of gentleness towards animals became associated with Celtic saints such as Brendon (sixth century) and Northumbrian saints such as Cuthbert (seventh century) (Waddell 1995). The detailed veracity of these stories matters less than the widespread veneration of these saints among Christians throughout the Middle Ages (and beyond). This veneration fostered a gentle attitude to animals, both wild (such as seals and ravens) and domestic (such as sheep and dogs), albeit one contrasting with traditions of hunting (in which, for example, Basil the Great joined) (Coates 1998: 56), and also with anthropocentric teachings spread by followers of church fathers such as Augustine. While this was an age when many wild animals were hunted to extinction, the lives of the saints also exercised an important influence on attitudes to nature, particularly among the poor and the unlearned. Meanwhile, some small contributions were made by Byzantine scholars to both zoology and botany (Egerton 2012: 17).

      We now turn to monasticism, and the emergence of monasteries and nunneries. Following the Rule of Benedict (c. 480–c. 544), itself based on the teachings of Basil the Great in the East, the Benedictines founded the first of many monasteries at Monte Cassino in Italy in the early sixth century. The monks’ main activities, besides prayer and worship, consisted in gardening and farming. ‘St Benedict’, writes René Dubos, ‘believed that it was the duty of the monks to work as partners of God in improving his creation … implicit in his writings is the thought that labour is like a prayer which helps in recreating paradise out of chaotic wilderness’ (1974: 126, 131–2; see also Coates 1998: 56–7). Dubos finds here a continuation of the ancient tradition (as depicted by Passmore) of completing and perfecting an unfinished creation, adding that such a creative stewardship of the earth is compatible with reverence for nature. While not all monasteries always lived up to these ideals, Western monasteries contributed to establishing a pattern of fertile farmland, and also of islands of order, in turbulent and unpredictable times.

       Lynn White and medieval technology

      White’s understanding of the attitude of Christianity to nature (as anthropocentric and despotic) has already been encountered (see above, ‘The New Testament and the Christian message’). But his main specialism concerned medieval technology, and he wrote illuminatingly about wind-power and late medieval clocks and organs (White 1962). In this work he also discussed the introduction of heavy ploughing in Christian seventh-century Europe (use of ploughs equipped

Скачать книгу