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But he always did so with qualifications and nuances, recognizing that such ploughing had occasionally been used much earlier (in Roman times) and was introduced to Britain and Normandy much later by the pagan Vikings (White 1962: 51; Attfield 2009b). But in his famous 1967 essay in Science, the nuances are omitted, and heavy ploughing, together with its implications for land tenure, is claimed as epitomizing the supposed new despotic Christian attitude of mastery over nature. ‘Formerly man had been part of nature; now he was the exploiter of nature.’ These claims appear to be upheld by White’s (controversial) despotic account of Christian theology.

While this form of ploughing was much more effective than the scratchploughing that preceded it, its introduction was not confined to Christian cultures; nor was it universal among them. Besides, the suggestion that humanity had, until that century, been ‘part of nature’ conflicts with the vigorous forms of agriculture promulgated long before by Hesiod, Virgil and Roman prose writers such as Columella (first century CE), and the suggestion that fear of nature and belief in spirits animating it had disappeared conflicts with the attitudes assumed in, for example, Beowulf (probably composed in the eighth century) (Coates 1998: 58). Nor does White’s ascription of a despotic view fit the attitudes of Basil, Benedict or their followers. In any case, his basing of this change of West European attitudes on a single technological development ascribed to the seventh century strikes many (including Coates) as disproportionate and ‘idiosyncratic’ (Coates 1998: 62).

      White seems correct in ascribing growing technological superiority to Western Europe across the Middle Ages, and finding some of the roots of current ecological problems in its subsequent impacts. But since those roots more cogently turn on the industrial revolution of over a millennium later than the period to which he traces their origins, his case, even if it were better supported by early medieval technology, would require many additional explanatory factors to bridge this thousand-year chasm. Others have indeed detected an industrial revolution in the thirteenth century, citing the fulling-mill and the windmill (Carus-Wilson 1954; Coates 1998: 63), but without associating these developments with such wide-ranging changes of human self-understanding as those alleged by White. Besides, as Coates proceeds to show, this period also saw the beginnings of an increasing appreciation of nature and ‘the greenwood’ (Hutchinson 1974; Coates 1998: 64), rather than a monolithic posture of human mastery. White’s depiction of medieval attitudes as dependent ultimately on his account of theological beliefs in any case gives undue prominence to a single kind of underlying cause (ideas and beliefs), disregarding many other factors, among which are social, economic and cultural trends.

The Rise of Islam

      Islam originated in seventh-century Arabia, but before long took over Egypt and the rest of North Africa and also the former Roman province of Syria, soon expanding into most of Spain, Sicily, Mesopotamia, Persia and the lands north and east of it once conquered by Alexander the Great. It proclaimed a purer and less diluted version of monotheism than Christianity, and embodied the belief that the Qu’ran conveys God’s literal message to humanity. In the late Middle Ages, Mohammedans lost Sicily and Spain but captured Asia Minor, the Balkans and (in 1453) Constantinople.

Islam has always maintained that human beings are God’s vicegerents (khalifa) on Earth, and the custodians of the entire natural world, charged not to violate the ‘due measure’ and ‘balance’ that God has created. Thus, although the entire bounty of nature has been created for the sake of human beings, this anthropocentric stance does not imply that humanity is granted unbridled exploitative powers, for nature has been made for all generations, and not just for one, and human beings remain answerable to God. Within Islamic tradition (Hadith), there is provision for recognizing hima (protected pasturage, with special protection for indigenous flora and fauna), and also for harun, sanctuaries where killing animals of game species is forbidden, and where springs and watercourses are respected (Nomanul Haq 2001).

      The Islamic philosopher Averroes, or Ibn Rochd (1126–98) flourished in the relatively tolerant Muslim kingdom of southern Spain in the twelfth century (where by the end of the tenth century the royal library at Córdoba was said to have had more than 400,000 volumes: Whitney 2004: 11). He was influenced by Aristotle, and his work is a Muslim counterpart to Christian theology, conveying belief in divine purpose and concern for humanity. Like many Christian thinkers, he was impressed by the natural world as a work of art, and argued that it discloses the work of a craftsman-like creator (Glacken 1967: 220–1). He also defended science, replying to The Incoherence of the Philosophers, an anti-scientific treatise of al-Ghazali (1058–1111), with his formidable counter-sceptical work The Incoherence of the Incoherence (Whitney 2004: 13).

      Thus Islam during the Middle Ages fostered the scientific quest for laws of nature, particularly at centres of learning such as Córdoba and Baghdad. These studies made a large difference when, in the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance period, West Europeans, influenced by Islamic science, resumed the study of mathematics, physics and astronomy.

       St Francis of Assisi (1182–1226)

      Francis of Assisi has been suggested by White as the patron saint of ecologists; White (1967) considered him an isolated exception to what he considered the Christian postures of anthropocentrism and mastery of nature. But this was a case of what Coates calls ‘making figures from the past over in our own image’, adding that ‘nineteenth-century Romanticism … launched the modern process of reinvention by casting Francis as a nature mystic’ like ‘a medieval Wordsworth’ (1998: 53).

The historical Francis, however, as Susan Bratton has concluded, fits into a long line of saints who respected and befriended animals as fellow-creatures: ‘St. Francis was not … an aberration, but the product of a thousand-year tradition beginning with Antony in the inner desert, and kept alive by the great monastic libraries of Europe’ (1988: 52). He is said to have talked and preached to bees, doves and even a wolf, chiding those that harmed human beings, reminding them of their indebtedness to their creator, and urging them to praise God (rather as the Psalms had done). Brother Thomas of Celano relates that he called all creatures by the name of ‘brother’, and Francis himself, during his final years, composed The Canticle of Brother Sun in which he addressed the sun and moon, fire and the wind as ‘brothers’ and water as ‘sister’. Stories of his preaching to swallows and at Gubbio to a ravenous wolf are recounted by Ugolino de Monte Santa Maria in The Little Flowers of St. Francis, composed a century after his death (Glacken 1967: 214–16), while the Franciscan order continued his teaching, albeit in diluted form.

      Even if these stories display the embroidery developed during an oral tradition, their telling in the early fourteenth century is itself significant, belying Passmore’s claim that ‘In any case, Francis had little or no influence’ (1974: 112). Many of Francis’s ideas were in fact transmitted by his follower, the theologian Bonaventure (1221–74), who qualified Francis’s teaching by adding that the relation to God of different creatures differs according to their capacities (Santmire 1985: 98). Certainly, Francis’s attempts to humanize or make responsible citizens of wolves would not commend him to modern ecologists. In his beliefs, he was a man of this own time, with an unusually intense rapport with nonhuman creatures, alongside a related concern for economic and social justice among human beings. The main reason he appeared so exceptional to White was White’s controversial characterization of Christianity as uniformly committed to a despotic attitude to nature.

      In 2015, Pope Francis paid tribute to St Francis of Assisi in his Encyclical Laudato Si’ for his joyful communion with fellow-creatures ranging from the stars to the animals and flowers. After quoting Romans 1:20, he also noted that Francis asked that part of the friary garden should be left untouched so that wild flowers could grow there, and so that those who saw them could raise their minds to the creator of such beauty (Pope Francis 2015: 10–12). While the assumptions of our day are not those of St Francis, retrieval of the awe and wonder that he showed towards the natural world could, as Pope Francis suggests, rescue us from attitudes of mastery and lifestyles of exploitation (see Attfield 2016: 99–100.)

      

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