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Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179) became abbess of two Benedictine nunneries in north central Germany, composed music and, between 1150 and 1160, wrote several books, including visionary works and also Causae et Curae (Causes and Cures) and Physica (Natural History). Causae et Curae begins with an account of the creation and the impacts of the sun, moons, planets and winds on the earth and human bodies. She goes on to discuss the four elements (see the sections above on Empedocles and on Aristotle), the four humours (blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile), reproduction, the effects of the fall of humanity on human health and the physiological basis of personality, finishing with herbal and other remedies for ailments.

      Physica covers the elements, animals, stones, fish, birds, metals and, especially, plants, with regard to their relation to the four humours and to remedies. Thus, Hildegard added environmental factors to the ancient medical teachings of Galen (129–199/200 CE), supplied original views about the male and female roles in conception, and devised (among other metaphors drawn from the natural world) the metaphor of greenness (viriditas) for the force of life generated by God.

      Hildegard was one of the last of a series of learned abbesses known to us from the middle ages (Whitney 2004: 162–5). Neither Glacken nor Coates mentions her, and her books have largely been overlooked, but her musical compositions have become well known, and her understanding of human physiology and its relation to religious ideas are beginning to receive scholarly attention. She can in any case be credited with anticipating, to some extent, the modern green movement by introducing the term ‘greenness’ for the force of life to be found in nature.

      Soon after the death of Hildegard, Albert the Great (1193–1280) wrote about geography, climate, the seasons and their influence in his book De Natura Locorum, probably based on his travel on foot between the Dominican monasteries of France, Italy and Germany (Glacken 1967: 227–9). Like Theophrastus, he was aware that human interventions can change the impact of geography, as when trees are felled. His writings were influenced by bestiaries (which used animals to teach moral messages) and also by astrology (regarded then as a legitimate science; Lindberg 1992: 274–7).

      Yet Glacken regards Albert’s work as ‘the most important and the most elaborate discussion of geographical theory with relation to human culture since the Hippocratic Airs, Waters, Places’ (1967: 270). He was interested in the details of soil preparation and of grafting, and, building on Aristotle’s works, wrote On Animals, the foremost medieval work of zoology (Lindberg 1992: 353; Whitney 2004: 189–93); but at the same time, he was just as prone as ancient (and many modern) writers to overgeneralization about human characteristics and to racial stereotyping (Glacken 1967: 270). Nevertheless, Albert played a key part in the transmission of ancient ideas to the thinkers of the early modern and modern periods.

Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225–74) was a pupil of Albert, and an early advocate of biodiversity (albeit using different terms), holding that ‘it is better to have a multiplicity of species than a multiplicity of members of one species’ (Glacken 1967: 230). This multiplicity makes the universe more perfect, as the great chain of being had long maintained (see the subsection above on Aristotle and Theophrastus). In the fifth of the ‘Five ways’ of his Summa Theologiae, Thomas reasons from the order and apparent directedness of natural beings that lack intelligence to the direction supplied by their creator, ‘and this being we call God’ (Glacken 1967: 229). And like Averroes, Thomas in his Summa Contra Gentiles regards the heavens and the earth as the handicraft of a craftsman. He supports this view with passages such as Psalm 104, and also Paul’s letter to the Romans (see the subsection above on the New Testament). At the same time, he derives further support for his natural theology from Aristotle’s claim that nature does nothing in vain (Glacken 1967: 231–2).

      Thomas frequently seeks to demonstrate the goodness of nature, replying both to the Manicheans of the ancient world and to the Albigensians of his own time. Evils are due not to the primary cause (the creator), but to the exercise of their powers by lower agents or secondary causes, exercising delegated powers which they hold because of the ends for which they were created. Foremost among lower agents is humanity, which Thomas believes to be master over the animals, and authorized to domesticate selected animal and plant species. But this is a derivative dominion, and its derivativeness calls for human beings to show humility (Glacken 1967: 236).

      Even so, there is a marked difference of tone between Thomas Aquinas’ despotic view of humanity and the tone that we have met in Chrysostom, Basil, Cuthbert and Francis. The diversity of Christian medieval assumptions helps explain the diversity of modern readings of the period, which range from interpreting everyone except Francis as anthropocentric and despotic (including Thomas’s late medieval successors) (White 1967) to locating a patron saint of ecology in St Benedict, and celebrating the Benedictines and Cistercians accordingly (Dubos 1974). Borrowing Passmore’s approach to the ancient world, we could reasonably find the seeds of enlightened approaches and compassionate perspectives in the medieval world, alongside widespread exploitative attitudes, all of them prone to influence that period’s modern successors.

This chapter has selectively surveyed environmental thought in the ancient world, the Bible, early Christianity and the medieval period (including the rise of Islam in the early part of that period). In the next chapter we turn to the successors of that period who lived in the part of the modern period prior to the working life of Charles Darwin. While ancient and medieval influences underlay their thought, many were determined to make a new start. They sought to match the discovery of the new world of America with new beginnings in science, in art, in literature and in poetry, and to reform religion by returning to Christian origins. Their attitudes to the natural world reflect these changed perspectives. So it is to the early modern period that we now turn.

Recommended reading

      Attfield, Robin (1991 [1983]). The Ethics of Environmental Concern, 2nd edn. Athens: University of Georgia Press.

      Bratton, Susan Power (1988). ‘The Original Desert Solitaire: Early Christian

      Monasticism and Wilderness’, Environmental Ethics, 10(1): 31–53.

      Coates, Peter (1998). Nature: Western Attitudes since Ancient Times. Berkeley: University of California Press.

      Dubos, René (1974). ‘Franciscan Conservation and Benedictine Stewardship’, in David and Eileen Spring (eds), Ecology and Religion in History. New York: Harper & Row, pp. 114–136.

      Egerton, Frank N. (2012). Roots of Ecology: Antiquity to Haeckel. Berkeley: University of California Press.

      Glacken, Clarence J. (1967). Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought from Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press.

      Lovejoy, Arthur O. (1936). The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

      Passmore, John (1974). Man’s Responsibility for Nature. London: Duckworth.

      Santmire, Paul (1985). The Travail of Nature: The Ambiguous Ecological Promise of Christian Theology. Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press.

      White, Lynn, Jr. (1962). Medieval Technology and Social Change. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

      White, Lynn, Jr. (1967). ‘The Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis’, Science, 155(37): 1203–1207.

      Whitney, Elspeth (2004). Medieval Science and Technology. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

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