View Comments      Email Article       Printable Version

Published: May 4, 2008

Can we keep ears from itching?

Eco-spirituality and the search for mystery

Notes from a Cultural Madhouse

By Christopher Zehnder

The interest of Catholics – religious sisters and brothers, priests and laymen – in what is called “eco-spirituality” is a curious phenomenon. What has turned devotees of God’s Mother into worshippers of the Earth Mother? How did some Catholics go from adoring the Eucharist, the Body of Christ, to reverencing the universe as the Body of God? How did confessors of the transcendent but ever present Trinity become promoters of an immanent, “panentheistic” deity?

In short, what turned educated, observant Catholics into bargain-basement Buddhists?

One may, of course, chalk it all up to the mystery of infidelity, or to the spirit of novelty, the “itching ears” of those who "turn away from listening to the truth and wander into myths.” Such explanations are sound, as far as they go; but they do not go very far. For often (though not always) men gravitate toward errors on account of an incomplete comprehension of the truth. And they fail to comprehend the fullness of truth because the truth is not presented to them in its fullness.

In other words, it may be that the Church culture and society these men and women religious and lay Catholics grew up in – that of the ‘40s, ‘50s, and ‘60s – did not fully express Catholic truth; and, when they discovered those aspects of the truth that their culture ignored, failed to enunciate, or positively rejected, these formerly observant Catholics came to think that, in order to embrace the truth they had discovered, they had to reject or radically modify the truth they had received.

This was the case of Martin Luther. Schooled in a corrupt scholasticism stemming from the Nominalist doctor William of Ockham, Luther had learned to think of God as Absolute Will. Luther’s God was the Utterly Unknown, of whose pleasure none could have assurance because, being utterly beyond any human conception, God was entirely outside any human notion of justice or mercy. Luther’s God was not the Catholic God who, although He can not be known fully or in Himself by those on earth, is yet reflected in what He has created – the Father God, whose mercy can be dimly seen, for instance, in a human father’s love for his children. To embrace the notion of a God of mercy, Luther, therefore, had to reject what he perceived to be the notion of God as taught by the Catholic Church. And, in the end, he had (he thought) to reject the Catholic Church herself.

From my reading of Reformation history, I have come to see the “Great Revolt” of the 1960s in light of the Protestant Revolt of the 16th century. The analogy is not exact, but the similarities between the two periods are telling. Both periods experienced a growing vagueness in theology, a tendency among certain groups to an oversimplification of dogma, a spirit of accommodation to, rather than a radical challenge of, the world. The contrasts between pre- and post-1517 Christendom are as startling as those between the pre- and post-Vatican II Church. From the vantage point of hindsight we may, of course, better judge the causes of the first revolution. Cast in the maelstrom of the second revolution, it is harder to perceive what gave rise to it.

Yet there are reasons for our current revolution and, more particularly, for the move among so many Catholics from a soundly Catholic to an “eco” spirituality.

One cause, I think, is the way Western society came to view the relation between God and His creation. The roots of this viewpoint reach into the 14th century, while its full flowering was seen only in the 18th. William of Ockham’s Nominalism found its full expression in 18th century rationalism and its religious expression in Deism. The Deists believed in God, but in what they called “Nature’s God” – the great creator and architect of the universe. The Deist God, however, is not the Christian God, whose providence not only created the world but is ever present in the world. For the Deist, God created the great machine of the universe, gave it laws by which it would run, and then left it to itself. The universe, under this conception, runs by purely natural energies, according to purely natural laws. For the Deist, God is not merely transcendent, but utterly separate from his creation.

Under the Deist conception, therefore, the world of nature and the society of men can be understood and, more importantly, manipulated without reference to God. There are natural laws governing everything, and natural energies moving everything, and they are immutable. Man discovers these natural laws (operating not only in the physical world, but even in politics and economics), and may learn to re-channel them; but their basic character and thrust are set. God Himself might be able to alter or abolish His laws, but He does not, either naturally or miraculously; for the Creator has cut Himself off from His creation.

Under the Deist conception, providence becomes merely the laws God set in place to run the universe, which, in turn, is reduced to being at best a very complex mechanism. Man can understand this mechanism, but only through the avenue of experimental science, which relies on careful protocols of observation and measurement. There is no mystery to the universe, only the undiscovered mechanisms and laws by which it runs. The mystery is not that of the transcendent, infinite God, who is present in the world, interpenetrating its every fiber, actively engaged in it and keeping it in being.

In this scientific conception of the world, the world speaks only of itself. It might point to a creator, but beyond His being a creator, it says nothing more about Him. It presents us with facts, but no metaphors. It is not suggestive of a person, but is utterly impersonal. It does not whisper of higher conceptions, for there are no higher conceptions. The universe is what it is and nothing more.

Such a conception has been the mindset of Western civilization since at least the 18th century. And Catholics have not escaped it. Though the Church has continued to affirm the providence of an ever-present God working in and around us naturally and at times miraculously, this teaching too often has not influenced how Catholics practically think and behave in the world. It is a confession, but not a conviction. We may believe the world speaks the mystery of God, but we don’t listen for it. Like our contemporaries, we have come to speak of the world and act as if it were just a mechanism.

This failure of Catholics to comprehend their own tradition invited reaction in that decade of reaction, the 1960s. The mechanistic concept of the world cannot speak to man’s deepest aspirations, for since we too are interpenetrated by the presence of God, we sense and long for a conception of the world that accounts for this. Searching for a concept of a universe that speaks of God and not merely of itself – and not hearing a coherent account of such a concept enunciated by Catholics or the Church’s leadership, or not seeing believers live in accord with a spirit of reverence for the mystery that surrounds them – it is not surprising that some in the Church would seek for it elsewhere. And, even though what they found elsewhere was a mess of pottage, a murky soup of borrowings from other religions and philosophies mixed with a popular scientism, it nevertheless appeared to fulfill their longing for more integral view of the world better than did the inheritance they received from the Church.

That the mechanistic view of the world was not the Church’s real inheritance is beside the point – or, it is precisely the point. In not passing on this one aspect of the inheritance, Catholics have laid the conditions for the rejection of the fullness of the inheritance. For this is what eco-spirituality is, a rejection of the mystery of the Faith. It is a denial of the Incarnation; for, in seeking to bring God again into the universe, eco-spirituality has collapsed God into the universe. God cannot become man, because He is and always has been man – and everything else. Eco-spirituality represents the ultimate leveling, which, in the end, destroys mystery. For mystery requires a sense that there is an other, who is really another.

But in condemning eco-spirituality, we who boast of our orthodoxy must not fail to assess our own way of seeing the world God has made and continues to enliven and support. Every falsehood invites us not to self-congratulation (“see how orthodox we are”) but to a deeper contemplation of the truths we ourselves may be ignoring or have never fully grasped. Men invent heresies for less than worthy reasons, to excuse their own faults or just to scratch itching ears. But human motives being complex, we cannot dismiss the thought that a man may become a heretic out of an excessive regard for a truth. And have we clearly enunciated this truth and lived in accord with it – that is, as if it were true? The phenomenon of eco-spirituality, I think, invites us to an examination of conscience: in regards to creation, have we acted like believers in a providential God or have we been mere materialists?

© California Catholic Daily 2008. All Rights Reserved.