[This essay appeared in the Financial Times on July 3, 2015]
Free market conservatives hate it, it fails to address the threat of overpopulation, and it dismisses carbon credits as a way to combat global warming. Nonetheless Pope Francis’s encyclical, Laudato Si’, will ultimately be recognised as one of the most significant events in the modern environmental movement. Above all, it takes a big step towards healing a breach between western religions and nature that dates back to the dawn of monotheism.
Francis goes much further than Pope Paul VI, who more than 40 years ago inveighed against the “ill-considered exploitation of nature”. He explicitly recognises and explores the link between what he construes as a warped interpretation of dominion — an interpretation that relegates nature to mere stuff put at humanity’s disposal — and the wanton despoliation of the planet. His encyclical builds on the thinking of the many Christians who mined Biblical texts to support the notion that the creation is sacred. The Pope cited his namesake, St Francis of Assisi, who averred “through the greatness and beauty of creatures one comes to know by analogy their maker”.
It is no overstatement to say that the present, human-wrought, sixth-great extinction crisis — the biggest die-off in species since the dinosaurs — as well as the climate crisis that may prove our undoing, are a result of the view of dominium Pope Francis seeks to bury. Arnold Toynbee, the British historian, recognised this nearly 50 years ago. He argued in an essay on the origins of pollution that the arc of western religion has been to get the gods off our back so that humanity can do business. This started in ancient Greece, where moral space for exploiting nature was created by moving the gods out of the trees and exiling them to Mount Olympus.
The advent of monotheism took this further by bundling the deities into one God and placing Him in outer space. Throw in the Protestant revolution, which made material success virtuous, and it was but a short step to the throwaway consumer society Pope Francis rails against.
The conclusion that humanity is intrinsically different from the rest of nature made sense to early Christian thinkers, given that they rarely encountered any creature that suggested continuity between animals and people. By contrast, in central Africa, great apes provided a constant reminder for the animists that nature is a continuum. It is notable that the version of Genesis recounted by Josephus — a Zelig-like figure of Roman times who was first a Jewish general, then an adviser to the son of the Emperor Vespasian and also an important historian — states that humans could talk to the animals before the fall, an explicit statement that knowledge and intellect separate us from the rest of the natural order. Over the years, the text and the interpretation changed; instead of being a curse, the knowledge that caused our alienation from nature morphed into a glory.
Fast forward to 1962, when Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring marked the dawn of the modern environmental movement, awakening the world to pollution. A few years later there was some success in teaching language to chimpanzees, which may ultimately have done more to undermine the concepts of human nature that supported the moral justification for our abuse of nature.
Today, attitudes about animal intelligence have shifted to the point where US courts have permitted filings arguing that chimpanzees should be regarded not as property but persons. An unthinking sense of entitlement has given way to an honest struggle to reconcile acknowledgement of our ties to nature with the functioning of a modern industrial society — the same conundrum Francis addresses in his encyclical.
Indeed, there is proof in the encyclical that the Pope is mindful of the conundrum posed by recognising that nature is sacred in a modern industrial society. In paragraph 90, he acknowledges that humanity must accept its responsibilities without the divination of nature paralysing all economic activity or eclipsing the plight of the poor. There is no easy way to achieve that balance, but even the subtle shift from entitlement to respect and awareness of life’s interconnections could work wonders.
Thus religion, at its most profound, changes. Two decades ago I asked James Parks Morton, then dean of Saint John the Divine, the Episcopal cathedral in New York City, how the Church could reconcile the idea of respect for nature with an ethos that for centuries has viewed nature as mere stuff. His simple answer was that a cathedral’s transept was the centre of the soul of its community; and, if the centre moved, the church had to move. Pope Francis is trying to move the church. Laudate Papa.
