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Sunday
I report again today on John Gatta’s Green Gospel: Foundations of Ecotheology, which is the subject of our Lenten study this year. As I’ve been noting, Gatta believes that Christian faith applies to all creation, not only humans. If this is true, then nature experiences some version of sin and salvation. At one point in his second chapter, Gatta writes,
St. Paul affirms that the rest of creation, too, shares in humanity’s wounded condition. Suffering from a certain incompleteness and “bondage to decay,” the whole creation in his view has been “groaning in labor pains,” waiting “in eager longing” for a redemptive liberation to be achieved in and through Christ (Romans 8:19, 21–22).
John acknowledges that it’s difficult to envision such fallenness, as well as what redemption might look like. “We realize, of course, that nonhumans suffer many ills—including, on the part of sensate animals, physical pain, loss, dislocation, terror, and death—even if they are not capable of sin,” he writes, adding,
We may even dream of a transformed biological order, free of predatory violence, that resembles the “Peaceable Kingdom” prophesied by Isaiah (11:1–9) and often represented pictorially by Quaker artist Edward Hicks.
I note in passing that John Milton, in Paradise Lost, sees creation suffering a fall along with Adam and Eve. Whereas the weather in Eden has been temperate and all the animals vegetarians, Milton says the humans tasting the forbidden fruit changes all that. Suddenly we have seasons:
The sun
Had first [God’s] precept so to move, so shine,
As might affect the earth with cold and heatScarce tolerable; and from the north to call
Decrepit winter; from the south to bring
Solstitial summer’s heat.
And because death has entered the world, animal behavior changes as well:
Beast now with beast ‘gan war, and fowl with fowl,
And fish with fish; to graze the herb all leaving,
Devoured each other; nor stood much in awe
Of Man, but fled him; or, with countenance grim,
Glared on him passing.
Of course, Milton believes that nature’s fall from perfection is all due to humanity. And while it is true that humans have had a disproportionate impact on the world, Gatta’s vision of creation goes beyond humans. Because it does, he must acknowledge the limits of his vision:
What God’s redemption of all creation might ultimately look like, …I cannot pretend to know. I know only that a Christian faith worthy of the name must presume that God somehow wills to bring to fulfillment not human beings alone but everything God had ever created, sustained, and esteemed as “very good.”
Gatta then points to the “larger life mystery of symbiotic processes reflected in nature”:
We know that through the course of earth’s biological cycles death, dissolution, and decay are perforce conjoined with the emergence of new life. Poet Walt Whitman helps us remember that dead bodies make for “good manure.” Vedic teaching likewise recognizes the interwoven texture of death and life, affirming that Lord Brahma, as creator, must be seen as more nearly partner than adversary of Lord Shiva, the destroyer.
Along these lines, Gatta cites one of Wendell Berry’s sabbath poems, noting that it is informed by St. Paul’s reflections on creation and that it “beautifully captures this cyclic dynamic rooted in a transformational falling and rising”:
What stood will stand, though all be fallen,
The good return that time has stolen.
Though creatures groan in misery,
Their flesh prefigures liberty
To end travail and bring to birth
Their new perfection in new earth. . . .
What stood, whole in every piecemeal
Thing that stood, will stand though all
Fall—field and woods and all in them
Rejoin the primal Sabbath’s hymn.
God is what stands “whole in every piecemeal thing that stood,” the underlying creative force. “Fall” invokes the original fall, which is countered by all of nature rejoining “the primal Sabbath’s hymn.”
While Gatta doesn’t want to privilege humankind over the rest of creation, he also doesn’t want to downplay the significance of humankind in nature’s journey. There are environmentalists who essentially see humans as creation’s original sin, messing up an otherwise perfect nature. I pick up some of this sentiment in Sarah Teasdale’s post-World War I poem “Then Will Come Soft Rain,” which dreams of a world in which humans have eradicated themselves:
There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white,Robins will wear their feathery fire
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree
If mankind perished utterly;And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone.
Teasdale seems to regard humans as an unfortunate desecration of nature’s innocence. But humans have also produced beautiful poems like Teasdale’s. Through the human mind, nature comes to know itself, and while that can have bad effects, it can also have good ones. In other words, by evolving to include humans, nature is changing in remarkable ways, and who knows what the future holds? Why long for a blissful pre-human past when the future could be (emphasis on “could” as there are no guarantees) even more exciting? As Gatta puts it,
For Christians, the doctrine of a “fortunate fall,” or felix culpa, derives from recognition that through the saving deed of Christ’s death and resurrection, humankind’s moral standing or nature has been marvelously elevated to a level even above that presumed in its pre-lapsarian state.
In the final stanzas of Paradise Lost, the archangel Michael promises Adam,
for then the Earth
Shall all be Paradise, far happier place
Than this of Eden, and far happier days.
To which Adam responds,
O Goodness infinite, Goodness immense!
That all this good of evil shall produce,
And evil turn to good; more wonderful
Than that which by creation first brought forth
Light out of darkness!
A new creation surpassing the original creation, in other words.