Since the publication of Pope Francis’ encyclical Laudato Si in 2015, dioceses and parishes worldwide have sought to become more environmentally aware and adopt greener practices, in line with wider cultural trends and concerns. Laudable as this is, we also need to look in the other direction: How might the growing ranks of the religiously unaffiliated who express concern and love for nature find their way to the God of Jesus Christ?
To be sure, a greener Church itself will not attract the environmentally conscious. It would be pushing on a string, for the latter do not need a Church for their passion. And as discussed in a previous article, Church teaching on the environment is not reducible to environmentalism. If the string is to tug the other way, toward Christ, we must go deeper. Here, we sketch out in a preliminary fashion three points of departure that open-minded nature-lovers might explore: beauty, ethics, and spirituality.
Nature’s beauty points to God
The beauty of the natural world is the soul of environmental care and concern. Not everyone considers themselves “green,” but many of us seek to experience and savor the beauty of nature in our vacations, our gardens, in leafy suburbs and urban parks, or virtually through high-definition nature documentaries, through our cameras, and even our screen savers. Nature is in demand. In the UK, for example, each year, its “National Parks” and “Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty” draw some 270 million visitors. Worldwide, the global ecotourism industry is projected to grow by 14 percent a year to reach $374 billion in 2028.
This data bespeaks a widely perceived reality that the natural world, at a species, local, landscape, or geological scale, is shot through with pattern, harmony, and splendor—in a word, beauty. In a culture knotted up in relativism and subjectivism (your truth, my truth), this evident and widespread fascination with natural beauty is a curiously long loose thread of objective truth and value. Pull on it, and that tangled skein of relativism perhaps starts to unravel.
While Christians should care for the earth, they also look in hope to “the new heavens and the new earth.”
It is notable that C.S. Lewis’ defense of Natural Law morality, The Abolition of Man, does not begin with morality. It opens instead with a critique of the relativizing of natural beauty—in his example, a waterfall—into mere personal feeling. Lewis argues what every tourist knows deep down, that to admire a waterfall, or other such “beauty spot,” is to claim that the thing “merits” their admiration and amazement.
Nor can this recognition of natural beauty be discounted as belonging only to affluent moderns. The splendor of creation is there for all to see in the books of Genesis and Job and Wisdom and the Psalms. Even the prosaic Aristotle said that “in all things of nature there is something of the marvellous.” For Man is the animal that is arrested by beauty. Confronted by the glories of nature, we often fail for words, perhaps simply register a “Wow!” When we do so, we are sharing in the delight of the Creator himself, who simply “saw that it was good.”
To be sure, a new appreciation of nature’s beauty came in the wake of the Industrial Revolution, when it was jeopardized by despoliation and pollution. In this utilitarian landscape arose the Romantic Movement, “a movement of unsettled souls in search of settlement,” according to philosopher Roger Scruton. For such souls, natural beauty represented a scarce and sacred source of meaning. And now, in the acute restlessness of postmodernity, nature’s attraction grows ever stronger. Indeed sacred, for as Scruton argues, it draws me into the “interpersonal reality of being,” not simply as an object to admire, but something that draws me out of myself and ultimately points the way home—to God:
“What is revealed to me in the experience of beauty is a fundamental truth about being—the truth that being is a gift, and receiving it is a task. This is a truth of theology that demands exposition.”
—Scruton, The Face of God, pp. 151-2
St. Augustine, fourteen hundred years before the Romantic Movement, already saw this:
Question the beauty of the earth, question the beauty of the sea, question the beauty of the air . . . question the animals that move in the waters, that amble about on dry land, that fly in the air . . . question all these things. They all answer you, ‘Here we are, look ; we’re beautiful.’ Their beauty is their confession. Who made these beautiful changeable things, if not One who is beautiful and unchangeable?
—Sermons, 241, Easter (c. 411)
In his autobiography, Confessions, Augustine also admitted that the “lovely created things” of the earth could never be an adequate home for the restless human heart. Nothing more than the One that he would call “O Beauty ever ancient ever new” would suffice.
A path toward objective moral value
While the beauties of nature point to objective, transcendent value in the aesthetic sense, so an environmental sensibility presupposes objective, transcendent value in the moral sense.
Environmental concerns are inescapably grounded in two basic ethical criteria: an ethics of duty (we humans are responsible for this good earth) and of justice (we should put right what has gone wrong). Yet duty and justice are precisely part of the “Natural Law,” what C. S. Lewis terms the “Tao.” They do not sit comfortably in a materialistic or relativist system.
In a relativist system, such ethics can become skewed, as in the idea that humans have a duty to depopulate themselves or that environmental justice means giving plants or animals the equivalent of human rights. Such mutations are self-contradictory, for if humans were just another species that has happened to destroy other species, there would be no external point of reference from which to ground moral judgement. Rather, as Pope Francis stresses, recognition of moral responsibility goes hand in hand with humans’ unique and God-given role and dignity:
A misguided anthropocentrism need not necessarily yield to “biocentrism,” for that would entail adding yet another imbalance, failing to solve present problems and adding new ones. Human beings cannot be expected to feel responsibility for the world unless, at the same time, their unique capacities of knowledge, will, freedom, and responsibility are recognized and valued.
—LS 118
In The Abolition of Man, Lewis argues that you cannot pick and choose from the Tao. “What purport to be new systems . . . or ideologies, all consist of fragments of the Tao itself . . . swollen to madness in their isolation, yet still owing to the Tao and to it alone such validity as they possess” (pp. 43-44). The duty of caring for the earth and for posterity is only one duty amongst many: duty to parents, elders, country, ancestors, children. What we owe to the earth and the ecosystems is but a shadow of the justice we owe to the highest creatures in all creation. For like the ecosystems that precede and condition us, the Natural Law is precisely an “ecology” that is an independent and inescapable condition of our existence. To flourish, we must ground our lives and communities within this moral ecosystem. And like an ecosystem, “everything is connected,” as Pope Francis repeats. One question of value leads to another. Take for example duty to posterity:
Once we start to think about the kind of world we are leaving to future generations, we look at things differently; we realize that the world is a gift which we have freely received and must share with others. . . . When we ask ourselves what kind of world we want to leave behind . . . we are led inexorably to ask other pointed questions: what is the purpose of our life in this world? Why are we here? What is the goal of all our work and all our efforts? . . . It is no longer enough, then, simply to state that we should be concerned for future generations. We need to see that what is at stake is our own dignity.
—LS, 159-60
In a disenchanted Western culture, this semi-conscious apprehension of beauty and moral value in or through nature can take on a spiritual, pagan-like quality.
One cannot be both an environmentalist and a moral relativist. And once we accept that moral value and human dignity are objective realities, then environmentalism becomes positioned by something greater than it. And that in turn opens up the question of the Creator who is our Absolute Good, and the source and destiny of every human person.
A path toward a larger reality
In a disenchanted Western culture, this semi-conscious apprehension of beauty and moral value in or through nature can take on a spiritual, pagan-like quality. If this seems fanciful, consider the UK Treasury’s internationally-regarded “Dasgupta Review of the Economics of Biodiversity,” which amid detailed economic analysis, contains this remarkable passage:
Many people, perhaps in all societies, locate the sacred in Nature. . . . Many today would regard an awareness of the sacred to encompass a sense of awe and wonder, of self-transcendence, through which we locate ourselves within the landscape around us and imagine what lies beyond. That sense is not confined to what cosmopolitans call ‘traditional cultures.’ That sense of spirituality is often experienced today not in isolation, but communally, such as among birdwatchers, hikers, cyclists, surfers, divers, and anglers. . . . The sense of transcendence that Nature invokes may still exist everywhere, but as our Review has shown, it has taken a severe beating in modern times. . . . These senses are enriched when we recognise that we are embedded in Nature. To detach Nature from economics is to imply that we consider ourselves to be external to Her.
—pp. 309-10
Dasgupta then goes on to speculate whether “the sacredness of Nature” gives it “moral standing,” even asking whether nature has, like ourselves, “personhood.”
Speculations like these, bolstered by the global and intergenerational dimensions of environmental problems, seem to propose a spiritually larger picture of reality than a “man-is-the-measure-of-all-things” worldview. Individualism, consumerism, and materialism by comparison can seem cramped, complacent, myopic, and impoverished. Yet that should not surprise or excessively alarm Christians. As G.K. Chesterton argued a century ago, “Paganism was the largest thing in the world and Christianity was larger; and everything else has been comparatively small” (The Catholic Church and Conversion). Chesterton himself half-joked that if he ever had to leave the Church
the best I could hope for would be to wander away into the woods and become . . . a pagan, in the mood to cry out that some particular mountain peak or flowering fruit tree was sacred and a thing to be worshipped. That at least would be beginning all over again. . . . [But] I know very well that if I went upon that journey I should either despair or return. . . . I should not imagine any divinity that was sufficiently divine.
—ibid
A nature-based spirituality honors the human instinct to transcend the material and “locate the sacred.” But it is not large enough. Christianity is large enough to contain what is good and correct what is perverse in environmentalism. It is larger because it rejects false choices between the value of nature and the unique value of human beings; between humans conquering nature and humans dissolving into nature. It is larger because it speaks not just of “nature” but of “creation” and “creatures” that are the gift of the Creator, who is both transcendent and immanent. Nature may raise the question of unknown gods, but it is Christianity, like St. Paul in Athens, that has a definite answer to give. While nature can console and inspire, it cannot address the suffering and sin in human hearts and lives. And while Christians should care for the earth, they also look in hope to “the new heavens and the new earth.”
On the face of it, environmentalism seems a post-Christian phenomenon. But in its apprehension of the good and the beautiful, and the deeper questions about reality that it poses, it may be seen as a pre-Christian wandering. Just as Jesus came not to abolish the Law and the Prophets, but to fulfill and purify them, we might say that his Church does not come to abolish your love for nature but to fulfill and purify it.