Ecology and Pagan Religiosity (Intro)

Part 1 - Intro

The following is an introduction to a planned series of articles exploring the relationship of ecology to pagan religiosity. If I feel it succeeds, it is my hope to reorganize it into a published book. For that reason, any and all criticism or commentary is welcome. However, it is still just an introduction, and the open-ended vagueness is intentional.

---

"Brother wolf, thou hast done much evil in this land, destroying and killing the creatures of God without his permission; yea, not animals only hast thou destroyed, but thou hast even dared to devour men, made after the image of God; for which thing thou art worthy of being hanged like a robber and a murderer. All men cry out against thee, the dogs pursue thee, and all the inhabitants of this city are thy enemies; but I will make peace between them and thee, O brother wolf, if so be thou no more offend them, and they shall forgive thee all thy past offences, and neither men nor dogs shall pursue thee any more."

The wolf bowed its head and submitted to Francis, completely at his mercy.

-The Flowers of St. Francis¹

The tale of St. Francis and the Wolf of Gubbio is a window into a worldview that has shaped the West’s relationship with nature for centuries. Man, a titan towering above the beasts and gardens of the world, bends and molds nature toward his own ends - ultimately, his striving towards God. There was no question about this hierarchy and relationship: nature was for man, and indeed, it was put to his use.

At the height of the cultural frenzy of the 1960s, everything that the West had held dear for centuries prior was subjected to relentless self-criticism. In no small part was this criticism extended to the medieval conception of man’s place in the world, and his supremacy over and ownership of nature. We were beginning to notice the sudden and dramatic changes brought to the world as a result of industry and globalization, and it was beginning to make us anxious.² The self-criticism born of this anxiety was not merely about matters of energy consumption, recycling initiatives, littering fines, or the establishment of protections for the wilderness - it was an existential reflection, fueled by simultaneous changes in religious and cultural attitudes across the West. What is mankind’s place in the world? Is he its conqueror, its steward, or its slave? Above all else, when we answer, are we prepared to make the necessary, radical changes to our civilization that are subsequently demanded?

At the heart of this self-reflection was a controversial 1967 essay by medieval historian Lynn Townsend White Jr., titled The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis³. White set forth an argument, which remains controversial to this day, that the “roots” of our proclivity toward the degradation of the natural world are found in a fundamentally religious, ontological question: what is our place in the world? Specifically, White assessed that the answer prompted by a uniquely Western conception of Abrahamic faith, which came to define Western culture and values itself, was the start of the chain of dominoes. Not only can Latin Christendom be correctly credited with the West's obsessive love of scientific inquiry and technology and all of the ecological harm contained therein, but White's analysis of how this came to be provokes a more troubling conclusion. Our problem is that we have adopted an anthropocentric worldview: that man is fundamentally above nature in quality in this story of creation, and that nature has little value aside from what it can offer to mankind, be it material or transcendent:

What did Christianity tell people about their relations with the environment? While many of the world's mythologies provide stories of creation, Greco-Roman mythology was singularly incoherent in this respect. Like Aristotle, the intellectuals of the ancient West denied that the visible world had a beginning. Indeed, the idea of a beginning was impossible in the framework of their cyclical notion of time. In sharp contrast, Christianity inherited from Judaism not only a concept of time as nonrepetitive and linear but also a striking story of creation. By gradual stages a loving and all- powerful God had created light and darkness, the heavenly bodies, the earth and all its plants, animals, birds, and fishes. Finally, God had created Adam and, as an afterthought, Eve to keep man from being lonely. Man named all the animals, thus establishing his dominance over them. God planned all of this explicitly for man's benefit and rule: no item in the physical creation had any purpose save to serve man's purposes. And, although man's body is made of clay, he is not simply part of nature: he is made in God's image.

Especially in its Western form, Christianity is the most anthropocentric religion the world has seen. As early as the 2nd century both Tertullian and Saint Irenaeus of Lyons were insisting that when God shaped Adam he was foreshadowing the image of the incarnate Christ, the Second Adam. Man shares, in great measure, God's transcendence of nature. Christianity, in absolute contrast to ancient paganism and Asia's religions (except, perhaps, Zoroastrianism), not only established a dualism of man and nature but also insisted that it is God's will that man exploit nature for his proper ends. ⁴

Of course, there are plenty of granular details to quibble with in White's assessment. A theologian would reply that man was called to be a steward of a possession that is not his own, but God's, not its pillager. An anthropologist would note that plenty of pagan societies have shown a similar capacity for environmental harm, be it Bronze Age Europeans deforesting their continent or modern Indians rendering their holy rivers irreparably toxic.⁵ White's point and line of reasoning, however, is not to say that that this is a particularly Christian problem that we demand the priests and cardinals of the world solve for us, or else. His goal, one I would argue has succeeded, was to explain where our Western relationship to science and industry comes from, and prompt a discussion on what must be done about that relationship.⁶

Even in the most “green” conceptions of nature within Christianity, we are still faced with the problems that are exacerbated by this hierarchy. This can be seen in an example White uses, the story of Saint Francis of Assisi and the Wolf of Gubbio. A wolf was terrorizing the village, consuming its livestock and attacking its people, and so the villagers asked Francis for help. As the story goes, he rebuked the wolf for his sins against man and warned him that he should be put to death for his actions. Like Christ, Francis offered him a way out: cease these attacks, and the villagers shall feed and house you as one of their own. The wolf accepted, and when he died years later, the villagers mourned and buried him at a local shrine.⁷ White offers this as a way out for Christians, but overlooks a serious problem underlying the story's motif of salvation. The wolf was given a choice between two options: become domesticated, or be put to death. Charged with the sin of being a wolf, he submitted to man and the demands and ideals of his civilization, and died a simple house dog. Even here, at the very feet of the patron saint of ecology, nature was transformed specifically to the ends and formulations of man. To this day we continue to present this demand to the predators of the forests that border our villages, and to nature at large.

If man is fundamentally above nature—a hierarchy ordained by the hand of God himself—then there is little stopping him from putting it to his own use like he would for any other piece of property. Additionally, the soteriological and apocalyptic connotations of Christianity imply a worldview that is fundamentally world-rejecting⁸, characterized by a negative evaluation of the state of man and the world and the exaltation of a higher realm as a means of escape. Indeed, Christendom has constantly battled heresies within itself that outright declare nature and the created world as evil, from the Gnostics of the Early Church to the Cathars of the late Medieval. All of our most deeply held religious beliefs point toward an evaluation of nature that devalues it and prompts its packaging and consumption in service of our own ends. God had instructed us to subdue and fill the Earth⁹, and indeed we have: As we approach 9 billion individual humans on this planet, the state of the natural world has declined by an astonishing degree. Moreover, the spiritual and cultural values that the natural world has provided to man are increasingly scarce, and increasingly harder to access. We risk more than the extinction of particular species or ecosystems, it is our own relationship which nature which has come under threat. Our descendants are faced with an increasingly synthetic, increasingly all-too-human world in which they will live, and one we will be buried underneath. Paradoxically, the services that man depended on nature to provide are endangered by the demand that nature be in service to man. Something must change—we are in desperate need for a realignment of values.

The religious dimension offers itself as the most promising arena to do this, and for a number of reasons: Firstly, the problem is one of religious values. Secondly, religious values greatly define the beliefs, attitudes, behaviors, and folkways of its practitioners. Lastly, our times are rife with religious instability and agnosticism, implying a soured attitude towards the dominant Abrahamic faiths and a desire for alternative worldviews. As such, religions which contain values that promote the inverse of the aforementioned problems are appealing. These religions would be world-accepting (either that it views the world as generally all there is or believes its condition is sacred), non-dualist or lacking division between man and nature, and above all else depends on the interaction between nature and man as the medium for religious experience.

In recent generations, perhaps as far back as the 19th Century, individuals have responded to the degradation and desacralization of nature by seeking out religions which match this formulation. Specifically, they have turned to (in increasing number) to the various pre-Christian religions of their ancestral lands, which can be generally classified as paganism.¹⁰ These nature religions pass the formulation with flying colors. In most cases, man is not separated from nature by kind in a dualistic fashion, but understood to be part of or within it in a significant way. Pagan religions generally lack a conception of sin and therefore a soteriology, accepting the world for what it is and what is fated to be. Of course, they additionally consecrate specific wild areas such as groves or streams to specific gods or local deities. This extends in kind to animals as well, with folk beliefs towards animals as divine messengers or otherwise sacred in some context.

Much of this has already been written about in recent decades by other authors. What has received comparatively little attention, however, is an evaluation of the concept of ecology within pagan religiosity. Ecology, as defined by the science itself, is the study of the interactions between and within all part of a particular environment, including all living and non-living components of the system: individual organisms, populations, food webs, climate, topography, hydrology, and even culture. In regards to religiosity, it is particularly this emphasis on the interactions between an individual or population and their particular environment that has been overlooked. Not only must pagan religiosity be viewed as a complete system particular to a specific environment, but it also must be viewed in light of a practitioner within that context. Recent waves of both pagan and environmentalist thought have come short largely in part due to a failure to apply this framing to their respective worldviews. While the ecological perspective emphasizes both man and nature, many strains of environmentalism are expressly anti-human, approaching issues in a nihilist and apocalyptic context which emphasizes not merely a significant degradation of the human experience, but the removal of its value from the equation entirely. Conversely, contemporary pagan movements have a tendency to ignore their ecological contexts entirely, opting to instead seek a “direct connection with the divine” at the level of single individuals. The result is a novel, universalist conception of paganism which disregards local beliefs, ancestors, cultural contexts, and deities in favor of a universal archetype of “the divine”. In the case of both the environmentalist and pagan, failing to factor in the relationship between man and his surroundings, his ecology, results in disillusionment and a failure to anchor oneself within the world as it appears to him. The concept of ecology and its existential implications must be considered.

Tyler Miles Lockett

An analog to this perspective, as it will be shown, can be found in the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. The concepts of Dasein and being-in-the-world emphasize the inseparable relationship between human existence and its environment, within a specific context of meaning, culture, and place. Heidegger’s presentation of man as a situated, world-disclosing entity offers a framework for understanding pagan religiosity as an ecological phenomenon, where men, gods, and the natural world are intertwined in a dynamic and localized web of interactions. The concept of thrownness describes the inescapable reality of man’s situated position within a specific historical, cultural, and ecological context, and for Heidegger, an authentic interaction with reality entails confronting and accepting this fact for what it is. Man is not separated from the world, but thrown into it, and must deal with all that this entails.

When one approaches religiosity from this perspective, a number of doors are opened which will be of great utility. Why is there such a great diversity in the pantheons, myths, and rituals of various peoples, yet at the same time such a perennial coherence? Are these pantheons particular to a specific people, or are they universalist and open to whomever enters covenants with its gods? In regards to matters of social and cultural attitudes, what exactly is demanded of us, and what significance does our ecological relationship to the land and each other have to this? As our environment changes, how will we? This work is interdisciplinary inquiry into these questions, covering topics including biology, anthropology, myth, linguistics, history, and philosophy. It is my hope that it provides the reader with a more complete understanding of the religiosity and worldview of the pre-Christian peoples that are sought to be emulated by contemporary pagans, and additionally, how our different ecological context will produce different results.

On this theme, Ludwig Klages concludes in Man and Earth, a lecture for Free German Youth Day in 1913:

No teaching can return us to that which has once been lost. Regarding all such attempts, we feel that man simply does not have the ability to bring about a transformation of his inner life on his own. We stated earlier that the ancients never presumed to unravel nature's secrets by means of experiments, and never thought to conquer her through the use of machines, which they dismissed as clever contraptions that were suitable only for slaves; we now insist, moreover, that they abhorred such attempts as ungodliness. Forest and spring, boulder and grotto were for them filled with sacred life; from the summits of their lofty mountains blew the storm-winds of the gods (it was not from lack of a "feeling for nature" that one did not climb their peaks!), and tempest and hailstones threatened or clashed furiously in the play of battle. When the Greeks desired to construct a bridge across a stream, they begged the river deity to pardon this deed of man for which they atoned by offering up to him a sacrificial libation of wine. In ancient German lands, an offense against a living tree was expiated by the shedding of the offender's blood. Today's mankind sees only childish superstition in those who attend to the planetary currents. He forgets that the interpreting of apparitions was a way of scattering blooms around the tree of an inner life, which shelters a deeper knowledge than all of science: the knowledge of the world-weaving power of all-embracing love. Only when this love has been renewed in mankind will the wounds inflicted by the matricidal spirit be healed.¹¹

1. Ugolino Brunforte, Fioretti di Santo Francesco d’ Ascesi. Translated by Rev. Fr. Roger Huddleston.

2. The cultural anxiety of the time and resultant transformation can be best represented by the discussion following the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962). According to H. Patricia Hynes, “Silent Spring altered the balance of power in the world. No one since would be able to sell pollution as the necessary underside of progress so easily or uncritically.”

3. White is otherwise known for his work on medieval technology and the cultural changes brought forth by them, such as the stirrup enabling the shock combat of heavy knights and therefore feudalism: see Medieval Technology and Social Change (1962).

4. Lynn White, Jr. The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis. Science 155, 1203-1207 (1967). DOI:10.1126/science.155.3767.1203.

5. This argument was put forward in a response to White’s paper by Lewis Moncrief titled The Cultural Basis for Our Environmental Crisis (1970). White later replied in 1973 with a paper titled Continuing the Conversation, where he reemphasizes his use of “roots” to explain Christianity’s culpability for environmental harm, rather than its active agency.

6. White is certainly not the first to draw this association between Christianity and technology. The most well-known example may be found in Oswald Spengler's discussions of “Faustian” civilization in The Decline of the West (1923), which Spengler describes as having a unique relationship with and philia of technology, spurred by Christianity’s metaphysical emphasis on transcendence, infinity, and the will to overcome earthly limitations, thus encouraging of a relentless pursuit of mastery over nature through technical innovation.

7. In the 1800s, the Church of Saint Francis of the Peace - where the wolf was buried according to legend - underwent extensive excavations as part of a renovation. Curiously, the remains of a wolf, dated precisely to the time of Francis, were uncovered. Though this story is primarily mythological and certainly serves as an allegory for Christian values, it cannot be reasonably said that the story is purely mythological.

8. The use of the terms world-accepting and world-rejecting are borrowed from Robert Bellah’s definition and use in his paper Religious Evolution (1964). A full explanation and application of the terms should be sought through his own writings.

9. Genesis 1:28

10. There are multiple words that people would prefer to use in place of “paganism” - heathenry, asatru, druidry, etc. My use of the term intends to encapsulate all pre-Christian faiths, and their contemporary reconstructions, rooted in the commonly-associated characteristics of nature worship, ancestor veneration, and a world-accepting religiosity. On this definition, non-Abrahamic religions such as Satanism or Buddhism would not apply.

11. Ludwig Klages, Man and Earth (1913). Translated by Joseph D. Pryce.

---