Ecology and its Spiritual Significance: a Christian Reading

Abstract

The present paper is based on the contention that there are two conceptions of the understanding of nature, nature as an object and nature as environment. The former understanding of nature is enhanced by instrumental rationality, which is said to be the cause of ecological crisis. It is shown in the paper that till the nineteenth century, Christian scholars and theologians have neither judged nature according to human utility (instrumental rationality) nor have they made earthly man as the measure of all things. They have considered man as a channel of grace for nature because man only can cast light into the world of nature through his active participation. This excellence was distinctively evident in some of the Christian saints, mystics, and theologians like Origen, Irenaeus, St. Bonaventure, Gregory of Nyssa, Dionysius the Aropagite, and St. Francis of Assisi. For them, nature was sacred and there was a definite disdain of the artificialities of sedentary life. According to them, species is the manifold ideas in the divine mind which at a particular cosmic moment have become imprinted in the corporeal world and retain their reality on other planes of existence. In a word, the present paper argues for re-inventing the spiritual significance of nature by the humanization of the cosmos and the cosmicization of the human because the foundations of Christian tradition were built on a relation among man, God, and the cosmos where the unity and multiplicity in nature is related to the concept of Trinity in Christianity as well as to the cosmic character of Christ.