Abstract
This article analyzes how the author and environmental activist Carl Amery draws together the topics of Catholicism and ecological criticism in the pilgrimage novel Die Wallfahrer, or The Pilgrims (1986). The novel depicts the journeys of four pilgrims to the Marian shrine at Tuntenhausen in Bavaria. In their journeys towards the surprising and unorthodox Virgin Mary of Tuntenhausen, the pilgrims anticipate their ultimate journey towards Gaia, the earth goddess in Greek mythology, and the inspiration for the Gaia Hypothesis, which proposes that the Earth evolves as a system in which organisms are an active, fundamental component. This article explores how the novel recasts the pilgrim journey as a journey towards an ecological consciousness of humans’ creatureliness and increasingly detrimental impact on the web of life. Particular focus is placed on the way Amery dramatizes the connection between salvation history and the Gaia theory that has lately received renewed interest in the context of the Anthropocene debate.
Highlights
In his magnum opus, the novel Die Wallfahrer, or The Pilgrims (1986), the author, environmental activist, and co-founder of Germany’s Green Party Carl Amery draws together the topics of Catholicism and ecological criticism through pilgrimage
Each stop on Innozenz Maria’s pilgrimage leads him to further consider his own status as a creature embedded in the biosphere, and will point not to the Immaculate Virgin, but to the earth goddess Gaia
The pilgrim path embarked upon on the count’s trip to Tuntenhausen does not lead to greater purity, but a loss of innocence, and contact with physical and moral filth. This journey towards impurity situates Innozenz Maria in a larger story of salvation as it prepares him to accept Gaia’s future offering of evolutionary purification, the chance to begin the evolutionary cycle all over again after humanity has caused an ecological disaster destroying all life on the planet
Summary
The novel Die Wallfahrer, or The Pilgrims (1986), the author, environmental activist, and co-founder of Germany’s Green Party Carl Amery draws together the topics of Catholicism and ecological criticism through pilgrimage. But in an unexpected ecological framework, painted against the backdrop of the Anthropocene As they comethey intocome contact these different images of the Virgin pilgrims do not become of spiritual their spiritual as might be expected a pilgrimage, rather theirown own physicality more aware aware of their state,state, as might be expected in ainpilgrimage, butbut rather ofoftheir and their status as living creatures, and of the impact of humanity on the biosphere. Before they shift place each pilgrim’s motivation and journey into a larger ecological context Before they shift the focus of the pilgrims outwards towards the biosphere, turn the pilgrims’. As they appear and appear re-appear the pilgrimages, the Marian the figures function as function as typological figures;they namely, they to an archetype, and draw events together. Amery depicts a shift from a Christocentric to a biocentric worldview without abandoning Christian spiritual or Catholic cultural allegiances
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