When I heard about the devastating earthquake in Haiti, I was reading Hans Urs von Balthasar's Cosmic Liturgy: The Universe According to Maximus Confessor. It seemed like a cruel joke to turn from news of the natural tragedy to the following line:
"[Maximus'] thinking is dominated by an undiminished optimism with respect to the reasonableness of nature's motion, to its directedness and consequently to its correctness; this is a trust in the essential goodness of nature."
What are we to do with a world that can wreak such death and destruction upon our brothers and sisters? Of course the primary and immediate Christian response to this incident has to be the outpouring of love through physical, tangible aid along with prayerful support. Long-term pragmatic issues would include investigating ways in which we might help support establishing infrastructure to help mitigate future disasters, not only in Haiti but in other parts of the world, especially those lacking the financial and material resources of the US.
But the Christian community also needs theological tools to engage the reality of a natural world that routinely inflicts enormous pain upon us. Much effort has been (rightly) spent in the last few years developing a Christian eco-ethic that values the natural world as God's sacred creation. But a more nuanced view of the nature of nature is needed to make sense of the vicissitudes of this good creation.
Does the standard liberal Christian ecological ethic (which I support) rest upon an assumption that nature is inherently good? And if so, what does this "goodness" mean? Does it mean orderly? Does it mean benevolent? Is it good in the same way the Imago Dei in humanity is "good"? Is its goodness necessarily manifest in relation to humanity?
Classical Christian doctrines of Creation have often had to fight against the tendency to identify the material world as necessarily evil (or, at least, not "good") because of its materiality. This tendency arises from a painful awareness that Christians shared with many Greco-Roman societies: material existence involves change, and change involves decay and death. It is the instability of physical motion that causes anxiety and fear about a transient existence.
Some options that were later deemed insufficient include a radical gnostic anti-materialism or a Manichaean dualism. Both of these options (more or less) posit an utter division between the goodness of intellectual/spiritual/immaterial existence and embodied/carnal/material nature. The key in these systems (again, with brutal generalization) is to transcend the constraints of the material world through diverse ascetic or mystical practices.
Plenty of more traditional Christian practices and theologians have embraced aspects of this cosmology. Most notably, Origen sees material existence itself as constitutive of sin and the result of the primordial fall of immaterial souls from their initial unity with God. The theology of Augustine is often caricatured as dualistic in a gnostic sense, but his polemic against the Manichees encourages a more positive view of created nature as grounded in the supreme ontology of God--and therefore as good--but ultimately disordered due to sin. Materiality per se is not the issue for Augustine; it is, rather, the rebellion of matter against the spirit that ought to rule it, particularly in the human soul and will.
One of the great contributions of Maximus the Confessor is the affirmation of materiality and motion as not merely consequences of the fall and of sin. Pushing against Origenist tendencies, Maximus identifies movement, change, and striving as constitutive elements of created nature. These motions, frightening in their seeming chaos, are ultimately good because they are oriented toward their consummation in the God who is also their origin.
But what are we do with the good motions of nature when they turn to violent quaking? Are we to chalk it up to the mystery of God? Are we to affirm the benevolent providence inherent in all motions of creation? Are we to blame the corrupted human will that knows not how to live in concert with such motions?
Or is it simply the case that shit happens?
I'm ending this post in aporia. I have theological convictions about the relationship between Creation and Creator. I have philosophical speculations about the nature and telos of the natural world. But none of those really make sense of things in Port-au-Prince.
Ultimately, I have to move to the incarnation. Whatever the nature of nature, the incarnation affirms that God has taken all of created nature--in all its messiness and chaos--into God's self out of love for it. With that in mind, I will leave you with more Maximus :
"The world of appearances dies, just as man must, in order to rise again--transformed from old age to youth--in that resurrection which we hope will soon follow death... while God's power radiates over all things its visible and active presence, offering each creature in an individually appropriate way, yet to all through a share in itself, the unbreakable bond of unity for endless ages." -- Mystagogy, ch. 7
Amen.
1 comment:
Thanks for this, Adam. I, too, end in the incarnation. God is willing to die with those crushed under buildings, and God is wrapped around those being pulled from the rubble and crying for clean water. God is also the constant prophet, calling us to act, to pray, to repent of our selfish ways and turn our best actions toward those in need.
That's the best I got for now.
Rachel
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