Dominic Kirkham reviews Thomas Berry: Selected Writings on the Earth Community, edited by Mary Evelyn Tucker. Orbis (New York 2014). Pbk. 200 pages. £14.99.
Thomas Berry was a Roman Catholic priest, academic and historian of religions who became an outstanding advocate of environmentalism. He died in 2009 (in Vermont) at the age of ninety five after having produced a long list of works that do not easily fit into any category. He referred to himself as a ‘geologian’ and also as an ‘integral ecologist’ — one who reflects on the planet ‘in both its numinous and physical meaning’. In fact he became a modern prophet, a spokesperson not for a deity but the Earth. He offered a new vision of the intrinsic value of nature within the unfolding universe and the place of ‘the Earth community’ within it. Perhaps his most central thought is that the universe is the ‘primary bearer of religious experience’.
He was inspired by the work of the mystical palaeontologist Teilhard de Chardin, with whom his own life and works have much in common. The great sweep of Teilhard’s vision of an unfolding universe — ‘cosmogenesis’ — and the emergence of life provide the essential context for Berry’s thought. The book he co-authored with Brian Swimme, The Universe Story, is a magnificent panorama and celebration of the life of the cosmos as ‘a single multiform celebratory event’, which has even been made into a film.
This story takes us to an understanding of the new age into which humanity is now entering — which Berry called the Ecozoic Era. This era, for Berry, has brought to a close the previous Cenozoic geological period of sixty-five million years, with its unparalleled fluorescence of life on earth, and is now characterised by the dominance of one species: us. Because our history has been an exploitative one — in which ‘an overlay of mechanistic patterns has been imposed on the biological functioning of the living world’ — our future and that of the planet will depend on a new set of attitudes characterised by acceptance, protection, fostering; that the universe is a ‘communion of subjects rather than a collection of objects’.
As well as being lucid, visionary and moving, Berry’s writings are also religiously radical. He looks beyond the various religious traditions, with their various claims to revelation: ‘This new story of the universe is now needed as our sacred story.’ The problem is that few spiritual guides seem able to accept this understanding as a revelatory experience. In particular christians have been negligent and seem ill-adapted to deal with these issues; Berry dismisses the traditional teaching of christian stewardship as being fundamentally flawed in that it ‘does not recognise that nature has a prior stewardship over us’.
On a more general level, for Berry, Western industrial civilisation has become deluded by a false sense of progress which pays scant regard to ‘Earth processes’. He is very clear that: ‘The industrial movement, with its ideal of the subjection of the planet, must now give way to the ecological movement.’ The problem is that we are in a state of denial; our conviction has become an addiction; the paradigm of commercial-industrial progress is our basic referent for reality and now becoming pervasive amongst all the peoples and cultures of the Earth.
If there is to be hope for the future Berry sees this not only in a change in our attitudes but in the sensitivities that can still be found among primordial religions and some tribal peoples of the world, who do not simply sustain their own traditions but ‘call the entire civilised world back to a more authentic mode of being.’ He was thinking of the traditions of the native American Indians and the Chinese understanding of ‘the fathomless depths of the Great Tao’ or the sense of Jing (reverence), ‘which radiates a sense of awe with which the individual regards the universe.’ He expresses the hope that the great religious traditions will promote one ‘multiform global experience’ recovering contact with their ‘most pristine forms and ancient literatures’.
No doubt Berry’s is a timely and prophetic voice. But, as always, the question is: will anyone take heed? Will the Ecozoic Era of human dominance become a new beginning or a final conclusion?
Dominic Kirkham’s book From Monk to Modernity: The Challenge of Modern Thinking will be published by SOF and launched at the SOF annual conference in July.