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The Monastic Ethic and the Spirit of Greenery
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2024
Extract
- Lucio: Why, how now Claudio! whence comes this restraint?
- Claudio: From too much liberty my Lucio; liberty,
- As surfeit, is the father of much fast;
- So every scope by the immoderate use Turns to restraint..
- (Shakespeare, Measure for Measure Act 1 Scene 2 )
What we can call ‘greenery’ is all about ordering one’s life. It is about how to live in our common home; to be green it is not necessary to be a Christian. An eclectic mix of cosmology and apocalyptic speculation, politics and sheer commonsense, make up what Germaine Greer has called the ‘Tyranny of the Green Religion’. This embodies both criticism and hope and, more immediately, a call to change the minutiae of one’s life in the face of a perceived threat to that life. In the face of massive pollution outside the private sphere of influence we are trying, rather desperately perhaps, to rediscover personal ways of becoming clean. Ironically, this might be achieved by romantically rediscovering the organic, the soil, dirt, clay itself, the natural, the given in the face of the man made; an attempt to place the moral and political orders once more in the context of the natural order.
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- Research Article
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- Copyright
- Copyright © 1992 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
References
1 Published by Geoffrey Chapman and Hodder and Stoughton respectively.
2 see Max Weber: The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. It is an interesting historical question why it was that England had the first industrial revolution, an England which had destroyed its monastic life by 1540. For the subsequent history see Charles Taylor's magnificent book Sources of the Self, especially the chapter entitled ‘God loveth Adverbs’. It is of course the most successful industrialisers and historically puritan nations which have become ecologically aware.
3 For Luther's vitriolic views on religious life see especially Biol, François O.P. The Rise of Protestant Monasticism (Helicon, 1963)Google Scholar. Luther's main criticism is that it is elitist. It is certainly true that in Aristotelian and Thornist ethics the life of production and the family has been of only secondary importance. But there is surely no hierarchy of nearness to the sacred.
4 See Environment Guardian 8th December 1990, The Tablet, 27th April 1991.
5 See Harting, Henry Mayr ed., St Hugh of Lincoln, (Clarendon Press, Oxford) p. 16Google Scholar.
6 Philippine Bishops, Pastoral on Debt.
7 Noonan, John T. The Scholastic Analysis of Usury (Cambridge, Mass. 1957) p.396Google Scholar: ‘What the scholastics mean by maintaining the sterility of money is that money should be considered by itself without identifying it with the capital or consumer goods with which it may be exchanged. What the scholastics’ critics mean by asserting ‘the fertility of money’ is that they have identified money with real capital'.
8 See for example the remarkable articles in The Guardian, July 6th and July 31st 1990.
9 See Walters, Hugh, ‘Pro Foco non pro Foro’, Allen Review, Michaelmas, 1991Google Scholar.