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O Magnum Mysterium? Eco-theology at the foot of the Cross
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2024
Abstract
In Laudato Si’, Pope Francis urges not just a renewal of respect for creation but also a metanoia in our attitude to the created world. This article is a response to the Pontiff's challenge, exploring how a distinctively ‘modern’ approach to creation arose in the late nineteenth century which still influences our attitudes today. As those attitudes arose, however, the article argues that Christian thinkers were able to articulate other approaches, which are referred to as ‘doing eco-theology at the foot of the Cross’. The article explores these views and their implications in shaping a Christian response to the present ecological crisis within which we find ourselves. In particular, it concentrates on the interpretations of ‘nature’ in the writings of the German atheist philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) and his exact English Jesuit contemporary Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889) who were bothworking at the dawn of the ‘modern’ view of ‘nature’ and creation.
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- Copyright © 2022 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
References
1 I shall cite here from the German text contained in Friedrich Nietzsche Werke in Zwei Bänden (Munich, 1990)Google Scholar, hereafter GW, and the English translation of Whiteside, S., The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music (London, 1993)Google Scholar, hereafter BT.
2 The Dionysian/Apollonian trope is a common feature of early twentieth century culture. As well as the examples cited, we can reference E.M. Forster's 1902 short-story, The Story of a Panic and Karol Szymanowski's 1918 opera King Roger.
3 Although reluctant to acknowledge his debt to Nietzsche it is clear that the psychological schema that Nietzsche developed in works such as The Birth were heavily influential on both Sigmund Freud's and Carl Jung's emerging notion of ‘unconscious drives’. For more on this topic see Tyler, Peter M., The Pursuit of the Soul: Psychoanalysis, Soul-making and the Christian Tradition (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 2016)Google Scholar.
4 Plato, Timaeus 30b. I am using here the version of the Timaeus in the Loeb Classical Library: Timaeus, Critias, Cleitophon, Menexenus, Epistles. Trans. Bury, R. (London: 1929/1989)Google Scholar.
5 I draw here upon the version of the Enneads in the Loeb Classical Library, trans. Armstrong, A. H. (London: 1966–1988) 440-445, 468Google Scholar.
6 Louth, Andrew, The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition: From Plato to Denys (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007/1981), p.38CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
7 As is common in so many neo-Platonic and other contemporary Gnostic texts, for example, Numenius’ second god and Albinus’ ‘celestial mind’. Space doesnot allow a detailed exposition of all the variants of neo-Platonic and Gnostic cosmology here and I am concentrating on Plotinus as an important representative of that thought-world while emphasising that Plotinus is just one of many variants of the ‘world soul emanation’ theme that were criss-crossing Southern Europe, Africa, and Asia Minor during the evolution of early Christianity. For more on the various schools and their interpretation see Louth (2007).
8 As Armstrong puts it: ‘He shows contemplation as the source and goal of all action and production at every level: all life for him is essentially contemplation’ (Plotinus, The Enneads, trans by Armstrong, A. H., Loeb Classical Library (London: Heinemann), Vol 3:358Google Scholar.
9 Gregory of Nyssa, Against Eunomius III.40; see Johannes Zachhuber, ‘The World Soul in Early Christian Thought’, https://www.academia.edu/5977922/The_world_soul_in_early_Christian_thought(downloaded 2020).
10 Unpublished paper reproduced with kind permission of the author.
11 E. McMullin, ‘Creation ex nihilo: Early History’, in Burrell, D., Cogliati, C., Soskice, J., Stoeger, W., Creation and the God of Abraham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010, p. 21CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
12 St. Augustine, The Literal Meaning of Genesis, trans. Taylor, John H. (New York: Newman Press, 1982), 45Google Scholar.
13 Strangely enough both thinkers were born in the same year and ended their writing careers in the same year: Hopkins dying in Dublin in 1889, while at the same time Nietzsche collapsed into insanity in Turin. He spent the rest of his life in an asylum, dying in 1900.
14 ‘Oh God, make it quick with us!’. Martin, R. B., Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Very Private Life (London: Harper Collins, 1991), p. 245Google Scholar.
15 Ibid., p. 247.
16 Quotations from The Wreck of the Deutschland are taken from the Penguin edition of Gerard Manley Hopkins: Poems and Prose, ed. Gardner, W.H. (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1953/1985)Google Scholar.
17 House, H. (ed.), The Letters and Papers of Gerard Manley Hopkins, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959), p. 71fGoogle Scholar.
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19 G. M. Hopkins, ‘Duns Scotus's Oxford’ in the Penguin Edition 1959, p. 40.
20 Ibid., p.147 and p.148.
21 H. House, op. cit., p.328.
22 G. M. Hopkins, Penguin Edition 1959, p. 148.
23 As I write this news reports came in of the terrible drownings in the Channel of modern-day refugees escaping conflict in Afghanistan and Iraq. Hopkins's poem has taken on a terrifying contemporary relevance again.
24 ‘Aber der Gekreuzigte verlangt auch vom Künstler mehr als ein solches Bild. Er fordert von ihm wie von jedem Menschen die Nachfolge: dass er sich selbst zum Bild des Kreuztragenden und Gekreuzigten gestalte und gestalten lasse’ (Stein, E.: Kreuzeswissenschaft: Studie ȗber Joannes a Cruce, ed. Gelber, L. [Freiburg: Herder, 1050], p. 6Google Scholar, my translation.