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           Thomas Berry's Earth Spirituality and the "Great Work"
                            by Andrew J. Angyal
       Originally presented at Works of Love - Scientific & Religious
               Perspectives on Altruism, May 31 - June 5, 2003
            published in The Ecozoic Reader, 3, 3 (2003): 35-44.


Cultural historian Thomas Berry has devoted his career to understanding how
Western religion and culture have failed to sustain a nurturing relationship
between humans and the Earth. In his major works -- The Dream of the Earth,
The Universe Story, and The Great Work -- he has traced the Western
spiritual estrangement from the earth implicit in the growth of modern
technological culture. Berry calls for a new cosmology, expressed in a "New
Story" or mythic consciousness that will reunite humans with the creative
energy of the universe and overcome our destructive spiritual estrangement
from the source of life. Berry's work offers both a conceptual framework for
understanding how this western cultural estrangement has come about and a
means of overcoming it through his new cosmology. Implicit in Berry's work
is a reunification of science and religion through an "Earth Spirituality,"
an incarnational spirituality, an affirmation of the spiritual potential of
matter, and a reflection of how we treat the material world. Berry, in a
clever pun, calls himself a "geologian," not a theologian, meaning
presumably that he is concerned with the earth, not with God, and reflecting
the focus of his spirituality.

In his paper, "The Spirituality of the Earth," published in The Riverdale
Papers, vol. V, Berry talks explicitly about his vision of a spirituality
that is not merely appreciation of the Earth; instead, he means that the
Earth itself is endowed with an innate spirituality. His concern is with the
Earth as a maternal and nurturing principle that is the source of our
existence and our spirituality. The Earth is the primary subject, "endowed
with a spiritual mode of being," not merely an object of spiritual regard
("The Spirituality of the Earth" 1). As Western Christianity has become an
increasingly redemption-based rather than a creation spirituality, Western
science and religion have become separate entities and the social impact of
religion and ethics has diminished. "The central pathology that has led to
the termination of the Cenozoic," Berry observes, "is the radical
discontinuity between the human and the nonhuman" (The Great Work 80). But
now Western science has provided what amounts to a "new revelation" in its
understanding of the origins of the universe, as well as an evolutionary
understanding of human nature. A new common ground for science and religion
has become possible with the emergent view of the universe. Berry calls for
a new spirituality "grounded more deeply in the numinous dimension of an
emergent universe." ("The Spirituality of the Earth" 3). "Our spirituality
itself is earth-derived," he observes. "If there is no spirituality in the
earth, then there is no spirituality in ourselves" ("The Spirituality of the
Earth" 1). The language of redemption-oriented spirituality has ceased to be
effective in our contemporary world and may indeed widen the gap between
human and environmental concerns. In building upon the insights of Teilhard
de Chardin, Berry argues that "the earth has an intrinsic spiritual quality
from the beginning" and that "this spiritual quality finds a distinctive
expression in the human mode of being" ("The Spirituality of the Earth" 3).

"For Berry, the primary problem facing humans today concerns the human
attitude that we as a species are somehow essentially disengaged from the
earth on which we live and that our destiny is to bend nature to our
purposes" (Kinsley 172). The story or myth that continues to drive this goal
of human domination of the earth is a secular version of the old millennial
dream of Christianity, a version in which God will rule the Earth and peace,
harmony, and justice will prevail, brought about, however, through human
science and technology. But this destructive myth of a technological
wonderland in which nature is bent to every human whim is turning the Earth
into a wasteland and threatening human survival. Western spiritual
traditions have not been able to impede these lethal tendencies, but have
encouraged them as part of God's plan for human domination of the Earth, and
these traditions have understood human destiny as primarily involving a
heavenly spiritual redemption (Kinsley 173). The Western religious
traditions "are also seriously deficient in not teaching more effectively
that the natural world is our primary revelatory experience" (The Great Work
75). The Logos or reason of science must be balanced with a healthy,
life-affirming Mythos, or Story embodying a poetic and spiritual
appreciation of the Earth. With their preoccupation with redemption and
their neglect of creation, modern religious traditions are unable to offer a
spirituality adequate to experience the divine in ordinary life or in the
natural world. Not only is the loss of the sacred a notable deficiency in
modern religion, but "an absence of the sacred is the basic flaw in many of
our efforts at ecologically or environmentally adjusting our human presence
to the natural world," according to Thomas Berry ("Foreword" 18). As Loren
Eiseley has warned, science alone will not save the world.

An authentic new global Earth spirituality lies in the Universe story, the
emergent story of cosmogenesis or the unfolding of cosmic creation leading
to life on earth. "There is enormous potential religious value in the new
story of the universe, but Christianity still cannot accept this story as
its own sacred story, " Berry observes in Befriending the Earth (27). Our
traditional Judeo-Christian story of creation is outmoded and prescientific,
but as a culture we have been unable to accept the "New Story" that science
has given us, despite the best efforts of popularizers such as Carl Sagan.
The recent rise of religious fundamentalism has made it even more difficult
for the three great monotheistic religions to accept a science-based Earth
spirituality. The sense of God as transcendent and separate from creation is
one of the chief difficulties of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Berry would
like to recapture a sense of the immanence of the Sacred in the world. We
are at a moment of transition, according to Berry, in which we need a new
vision to carry us from the end of the Cenozoic into the Ecozoic Age.

According to Berry, the Earth is the source of our spiritual energy, which
needs to be expressed in a nurturing and healing mode. We need a spiritual
vision of human life grounded in the biological processes of the planet and
integrated with every other terrestrial life form. We need a new
understanding of human nature as the "understanding heart of the universe"
or "the consciousness of the world" ("The Spirituality of the Earth" 6). The
Chinese have a concept of human nature as the hsin, "the understanding heart
of heaven and earth" (Ibid 6). We need to renew our communion with the
spiritual forces out of which we were born. As Berry has repeatedly
observed, "the universe is a communion of subjects rather than a collection
of objects" (Universe Story 243). In Dream of the Earth, he observes that
beyond our genetic and cultural coding, humans need "to go into the earth,
as the source whence we came, and ask for its guidance, for the earth
carries the psychic structure as well as the physical form of every living
being upon the planet" (195). Science has given us a story of a
time-developmental universe in which humans are related to all other forms
of life, but this has not yet penetrated into our religious and mythic
consciousness. Or perhaps it was there, among Indigenous Peoples, but it has
been suppressed by the monotheistic religions. Perhaps this communion can
come about through the emergence of new spiritual metaphors, poetry, and
liturgies, or in a personification of the Earth itself as a numinous
presence -- as Gaia or Mary -- or in a new understanding of our "coming of
age" as a species, but it must result in a spiritual transformation that
leads us to take responsibility for the well-being of the planet. The
problem lies in our anthropocentric worldview, but can we outgrow it? Our
preoccupation with our human needs alone has become totally dysfunctional
and needs to change.

Berry's new Earth spirituality, grounded in a new cosmology, will encourage
the growth of universal compassion and empathy for all forms of life. There
is great potential for altruism and biophilia in our recognition that we are
all created from the same physical matter. Humans will come to understand
that they are but one manifestation of the dynamic creative energy of the
cosmos, which Dante and Rumi called Love and which draws everything into
itself. A new Mythos of the Earth will envision humans as one species in the
great community of life and will emphasize the interconnectedness of all
life.

In a recent interview in Caduceus entitled "The Mystique of the Earth,"
Thomas Berry expands the concept of Earth spirituality as Earth community.
First of all, he emphasizes that "human health is a subsystem of the earth's
health. You cannot have well humans on a sick planet" (2). He restricts his
use of the word spirituality, observing that "we talk about spirituality but
first of all humans are not spirits. That's why I don't use the word
`spirit' or `spirituality' much. `Spirit' has no inner reference to body, or
to matter. We are ensouled beings. The soul is that vital principle in a
living organic body, and all living beings are ensouled beings" (2). The
difference is that "humans have an intelligent soul, a soul that is capable
of reflecting on itself and on the deeper aspects of the universe"(2). Thus
"the universe knows itself in us"(2).

Our problem is that because humans have assumed that anything nonhuman is of
lesser value, we have created a human governance that only benefits us
rather than the larger community of life. We have failed to recognize that
we are but a subset of a larger integral Earth community of life. Our laws
privilege human rights and private property rights at the expense of the
rest of life. "If there are no rights and no protections for anything that
is not human, then we establish a predator relationship"(2). When we begin
to consume everything that is not human, we risk losing our humanity, which
can only be defined in the context of a comprehensive Earth community. What
we need is to develop "an integral human order within the order of the
planet earth" (3). Such a change in human thinking would involve a virtual
reinvention of the human, which Berry has called for in The Great Work
(159-165).

In The Great Work, Berry identifies the four human institutions that need to
change to facilitate the transition to the Ecozoic Era -- government,
religion, the corporation, and the university. Universities need to teach
the Universe Story and make ecology a centerpiece of their curricula. Humans
need to learn that they are genetically related to all other life and that
our future depends upon the well-being of the planet. In The Great Work,
Berry discusses the necessary reforms in all of these major institutions,
but he has observed that the single most devastating document for the
nonhuman world has been the American Constitution, with its exclusive
emphasis on human rights (74). Some of the most interesting applications of
Berry's ideas have emerged in the area of environmental law, and among the
most promising of these developments is a new Earth jurisprudence.

Berry recognizes how difficult it will be to establish a conceptual
foundation for legal rights for the nonhuman world, but we have to reframe
our thinking, as Aldo Leopold has said, and learn "to think like a mountain"
(A Sand County Almanac 140). We have to expand the resources of our language
and find new conceptual expressions for nonhuman rights. Berry's
articulation of the nonhuman world's fundamental right to exist reflects
both a "Deep Ecology" perspective and his theological training in Thomistic
philosophy, since he often makes recourse to natural rights arguments. His
outline of "The Origin, Differentiation and Role of Rights" (1/1/01)
provides an important conceptual foundation for environmental law, based on
his assumptions that the right to exist is innate for the nonhuman world
because it is grounded in the universe, not in any act of human law. There
are ten basic precepts in Berry's original "Rights" statement, and although
he has recently published a shorter version of "Rights of the Earth" in
Resurgence (2002), I am presenting the original, more comprehensive version:

  1. Rights originate where existence originates. That which determines
     existence determines rights.

  2. Since it has no further context of existence in the phenomenal order,
     the universe is self-referent in its being and self-normative in its
     activities. It is also the primary referent in the being and activities
     of all derivative modes of being.

  3. The universe is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects.
     As subjects, the component members of the universe are capable of
     having rights.

  4. The natural world on the planet Earth gets its rights from the same
     source that humans get their rights, from the universe that brought
     them into being.

  5. Every component of the Earth community has three rights: the right to
     be, the right to habitat, and the right to fulfill its role in the
     ever-renewing processes of the Earth community.

  6. All rights are species specific and limited. Rivers have river rights.
     Birds have bird rights. Insects have insect rights. Difference in
     rights is qualitative, not quantitative. The rights of an insect would
     be of no value to a tree or a fish.

  7. Human rights do not cancel out the rights of other modes of being to
     exist in their natural state. Human property rights are not absolute.
     Property rights are simply a special relationship between a particular
     human "owner" and a particular piece of "property" so that both might
     fulfill their roles in the great community of existence.

  8. Since species exist only in the form of individuals, rights refer to
     individuals and to their natural groupings of individuals into flocks,
     herds, packs, not simply in a general way to species.

  9. These rights as presented here are based upon the intrinsic relations
     that the various components of Earth have to each other. The planet
     Earth is a single community bound together with interdependent
     relationships. No living being nourishes itself. Each component of the
     Earth community is immediately or mediately dependent on every other
     member of the community for the nourishment and assistance it needs for
     its own survival. This mutual nourishment, which includes the
     predator-prey relationships, is integral with the role that each
     component of the Earth has within the comprehensive community of
     existence.

 10. In a special manner humans have not only a need for but a right of
     access to the natural world to provide not only the physical need of
     humans but also the wonder needed by human intelligence, the beauty
     needed by human imagination, and the intimacy needed by human emotions
     for fulfillment. (1/1/01)

Thomas Berry's vision of a mutually enhancing Earth community in which the
rights of all subjects are respected involves an enormous paradigm shift
from the present anthropocentric, mechanistic, reductionistic, and
exploitative ways of thinking about the nonhuman world. Berry envisions the
Earth as an ultimate good in itself, irrespective of how humans may benefit
or profit from it, not merely as a collection of raw materials or natural
resources to be exploited. His vision will entail fundamental changes in
human ethics, law, and government. The difficulty will be in translating
these general principles into more specific policies and programs.
"Governance at all levels occurs within a framework established by laws,"
notes Cormac Cullinan, because "laws are embedded in society and reflect the
perspectives of the dominant societies that made them" ("Justice for All"
37). The American Constitution was designed to protect personal human rights
and private property rights, not to protect the natural world. It reflects
an outmoded eighteenth century view of the natural world and hence has
helped to legitimize the continued exploitation of the world. As Cormac
Cullinan notes, "Fundamentally changing our governance systems will require
more than reforming existing laws or making new ones. We need to take a long
hard look, not only at our legal systems, but, more importantly, at the
legal philosophies that underlie them. Only by creating a vision of an
`Earth Jurisprudence' will we be able to begin a comprehensive
transformation of our governance system" (Ibid 37).

Jonathan Swift remarked that "vision is the ability to see the unseen."
Thomas Berry's Earth Spirituality offers a new vision of a mutually
enhancing Earth community, a vision which could permit us to reconceive the
basic institutions of government, religion, education, and business, and
from which a genuine Earth Jurisprudence might eventually emerge. Promising
work has already been accomplished by Cormac Cullinan's Wild Law (Siberink,
2002), Mike Bell's work with Inuit self-governance and restorative justice,
the Gaia Foundation's Earth Jurisprudence meetings, and Vandana Shiva's ten
principles of Earth Democracy. In the area of Earth Jurisprudence, Thomas
Berry's call for a "Great Work" has clearly been heeded.


Sources Consulted:

Bell, Mike. Thomas Berry and an Earth Jurisprudence: An Exploratory Essay"
The Trumpeter 19, 1 (2003): 69-96.

Berry, Thomas, and Thomas Clarke. Befriending the Earth: A Theology of
Reconciliation Between Humans and the Earth Mystic, CT: Twenty-Third
Publications, 1991.

Berry, Thomas. The Dream of the Earth (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books,
1988).

__________. "Earth Spirituality." Riverdale Papers, vol. V (New York: The
Riverdale Center for Religious Studies, n.d.): 1-15. Also in Liberating
Life: Contemporary Approaches to Ecological Theology, ed. William 11 Birch,
et al (1990).

__________. "Foreword." Thomas Merton, When the Trees Say Nothing: Writings
on Nature, ed. Kathleen Deignan (Notre Dame, IN: Sorin Books, 2003.

___________. The Great Work: Our Way into the Future (New York: Bell Tower,
1999).

"The Mystique of the Earth." Interview with Caroline Webb. Caduceus 59
(Spring 2003): 8-13.

__________. "The Origin, Differentiation and Role of Rights" (rev. 1/1/01).

__________. "Rights of the Earth: Earth Democracy," Resurgence 214
(September/October, 2002): 28-29.

__________, and Brian Swimme. The Universe Story: From the Primordial
Flaring Forth to The Ecozoic Era -- A Celebration of the Unfolding of the
Cosmos New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 1992).

Cullinan, Cormac. "Justice for All," Resurgence 214 (September/October
2002): 36-37.

__________. Wild Law (Claremont, SA: SiberInk, 2002).

Kinsley, David. Ecology and Religion: Ecological Spirituality in
Cross-Cultural Perspective Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1995.

Leopold, Aldo. A Sand County Almanac (New York: Ballantine Books, 1966).



Andrew J. Angyal
Department of English and Environmental Studies
Elon University

Andrew J. Angyal is a professor of English and Environmental Studies at Elon
University, where he has taught for the past twenty-seven years. A deep
interest in American natural history writers has led to three critical
biographies of Loren Eiseley (1983), Lewis Thomas (1989), and Wendell Berry
(1995), and he is currently working on a biography of Thomas Berry. He has
been active in developing the Environmental Studies Program at Elon, where
he teaches seminars on American Environmental Writers and Environmental
Visions. Angyal taught as a Fulbright Professor at Louis Kossuth University
in Hungary in 1986, and has subsequently taught in Poland, Czechoslovakia,
and China. He was awarded a USIA Samantha Smith Grant for a student exchange
with Hungary (1990) and was a Fellow in Eastern European Studies at
Appalachian State University (1990-91). He was a member of the NEH Summer
Institute on the "Environmental Imagination" at Vassar College in 1997 and
has attended many of the past Templeton Foundation advanced faculty
seminars. He holds a Ph.D. in English from Duke (1976), a M. A. in Religion
from Yale Divinity School (1972), and a B. A. in English from Queens
College, CUNY. Along with his teaching, Professor Angyal runs Windy Knoll
Farms, a small organic farm in which he raises organic fruits and
vegetables, cut flowers, and Southern heritage apples, and has a small
vineyard. He is an active member of Carolina Farm Stewardship Association,
which includes his farm on their annual spring farm tour.


Copyright © 2003 Andrew J. Angyal
Reprinted with permission of the author.



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