judging nature: christianity and the religions of nature

Carmody T S Grey MA Systematic and Philosophical Theology 27th September 2012

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Judging Nature:

Christianity and the Religions of Nature


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Judging Nature: Christianity and the Religions of Nature

Earth is a hard text to read.

Waldo Williams1

Ethical and spiritual nature-rhetoric is increasingly significant in late-modern personal and

political discourse. Notions of human wellbeing, aspiration and fulfilment are frequently

correlated to certain conceptions of nature and the natural. The novelty of the modern feeling

for and cultural construction of ‘nature’2 often escapes notice, and yet the influence of nature-

rhetoric on the formation of late-modern cultural and individual identities can hardly be

overestimated. But the modern feeling for the natural world sponsors a deeply problematic

understanding of ‘nature’ and cannot coherently articulate the good of either the human or

nonhuman worlds. Most theological literature responding to the natural world dwells on a few

central areas of contention: anthropocentrism, dominion, covenant, stewardship, eco-

spirituality, animal ethics and so on, neglecting to examine the ideological inheritance of our

construction of nature, the way it is used in contemporary discourse to inform and orient the

modern self and its search for the good.

1 Trans. Rowan Williams, The Poems of Rowan Williams (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), 106. 2 For a useful exception, see Stratford Caldecott, ‘Catholicism and the New Age Movement’ in Gavin D’Costa ed., The Catholic Church and World Religions (London: T&T Clark, 2011), 178-216.


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I defend here a theological approach to the natural world that takes as central its moral

significance to us, its role in our construction of the good.3 It is the perception and election of

certain goods, particularly those defining and governing goods Charles Taylor names

‘hypergoods’, that organise, structure, and orient our language about our selves and the world.4

Taylor shows that outside language about what is good for us, what is the good we are aiming

for and locating ourselves in relation to, what we hope for and desire, we cannot negotiate the

world. Accordingly I engage the question of the meaning and character of the natural world

from the point of view of our search to orient ourselves to the good, an angle which exposes

what is really going on in secular discourses about ‘nature’, namely that the physical, biological

environment is being enthroned as the locus of value and meaning in a way which is both

dangerous and useful to theology. This brings into focus the unique resources of Christian faith

to read the natural world truly, because it has a moral-critical power which derives from its

having rejected the living earth as the final moral and spiritual axiom. This is vital, because once

we have established that our relation to and interpretation of the natural world is best

understood through the lens of our search for the good, for what governs and directs moral and

spiritual aspiration, then the violence, waste, and conflict of the natural world become intensely

problematic for us. Both Christian and non-Christian constructions of the nonhuman world

often neglect to recognise and respond to its extreme moral ambiguity. But apart from an

acknowledgement of nature’s brokenness, neither the moral vacuity of construals of the natural

world which position it as the governing and normative context for human life, nor the critical

and unique contribution of Christian orthodoxy to understanding nonhuman nature, become

apparent.

The role of the religions of nature here is a two-sided one. By their attentiveness to the natural

world and its inhabitants as sentient and intelligent ‘others’, they reshape the cultural

imagination to include the natural world as a partner in discourse, full of demanding and

responsive presences, encouraging the extension of the Christian moral imagination to the

whole animate and inanimate world. In this way the modern feeling for nature provides a

3 Critically exploring the multivalency of this word is part of my task. See section 2.i. Cf. Richard Fern, Nature, God and Humanity: Envisioning an Ethics of Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 11. 4 Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), chapters 1-3; for ‘hypergoods’, see 63ff.


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salutary counternarrative to the reductionist-naturalist perception of nature as a world of dead

objects which has no dramatic interaction with us, a perception against which Christians need to

be innoculated. Theology can receive the modern feeling for nature as a testimony to the

character of God’s ‘second book’ of revelation: the created world is orientated to a

transcendent and immeasurable good which can never be translated wholly into our own terms,

revealing the living earth as a stage of material presences, mysterious ‘others’ whose depth and

inwardness can never be exhaustively grasped and who are players, with us, in the drama of

brokenness and redemption. Seeing this sensitizes us to the suffering, death and waste

attendant upon the mechanisms and processes of the natural world, so that we come to

recognise these as proper causes of protest and resistance. This is the positive role of the

religions of nature. But negatively, once we have become so sensitized, their moral vacuity

provides no grounds for this protest, nor for the hope which is necessary to make protest

credible. Christian orthodoxy recognises that the common discourse we share with the natural

world is the story of grace, a story which reveals the true character of the old creation only in

the new, and so shows how the natural world too is found wanting in the judgement of God.

This is the only background against which nature’s profound and distressing moral ambiguity

can be identified as both real and regrettable, and so underwrites the human need and desire to

construct nature positively in relation the good.

So theology must resist a polarised reaction to nature-rhetoric. It cannot opt in wholly with the

feeling for nature inasfar as it fails to recognise that nature’s depth is precisely grace. But

neither can it disenchant nature in order to emphasise its subjection to a higher logic, which

would be implicitly to accept reductive ideology in which the meaning of finite things can be

exhausted by our understanding and controlled by our agendas. Both new atheist reductionism

and the modern feeling for nature assume that finite things are comprehensible on their own

terms. Against this, Christianity defends the irreducibility of the material, its stubborn opening

onto a reality whose depths we can never plumb. That is why it is not enough to bring theology

‘up-to-date’ with ecological awareness, as though the best Christianity can do is provide its own

version of ecospirituality to offer to a crowded marketplace. Rather, theology should be able to

show that Christian faith alone can read nature in a truly non-reductive way. If grace is the inner

truth of nature, this is transformative not just for the humanum but for the whole material

world, and only this makes sense of materiality. Only by speaking of the natural world as


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creation, only if creation is revealed to itself in Christ, the first-born, can we know what it is to

be ‘natural’ and so judge nature truly.

The following discussion takes place in three stages. In the first section, I describe and critique

the pantheistic, immanentist turn to nature which discovers the living earth as the final locus of

meaning and truth. In the second section I consider how the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo shows

grace as the inner truth of nature, and so reinstates a moral and theological narrative, a drama

of redemption, as the fundamental hermeneutic for reading the ‘difficult text’ of this earth. The

moral ontology of Christian orthodoxy demands an unflinchingly honest vision of the darkness

of cosmic and planetary history, seeking neither to explain nor to defend this history, but

determined rather to enact the judgement of a God who has no use for evil. The third section

argues that theology should learn from the religions of nature how to renew its imaginative

engagement with the natural world.

The overall thesis is that, on the one hand, the religions of nature fatally idealise the natural

world and so forfeit what they wish to celebrate, and on the other, that Christian thought and

imagination can draw from the religions of nature a renewed awareness of nature’s graced

depth. Theology can in this way be chastened into a greater sensitivity both to nature’s tragedy

and to its grandeur, and so will grow more fitted for hope and for praise.


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1. The Religions of Nature

i. The Turn to Nature

The development of the modern feeling for nature which I detail below demonstrates that our

conceptions of nature and the natural are always evaluative, qualitative, and normative. We

only grasp the natural world in the context of an overall orientation to the good. Taylor speaks

of ‘inescapable features of our moral language’ which cannot be replaced by any other kind of

language, because ‘orientation to the good is not some optional extra, something we can

engage in or abstain from at will, but a condition of our being selves with an identity’.5 There is

no non-evaluative description which can substitute wholly for evaluative description, because

orientation to the good is the unavoidable context in which all our speech, our identity-

formation, our ‘making the best sense’ of the world takes place. So there is no nature-talk that

is stripped bare of the question of what is ultimately good and worthwhile; of what is the

governing criterion by which we identify the good. ‘Strong evaluations’ and ‘qualitative

distinctions’ simply are not discardable.

It is in this sense that the overarching question of the good is the proper setting for the ongoing

human inquiry into how to relate to the natural world, what the natural world is for us. This

illuminates the universal human need to use the nonhuman realm to find out who we are; it

5 Taylor, Sources, 68.


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‘mediates the construction of humanity’ and so is ‘central to the mission of modernity’.6 By

setting ourselves in the context of the whole world, we find out who we are.7 We might say that

‘nature’ is always and fundamentally a religious matter. If it is the question of the true goods or

hypergoods that always and everywhere shape our discourse about the world, this points the

debate concerning the meaning and character of the natural world towards the elucidation of

the competing pictures of the good that different readings of it assume, which is what I

undertake here. If one picture of the nonhuman world is found to be preferable to another, it

will be on these grounds. As the discussion unfolds we will see that it is only in the context of a

Christian moral ontology, which identifies what is good with what is finally and non-negotiably

real, that the inescapability of reading the world in evaluative, aesthetic and moral terms is

comprehensible and justifiable.

In his survey of the formation of modern identity,8 Taylor identifies the conscious location of the

self in nature as a key factor in the modern conception of the good.9 The turn to nature has

decisively shaped contemporary conceptions of human selfhood and wellbeing.10 The

representative points of this cultural movement are primitivism, European Romanticism, and

American transcendentalism. The notion of nature as source, moral guide and humanity’s true

inspiration which began in the eighteenth century became definitive of European culture and

sensibility.11 The modern self finds its norm, standard, and measure of authenticity in nature.

This has sponsored the re-definition of personal identity as inwardness, cut free from an

objective rational order and rooted instead in our own inner impulses.12 New expressions in

literature, painting, architecture and landscape design in the eighteenth and nineteenth

centuries showed nature as the self’s deepest inspiration and nourishment. The Romantic

movement has been formative in the development of contemporary conceptions of

6 Phillip Armstrong, What Animals Mean in the Fiction of Modernity (Oxford: Routledge, 2008), 2, 1. 7 See Armstrong, Animals. Cf. Anat Pick, Creaturely Poetics: Animality and Vulnerability in Literature and Film (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011). 8 Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 1989. 9 Taylor, Sources, 506-7. 10 Michael Northcott, The Environment and Christian Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 87. 11 Taylor, Sources, Part IV. 12 Taylor, Sources, 301.


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environment, nature and wilderness.13 Coleridge, Blake and Wordsworth gave poetic expression

to movements in European philosophy, inspired particularly by Rousseau, reacting to the

perceived rationalism of mechanistic conceptions of nature.14 Critical in the interpretation and

popularisation of Romanticism were the American transcendentalists. Ralph Waldo Emerson,

Henry Thoreau and John Muir were inspired by the holistic paradigm expressed in European

Romanticism and by the primitivism of Rousseau. Thoreau declared that ‘[i]n Wildness is the

preservation of the world’.15 This marks a genuine ‘sea-change’ in Western culture’s attitude to

nature. From being seen as a place of terror and exposure, wilderness was now ‘freighted with

moral values’ and invested with salvific power.16 Thus arrived a novel perception of wild nature

as redemptive, because pure, pre-dating and transcending civilisation and functioning as a kind

of ‘antidote’ to the human.17 This religious component of the turn to nature is central. It can be

traced, at least the modern period, to Spinoza, whose pantheism was developed by the English

Romantics into an aesthetic-sentimental appreciation of God in tree, river and mountain. The

American transcendentalists transformed English Romantic pantheism into a more dogmatic

doctrine of the sublime, according to which God is pre-eminently accessible in wild places,

especially vast, dramatic and imposing landscapes. God speaks not through nature but as

nature, interpreted by the experiencing, sentimental heart and mind.

ii. Three Versions of the Religion of Nature: Religious Naturalism, Nietzschean Realism

and Neo-Animism

What is propagated in the turn to nature and its inheritance in contemporary discourse is the

view of nature as a source of salus in the deep traditional sense of the ultimate health,

wellbeing and integrity of a human being. This view can be expressed in naturalistic, grimly

realist, and sentimental forms. It might be more accurate, then, to speak of ‘religions of nature’,

where by ‘religions’ we mean interpretations of the natural world which take it as normative for

human meaning and purpose, seeing in it the final and decisive context for the discovery and

13 See e.g. James C. McCusick, Green Writing: Romanticism and Ecology (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000). 14 McCusick, Green, 1. 15 Quoted Cronon, Uncommon, 69. 16 Cronon, Uncommon, 70, 71. 17 Cronon, Uncommon, 69.


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pursuit of the good and the right orientation of human desire and praxis. (As we see later some

evolutionary theologies might also be called ‘religions of nature’.) The variety of such forms

calls attention to the indeterminateness, considered by itself, of the natural world; it can be

‘read’ religiously in diverse ways. This indeterminateness suggests that a religion of nature

alone, a ‘nature is enough’ position (where ‘nature’ is conceived in a reductively immanentist

way), is already problematic precisely because there are insufficient grounds in immanently-

conceived nature for anything more than the proliferation of contestable interpretations.

Donald Crosby’s A Religion of Nature18 is a paradigmatic expression of a religiously naturalistic

reading of the nonhuman world. Crosby, a professional philosopher, describes his evolution

from Christian theism to process panentheism and finally to naturalistic faith in nature, a

position he calls ‘religious naturalism’. Along with other prominent religious naturalists such as

Loyal Rue, Ursula Goodenough, and Jerome Stone, Crosby argues that nature is both

metaphysically and religiously ultimate, the true, worthy, and inexhaustible object of religious

devotion and reverence. This position espouses an allegiance to science as the final court of

appeal for human knowledge and holds that meaning and purpose is discoverable only within

nature, vigorously opposing so-called ‘supernaturalism’ (where ‘natural’ and ‘supernatural’ are

conceived as opposites). Religious naturalism thus combines the naturalistic and sentimental

elements of the turn to nature, melding them into a single religious vision in which the scientific

and the personal together discover nature as what is finally real, true, and normative. Crosby

speaks of nature’s ‘religious rightness… its splendid appropriateness as the object of

wholehearted religious reverence and devotion’; it is ‘fully entitled to this reverence and

devotion’; it is ‘saving’ in its reassurance of our place in the scheme of things.19

A representative example of ‘Nietzschean realism’ as a response to the natural world is Mark

Rowlands’ The Philosopher and the Wolf: Lessons from the Wild on Love, Death and Happiness.20

A professional philosopher, Rowlands recounts his ten-year relationship with a wolf, Brenin,

which teaches him that the nonhuman world is pure, simple, powerful, and honest; human

beings, in distancing themselves from animality, are inauthentic deceivers and pretenders,

18 (New York: State University of New York Press, 2002). 19 Donald Crosby, Living With Ambiguity: Religious Naturalism and the Menace of Evil (New York: State University of New York Press, 2008), 22. 20 (London: Granta, 2008.)


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pitiable in their denial of their animal selves and in the grip of their own mythic, anthropocentric

constructions. With our simian proclivity to deception and manipulation, humans are the

animals who believe the stories we tell ourselves; and the principal story is that we, with our

intelligence and moral sophistication, are different from and superior to the nonhuman world.

In language reminiscent of neo-Darwinian socio-biology, Rowlands tells the ‘true’ story, that sex

and violence are the real drivers of life, the real motivators, and the final truth about human

beings.21 Our rationality is ‘a superstructure erected on a foundation of violence and the drive

to acquire pleasure’; and it is because our chief characteristic is malice that we had to invent

morality.22 Wolves embrace the world indiscriminately, accepting suffering and death as well as

joy; they neither regret nor anticipate, but live powerfully, unapologetically in an endless

present; they are without deceit. This contrasts painfully with our entrapment in history,

anticipation, regret, and self-regard.23 Brenin ‘was, in most important respects, unquestionably,

demonstrably, irredeemably and categorically superior to me’.24 The final chapter, ‘The Religion

of the Wolf’, argues that it is the wolf’s way of being that the human animal should pursue and

emulate. Romanticism and Nietzschean master-morality converge in a defiant affirmation of

life’s emptiness and hopelessness combined with the joyful aesthetic sensibility and

appreciation of nature’s beauty and mystery, espoused with the self-conscious maturity of one

who faces reality just as it is, without illusion, without false hope, a distinctively modern type

whose genealogy is described by Taylor.

Of the three types, ‘neo-animism’ has most to contribute to theology. It is a rediscovery of the

pagan sensibility of the sentience of the nonhuman world, its capacity to be a subject, in

dialogue and exchange with human subjects. David Abram’s The Spell of the Sensuous:

Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World25 is a compelling account of one man’s

discovery of wholeness in relationship and exchange with nonhuman subjectivities, and has

become influential in Christian as well as secular environmental thought. Abram talks of ‘our

carnal inherence in [the] more-than-human matrix’ which is ‘the animate earth’; ‘[w]e are

21 Rowlands, Wolf, 74. 22 Rowlands, Wolf, 79. 23 Rowlands, Wolf, 213. 24 Rowlands, Wolf, 85. 25 (New York: Vintage Books, 1997).


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human only in contact, and conviviality, with what is not human’.26 The pantheistic and

animistic spiritualities which Abram eloquently defends are grounded in a joyful sensibility of

the presence, power, inwardness and otherness of the nonhuman world. In our nature-illiterate

culture, we speak about animals, plants, rocks and rivers, but we need to learn again how to

speak to them, to join their discourse. This echoes the Romantic discovery of God’s voice

speaking not through nature but as nature. Testifying to the influence of primitivism, Abram

talks of ‘remembering’ our animal nature, our past communion with the sentient life-world.27 In

the participation in a more-than-human conversation we rediscover our animate, sensuous self

which speaks the language of the earth. ‘It is the animate earth that speaks; human speech is

but a part of that vaster discourse’.28 Abram echoes the chief of the Cayuses Indians, signing

over Cayuses lands to the US government in 1855: ‘I wonder if the Ground has anything to say?

I wonder if the Ground is listening to what is said?’29 He laments the loss of ‘the expressive and

sentient landscape’, the ‘thick and richly textured presence’ in which alone we are truly at

home, a loss which occurred first in the attenuation of our power to perceive the subjective

intelligence of the world around us, and now, catastrophically, through our willing destruction of

those landscapes and presences.30 The deracinated, disincarnate modern is condemned to

industrial, commercial, computerised perdition, in which shallow sensuality substitutes for a

sense of physical, psychological and ethical place. We have lost the sense that we are

surrounded by non-human sentience and awareness which contributes to and is in dialogue

with our own. A ‘perceptual shift’, now embedded in habits of thought and language, removes

us fatally from the animate ‘more-than-human’ world: we are now exiles, refugees, displaced

persons.31 The living earth is distanced, objectivised, commodified, and ultimately diminished to

a mere addendum to the human.

26 Abrams, Sensuous, 22. 27 Abrams, Sensuous, 258ff. 28 Abrams, Sensuous, 179. 29 Abrams, Sensuous, 181. 30 Abrams, Sensuous, 26. 31 Abrams, Sensuous, 196.


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What these types have in common is that they all identify ‘Nature’ as a hypergood, the ‘great

source’ of truth and goodness.32 We can summarise their perspective with the title of Loyal

Rue’s principal work: Nature Is Enough.33

iii. Nature is Not Enough: The Moral Ambiguity of the Natural World

The inadequacy of non-Christian accounts of the natural world, and of Christian readings which

absorb the naiveté of such accounts, become apparent only when dispute is engaged at the

level of the overall good of human life and of created reality itself. For the human orientation to

the good, and the (willed or involuntary) extension of this orientation to reality as a whole,

meets in the violence, brutality, waste, and indifference of natural world a profound and

distressing rebuff.

That Western modernity has persistently sentimentalised and falsified nature is apparent in our

over-familiarity with it. We no longer see (generally because we are not exposed to) the sheer

strangeness and foreignness of nonhuman life. A close look reveals it to be as grotesque as it is

beautiful. Much of it is bizarre, incomprehensibly different, unheimlich. More serious, however,

than our false domestication of the natural world is the fact that, while anthropogenic abuse of

nonhuman lives is protested, their infinitely greater sufferings at the hands of ‘nature’ does not

produce the same kind of anxiety. Christopher Southgate’s The Groaning of Creation is one of

the few works focusing exclusively on violence and suffering in the natural world.34 Southgate’s

particular concern is to show how evolution by natural selection produces a prevalence of pain,

death, and waste in the nonhuman world, to a degree that is serious and distressing for a

believer in a good God. Quoting Darwin, ‘[w]hat a book a devil’s chaplain might write on the

clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low and horridly cruel works of nature!’,35 he explains how

evolution has extended the problem of animal suffering over millions of years and species; and,

further, that the structure of the animal organism itself seems designed to maximise and utilise

pain. Suffering and extinction are not only intrinsic, but necessary; they are not incidental evils,

32 Taylor, Sources, 73. 33 (New York: State University of New York, 2011). 34 (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008). 35 Southgate, Groaning, 1.


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but the very mechanisms of evolutionary development, unavoidable to the production of good

outcomes such as consciousness and intelligence. Since evolution works by a mechanism of

overproduction, waste is built into the system. And it is not waste of individuals only, but of

whole species, entire genera. Many evolve to no end, suffering the innumerable agonies of

natural life just to be cast into the evolutionary dustbin.36 The evolving biological world is

‘random, contingent, blind, disastrous, wasteful, indifferent, selfish, cruel, clumsy, ugly, full of

suffering, and, ultimately, death’.37

Many instances of natural suffering seem gratuitously severe, disgusting, and pointlessly

extended. The famous case of ichneumonidae wasp, laying its eggs inside a caterpillar which is

then slowly consumed from the inside as the larvae hatch, is gleefully quoted by Dawkins and

others who point to the amorality of life. Baby penguins are flayed alive by leopard seals.

Sibling cannibalism is a necessary norm among many species. The agonies of predation,

parasitism, starvation, burning, freezing, disease, exhaustion are endlessly repeated. There is no

end to the horrors that can be enumerated. Nature is not only violent but cruel, and on a scale,

both in time and space, inconceivably vast. Even if we operate not with a traditional Darwinian

picture of undifferentiated ‘selfish’ competition, but acknowledge that inter- and intra-species

cooperation is as significant as contemporary studies suggest, the cost in blood and torment of

the evolutionary process is still immeasurable.38

It might be argued that this problem of ‘natural’ problem of evil is even worse than the problem

of evils suffered by human beings. Among nonhuman suffers, there is no space for that variety

of responses to suffering which may transform it, as there is in those human beings (a historical

minority, it must be observed) who are lucky enough to live to an age and in a condition in

which reflection and self-consciousness become possible. Individual nonhuman lives are not

capable of dealing with, transforming, or understanding such suffering; they are simply victims,

who in many cases were never able to realise any kind of good in recompense for the misery of

their brief existence. ‘There are innumerable sufferers… for which life seems to contain no

36 Southgate, Groaning, 8. 37 Holmes Rolston III, quoted Southgate, Groaning, 3. 38 See Sarah Coakley, ‘Sacrifice Regained: Evolution, Cooperation and God’ (Gifford Lectures, 2012), http://www.abdn.ac.uk/gifford/about/.

http://www.abdn.ac.uk/gifford/about/


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fullness, no expression of what it is to reach the potential inherent in being that creature.’39

Even were we to attribute to the higher animals the possibility of growth and change as a result

of the experience of suffering, this is true in such a tiny minority of cases it is practically

irrelevant. Nonhuman sufferers know no consolation and no recompense.

J.S. Mill’s unflinching condemnation of the ways of Nature is still unsurpassed as a description of

the horrors amidst which human beings have constructed civilisation. The burden of Mill’s point

is that natural evils so far exceed moral evils in scale and horror that they are not to be

compared: ‘In sober truth, nearly all the things which men are hanged or imprisoned for doing to

one another are Nature's every-day performances’ which she accomplishes ‘with the most

supercilious disregard both of mercy and justice’, inflicting ‘tortures in apparent wantonness…

on the largest scale and with the most callous indifference’.40 Thanks to Darwin, we know not

only that nature is like this, but that it has to be. To us has been revealed not only the sheer

chronological extent of this waste and suffering, but the embedded nature of that waste and

suffering in the system through which our species arrived.

Not long ago I was sleeping in a cabin in the woods and was awoken… by the

sounds of a struggle between two animals. Cries of terror and extreme agony

rent the night, intermingled with the sounds of jaws snapping bones and flesh

being torn from limbs… A clearer case of a horrible event in nature, a natural

evil, has never been presented to me. It seemed to me self-evident that the

natural law that animals must savagely kill and devour each other in order to

survive was an evil natural law and that the obtaining of this law was sufficient

evidence that God did not exist.41

A world in which such sickening agonies are necessary and omnipresent is a tragic world. It is

insupportable that such a state of affairs not be recognised as tragic. The fact that sceptics find

the character of the natural world to be incontrovertible evidence against a good Creator

underlines this. David Hull comments on the biology of the Galapagos:

39 Southgate, Groaning, 8. 40 John Stuart Mill, On Nature (Lancaster E-text, http://www.lancs.ac.uk/users/philosophy/texts/mill_on. htm). 41 Quentin Smith, quoted Southgate, Groaning, 5.

http://www.lancs.ac.uk/users/philosophy/texts/mill_on.%20htm

http://www.lancs.ac.uk/users/philosophy/texts/mill_on.%20htm


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The evolutionary process is rife with happenstance, contingency, incredible

waste, death, pain and horror… The God of the Galapagos is careless, wasteful,

indifferent, almost diabolical. He is certainly not the sort of God to whom

anyone would be inclined to pray.42

The sheer incompatibility of the power that appears to be at work in the natural world and the

power that makes itself visible in Jesus makes Christian faith look particularly fragile. Callous

indifference and cruelty, with a relentless favouring of the strong, in the one case; nonviolent

love which favours the weak, in the other. There could hardly be a more painful dissonance

here.

iv. Nonhuman Beings as ‘Others’

Three related objections are sometimes made to the posing of the problem as I have put it

above: that nonhuman lives have no intrinsic meaning or significance; that nonhuman beings do

not really suffer, or do not suffer severely; and that to speak of good and evil in the nonhuman

world is a category mistake. If any one of these objections were justified, it would indeed be

established that there is no violence, no evil, and no tragedy in the natural world. But the first

two objections reflect a historic prejudice which is, in my view, unsupportable, as I argue below.

Regarding the third, to demonstrate the validity of moral talk in the context of nature is a key

aim of my argument overall. We must be able to use moral vocabulary about the natural world

because we cannot otherwise make sense of our finding that world to be problematic, which we

do; the alternative, often employed by the religions of nature, is to adopt a perspectivist or

subjectivist metaphysics. Coupled with emotivist or other non-cognitivist forms of meta-ethics,

this move makes our moral talk altogether vacuous. Nature’s character as an affront to our

sense of the good must then be explained away as a matter of perspective only. Once this

‘explaining-away’ has occurred, suffering and death are not really objectionable, but only

appear to be (that is, if we choose to see it that way); and then the effort to enter into other

perspectives, in particular the perspectives of nonhuman sufferers, becomes a matter of

arbitrary taste or preference. This is wholly incompatible with realist metaphysics grounded in a

theistic moral ontology. It is, further, incompatible with the view that creation is intrinsically

42 ‘God of the Galapagos’, Nature 352 (1991): 485-6.


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good, for in that case nature’s distressing moral ambiguity can only be recognised as a kind of

subjection to evil, which is to say, to a tragic deficiency. The moral and ethical collapse

associated with undermining grounds for objective moral talk in the context of nature is a theme

that recurs throughout the discussion.

Turning to the first two objections, there has been a remarkable resistance in Western thought

to acknowledging nonhuman sentience or intelligence; the general view has been that ‘animals

scarcely had any mental life at all’.43 In theological works ‘animals’ are often referred to

primarily for negative contrast, in order to clarify human uniqueness.44 It has long been

fashionable for humanity to be defined over and against animality, characterised as ‘brutish’,

‘beastly’, ‘savage’ and so on. ‘It was as a comment on human nature that the concept of

‘animality’ was devised’.45 Some even dismiss as silly all moral talk about animals. Defenders of

the view that animals have real inner lives were accordingly labelled sentimental

anthropomorphisers.

[But t]he fact that some people are silly about animals cannot stop the topic

being a serious one. Animals are not just one of the things with which

people amuse themselves, like chewing-gum and water-skis, they are the

group to which people belong.46

Rather than take nonhuman lives seriously, a mechanistic view of nonhuman life has suited

science and society much better. It has enabled not only the experimental and industrial

exploitation of those lives, but also the bolstering of science’s professionalization as a physicalist

discipline which has no room for intention, for mind, except as reducible to matter.47 The

influence of naturalist reductionism here should alone make Christians inclined to doubt such a

view of nonhuman life. Further, advances in ethology have undermined it; Konrad Lorenz’s

seminal work has been followed by a spate of ethological studies in animal psychology,

intentionality, intelligence and so on. Donald Griffin’s landmark 1977 book The Question of

43 Mary Midgley, ‘Embarrassing Relatives: Changing Perceptions of Animals’, The Trumpeter 4 (1987), 18. 44 See e.g. Kathryn Tanner, Christ the Key (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 47-8. 45 See e.g Armstrong, Animals, 6ff. 46 Mary Midgley, ‘The Concept of Beastliness: Philosophy, Ethics and Animal Behaviour’, Philosophy 48 (1973): 114. 47 Midgley, ‘Relatives’, 19.


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Animal Awareness, for example, firmly used ‘every one of the taboo words, from consciousness

to introspection’ in relation to animals.48 The moral claims of animals on human beings have

been more readily discussed now that scientific evidence of nonhuman sentience is widely

accepted. ‘[T]he available evidence suggests that most or all vertebrates, and perhaps some

invertebrates, can suffer’.49 Many can suffer intensely, particularly those with highly developed

nervous systems, social systems, memories, and a capacity to anticipate the future, such as

primates and cetaceans. Alasdair MacIntyre uses the highly developed sociality and relationality

of dolphins to establish mutual dependence as the chief criterion of moral life, by which

standard certainly many of the higher mammals are ‘moral’ subjects.50

Mary Midgley’s Animals and Why They Matter ruthlessly exposes the philosophical idiocy of

denying value and sentience to nonhuman beings.51 Midgley robustly defends the practice of

imagining, responding to, and enshrining in law the status of at least some nonhuman animals

as ‘others’, arguing that they are in some sense dramatis personae, interacting with human

beings in ongoing conversation and mutual presence.52 She interprets the resistance to

acknowledging animals as ‘others’ to be a refusal to admit new characters to the drama, arguing

that the question ‘Who is a person?’ is much more like ‘Who is important?’, ‘Who is a significant

character?’ than ‘Who has got two legs?’ (women were once not considered ‘persons’ under

American law).53 This role of nonhumans as co-players in the moral drama of life who challenge

our understanding of reason and personhood is explored with discomforting acuity in J.M.

Coetzee’s celebrated novella The Lives of Animals.54 Whether Christian ethics can accept any

animals as ‘persons’ in the full sense is not the important issue here, but rather, the

acknowledgement nonhuman lives and presences as ‘others’. This is especially pertinent to

Christian faith which holds that they are sharers, with us, in a common story of creation, which

is to say, of grace and vocation. Once we acknowledge nonhuman lives in this way, the ambit of

48 Midgley, ‘Relatives’, 19. 49 David DeGrazia, Taking Animals Seriously: Mental Life and Moral Status (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 123, italics original. 50 Alasdair MacIntyre, Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues (London: Duckworth & Co., 2009), ch.3. 51 (USA: Thomson-Shore, Inc., 1983). 52 Mary Midgley, ‘Persons and Non-Persons’ in Peter Singer ed., In Defence of Animals (New York: Blackwell, 1985), 52-62. 53 Midgley, ‘Persons’, 53-4. 54 Ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).


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our moral concern necessarily extends itself to them, and the existential anxiety attendant upon

perceiving the brutal, wasteful, and indifferent processes of ‘nature’ (in particular but not

exclusively in light of evolution) will increase dramatically. For if even some nonhuman beings

are recognised as ‘others’, then there is in creation an inconceivably vaster quantity of what

Marilyn McCord Adams calls ‘horrendous evils’, evils which ‘defeat, engulf, destroy any value in

[a creature’s] life’; ‘God could not be said to have been good to such individuals’.55

The fundamental mysteriousness of nonhuman experience and consciousness, its evident

unlikeness to our own, will always remain. But to conclude from this that nonhuman sentience,

intelligence, and suffering are insignificant is unsustainable; these positions are not logically

connected. Further, it is confused to claim, as unfortunately do some Christians, that attributing

significant value to nonhuman lives somehow detracts from the distinct value of humanness.

Whatever we wish to say about the unique and unrepeatable vocation of human beings in the

created world is entirely compatible with (and arguably inseparable from) the attribution of

significant value to nonhuman life.56

If man was the relative of animals, then animals were the relatives of man,

and in degrees bearers of that inwardness of which man…is conscious in

himself.57

v. The Moral Ineptitude of the Religions of Nature

By calling attention to the distinct and precious qualities of the natural world, particularly its

sentience, the religions of nature recall Christians to the moral protest that is enjoined upon

them not only against the suffering of human beings, but against the incomprehensible degree

of torment and loss in planetary history. But having done so, they have no resources to respond

to the apparent inconsolability of this situation. What is required, in light of the natural world’s

moral ambiguity, is not a Gnostic rejection of it, which fails to be honest to its beauty and to the

joy it awakens in us, nor a naïve wholesale appropriation and approbation of all that is ‘natural’,

55 Karen Kilby, ‘Evil and the Limits of Theodicy’, New Blackfriars 84 (2003): 16. 56 Cf. Rowan Williams, The Lion’s World (London: SPCK, 2012), 20-9. 57 Hans Jonas, quoted Conor Cunningham, Darwin’s Pious Idea: Why Ultra-Darwinists and Creationists Both Get It Wrong (Grand Rapids: W.B. Eerdmans, 2010), 65.


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which fails to be honest to the horror, revulsion, and grief it elicits from us. Neither can we

accept a flatly dualistic picture, as espoused by the Gnostic strands of the New Age movement,

which envisions nature as both good and evil but erodes the foundations for holding good as

finally normative, and so ultimately kills celebration and praise. Unless we have a language of

good and evil which is serious and real, not merely projected and ironic, we will not even be able

to own the brokenness that attends all life. For this, what is needed is the good news that to

nature has been promised the revelation of itself. This revelation actually acts as a judgement

on nature’s present condition, because what is revealed is that the truth of nature is freely-given

gift, and so its deepest character is not conflict but peace; and thus its subjection to suffering

and death is precisely un-natural.

In contrast to this, philosophies and spiritualities which locate paradigmatically in the natural

world supreme beauty and meaning and the final criterion of truth, must either refuse to see or

accept as normative the scale and intensity of death, decay, predation and violence which mark

the biological sphere. No picture of the world which denies an overarching narrative of meaning

can sensibly identify or protest against meaninglessness. No worldview from which consolation

has been dogmatically occluded can speak meaningfully of the inconsolability of things. To be

baffled and appalled by meaninglessness and inconsolability is possible only in light of a moral

ontology which makes evil intolerable, so profound an offence to the good that it cannot be

justified, explained, or reasoned with. ‘The beauty of the world does not console us; it needs to

be consoled.’58 The world’s evil calls for refusal, resistance, and a consolation that we cannot

provide.

To the extent that the turn to nature, in its many forms, holds that to be ‘natural’, in a

reductively immanent sense, is to be good, pure and true (as popular language in cosmetics,

food, travel etc. clearly implies), it either accepts as normative the world’s brutality, or it

deceives itself. It thus has a polarising effect, leading either to nihilism, which brutalises, or self-

deception, which sentimentalises. This fatally undermines the immanentist soteriology which is

invested in nature, showing that natural world so conceived cannot be the source or ultimate

framework for a credible articulation of the good of either the human or nonhuman spheres.

Rowlands, for example, wants on the one hand to present nature as norm and ideal, regarding

58 Olivier Clément, Taizé: A Meaning to Life (GIA Publications: Chicago, 1997), 6.


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the immanent world of the biosphere as the normative context for human living, and on the

other, wants to retain the right to describe things as good and bad, unrestrainedly condemning

the catalogue of human mistreatment of animals.59 But the two arms of this strategy are

mutually undermining. If the natural world properly governs human behaviour and is the

desirable and admirable norm, it makes no sense to speak of good and evil at all. Neither does

it make sense to argue that human beings are uniquely deformed by their simian inheritance of

malice, manipulation and deception. One has forfeited the right to make such evaluative

judgements. For if the biosphere is the determinative environment for human morality and

aspiration, then death, loss, and suffering must be accepted as part of the way things are,

intrinsic to the order of the world, inevitable, and so in some sense as good. This is even more

so if nature is identified as the locus of divinity, as in neo-pagan readings of nature such as

Abram’s. One’s ground to any kind of moral protest is then eroded. Human beings, after all, are

‘merely’ a product of nature. Thus a religion of nature will either occlude tragedy, or will make

it final and irredeemable. Rowlands is harsh and unforgiving in his assessment of the world:

‘Life is a deeply unpleasant process… is profoundly cruel.’60 But in the same breath he demands

that we not be cruel, that we favour the weak (namely, nonhuman lives). To maintain these two

positions requires that the moral ideal be outside the sphere of loss and waste and pointless

cruelty which is the natural world.

A different approach is taken by Crosby, who recognises that nature is morally ambiguous, but

responds by dividing the religious from the moral. Nature, he says, is religiously good, but

morally it is a mixture of goods and evils.61 But to separate religion and morality is to separate

the good from the true and the real, and so to make morality a fiction, a mere choice for which

there are no grounds in the deepest character of things. Further, if nature is identified as what

is ultimately ‘right’, all its evils are actually goods in disguise. Crosby reinforces this point

explicitly by showing how nature’s goods could not arise without the evils and so the evils are

really goods.62 In this way he undermines the language of good and evil altogether, propagating

a perspectivist metaphysics and so eroding, like Rowlands, any foundation for real resistance to

violence, conflict and death. We can no longer believe our own moral intuitions.

59 E.g. Rowlands, Wolf, 91. 60 Rowlands, Wolf, 104. 61 Crosby, Ambiguity, ch.2. 62 Crosby, Ambiguities, 26-33.


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The worship of nature will entail that good and evil become indistinguishable, and mutually

dependent; or, to put it differently, the religion of nature must accept that what is, inasfar as it

is produced by nature, is good. In this way, serious complications result from the identification

of nonhuman nature as moral and aspirational ideal, and the abandonment of a theistic

framework for measuring and valuing it. The systematic diminishment of the uniquely human

capacity for moral judgement and criticism results in the loss of a believable moral discourse,

which entails the disintegration of that moral discourse which argues for the preservation of

nature and its installation as definitive of human wellbeing and moral striving. Human depravity

is then nothing to complain about, and the ground for respecting animals and preventing their

mistreatment, along with any number of other moral prescriptions, disintegrates in our hands.63

The collapse of believable moral discourse which the religions of nature bring with them

(thankfully their adherents are rarely coherent enough for this collapse to actually occur) is

deleterious for any project to prescribe and proscribe certain actions and attitudes in relation to

the natural world (or anything else), and so undermines the ethical programme. Or if, as is

usually the case, the ethical demands and imperatives continue cheerfully to be propagated,

proponents will find they are in fact engaging in an implicit act of critique of nature and

distancing of the human moral self from it. By insisting on universal ethical requirements they

are admitting in the clearest terms that the natural world is not definitive for us; we are

responsible to something that cannot be found in nature. But the existence of such a standard

implies that the brutality and violence which characterise nonhuman life are also, in some

sense, under judgement; and further, precisely in this obligation to a different standard, we

differ from nonhuman animals and from the physical environment.

The dogmas of the religions of nature lead to one of two possible outcomes: either the

nonhuman world will be sentimentalised, its horror muted and hidden, so that it presents no

affront to our seeking of the good (visible particularly in secular environmental and animal

ethics, and in popular culture generally); or a grim and hopeless realism will be espoused which

results in the brutalisation not just of nature but of human life, construed as ‘purely’ natural (a

favoured strategy of neo-Darwinist history and natural and social sciences). We practice both

these moves in our culture; often the same person will employ them at different moments.

Disney’s animal wonderlands, and the hells of factory farming, are sponsored by the same

63 A problem for Rowlands; see his Animals Like Us (London: Verso, 2002).


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consumer system. Neo-pagan appreciations of the truths of nature grow side-by-side with

embedded cultural reluctance to acknowledge that human beings too are subject to suffering

and death. We simultaneously extol the ‘natural’ body, and falsify it with the airbrushed fantasy

of popular media. These contradictions stem from our having lost the framework to see nature

as morally and aesthetically complex, in which painful opposites – beauty and ugliness, joy and

tragedy – are recognisable only in light of a logic that exceeds nature itself. Apart from this we

cannot recognise that it demands from us wonder but not worship, regret but not denial. To

correct the culture, we need a robust ontology which reveals the natural world as called and

oriented to good while subject tragically to evil.

Carl Mitcham argues that this dangerous ambivalence is characteristic of scientifically-inspired

philosophies which aspire to a holistic vision of biological life; Konrad Lorenz, for example, was

celebrated for pioneering a non-reductive ethology which recognised animal minds, and yet he

extrapolated his conclusions to support Nazi-sponsored eugenics programmes.64 This underlines

the vital importance of a theological framework for such a holistic philosophy of life. For if we

discard God and the language of judgement and redemption, there is no guarantee that our

holism will remain, in Hans Jonas’ terms, uncorruptibly and permanently on the side of genuine

human life.65

It becomes apparent here that the demand to relate to the natural environment in non-

anthropocentric terms is incoherent. Any moral account of the world, any identification of

goods and hypergoods, ‘must be in anthropocentric terms, terms which relate to the meanings

things have for us’; we simply cannot ‘start outside of all such meanings’.66 Contemporary

nontheistic accounts of the nonhuman world are just as value-ridden as theistic ones. There is

no non-anthropocentric way of construing the natural world. This highlights an intractable

problem with the vocabulary I have been using, namely that there is really no ‘nonhuman

nature’ as far as we’re concerned. The concept of nonhuman nature can only belong to, be

expressed and shared by, human beings; human beings alone could use it to designate anything.

64 Carl Mitcham, ‘Philosophical Biology and Environmentalism’, in Hava Tirosh-Samuelson and Christian Wiese, eds., The Legacy of Hans Jonas: Judaism and the Phenomenon of Life (Lieden: Brill, 2008), 505-6. 65 Hans Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of an Ethics for a Technological Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). 66 Taylor, Sources, 72.


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A strength of the theological construal of nature is that it is honest to the fact that we organise

the world according to our value-terms, and cannot help doing so.

2. Only the Good is Real: Theology and the Moral Ambiguity of Nature

i. The Nature of Nature

The specific responsibility of theology is to consider how ‘the invocation of a Creator God must

transform one’s understanding of the entire natural order’.67 It is theology’s task to talk about

everything just inasfar as it relates to God;68 because theology’s interest is the author of

everything that exists, there is nothing that is outside its remit.69 So we might say that what is

under contention between theology and secular discourses concerning the nonhuman world is

the nature of nature: What is the true character of existing things, just inasfar as they exist?

Christian thought has to show what nature is if it exists only by the continually renewed free gift

of being. It cannot accept a notion of nature as autonomously existing and self-referring, nor

one which divests nature from transcendent reference; what exists is precisely not

comprehensible on its own terms, but only in the context of the gift which constitutes its

being.70 The free donation of being which is the nature of nature does not bestow autonomy,

but rather establishes the graced participation of finite beings in the infinite life of God.71 So the

first step in a theological account of the non-human world and our human relationship to it is to

re-engage with what exactly it is to be ‘natural’.

A notion of ‘pure nature’, invented in the mediaeval period, underlies the contemporary,

popular understanding of the term. Rosemary Ruether summarises the modern meanings of

the word: ‘(1) …that which is ‘essential’ to a being; (2) …the sum total of physical reality,

including humans; (3) …the sum total of physical reality apart from humans; and (4) the

67 John Milbank, ‘Faith, Reason and Imagination: The Study of Theology and Philosophy in the Twenty-First Century’, http://theologyphilosophycentre.co.uk/papers/Milbank_StudyofTheologyand Philosophyinthe21stCentury.pdf, 5-6. 68 Milbank, ‘Faith’, 8. 69 See Mark McIntosh, Divine Teaching (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), ix. 70 Milbank, ‘Faith’, 14. 71 Milbank, ‘Faith’, 14.

http://theologyphilosophycentre.co.uk/papers/Milbank_StudyofTheologyand%20Philosophyinthe21stCentury.pdf

http://theologyphilosophycentre.co.uk/papers/Milbank_StudyofTheologyand%20Philosophyinthe21stCentury.pdf


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‘created’ world apart from God and divine grace.’72 In other words, the word ‘nature’

simultaneously designates a) everything that is not God, and b) that which is normal, basic,

obvious, physical, and ‘essential’. In this way the question is begged. God is defined already as

that which is not essential, not normal, extraneous to the sum total of reality. The notion of

pure nature sponsors a persistent dualism of nature/supernature (as promulgated, for instance,

in religious naturalism) in which, because it is found to be incredible and sterile, the

‘supernature’ element is discarded. Thus the contemporary usage of the word ‘natural’ to signify

what is good, pure, real and uncontestable expresses a theological move that has already denied

the real import of creatio ex nihilo. The word presents a contentious ontology as what is merely

normal and obvious. Further, it occupies a deceptive semantic space since it is both descriptive

and evaluative at the same time, identifying what simply and barely is the case, and at the same

time expressing an approved norm or standard and object of aspiration. Borrowing the

terminology of Clifford Geertz, we might say that in contemporary usage to identify something

as ‘natural’ is both thin and thick description; it carries a hidden freight of value as well as

(allegedly) designating what merely is.

When this word is used to refer, as a primary meaning, to the physical environment, the living

earth, the cosmos etc., a theology is assumed which divests the world around us from its

participation in transcendence. The ‘religions of nature’ supported by the Romantics and

transcendentalists are one expression of the ideology that results: the biological and material

sphere is the ultimate norm. Human aspiration then expresses itself in a religious attachment to

the natural world. This move will be accompanied by the increasing irrelevance, and final

nonexistence, of the God of traditional theism, for the developed Western notion of ‘nature’

already identifies what is ‘normal’ with what is not divine, and so contains in embryo the

irrelevance and nonexistence of God. It is just such a notion of nature that has colonised the

language of environmentalism, conservationism, ecospirituality, and the popular perception of

human beings and their place in the nonhuman world. A purely immanent soteriology results.

Against this, it is in the orthodox framework of creatio ex nihilo that the ‘selfhood’ of nonhuman

nature can be understood and its relation to human aspiration and salvation can be grasped.

Theology cannot reclaim nature as a theatre of grace and redemption until it overcomes the

72 Gaia and God: An Ecofeminist Theology of Earth-Healing (San Francisco: Harper, 1992), 5.


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intellectual legacy which defines ‘nature’ as that which is opposite to and separate from God.

This involves the reclamation of nature as always already graced, never autonomous and self-

sufficient but existing through the always-prior donation of divine plenitude. This understanding

is clearly indicated by the doctrine of Chalcedon, which is itself an expression of faith in creatio

ex nihilo; it is God’s non-competitive intimacy with each existing thing that constitutes it in its

particularity and distinctiveness.73 If creation itself is gift, then grace is not the opposite of

nature, but is its deepest truth, guaranteeing and not compromising its reality and selfhood.

God’s creative indwelling of existing things is exactly what assures their ‘naturalness’, their being

themselves. Theology should hasten to explore what this means in the context of the

nonhuman world specifically, taking as its starting-point a classical ontology in which a univocal

concept of being is resisted, in favour of an analogical, participatory model. In such a model, the

‘nature’ of existing things is firstly and definitively the grace of God’s gift of being and call to

freedom. On this model, our usual understanding of ‘nature’ and ‘supernature’ is reversed: God

alone is truly natural; supernature is the real nature.74 It is then strictly impossible to grasp

nonhuman lives and the biosphere as a whole outside the context of gift and vocation. It will,

further, not be possible to speak of the nonhuman world in a morally neutral, indifferent, or

disengaged fashion. Faith in creatio ex nihilo rules that out. We are mandated – obliged – to

respond to the nonhuman sphere in moral-critical terms, by recognizing that it too has a graced

orientation to the good embedded in its created nature. The basic hermeneutic for reading the

‘difficult text’ of this earth will be the story of grace, the moral drama of redemption.

If the narrative of grace is the true story of creation, Christian readings of the nonhuman world

should place soteriology in equal place with cosmology. In this way they can show the sense of

moral language in the context of the nonhuman world. Christian engagements with the

nonhuman world have in most cases failed to apply this logic because the environmental

movement tended to see Judaeo-Christian cosmology as a principal reason for the ecological

crisis.75 The emphasis on providing a nature-friendly cosmology has resulted in the suppression

or sidelining of soteriology as the primary locus for Christianity’s engagement with the natural

73 Cf. Kilby, ‘Evil’, 18. 74 Conor Cunningham, ‘Natura Pura, The Invention of the Anti-Christ: A Week With No Sabbath,’ Communio 37 (2010): 251. 75 Stephen R.L. Clark, ‘Is Nature God’s Will?’ in Animals on the Agenda, eds. Andrew Linzey and Dorothy Yamamoto (London: SCM, 1998), 123-5.


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world.76 Theologians have been forced to accept terms of debate that contradict Christian

orthodoxy’s own logic. Michael Northcott, for example, organises his survey of Christian

frameworks for environmental ethics entirely according to cosmology.77

But orthodoxy holds that ‘the story of grace, the new creation, articulates the core meaning of

creation.’78 In the Incarnation alone is creation revealed, so soteriology regulates cosmology.79

God’s gift of being to a creature is comprehensible only in light of his elevation of all creation to

participation in his own life. We are immediately involved in notions of judgement and hope if

we are to make sense of what it is to be ‘natural’. This vividly underlines the conclusion reached

above, namely that what is at stake in truthfully conceiving the natural world is the ordering of

all things towards the good, towards that value which gives all things value, towards whatever is

their ‘point’, their meaning; that we cannot talk sensibly about ‘nature’ outside the context of

that governing and defining ‘hypergood’ by which we orient ourselves and the world. This is

why it is of considerable importance to theology that the contemporary ‘turn to nature’ has

developed a salvific narrative of its own and occupies a soteriological space. The encounter

between Christianity and the religions of nature tends to take place on cosmological or ethical

grounds; but this is not the most fundamental level of dispute. Just as the Christian reading of

nature is soteriological, so too is the secular reading; they are readings which determine, in

Taylor’s terms, where we place the natural world in relation to the hypergood(s) of our lives.

The clash between Christian and non-Christian nature-rhetoric is wrongly read unless it is seen

to be a dispute about what ‘the good’ is. For Christian faith to contest the ground, for it to

reinstate a discourse of grace as the governing narrative of nature, will mean arguing that

notions of judgement, hope and redemption are not optional, that we cannot do without them;

and that these notions cannot stand apart from that hypergood which is not reducible to the

world and yet is the world’s deepest truth. To the theologian falls the task of showing that

without the moral-critical question, the question that arises from the priority of soteriology, the

natural world becomes incomprehensible at best, repugnant at worst; and that the moral-

critical question can arise seriously only in light of the acknowledgement of an extra-mundane

76 Jenkins, Ecologies, 12. 77 Northcott, Environment, 124ff. 78 Willis Jenkins, Ecologies of Grace: Environmental Ethics and Christian Theology (Oxford: OUP, 2008), 14, quoting William Schweiker. 79 Jenkins, Ecologies, 13.


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(which, because of that, can alone be wholly intra-mundane) presence. The question must be

insisted on as necessary, as a sine qua non: What does it mean to speak of judgement, moral

contest, redemption, good and evil, applied to the natural world, the living earth, and biological

history as a whole? It is just here that the logic of theology’s own central concern coincides with

the question which the nonhuman world itself poses to us, if it is clearly seen, rather than

imagined or prejudged. The construction of a morally critical relationship to the nonhuman

world is obligatory. Christianity’s moral ontology gives it unique resources for this.

ii. The Unintelligibility of Evil: Orthodox Moral Ontology

In the recent wave of responses to the grim spectacle of billions of years of evolutionary waste

and torment, theologians have generally opted for a means-ends justification which takes the

form of a theodicy: explaining the natural world’s evil, and, in some sense, making it good in

light of final ends. This approach unfortunately characterises the vast majority of theological

appropriations of evolution, as a recent comprehensive survey demonstrates.80 Southgate’s

theodicy is a representative case. Like most evolutionary theodicists, he proposes a

Whiteheadian process theism in which God realises himself through time, a sufferer who travails

in his body which is the world, co-suffering with each tormented creature.81 God is subject to

change and unfolding in the evolutionary process, to which he entrusts himself and his creation

(if ‘creation’ has any meaning here).82 Following Arthur Peacocke and John Haught,83 Southgate

imagines a God who is effect as well as cause, who is influenced by the evolutionary process and

whose sharing in that process is characterised by ‘letting-be’ rather than by direct action.

Holmes Rolston III, who formed one of the most influential evolutionary theodicies, talks of the

‘instrumental suffering’ by which God brings about good ends in evolution;84 like Southgate he

argues for the necessity of suffering and death in God’s good work. For Rolston harms are

80 Ted Peters and Martinez Hewlett, Evolution from Creation to New Creation (Nashville: Abingdon, 2003). 81 Holmes Rolston III, Science and Religion: A Critical Survey (London: Templeton Foundation Press, 2000), 144-46. 82 Asserting that God suffers in no way furthers the theodicists’ project to justify God. Kilby, ‘Evil’, 20. 83 Is Nature Enough? Meaning and Truth in the Age of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 84 ‘Naturalizing and Systematizing Evil’ in Willem Drees ed., Is Nature Ever Evil? Religion, Science and Value (London: Routledge, 2003), 67-86.


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instrumental in the bringing about of values, such as the harm of predation for the good value of

adaptation (speed, agility, highly developed senses etc.). Many evolutionary theodicies, such as

Richard Kropf’s Evil and Evolution: A Theodicy,85 draw on Teilhardian models of cosmic unfolding

to produce developmental theodicies in which a chance-laden and pain-filled process will be

compensated for by an ‘Omega Point’ at which all things will be consummated and the evils will

be seen to have been worthwhile. Such theodicies propound a ‘linear and non-dramatic view of

history as an inevitable march into a brave new Future,’86 non-dramatic because ultimately

there is no contest, no struggle, nothing hangs in the balance.

These authors tend to reject notions of fallenness on grounds that there is no evidence for an

original situation in which the fall could have occurred, because human beings evolved after the

rest of the natural order was established. The fall of the world in the sin of Adam ‘must seem a

very unrealistic view to anyone who accepts some form of evolutionary theory…’87 On such a

view the fall is generally framed as a catastrophe at the chronological beginning of creation and

is considered fictitious, or at best mythic, in consequence. By this move, evolutionary

theodicists cut themselves off from the orthodox view that the cosmos is, in some fundamental

and always-regrettable sense, broken and tragic; that this is not how God made things. In this

way they leave themselves only one alternative, which is to affirm that the way things are now is

the way they were always meant to be. And so they seek to justify evil, rather than rejecting it,

looking for explanations of evil within the evolutionary process itself, which with its associated

costs is generally considered to be the ‘only way’ that was available to God for the ‘creation’ of a

free world.88 ‘Evil and suffering are best explained… not by expiatory notions of sin, but as the

natural and necessary by-product of growth into the Future.’89 There was no possible world in

which these goods could exist (e.g. consciousness, freedom, complexity etc.), without these evils

(predation, parasitism, disease, death etc.).90 The result of all this is that there is nothing truly

regrettable about the pain, suffering, waste and death of this world; there is no reason for

protest and lament.

85 (Eugene, Oregon: Wipf & Stock, 2000). 86 Larry Chapp, Review of Is Nature Enough? Meaning and Truth in the Age of Science, by John F. Haught, Modern Theology 23 (2004), 642-5. 87 Keith Ward, Rational Theology and the Creativity of God (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985), 203. 88 Southgate, Groaning, chapters 3-4. 89 Chapp, Review, 644. 90 Southgate, Groaning, esp. chapter 3.


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These kinds of solutions are unacceptable. They envision a deity who is not only amoral but

ultimately powerless, who could not possibly be the source of being who creates from nothing

because he subject to time and change, is composite rather than simple, and depends on evil to

bring about good. This picture of God is underwritten by an understanding of ‘the Fall’ which is

risibly childish; because we can no longer picture Adam and Eve in their garden 6,000 years ago,

the conclusion is drawn that we must affirm the universe as it is. By modifying theism in this

way, evolutionary theodicies have turned evolution into a religion, installing it as the

preeminent hermeneutic of faith.91 Thus is surrendered the substance of the good news, the

news that the real has no use for evil. The gospel of the eternal and only-good God is

exchanged for a victim deity who sponsors tragedy.

In his response to the Asian tsunami of 2004, The Doors of the Sea,92 David Bentley Hart

demonstrates the grave deficiency of accounts of good and evil which instrumentalise evil, or

which deny it by arguing that it is, in some sense, good. He outlines an Augustinian moral

ontology which denies to evil any foothold in reality, any lasting significance or final, permanent

validity. Evil is rather a nothingness, a deficiency in being, a privatio boni. Goodness is the truth

of things and evil ‘exists’ only parasitically, only in relation to the good. The Augustinian account

of evil owes its ontology to Plato, who identified reality itself with the good. This underlies the

participatory, analogical view of nature and grace I have defended above. God alone is what is

truly real and good. Things exist and are good only inasfar as they participate in the being and

goodness of God, and that participation is itself gift, ‘grace’. Hence, for the Christian, the world

is never morally neutral or indifferent, whether human or not, since as far as it exists, it is good;

being and value are not separable. The necessary orientation of our interpretations of ‘nature’

towards and in light of the good (whether Nietzscheanly ironic or not) is given sense only in this

way.

The consequence of this moral ontology is that evil cannot be either explained or justified.

Inasfar as something which is evil lacks in existence and reality, it also becomes deficient in

comprehensibility; it falls away from intelligibility, which is a property of goodness. It cannot

therefore be organised meaningfully in relation to the good, since evil is itself a void of meaning

91 Cf. Mary Midgley, ‘Evolution as a Religion: A Comparison of Prophecies’, Zygon: Journal of Science and Religion 22 (1987): 179-94. 92 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005).


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and of positive relation. This means that evil can never be justified as instrumentally bringing

about the good. (Though it may be the case that God brings good out of evil.) We should

endeavour always to experience evil as unacceptable and problematic. It is the unacceptability

of evil that is the sign of redemption. Or, to put it the other way round, for us to be appalled by

suffering and death is to enact hope, because it expresses our sense that evil is something

wrong with the world. ‘[E]vil is in itself strictly evil – always bad, always to be avoided’.93 Only a

moral ontology which denies to evil any positive validity, which insists that evil is ‘always bad’,

can justify an attitude of protest.94 Otherwise we cannot take our moral response to the world

seriously.

What is of central importance, then, is that theology provide a moral ontology which grounds

notions of expectation and deficiency, hope and judgement, which are essential in the face of

what the world is really like. This means that theology’s primary responsibility in face of the

natural world’s painful moral ambiguity is precisely not to offer a theodicy; not to justify evil.95

Consideration of evil in the nonhuman world is becoming increasingly fashionable, but it is

taking place primarily in the context of the question of God’s accountability for nonhuman

suffering, or alternatively, justifying such suffering either by a final good, or by God’s own

sharing in creaturely suffering. But producing such a theodicy betrays the very possibility of

objecting to evil, putting the cart before the horse by trying to explain God’s relation to

nonhuman suffering without having established the right ontology (or in other words, what

‘natural’ means in the first place). With a properly theological ontology of ‘nature’, the question

of evil, pain and tragedy takes on its true aspect, because it comes to be seen as a question

about the inner constitution and destiny of each existing thing. To understand what ‘nature’

really is comes to be seen as the best kind of response to evil, the most determined and

fundamental level of resistance. For if the nature of nature is grace, there can be no

reconciliation with evil.96

Furthermore, the concern with nonhuman suffering is symptomatic of a deeper move in

Western culture to cultivate a ‘feeling for nature’ as a fundamental dimension of human good,

93 Charles Mathewes, Evil and the Augustinian Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 71. 94 Cf. Cunningham, Darwin’s, 288-90. 95 See Terrence Tilley, The Evils of Theodicy (Eugene, Oregon: Wipf & Stock, 2000). 96 Cf. Kilby, ‘Evil’, 15.


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or salus. Apart from a careful discernment of this move, and exposure of its ideological baggage,

the theological question is begged: How have I learned to care for nonhuman suffering? What

justifies me in thinking I can apply notions of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ to nonhuman nature? A certain

ontological framework is presupposed by the attempt to think of the natural world in morally

critical terms, whether those terms are ethical (What are my responsibilities to the nonhuman

world?) or existential (Why do animals suffer?). In such a framework, the problem of evil in

nonhuman nature takes on its proper proportion. It appears that far more fundamental than

the question ‘Why does God allow the natural world to be a place of such violence and

brutality?’ is the question ‘How can I justify speaking of evil at all in the context of the

nonhuman world (or anywhere else)?’ The fundamental insight here is the recognition that just

to ask this second question is itself already a kind of answer to the question of the natural

world’s tragedy, because to justify our right and duty to speak of evil in the context of the

nonhuman world just is to place it in relation to an overarching narrative of grace as inner truth

of nature, and salvation as the inner truth of creation.

To deny evil’s intelligibility is not a refusal to respond, a purely negative reaction, but is the

ground for the most comprehensive and truthful response; an insistence that the abyss of

millennia of bloodshed and waste is really an abyss, an appalling surd that cannot be correlated

with meaning. Only from such an ontology can we maintain a ‘No’ to death and violence,

because we are aligning ourselves with God in an act of protest that is coextensive with reality

itself. So the theological response to the religions of nature is not to explain the prevalence and

seeming embeddedness of evil in biological change and growth; rather it is to witness

unflinchingly to ‘[t]he whole nightmare of world history’.97 Such witness requires the provision

of a framework in which violence, conflict and death can be experienced as scandalous, in which

this world’s darkness appears as an abomination to heaven. Only if nature is grace can the

world be recovered not as neutral but as the stage for a moral drama in which good and evil are

real, if not equal, players. Outside this context, neither nature’s hideousness nor its glory can

really be serious.

97 Benjamin Myers, Christ the Stranger: the Theology of Rowan Williams: A Critical Introduction (London: T&T Clark, 2012), 27.


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iii. The Good News of Judgement

So the matter of first urgency is to establish that nature must be seen as broken and ruined, as

well as good, because unless evil is finally and non-negotiably objectionable, unless the natural

world is subject to judgement, we have no hope. This is the point Hart makes in relation to

natural evils such as the tsunami, and his point applies equally to the suffering and violence

attendant on other nonhuman systems and processes. We are obliged to find such evils to be

groundless and absurd; our horror must not be swamped by sentimental religious comforts and

assurances of recompense, nor mitigated by an insistence that these evils are instrumentally

useful to God and God’s purposes. Only our horror at nature’s violence does justice to God’s

absolute rejection of evil.

Now we are able to rejoice that we are saved not through the immanent

mechanisms of history and nature, but by grace; that God will not unite all of

history’s many strands in one great synthesis, but will judge much of history

false and damnable …98

God is ‘the necessary condition for unconsoled outrage’ at the world’s violence and brutality,

because he is the judge who finds ‘much of history false and damnable’.99 It is for this reason

that the important thing is not to explain evil but to be worried by it; to insist on finding it

troubling, and not to seek premature closure for the experience of disjuncture and

disorientation that knowledge of the world’s darkness evokes in us.100 It is the right and duty of

believers to be inconsolable in the face of evil; the believers’ hope is that their inconsolability

will at the last be vindicated by God’s judgement that evil is absurd. So Christians will grieve for

nature, as well as celebrating it, rejoicing in its beauty precisely because they are at liberty to

mourn for that beauty’s compromise by ugliness and loss. To be mandated by the reality and

goodness of God to find nature’s suffering and violence unacceptable precisely is to enact the

good news, the news of the final triumph of the good. Apart from this there is no protest and

no hope. To acknowledge that nature is fundamentally good is to enact a judgement on it, to

recognize certain aspects of it as damnable.

98 Hart, Doors, 104. 99 Rowan Williams, Dostoevsky: Language, Faith and Fiction (London: Continuum, 2009), 81. 100 D.Z Phillips (ed.), Religion and Morality (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), 147.


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Judgement is thus the true setting for the practice of hope.101 Judgement is God’s saving refusal

to accept creation on any terms other than gift, which is to say, the victory of peace over enmity

and conflict. Without a belief in the judgement of God on evil, the motivation to keep faith in

creation, with its dismal history of loss, pain and waste, will disintegrate.

[C]reation is… given to us always through the eschatological achievement of

the new Jerusalem, the perfected heaven and earth, and all our lesser,

spoiled historical realities depend for their very existence upon this

mediating source.102

In this way it is the new creation, the eschaton, which allows us to see meaning in the present.

This world makes sense only in light of its end, and as salvation is the real meaning of creation,

the new heavens and the new earth are the real meaning of the natural world. But this end is

itself a judgement on the tragedy of the present. What is wrong, ultimately, with the ersatz

consolation or too-easy nihilism of the religions of nature and the theodicists is a failure to open

the world to judgement, because they have not held the tragedy in focus, refusing to

ackowledge the mortal woundedness of the world, ‘a world of meaninglessness, of destruction,

violence, death, and loss’.103 The life and death of Jesus give us the means to dwell in this

meaninglessness without self-delusion or despair. ‘[T]he whole sequence of history is ‘empty

and trivial in itself’, yet, paradoxically, one event within that sequence – the Incarnation –

becomes a vehicle of divine meaning’.104 Given this world, the Incarnation is just what we

should expect: ‘not a ‘triumphant epiphany’ but the shipwreck of one particular human life, a

life in which God willingly endures the emptiness of history’.105 This shipwrecked life is itself

God’s judgement on violence and death. Theologians too often neglect to observe that the

history whose emptiness is entered by God is a planetary history of barren blackness, and then,

after the genesis of life, of almost unrelieved suffering for every sentient creature which has

ever lived.

To return to the framework of Taylor with which we began: we all interpret our lives and the

world in terms of ultimate goods which sustain and direct us. Taylor argues that outside

101 Benedict XVI, Encyclical Letter Spe Salvi (London: CTS, 2007), 48. 102 Milbank, ‘Faith’, 22. 103 Rowan Williams, quoted Myers, Stranger, 24. 104 Myers, Stranger, 24, quoting Williams. 105 Myers, Stranger, 24, quoting Williams.


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language about the good we cannot negotiate the world. But it seems we cannot negotiate the

world in the language of the good either, because the world, apparently, is wholly unamenable

to being read in moral terms. This is a world in which hypergoods are hard to come by, since the

motor of natural life is pain and death. The religions of nature try to make this world fit a

pattern of the good, but it does not fit; and anyway, having done away with that infinite depth

and mystery that exceeds and in some sense defeats this world, the language of good and evil is

no longer at home in reality. Against this, the Gospel announces Christ as the word God speaks

into the alienation and hopelessness we discover when our search for the good, for salus for

ourselves and the world, meets in history a crushing and unanswerable rebuff. ‘It is the

impossibility’ that the darkness of history ‘should be the final word’ that reveals the judgement

of God as the true good news.106 That judgement on this world of death is the very cause of our

hope, the saving act which inaugurates the new creation. ‘[F]aith in… [j]udgement is first and

foremost hope’, the ‘decisive’ hope which is our consolation.107 It is that judgement which

allows us to frame reality in terms of the good, the indispensable condition of talking

meaningfully about ourselves and the world.

An important point arises here about the character of theological enquiry. In a peculiarly vivid

way, the natural world shows that the theologian will not, on pain of unfaithfulness, be able to

respond adequately to evil.

[I]t is of the very nature of Christian theology to make affirmations, or

patterns of affirmations—about the goodness, faithfulness and

creative power of God on the one hand, and the brokenness of

creation on the other—that it cannot co-ordinate or make sense of.

There are points at which systematic theology…ought to

be…systematically dissonant.108

We can trust this dissonance because it has the same shape as the story of Jesus. The

impossibility of making sense of the natural world’s almost unbroken darkness, our inability to

see meaning in it, forces us even more abruptly than many instances of human suffering to

106 Benedict XVI, Spe, 44. 107 Benedict XVI, Spe, 44. 108 Kilby, ‘Evil’, 24.


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apply the logic of Calvary and Easter: that God is in sheer contradiction with this world, that

there is a dissonance at the heart of things because God and the world make nonsense of one

another; and yet we are invited to trust that the moment of profoundest discordance reveals

the reconciliation of all things. Karen Kilby echoes Barth in suggesting that in the face of evil

theology must sacrifice its coherence, must remain broken and incomplete.109 Not to be able to

make sense of evil is a necessary and laudable failure; a failure to which theology should

continually recommit itself. The ‘non-explanation’ should be ‘deliberate and up-front’.110 It is

this ‘systematic inexplicability’ that the Christian moral ontology protects, by insisting that evil is

privatio boni.111 By remaining in this inexplicability, accepting the exhaustion of our own

resources of sense-making, we are delivered to the judgement of God.

iv. Cosmic Brokenness

Robert Murray and Margaret Barker, both Old Testament scholars, argue that Scripture pictures

a broken cosmic order, shattered by hostile cosmic elements which God bound at the creation

but which break free in rebellion. God promises to heal the brokenness and restore harmony, a

restoration that will bring peace to the whole creation, embracing human and nonhuman beings

in a single covenantal community.112 The cosmic harmony, guaranteed by God in the Noahide

covenant ‘with all creatures’, is continually threatened by hostile spiritual powers and forces,

but its permanent establishment is frequently prophesied (as for example in Hosea 2 and Isaiah

11, 54, and 65). Richard Bauckam’s exegesis of Mark 1.13, ĸαι ήν μετα των θηριων, suggests

that this verse refers to the prophesied restoration of cosmic harmony as a messianic peace,

tasted here proleptically by Jesus and awaiting final unfolding at the parousia.113 Murray

suggests that in this verse we have an image of the New Adam, ‘to whom the animals come as

to their Lord, in peace’.114 This messianic peace conquers the enmity caused by the ‘cosmic

109 Kilby, ‘Evil’, 25. 110 Kilby, ‘Evil’, 25. 111 Kilby, ‘Evil’, 25. 112 Robert Murray, The Cosmic Covenant (London: Sheed and Ward, 1992), especially ch.2. 113 Richard Bauckham, ‘Jesus and Animals II: What did he practise?’ in Andrew Linzey and Dorothy Yamamoto eds., Animals on the Agenda: Questions about Animals for Theology and Ethics (London: SCM, 1998), 54ff. 114 Murray, Cosmic, 127.


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catastrophe’ which caused ‘the collapse of the covenant system’.115 In Romans 8.18-23 Paul

develops Hebrew conceptions of the subjection of the cosmos to struggle and pain and its

sharing in human moral and spiritual striving. The ‘creation’ is described as groaning, travailing,

in birth-pains, awaiting with longing expectation the glorious freedom of God’s children. Paul

sees the whole material world suffering from ματαιοτης, ‘frustration’ or ‘futility’. He links the

suffering of creatures to στοιχεια, principalities and powers, cosmic forces of evil; the wellbeing

of the material world is under the influence of both human and angelic/spiritual agencies, for

good and ill.116

If we take seriously this vision of the cosmos itself as a participant in the moral drama, and so as

subject to evil as well as straining towards the good, we will see nonhuman life suffering a

twisting and distortion in which human beings are complicit. Much of the contemporary

theological engagement with the natural world lacks this perspective, refusing to index

nonhuman wellbeing to human/angelic probity and holiness. Jack Mahoney, Andrew

Elphinstone, R.J. Berry and others influenced by the theory of evolution have derided this a

childish form of scapegoating, blaming human wickedness for everything that’s wrong with the

world and engaging in superstitious angelology. Mahoney, for example, recommends a

wholesale recasting of sin and salvation in evolutionary terms, so that mortality is recognised as

‘normal’ and Jesus’ death is not expiatory but exemplary. But these proposals make nonsense

of Christian faith. It is the death of the Lamb of God for the sins of the world that brings

scapegoating to an end, an end which is possible precisely because death is the wages of sin, not

of evolutionary necessity. ‘The Fall’ is a temporally and spatially primordial intrusion of

corruption and conflict into God’s peace which affects the entire created order, not an event

which can be chronologically located. The world’s travail needs to be reappropriated as a

dimension of misused freedom. Nature’s violence

stems from the shudders of the world in refusal, the outcome of Lucifer's

paroxysmic anger, exhausting itself in protest against its own root in divine

love. But that violence cannot rend the heart of the world, that anger cannot

115 Margaret Barker, Creation: A Biblical Vision for the Environment (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 139. 116 See Murray, Cosmic, 131-2.


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offend creation's essence. [Nature’s violence is] “not a substantial only a

functional corruption of the world.”117

For ‘[d]eath does not belong fundamentally and irrevocably to the structure of creation, to

matter’.118 Unless death and violence appear as aberrations, as departures from God, as

abnormal, we have exempted this world from judgement and so entered it into a terminal

treaty with darkness.

Religion and secularism by explaining death give it a ‘status’, a rationale,

make it ‘normal.’ Only Christianity proclaims it to be abnormal, and,

therefore, truly horrible. At the grave of Lazarus Christ wept.119

It is popular, among the propagators of nature-rhetoric (both the laudable and the less laudable)

to speak approvingly, if a little sadly, of processes like predation, suffering, decay and death as

‘natural’. But as far as the gospel is concerned death is paradigmatically unnatural, for nature is

constituted by freely given, undying and inextinguishable divine life. In this ‘nature’, death is a

disgusting, horrible vacuity. And so the violent ways of this living earth in the present

dispensation are not the norm to which any creature must finally conform, nor the paradise in

which we and our nonhuman company on this earth are finally at home. We are enjoined to

have a hope for all creatures which infinitely exceeds and contradicts the logic of kill and be

killed, eat or be eaten. The logic of God is rather that a flesh and blood more truly material than

we can conceive gives itself agelessly for the life of the world, making a peace which no violence

can erase and which is the promised end of all things. There is ‘no part of nature that is dead

and not rising to life’ with Christ.120 The religions of nature have to accept death as ‘part of

nature’, as do evolutionary theodicies and process theisms, because they must make sense of

the world not in light of its destiny in the risen Christ’s gift of peace, but in light of its wounded,

bloody present; and so they have lost a vocabulary of judgement by which to recognise death

and pain as distortive of life and matter, not as intrinsic properties.

117 Bulgakov, quoted Jenkins, Ecologies, 222-3. 118 Joseph Ratzinger, The God of Jesus Christ: Meditations on the Triune God (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2008), 100. 119 Alexander Schmemann, quoted Cunningham, Darwin’s, 417. 120 Bulgakov, quoted in Jenkins, Ecologies, 224.


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To understand the entire world as broken and tragic, not just the human sphere, by some

incomprehensible and primordial betrayal of God’s purpose, is truly to apply a doctrine of

creatio ex nihilo because this doctrine conceives all being, because participating in God, to be of

eternal moral significance, in which death, loss, and torment are therefore always betrayals of

God. This will only make sense if we can articulate a notion of sin that has cosmic relevance. To

hold that the cosmos itself is broken will need a fresh exploration of two traditional (and now

perhaps unfashionable) tenets of Christian belief: the primordial betrayal of freedom by spiritual

creatures (which will involve reinstating angelic and demonic agency in the cosmic drama), and

the idea of human beings as cosmic priests, mediators between the physical and spiritual

realms, whose sin therefore infects the material world. For these respectively, the apocryphal 1

Enoch, particularly in its influence on canonical texts, and the theological anthropology of

Maximus the Confessor could be important resources, as well as a vigilant retrieval of Old

Testament resources. In the Hebrew Scriptures creation’s harmony is directly dependent on the

righteousness of human beings and angels. The Temple represented the whole material and

immaterial realm with humanity, in partnership with the angels, maintaining order and peace in

the spiritual and physical creation by their priestly service and their diligent observance of God’s

commandments.121 The image of the Temple draws attention to the Biblical view of creation as

a single system; human beings and angels, in betraying the covenant, plunge the cosmos into

‘waste…violence and corruption’; ‘the world was changed’.122

Only against this background can we understand Scripture’s prophecy of the restoration of

creation, its return to peace. ‘Until that final glory… the world remains divided between two

kingdoms, where light and darkness, life and death grow up together and await the harvest’.123

We find here, as Hart suggests, that Christianity comes nearer Gnosticism and Platonism than

we might have thought, for if the ground of being which is good, true, beautiful, is eternally

incompatible with ugliness, conflict and death, then the material world participates in a

monumental battle between irreconcilable forces. Though not irredeemably evil to the degree

these philosophies imagined, the natural world is not straightforwardly good, but complexly

121 See e.g. Barker, Creation, 53-62. 122 Barker, Creation, 141-3, 147. 123 Hart, Doors, 103-4.


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entangled in death and loss: ‘[w]e are to act against the grain of the world.’124. But the

understanding of evil as privatio boni stops this near-Gnosticism from tipping over into a

Manicheeism which would install cosmic conflict as the permanent and irresolvable character of

reality. If evil is a privatio boni, the world’s moral ambiguity is rendered radically contingent and

evil remains a non-thing with no future and no claim on anything.

Reasserting these ideas as essential to orthodoxy must take place by a re-animation of Christian

imagination, not by the dogmatic re-imposition of old cosmic hierarchies which are no longer

credible.125 To this we turn in section three. This will result in both a more and a less

‘anthropocentric’ picture than most moderns will find easy to swallow. More anthropocentric

inasfar the nonhuman sphere displays in a peculiarly intense fashion the catastrophe of our own

unfreedom. If, on Nicholas of Cusa’s principle, the higher is reflected in the lower, then we see

in the natural world the fallenness of free creatures unveiled in all its unapologetic violence.

Further, in their suffering, nonhuman creatures are helpless and childlike, unable to respond,

their wellbeing entirely vulnerable to us and dependent on humanity’s acceptance of its priestly

role (a state of affairs which the present ecological crisis makes abundantly clear). We receive

God’s deliverance not for ourselves alone but for all creation, for it is the human spirit that

‘summons all of nature to the Resurrection’.126 But it is also a less anthropocentric picture than

modernity is comfortable with inasfar as it posits a corrupt agency of free spiritual creatures in

connivance with our own rejection of the good, threatening our self-importance and revealing

our vanity as cheap folly. The reality of evil threatens our illusions of control.127 We are not the

only combatants in the cosmic battle, and to win it is not in our power.

124 Myers, Stranger, 27. 125 Milbank, ‘Faith’, 19; this does not mean that hierarchical doctrines such as Cusa’s cannot inform this process. 126 Bulgakov, quoted by Jenkins, Ecologies, 224. 127 See Mathewes, Evil, 29 ff.


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3. The Religions of Nature Informing Theology: Valuing and Imagining Nonhuman Life

i. A World ‘Saturated with Christ’: Baptizing Pantheism

Only a high Johannine Christology, which recognises the cosmic significance of the Incarnation

through which God intends to be ‘all in all’, can make sense of the theological moves described

above. To ‘save’ the world, to orient it securely and eternally to the good and so assure its full

intelligibility, to subdue the enemies of peace, to renew the covenant, is possible for priestly

humanity only through its common participation in the one Mediator between heaven and

earth, who is both the High Priest and the Logos through whom all things were made. Such a

Christology, enabling and enabled by a metaphysics of participation, assures the non-

competitive divine intimacy with matter, and so defeats dualism once and for all. Hans Jonas,

through his seminal work on Gnosticism, recognised in his philosophical biology that it is dualism

that is the real enemy of life and matter, repeating Augustine’s epiphany: only through the

union of creation and salvation can we avoid enthroning cosmic conflict as the fundamental

hermeneutic of the world.

Nicholas of Cusa’s rejection of nominalism at the beginning of the modern period offers a vital

precedent in the attempt to apply such a high ‘cosmic’ Christology to the biological world and so

to unite nature and grace. Cusa saw that if we are to avoid making salvation (grace) an

afterthought or stopgap measure in relation to creation (nature), then the Incarnation must be

understood as absolutely predestined ante lapsum.128 ‘Creation is never made to wait for the

incarnation to happen; it has always already happened.’129 The truth and goodness of creation

can only be secured if grace is seen to be the spontaneous and characteristic orientation of

creation itself. The Incarnate Word is the very structure of creation, enabling and not destroying

creation’s integrity and freedom. Christ is immanent in the material world from its inception;

the world is ‘saturated with Christ’.130 Cusa gives proper prominence to the Chalcedonian

formula as the metaphysical key which unlocks this saturation. In the hypostatic union, Christ

128 Nicholas Albertson, ‘That He Might Fill All Things: Creation and Christology in Two Treatises by Nicholas of Cusa’, International Journal of Systematic Theology 8 (2002): 185. 129 Albertson, ‘All Things’, 203. 130 Albertson, ‘All Things’, 186.


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unites and overcomes all oppositions; God, who is pure spirit, discloses his unfathomable and

non-contradictory unity with the material. By seeing the Incarnation as mysteriously preceding

creation itself, Cusa places the structure of the hypostatic union at the ontological fundament of

this world, and so the mutual transparency of matter and spirit becomes the governing

hermeneutic by which we ‘read’ creation. This vision underlines the orthodoxy, in principle, of

the Teilhardian vision of a cosmos destined for divinisation in the cosmic Christ, the coextension

of the body of Christ in the Eucharist with the universe itself; the liturgy transforms the cosmos

into ‘a living [Eucharistic] host’.131 This returns us to the critical role of human beings as

ministers of this world-transforming action, for both good and ill.

This Cusan Christology baptises a pantheistic sensibility, installing it at the heart of Christian

orthodoxy. ‘It seems to be the case that God and creation are the same thing…’; ‘He gave

Himself as sensible world’; this world is a ‘Deus sensibilis’.132 God incarnates himself as world.

But this seeming pantheism is distinguished from monistic pantheism by Cusa’s doctrine of

hierarchy, which argues that God’s gift of himself necessarily concretizes in a diversity of distinct

forms. Thus is assured the world’s transparency to God, without opening the door to the

monisms which would see creaturely diversity as an illusion, a fancy of consciousness, so dulling

the world’s distinctness and freedom.

The infinite form is received only in a finite way; consequently, every creature

is, as it were, a finite infinity or a created god, so that it exists in the way in

which this could best be.133

Cusa’s ‘pan-Christic ontology’ both supports real ontological differences within the world and

shows each created thing as a theophany of infinite depth, an apparitione of God: ‘in the Giver

every creature is eternal and is eternity itself’.134 Every creature is a theophany which shares, in

endlessly differentiated ways, in the Logos’ disclosure of the Father. The more open and

attentive is our encounter with creatures, the better we attend to the Logos. Cusa’s Christology

131 Benedict XVI, Sermon delivered at Aosta, July 24th 2009 (printed in L’Osservatore Romano, July 28th 2009). 132 Albertson, ‘All Things’, 199, 200. 133 Albertson, ‘All Things’, 200. 134 Albertson, ‘All Things’, 199.


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echoes that of Maximus the Confessor.135 Together they highlight the right direction for a

theological anthropology. The cosmic priesthood of human beings becomes their sharing in the

Christological shape of creation. The central act of this priestly service is the celebration of the

world as an immeasurably diverse, multitudinous chorus of distinct voices, proclaiming each

one’s unique and unrepeatable character as an apparitione of God.

ii. The Ground Is Listening: The Selving of the Natural World

To attend to each creature as an apparitione of God, Christian thought needs to cultivate a right

imagination, to imagine nature well. ‘Nature, too… turns out to be cultural’; through our sharing

in the divine creative power we ‘create our own world and are in turn shaped by that world’.136

The religions of nature have developed a vocabulary of appreciation for and perception of

nonhuman sentience and intelligence that assists in the imaginative construction of nature so

that the theophanic character of each creature springs into relief. In this awareness we sharpen

our sense of the natural world’s depth, difference, and interiority, and so become aware of a

moral narrative in the context of nonhuman life.

What is at stake, in our valuing of nonhuman life, ‘ultimately is our own ability to think beyond

ourselves’,137 to allow the whole of reality to have a claim on us. It is this claim of the whole of

reality on the human heart and imagination that makes the problem of nature’s violence and

meaninglessness intense for the theologian. The Christological ontology exemplified by Cusa

demonstrates that to believe in the Incarnation just is to accept an obligation to think beyond

ourselves, to have an unbounded moral imagination, because God in Christ assumes and

transforms materiality as such. Natura, id est Deus, says Alexander of Hales, anticipating

Cusa.138 If the hypostatic union is the deep structure of creation itself, the whole world is a

moral space. God wills each creature into existence in the Word as an epiphany of himself. Life

itself is a distinctive and irreducible value, a specific and willed and intrinsically meaningful gift

of God the Holy Spirit. An individual creature or race of creatures represents ‘[a] whole strategy

135 Albertson, ‘All Things’, 189. 136 Milbank, ‘Faith’, 19, 23. 137 Erica Fudge, Animal (London: Reaktion, 2002), 22. 138 Cunningham, Darwin’s, 409.


43

of being alive on the planet, a whole quality of living experience’.139 This ‘quality of living

experience’ in nonhuman lives becomes evident only if we are willing to entertain an

imaginative leap which will always go beyond what ‘pure’ reason can establish. The ‘feeling for

nature’ which animates popular consciousness is in this respect a gift to theology, because it is

an exercise in cultural imagination which has learned to see the natural world as a theatre of

inexhaustible meaning and presence whose manifold variety defies reduction. Such an

imagination respects the intrinsic orientation of matter to mind, rejecting a dessicated

mechanistic hermeneutic in favour of a rich moral-aesthetic one. The religions of nature can

help theology to recover a perception of the biological sphere which has shaken off the

deadening hegemony of positivism.140

Midgley, drawing on the original etymology of persona as a theatrical mask, argues that how we

define significant ‘others’ is to do with the kind of stage we are referring to; what moral arena

we are operating in. For Christians the moral arena is everything that exists, and the stage in

which they are actors is that defined by Christ, which is the cosmos itself. Despite their

tendency to lapse into ontological incoherence, the religions of nature rightly point theologians

back to engage the whole ‘stage’ and all its personae, including manifold selfhoods of the

natural world, as constituent characters in the drama of redemption. (There might be a fruitful

comparison here with Calvin’s notion of the theatrum mundi).141 The notion of nonhuman

beings as ‘others’ is supported by Cusa’s doctrine of hierarchy: creatures have a distinct

ontological dignity as diverse expressions of divine self-disclosure, underlining the vocation of

created reality to participation in God’s own being. If creaturely agency is never in competition

with divine action, but is in insoluble unity with it (as Chalcedon requires), then all creaturely

agencies demand our absolute respect as expressions of God’s act.142

139 Southgate, Groaning, 9. 140 See Hans Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life (USA: Northwestern University Press, 2000). 141 See Belden Lane, Ravished by Beauty: The Surprising Legacy of Reformed Spirituality (Oxford: OUP, 2011), 71-5. 142 Cf. Kathryn Tanner, God and Creation in Christian Theology (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988).


44

Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:

Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;

Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,

Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came.143

Here Abram’s ‘speaking to’ the natural world takes on a fresh meaning; it becomes a way of

responding to the ‘selving’ of ‘mortal things’ as the way God acts in them. This ‘selving’ has its

own otherness and interiority; ‘the Ground is listening’. We are then precipitated into a

discourse in which the web of concern and responsibility has become uncomfortably wide.

Rowan Williams asks: ‘[W]hat if you had to make conversation with nonhuman partners? To

make friends with them?’144 It would mean at least that ‘the moral world is not exclusively

human and that obligations and relationships are not restricted to intra-human affairs’.145 If we

fail to join in this conversation, if we restrict the ‘selving’ of the world to the humanum, we are

not taking seriously the created character of matter. For matter is never ‘mere’; nature is never

purely an ‘exteriority’, ‘but rather in the case of life has its own interiority and thus resembles

mind’.146 ‘[T]he intellect is not discontinuous with the sensitive and the vegetative… there is no

such thing as mere animality.’147

It was the gift of the transcendentalists and Romantics that they responded to this selving in a

new and distinctly modern way. Alison Milbank explores the way Novalis, Coleridge and George

MacDonald sought ‘an integrated mode of knowledge that could revivify the dead world of

objects’, so that, in Coleridge’s words, ‘each Thing has a life of its own’.148 Learning how to

sense the nonhuman world in this mode was a disciplined exercise in the ‘alchemical’ character

of the imagination, which reveals to us the surprising newness and beauty of something which

seemed ordinary.149 It helps us to resist the zeitgeist which would have us live in a world of ‘flat

objects’.150 This zeitgeist can sometimes wear mask of celebration and delight in nature, but in

an entirely false manner. There is a way of talking about the depth and mystery of nature in a

143 W.H. Gardner ed., Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Selection of His Poems and Prose (London: Penguin, 1954), 51. 144 Williams, Lion’s, 26. 145 Williams, Lion’s, 22. 146 Cunningham, Darwin’s, 64. 147 Cunningham, Darwin’s, 165. 148 Milbank, ‘Apologetics’, 33, 35. 149 Milbank, ‘Faith’, 22. 150 Milbank, ‘Apologetics’, 34.


45

way that celebrates its total availability to human intellect, its infinite reducibility. This

‘celebration’ rejoices not in nature but in the unlimited progression of reductionism itself. Finite

things are celebrated precisely because they are wholly graspable. Christians are to celebrate

not the graspability of material things, but their ungraspability, their irreducibility to our own

agendas and concerns. Dawkins et al. proclaim as good news the omnipotence of human

understanding; but the real good news is that not all the powers of the human mind can exhaust

the essence of a single fly.

iii. God in Snakes and Lions: Renewing the Christian Imagination

The feeling for nature shows the way to a re-enchantment of the material world which is

properly sacramental, which restores to material beings their character as signs,151 provoking in

Christians a more cosmic hope, an extension of their moral imagination to the whole sphere of

material existence. More important than theology here is the renewal in image and story of the

unique and unrepeatable expression of God’s life which is each tree, insect, river and mountain.

The role of poets, storytellers, painters and so on is indispensable. The work of a C.S. Lewis or a

Tolkien evokes animals, natural landscapes, and material entities in a way that ‘sets them free’,

so that they are no longer ‘dead objects’ with no otherness or mystery but are ‘things set apart

from ourselves’ with a presence and intelligibility that our own understanding can never

exhaust.152 The knowledge of the wolf and the mountain are secrets of God. Tolkien’s portrayal

of the Ents, for example, as simultaneously familiar, alien, and possessing a primaeval strength

and intelligence provides an important corrective to the tendency to exclude non-animate

nature from mediation of the divine.153 Rowan Williams’ commentary on The Chronicles of

Narnia explores how Lewis conveys ‘a world in which human are not alone as intelligent actors,

actors in a theatre of providential and meaningful events’:

…the key role of human beings in the moral cosmos is only intelligible when

we see that human beings are always already embedded in their relations

151 Cf. Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1998). 152 Alison Milbank, ‘Apologetics and the Imagination: Making Strange’, in Andrew Davison et al. eds., Imaginative Apologetics: Theology, Philosophy and the Catholic Tradition (London: SCM, 2011), 39. 153 Cf. A. Trewavas, ‘Green plants as intelligent organisms’ in Trends in Plant Science 10 (2005): 413–419.


46

with the non-human world and that their moral quality is utterly bound up

with this... To be invited to see trees and rivers as part of the ‘people’ of

Narnia, and to have to ask what proper and respectful relations might be

between a human and a talking beast is to be jolted out of a one-dimensional

understanding of human uniqueness or human destiny under God. To be

human is to be with the non-human world…154

This shows the way for theology to use animality not primarily as negative, to contrast

unfavourably with humans, but positively as a cipher for the divine. In the figure of Aslan, Lewis

uses the power and danger of the natural world to show how God threatens us and overturns

our expectations and designs of control. ‘Is it not said in all the old stories that He is not a Tame

Lion?’155 The wildness of Aslan evokes God’s ‘inexhaustible strangeness, [his] refusal to be

captured’.156 When Aslan rolls and plays with Lucy, she could not decide ‘whether it was more

like playing with a thunderstorm or playing with a kitten’, and Aslan gives Caspian ‘the wild

kisses of a lion’.157 His physicality, so important in the stories, is a different, dangerous kind of

fleshliness, an animal fleshliness whose combination of otherness and accessibility somehow

underlines the strangeness and solidity of incarnation. The density and simplicity of animal

embodiment becomes a way of reintroducing us to God’s flesh, the most truly material body.

This pre-eminent materiality of the body of Aslan transforms his world: ‘Aslan’s world is… more

material than ours’.158 Throughout the Chronicles Lewis draws attention to the royal grandeur

and power of Aslan’s physical presence; shaking the ground as he walks, his pawprints shaping

the earth, the body of Aslan reintroduces us to the risk of becoming intimate with a flesh more

real and fleshly than our own.159 Some of Narnia’s inhabitants, before meeting Aslan, mock the

notion that he could be a mere Lion. But Aslan has no truck with this, nor with those (including,

in the Chronicles, other animals) embarrassed by his animality: ‘Touch me. Smell me. Here are

my paws, here is my tail, these are my whiskers. I am a true Beast’.160 We are not to be

squeamish about the flesh of God; otherwise we will neglect to reverence the innumerable

154 Williams, Lion’s, 24-5. 155 C.S. Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia (London: HarperCollins, 2011), 677, italics original. 156 Williams, Lion’s, 139. 157 Lewis, Chronicles, 185, 661, quoted Williams, Lion’s, 57. 158 Williams, Lion’s, 117. 159 Cf. Williams, Lion’s, 55-7. 160 Lewis, Chronicles, 299.


47

theophanies of creaturely bodies, including those whose dignity and beauty we have, through

force of habit, learnt not to see.

Just as the religions of nature should be allowed to contribute to this making-strange of the

animate and inanimate world, whose difference from us should never cease to call forth our

wonder and humility, so those outside the household of faith assist this renewal of Christian

imagination. Philip Pullman’s use of beautifully drawn animal figures in His Dark Materials161 to

represent the deepest and most intimate aspects of human identity and growth is a case in

point. D.H. Lawrence’ celebrated ‘Snake’ is an unparalleled meditation on the glorious,

menacing dignity of a nonhuman life which surprises us into an unexpected tenderness.

Lawrence describes the snake at his water trough as a ‘guest’ to whom he is merely a ‘second

comer’. ‘[L]ike a god’, ‘like a king’ before whom Lawrence ‘must stand and wait’, the snake ‘was

there before me’.

Was it perversity, that I

longed to talk to him? Was it humility to feel so honoured?

I felt so honoured.

This resplendent creature, ‘earth-golden from the burning bowels of the earth’, is ‘one of the

lords/Of life’. The encounter reveals to Lawrence, a cultured despiser of reptiles, his own

vulgarity and meanness of spirit, ‘a pettiness’ which he bitterly repents: ‘I have something to

expiate’.162 The religious quality of the language is unmistakable, but it never becomes

saccharine or trite; Lawrence’s spareness of language, the direct simplicity of his vision, carefully

preserves the sense of rawness and ambiguity in encountering a wild creature. He evokes the

perilous edge of human command and security, and is precipitated into an unexpected

reverence. His shame at his own reluctance to dwell there, at his smallness of heart in the

presence of this regal creature, is a sentiment that those cultured despisers of nonhuman lives

should learn from, especially those who doubt that God’s peace can possibly be meant for the

whole material creation. In its chastened celebration of the depth and difference of a creature’s

life, Lawrence here instantiates what Christian language should aspire to: the offering of a

‘vision of a new world’ in which I and my environment ‘acquire a depth hitherto unimaginable’, a

161 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007). 162 D.H. Lawrence, Selected Poems, ed. Keith Sagar (London: Penguin, 1986), 134.


48

world which is ‘manifestly worth taking unlimited time over’, in which we encounter ‘the

connectedness of [everything]… to its inexhaustible root or ground in the divine’.163 We become

capable of this encounter only by ‘letting down the guard of our imagination’.164 This renewal of

imagination requires a costly sensitization to nonhuman lives and worlds; costly because it

reawakens us to the tragedy involved in the crushing, waste and torment of those lives,

imposing the burden of seeing not just beauty and harmony but also ugliness and conflict in the

natural world.

It is ‘the plain word of God’ that drives us to this act of extravagant solidarity with all creatures,

and makes us witnesses to their promised future in God’s peace.

But will ‘the creature’, will even the brute creature, always remain in this

deplorable condition? God forbid that we should affirm this; yea, or even

entertain such a thought! … While ‘the whole creation groaneth together’

(whether men attend or not), their groans are not dispersed in idle air, but

enter into the ears of Him that made them. …‘[T]hey themselves also shall be

delivered’… Nothing can be more express. Away with vulgar prejudices, and

let the plain word of God take place. … [T]hey will suffer no more.165

Eighteenth-century American Quaker Edward Hicks celebrated ‘The Peaceable Kingdom’ in his

radiant depictions of Isaiah 11.6-9, dwelling lovingly on this scene repeatedly throughout his

painting career. The burning eyes of lion and leopard, and the doe eyes of cattle and deer, gaze

together out of his canvases, expressing with heartbreaking tenderness how ferocity and

gentleness are reconciled in the divine peace without loss or compromise.

163 Williams, Lion’s, 141. 164 Williams, Lion’s, 143. 165 John Wesley commenting on Romans 8.19-22, Sermons on Several Occasions vol. II (London: Wesleyan Conference Office, 1874), 281-2. Cf. Edward Quinn, ‘Animals in Heaven?’, New Blackfriars 65 (1984), 224-26.


49

4. Conclusion: The Peaceable Kingdom

The ‘Book of Nature’ has long been regarded as the second text of God’s revelation. But it is a

hard text, ‘a difficult gospel’166 which problematizes the world for us. In its light we are shamed

into acknowledging our pettiness and meanness of spirit, moved to expiate that pettiness, to

start again with the natural world so that we allow its inhabitants to disturb our torpid self-

regard. Williams writes of the wild-animal God evoked by Lewis’ Aslan as a force which

overturns the order we thought we had made, shattering our systems of control.167 These

systems are intellectual and religious as well as industrial, economic and political. The religions

of nature, perhaps contrary to expectation, improve our reading of the natural world by bringing

it alive for us so that it becomes capable of disturbing us in this way, defying our interpretive

agendas by inviting us into a conversation in which nonhuman participants challenge and

discomfort us with their own narratives of suffering, futility, travail. This conversation relativises

human talk, so that the cosmic priesthood of human beings comes to be seen not as possession

which secures our position at the centre, but as a destabilising gift from the one who shows

himself in the faces of snakes and lions. ‘Theories come and theories go. The frog remains.’168

Once we have allowed the natural world to gain some independence from us, some inwardness

and depth that is its own and not ours, then its monstrous darkness, the desperate suffering of

its inhabitants, appears as tragic and unbearable. In this way, the pedagogy of the second book

undermines the consoling explanations by which we justify and rectify ourselves and the world,

pointing to judgement as the only true consolation, acknowledgement of tragedy as the only

means of hope. Without this, our celebration of the natural world will be an ersatz one. With it,

we can join the rest of creation in the cosmic liturgy, forming a single community of praise,

celebrating not a projected harmony which we desperately and self-deceivingly construct, but

the gift of God’s peace which makes all things new. Apart from this peace, which is the saving

judgement of God on conflict and violence, the nonhuman world will always elicit denial or

despair: it will be seen and not loved; or loved, but not honestly seen; or, perhaps worst of all,

loved precisely because brutality and ruthlessness have a diabolical appeal of their own. Against

166 Cf. Mike Higton, Difficult Gospel: The Theology of Rowan Williams (New York: Church Publishing Inc., 2004). 167 Williams, Lion’s, 50ff. 168 Jean Rostand, quoted in P. Kyle Stanford, Exceeding our Grasp: Science, History, and the Problem of Unconceived Alternatives (Oxford: OUP, 2006), 3.


50

each of these, which cannot hold together both truth and goodness, stands the redemptive

krisis of God in what is absolutely real is the true, the good, and the beautiful. Thus, contra

those who claim that belief in a transcendent God devalues the material world, it is only in

relation to an author of existence for whom to create just is to freely bestow gift and so

establish peace as the deepest character of things, whose strangeness and judgement is made

evident to us in the whole created world and not only in the humanum, that we have a

framework for talking about value in the natural world at all.

The religions of nature can now be seen, not so much as wrong, but as incomplete. It turns out

that their problem is not that they take nature so seriously, but that they do not take it seriously

enough. What is needed from Christians is to become better lovers of this difficult text than the

nature-worshippers of our age, and so to show that it is by faith in the new creation that one

truly finds joy in the old.


51

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