by
Damien F. Mackey
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“We have had enough of immorality and the mockery of ethics, goodness,
faith and honesty …. There can be no renewal of our relationship with nature
without a renewal of humanity itself,” the Pope writes.
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Introduction
A superficial
reading of the Pope’s latest Encyclical Letter, Laudato Si’ (“Praise
be to you” - On Care For Our Common Home), has led many to jump to the
conclusion that this letter, addressed to all the people on earth, is entirely
about the topical matter of climate
change. But those who have read it more closely
have appreciated that Laudato Si’ is
only partially about that. Stephen P. White, for instance, a fellow in the Catholic studies program at
the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, DC., has observed that it is
more about something else (http://www.vox.com/2015/6/24/8834413/pope-climate-change-encyclical):
Given the media coverage since
its release, and the political implications of the pope throwing his moral
weight behind one side in a high-stakes debate about climate policy, one could
be forgiven for thinking that Pope Francis’s new encyclical is mostly
about climate change and what we
need to do to combat it.
Except it is and it isn’t. In
fact, mostly it isn’t.
What makes this encyclical controversial
is its reading of contested questions of science, economics, and politics. What
makes it radical — in the sense of going to the root — is the pope’s reading of
the profound human crisis that he sees underlying our modern world. Abuse of
our environment isn’t the only problem facing humanity. In fact, Pope Francis
sees the ecological crisis as a symptom of a deeper crisis — a human crisis.
These two problems are related
and interdependent. And the solution is not simply to eliminate fossil fuels or
rethink carbon credits. The pope is calling on the world to rediscover what it
means to be human — and as a result, to reject the cult of economic growth and
material accumulation.
Reading the encyclical, one
quickly realizes that the “pope fights climate change” narrative is far from
the whole story. In fact, that line leaves out the most fundamental themes of
the encyclical: the limits of technology and the need for what he calls an
“integral ecology,” which “transcend[s] the language of mathematics and
biology, and take[s] us to the heart of what it is to be human.”
[End of quote]
And Miranda
Devine, a columnist with The Daily
Telegraph (Sydney), depicts the Pope somewhat as a cagey fisherman, luring
the Greens with a bait, before giving it a sharp twist. (“Thought Pope Francis was a warmist? Think again” (http://blogs.news.com.au/dailyteleg). Firstly, the lure is presented:
CLIMATE alarmists are
cock-a-whoop over Pope Francis’s much-anticipated call to action on global
warming.
Yes, the leader of the world’s
1.8 billion Catholics, agrees with Kevin Rudd. The planet is in crisis, and
climate change is one of the greatest moral challenges, the Pope has written in
his first solo encyclical. Man is to blame and fossil fuels are bad.
It couldn’t be a more
political document, designed to influence the upcoming UN climate summit in
Paris later this year. Christiana Figueres, the UN’s climate change head, has
called it a “clarion call to guide the world”.
Looks like everyone’s a papist
now.
Alarmists are revelling in
what they hope is the discomfort of the climate sceptic, or agnostic faithful,
especially the Prime Minister.
“Hopefully this is Tony
Abbott’s come to Jesus moment on climate change,” Greens leader Richard Di
Natale said.
“If Tony Abbott won’t listen
to the science, I only hope he will listen to the leader of his church and see
the light on climate change,” said independent MP Andrew Wilkie.
The same people who have
flayed Abbott for taking orders from Rome, supposedly, when it comes to women’s
ovaries or same-sex marriage are now demanding he obey the Pope and start
spraying windmills across the landscape.
But now for that sharp twist of the lure. Devine continues:
But, as a Catholic and an optimist,
I suspect the Pope is engaging in Jesuitical trickery.
When you read the encyclical,
you see that climate change is a minor player, despite the media hype.
In 44,000 words, the word
“climate” appears just 18 times. This is illustrated in a word cloud by the
Catholic News Service, in which the size of a word correlates with the
frequency of its use: “climate” is not visible. “Human” is the largest word,
followed by “God”.
That is the cleverness of this
popular, enigmatic Pope. He has used climate change as the “bait” to lure the
chattering classes, the godless and the Gaia worshippers.
He gives them a bit of climate
sustenance, then whacks them with a full-frontal attack on moral relativism.
“We have had enough of immorality
and the mockery of ethics, goodness, faith and honesty … There can be no
renewal of our relationship with nature without a renewal of humanity itself,”
the Pope writes.
He is down on abortion,
contraception, embryonic research, sex changes and digital media, which gives
“rise to a new type of contrived emotion which has more to do with devices and
displays than with other people and with nature”.
He is all for the family,
which he calls “the heart of the culture of life”.
So now that the Pope has the
ears of the world, he’s relentlessly hammering us with unabashed Catholic
teaching, sugar-coated with populist environmentalism.
Genius bait and switch.
[End of quote]
Restoring Human Dignity
“I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth,
because you have hidden these things from the wise
and learned,
and revealed them to little children.
(Luke 10:21)
The Pope recently chose an audience of ‘little
children’, and not the ‘wise and learned’, to speak of war and to reveal a dark
secret (http://rt.com/news/257545-pope-francis-war-arms/): “Many powerful people don't want
peace because they live off war," the Pontiff
said as he met with pupils from Rome’s primary schools in the Nervi Audience
Hall.
Talking to
children during the audience organized by the Peace Factory Foundation, he
explained that every war has the arms industry behind it.
"This is
serious. Some powerful people make their living with the production of arms and
sell them to one country for them to use against another country”. ….
The head of the
Catholic Church labeled the arms trade “the industry of death, the greed
that harms us all, the desire to have more money."
“The economic
system orbits around money and not men, women,” he told 7,000
kids present at the audience.
Despite the
fact that wars “lose lives, health, education,” they are being waged to
defend money and make even more profit, the Pope said.
“The devil
enters through greed and this is why they don't want peace," 78-year-old Francis said.
But why tell this to children?
And why did Our Lady of the Rosary,
at Fatima (Portugal) on July 13, 1917, also speak of war and reveal a dark secret to three shepherd children (Lucia, Jacinta and
Francisco), and not to adults?
After showing them the terrifying
vision of Hell - {Lucia: “That vision only
lasted for a moment, thanks to our good Heavenly Mother, Who at the first
apparition [May 13] had promised to take us to Heaven. Without that, I think
that we would have died of terror and fear”} - the Lady told them:
‘You have seen hell where the souls of poor
sinners go. To save them, God wishes to establish in the world devotion to my
Immaculate Heart. If what I say to you is done, many souls will be saved and
there will be peace. The War is going to end; but if people do not cease
offending God, a worse one will break out during the pontificate of Pius XI.
When you see a night illumined by an unknown light, know that this is the great
sign given you by God that he is about to punish the world for its crimes, by
means of war, famine, and persecutions of the Church and of the Holy Father’.
Well, did not
Jesus himself reply to those who had asked him: ‘Do you hear what these
children are saying?’ ‘Yes’ … have you never read, ‘From the lips of children
and infants you, Lord, have called forth your praise’?’ (Matthew 21:16)?
Now, Pope
Francis is a teacher who has modelled himself on Jesus Christ. And Jesus Christ
was one who had, directly against the customs of his time, exalted little children.
This is how G. K. Chesterton told of it back in 1925, in his chapter “The Strangest
Story in the World” (The Everlasting Man:
http://www.worldinvisible.com/library/chesterton/everlasting/conten):
The
exaltation of childhood is something which we do really understand; but it was
by no means a thing that was then in that sense understood. If we wanted an
example of the originality of the Gospel, we could hardly take a stronger or
more startling one. Nearly two thousand years afterwards we happen to find
ourselves in a mood that does really feel the mystical charm of the child; we
express it in romances and regrets about childhood, in Peter Pan or The
Child's Garden of Verses. And we can say of the words of Christ with so
angry an anti-Christian as Swinburne:
'No sign that ever
was given To faithful or faithless eyes
Showed ever beyond
clouds riven
So clear a
paradise.
Earth's creeds may
be seventy times seven
And blood have
defiled each creed
But if such be the
kingdom of heaven
It must be heaven
indeed.'
But that paradise was not clear until Christianity
had gradually cleared it. The pagan world, as such, would not have understood
any such thing as a serious suggestion that a child is higher or holier than a
man. It would have seemed like the suggestion that a tadpole is higher or
holier than a frog. To the merely rationalistic mind, it would sound like
saying that bud must be more beautiful than a flower or that an unripe apple
must be better than a ripe one. In other words, this modern feeling is an entirely
mystical feeling. It is quite as mystical as the cult of virginity; in fact it
is the cult Of virginity. But pagan antiquity had much more idea of the
holiness of the virgin than of the holiness of the child. For various reasons
we have come nowadays to venerate children; perhaps partly because we envy
children for still doing what men used to do; such as play simple games and
enjoy fairy-tales. Over and above this, however, there is a great deal of real
and subtle psychology in our appreciation of childhood; but if we turn it into
a modern discovery, we must once more admit that the historical Jesus of
Nazareth had already discovered it two thousand years too soon. There was
certainly nothing in the world around him to help him to the discovery. Here Christ
was indeed human; but more human than a human being was then likely to be.
Peter Pan does not belong to the world of Pan but the world of Peter.
[End of quote]
Francis, like the popes before him -
and John Paul II particularly comes to mind here - is all about restoring ‘the
dignity of the human person’, in the face of global exploitation and the
indifference of the rich. This is a pontificate that has put the poor again front
and centre, recalling the Gospel’s mantra of preferential option for the poor.
It is a re-telling of the parable of
‘Dives and Lazarus’.
Stephen White well sums it up when
he writes:
Pope Francis sees the ecological
crisis as a symptom of a deeper crisis — a human crisis
As for who is responsible for all this, he places the burden at the feet of the developed world: “Many of those who possess more resources and economic or political power seem mostly to be concerned with masking the problems or concealing their symptoms, simply making efforts to reduce some of the negative impacts of climate change.”
As for who is responsible for all this, he places the burden at the feet of the developed world: “Many of those who possess more resources and economic or political power seem mostly to be concerned with masking the problems or concealing their symptoms, simply making efforts to reduce some of the negative impacts of climate change.”
Francis warns especially of the
damage that our “culture of waste” does to the poor. He dismisses attempts at
population control while leveling broadsides against financial markets,
inequality, and the indifference of the rich. Moreover, he sees all these
disturbing trends as interconnected. A casual attitude toward material goods
leads to a casual attitude toward people. A willingness to exploit creation is
deeply connected to a willingness to exploit human beings.
[End of quote]
Such is the
harsh reality of the modern, industrialised world, whose protagonists do not
seem to care about - or sometimes even notice - its uglification of what was
formerly beautiful. “The earth, our home, is beginning to look more and more
like an immense pile of filth,” the Pope writes. On climate change: “A very
solid scientific consensus indicates that we are presently witnessing a
disturbing warming of the climatic system.” He goes on to warn: “If present trends
continue, this century may well witness extraordinary climate change and an
unprecedented destruction of ecosystems, with serious consequences for all of
us.”
Some nine decades ago, G. K. Chesterton was uttering similar sentiments, when
writing of (http://www.worldinvisible.com/library/chesterton/everlasting/content.htm):
… the wage-slaves of our morbid
modern industrialism, which by its hideousness and in-humanity has really
forced the economic issue to the front. ….
…. The human unity with which I deal
here is not to be confounded with this modern industrial monotony and herding,
which is rather a congestion than a communion. …. for that is characteristic of
everything belonging to that ancient land of liberty that lies before and
around the servile industrial town. Industrialism actually boasts that its
products are all of one pattern; that men in Jamaica or Japan can break the
same seal and drink the same bad whiskey, that a man at the North Pole and
another at the South might recognise the same optimistic level on the same
dubious tinned salmon. But wine, the gift of gods to men, can vary with every valley
and every vineyard, can turn into a hundred wines without any wine once
reminding us of whiskey; and cheeses can change from county to county without
forgetting the difference between chalk and cheese.
[End of quote]
For those driven by the spirit of mammon, rather than by the Spirit of
Charity (Luke 16:13), financial expediency, or ‘the bottom line’, is the only
thing that matters – not truth, or beauty, or goodness, or kindness, or
humanity. Chesterton, again, puts it better, telling of the alienating effect
between neighbours (http://www.chesterton.org/lecture-5/):
Modern commerce,
says Chesterton again, is about savagery of the rich, the hunger of the
satisfied, and the sudden madness of the mills of the world. You cannot serve
God and Mammon because — obviously — loving Mammon keeps you from
loving God, thus breaking the first Great Commandment of Christ, but you
neither can you love your neighbor if you are a slave of that blind and bogus
god of money and materialism. Your neighbor becomes your competitor in that
system, and your enemy.
[End of quote]
Obviously, this is not a state of affairs that a
kindly pope such as Francis can support. And so: “There can be
no ecology,” he writes, “without an adequate anthropology.” Chesterton, writing
in less scientific and more paradoxical terms, contrasted “the flat
creatures living only on a plane” with the multi-dimensional ideal of the
Gospels pertaining to ‘the lilies of the field’ (http://www.worldinvisible.com/library/chesterton/everlasting/content.htm):
There is perhaps nothing so perfect in all language
or literature as the use of these three degrees in the parable of the lilies of
the field; in which [Jesus] seems first to take one small flower in his hand
and note its simplicity and even its impotence; then suddenly expands it in
flamboyant colors into all the palaces and pavilions full of a great name in
national legend and national glory; and then, by yet a third overturn, shrivels
it to nothing once more with a gesture as if flinging it away ' . . . and if
God so clothes the grass that today is and tomorrow is cast into the oven-how
much more. . . .' It is like the building of a good Babel tower by white magic
in a moment and in the movement of a hand; a tower heaved suddenly up to heaven
on the top of which can be seen afar off, higher than we had fancied possible,
the figure of man; lifted by three infinities above all other things, on a
starry ladder of light logic and swift imagination. Merely in a literary sense
it would be more of a masterpiece than most of the masterpieces in the
libraries; yet it seems to have been uttered almost at random while a man might
pull a flower. But merely in a literary sense also, this use of the comparative
in several degrees has about it a quality which seems to me to hint of much
higher things than the modern suggestion of the simple teaching of pastoral or
communal ethics. There is nothing that really indicates a subtle and in the
true sense a superior mind so much as this power of comparing a lower thing
with a higher and yet that higher with a higher still; of thinking on three
planes at once. There is nothing that wants the rarest sort of wisdom so much
as to see, let us say, that the citizen is higher than the slave and yet that
the soul is infinitely higher than the citizen or the city. It is not by any
means a faculty that commonly belongs to these simplifiers of the Gospel; those
who insist on what they call a simple morality and others call a sentimental
morality. It is not at all covered by those who are content to tell everybody
to remain at peace. On the contrary, there is a very striking example of it in
the apparent inconsistency between Christ's sayings about peace and about a
sword. It is precisely this power which perceives that while a good peace is better
than a good war, even a good war is better than a bad peace. These far-flung
comparisons are nowhere so common as in the Gospels; and to me they suggest
something very vast. So a thing solitary and solid, with the added dimension of
depth or height, might tower over the flat creatures living only on a plane.
[End
of quote]
We
are still in the Gospel realm of Luke 12 that titles this article.
Human
industry cannot replicate the beauty of God’s nature (v. 27): ‘Consider
how the wild flowers [or ‘lilies of the field’] grow. They do not labour or
spin. Yet I tell you, not even Solomon in all his splendour was dressed like
one of these’. Sadly, were he to appear today, the fabulously wise and wealthy Solomon,
instead of being clothed, perhaps, like his queen, “in gold of Ophir” (Psalm
45:9) and the like, would probably be wearing labels titled
and
For it seems that even the more artistic or
beautiful aspects of life (e.g. fashion, clothing, architecture) have become,
so to speak, ‘industrialised’.
Earlier in Luke 12, in vv. 13-21, Jesus gave a disturbing
parable most relevant to all of this:
The Parable of the Rich Fool
Someone in the crowd said to him, ‘Teacher, tell my brother to
divide the inheritance with me.’
Jesus replied, ‘Man, who appointed me a judge
or an arbiter between you?’ Then he said to them, ‘Watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; life does not
consist in an abundance of possessions.’
And he told them this parable: “The ground of
a certain rich man yielded an abundant harvest. He
thought to himself, ‘What shall I do? I have no place to store my crops.’
Then he said, ‘This is what I’ll do. I will tear down my barns and
build bigger ones, and there I will store my surplus grain. And I’ll say to myself, ‘You have plenty of grain laid up for many
years. Take life easy; eat, drink and be merry.”’
But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life will be
demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?’
This is how it will be with whoever stores up things for themselves
but is not rich toward God.”
Here the Gospel labels the Mammonite a ‘fool’.
Now just as Jesus
was, in this parable, urging a simpler life, one free from excess worry and
anxiety, so today pope Francis seems to be calling for a return to simplicity.
As White puts it: “We need to take up an ancient
lesson, found in different religious traditions and also in the Bible. It is
the conviction that “less is more”.”
And Chesterton was of the same mind-set, here (The Everlasting Man) echoing Luke 12:
But there is a deeper fallacy besides this obvious fact; that men need not
live for food merely because they cannot live without food. The truth is that
the thing most present to the mind of man is not the economic machinery
necessary to his existence; but rather that existence itself; the world which
he sees when he wakes every morning and the nature of his general position in
it. There is something that is nearer to him than livelihood, and that is life.
For once that he remembers exactly what work produces his wages and exactly
what wages produce his meals, he reflects ten times that it is a fine day or it
is a queer world, or wonders whether life is worth living, or wonders whether
marriage is a failure, or is pleased and puzzled with his own children, or
remembers his own youth, or in any such fashion vaguely reviews the mysterious
lot of man. This is true of the majority even of the wage-slaves of our morbid
modern industrialism, which by its hideousness and in-humanity has really
forced the economic issue to the front. It is immeasurably more true of the
multitude of peasants or hunters or fishers who make up the real mass of
mankind.
[End
of quote]
Quality Over Quantity
What appeals to
me personally about the pope’s Laudato Si’ encyclical
letter is the resonance I find in parts of it with my favourite book on the
philosophy of science, Dr. Gavin Ardley’s Aquinas
and Kant: The Foundations of the Modern Sciences (1950). The book can be
read at:
Whereas the ancient
sciences (scientiae) involved a study
of actual reality, the more abstract modern sciences (e.g. theoretical
physics), involve, as Immanuel Kant had rightly discerned, an active imposition
of a priori concepts upon reality. In
other words, these ‘sciences’ are largely artificial
(or ‘categorial’) - their purpose being generally utilitarian.
Ardley tells of
it (Ch. VI: Immanuel Kant):
Kant’s great contribution was
to point out the revolution in natural science effected by Galileo and Bacon
and their successors. This stands in principle even though all the rest of his
philosophy wither away. Prior to Galileo people had been concerned with reading
laws in Nature. After Galileo they read laws into Nature. His
clear recognition of this fact makes Kant the fundamental philosopher of the
modern world. It is the greatest contribution to the philosophia perennis
since St. Thomas. But this has to be dug patiently out of Kant. Kant
himself so overlaid and obscured his discovery that is has ever since gone well
nigh unrecognised.
We may, in fact we must,
refrain from following Kant in his doctrine of metaphysics. The modelling of
metaphysics on physics was his great experiment. The experiment is manifestly a
failure, in pursuit of what he mistakenly believed to be the best interests of
metaphysics.
But, putting the metaphysical
experiment aside, the principle on which it was founded abides, the principle
of our categorial activity. Later, in Ch. XVIII, we will see in more detail how
this principle is essential to the modern development of the philosophia
perennis.
Kant was truly the philosopher
of the modern world when we look judiciously at his work. As a motto for the Kritik
Kant actually quotes a passage from Francis Bacon in which is laid down the
programme for the pursuit of human utility and power. [Footnote: The passage is
quoted again in this work on [Ardley’s] p. 47.] As we saw in Ch. IV, it was
Bacon above all who gave articulate expression to the spirit behind the
new science. Now we see that it was Kant who, for the first time, divined the nature
of the new science. If Bacon was the politician of the new régime, Kant was
its philosopher although a vastly over-ambitious one.
It appears to
be this very sort of Baconian “régime” that pope Francis is currently challenging, at least, according to Stephen
White’s estimation:
While much has been said about
the pope’s embrace of the scientific evidence of climate change and the dangers
it poses, the irony is that he addresses this crisis in a way that calls into
question some of the oldest and most basic assumptions of the scientific
paradigm.
Francis Bacon and René Descartes
— two fathers of modern science in particular — would have shuddered at this
encyclical. Bacon was a man of many talents — jurist, philosopher, essayist,
lord chancellor of England — but he’s mostly remembered today as the father of
the scientific method. He is also remembered for suggesting that nature ought
to be “bound into service, hounded in her wanderings and put on the rack and
tortured for her secrets.” Descartes, for his part, hoped that the new science
he and men like Bacon were developing would make us, in his words, “masters and
possessors of nature.”
At the very outset of the
encyclical, before any mention of climate change or global warming, Pope
Francis issues a challenge to the Baconian and Cartesian view, which sees the
world as so much raw material to be used as we please. Neither Descartes nor
Bacon is mentioned by name, but the reference is unmistakable. Pope Francis
insists that humanity’s “irresponsible use and abuse” of creation has come
about because we “have come to see ourselves as [the Earth’s] lords and masters,
entitled to plunder her at will.”
Not truth, but power lust, will be the prime motivation of these, the Earth’s “lords and masters”, or, as Ardley has put it, “not to know the world but to control it”:
What was needed was for
someone to point out clearly the ‘otherness’ of post-Galilean physical science,
i.e. the fact that it is, in a sense, cut off from the rest of the world, and
is the creation of man himself. The new science has no metaphysical foundations
and no metaphysical implications. Kant had the clue to this ‘otherness’ in the
categorial theory, but he took the rest of the world with him in the course of
the revolution and hence only succeeded in the end in missing the point.
Most people since then,
rightly sceptical about Kant’s wholesale revolution, have been quite hostile to
the Kantian system in general. Others, perhaps without realising it, have
rewritten the revolution in their own terms, and thus have perpetuated Kant’s
principal errors (as e.g. Wittgenstein in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus).
A thorough sifting out of Kant
has long been required in order to separate the gold from the dross.
…. Kant’s mistake was to think
that the world had to be transformed to know it. The truth is that the
world may be transformed, if we so dictate, and then it is not to know
the world but to control it. ….
[End of quote]
From what
follows, I wonder if the pope - or at least White in his comments - may have
read Ardley’s book. Dr. Ardley had (on p. 5) pointed out that there are two ways of going about
the process of analyzing or dissecting something, depending on one’s purpose. And
he well illustrated his point by comparing the practices of the anatomist and
the butcher. When an anatomist dissects an animal, he traces out the real
structure of the animal; he lays bare the veins, the nerves, the muscles, the
organs, and so on. “He reveals the actual structure which is there before him
waiting to be made manifest”. The butcher, on the other hand, is not concerned
about the natural structure of the animal as he chops it up; he wants to cut up
the carcass into joints suitable for domestic purposes. In his activities the
butcher ruthlessly cleaves across the real structure laid bare so patiently by
the anatomist. “The anatomist finds his structure, the butcher makes his”.
Thus White: “Put another way, Pope Francis insists that the material world isn’t just
mere stuff to be dissected, studied, manipulated, and then packaged off to be
sold into service of human wants and needs”. And again: “The utilitarian
mindset that treats creation as so much “raw material to be hammered into useful
shape” inevitably leads us to see human beings through the same distorted lens”.
White
continues:
The pope repeatedly warns against
the presumption that technological advances, in themselves, constitute real
human progress. In a typical passage, he writes, “There is a growing awareness
that scientific and technological progress cannot be equated with the progress
of humanity and history, a growing sense that the way to a better future lies
elsewhere.” The pope writes critically of “irrational confidence in progress
and human abilities.” He writes hopefully of a time when “we can finally leave
behind the modern myth of unlimited material progress.”
Nevertheless:
This isn’t to say that Pope
Francis is anti-technology or even, as some have suggested, anti-modern, but he is deeply critical
of both our technological mindset and modernity’s utilitarian propensities.
While he acknowledges with gratitude the benefits humanity has derived from
modern technology, which has “remedied countless evils which used to harm and
limit human beings,” he also calls into question — forcefully — the idea that
utility is the proper measure of our interaction with creation.
[End of quote]
There may be a better way of doing things in the pursuit of what pope
Francis calls an “integral ecology [which] transcend[s] the language of
mathematics and biology, and take[s] us to the heart of what it is to be human”.
A too rigid mathematics can make for a cruel master.
Stephen White well sums up the Pope’s outlook:
An integral,
human ecology
“Everything is connected” is a constant
refrain in this encyclical, and it serves to underscore the way Pope Francis
understands the vocation — the calling — of the whole human race. We were made
by God and for God. His gift of creation is also part of that vocation and
comes with responsibility for its care and development. We’re part of creation,
but also is custodians. Creation’s greatest beauty is in its ability to reflect
the glory of its maker.
Christians believe in a God who
entered into his own creation in order to redeem it Most religions understand
that reality is not limited to physical existence; there are also spiritual
realities. But Christians, and Catholics in particular, have always insisted
that while the spiritual and physical are distinct, they aren’t so easily
separated. Even material reality is more than just material.
Many Christians, and certainly
Catholics, take a sacramental view of reality: a view in which mere things are
never just mere things. All that exists is shot through with meaning, since it
bears the fingerprints of the one who made it. Pope Francis quotes Scripture to
this effect: “Through the greatness and the beauty of creatures one comes to
know by analogy their maker” (Wisdom 13:5).
Moreover, Christians believe in a
God who took on human flesh — entered into his own creation — in order to
redeem it. “For Christians,” Pope Francis writes, “all the creatures of the
material universe find their true meaning in the incarnate Word, for the Son of
God has incorporated in his person part of the material world, planting in it a
seed of definitive transformation.”
This sacramental view of the
world changes the way Catholics estimate the worth and value of things, which
have their own intrinsic worth and meaning apart from any utility they might
hold for us. Because creation is the gift of a loving God, entrusted to us all
for its care and maintenance, we are not free to simply do with it as we
please. For Pope Francis, the world is most definitely not what we make of it;
it’s much more.
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