Essay

Climate

Creed

Sustainability

30 May 2024

9 min read

Why Climate Change is at heart, a spiritual problem

Climate change does not begin with technical solutions but with spiritual ones.

Mark Scarlata

Mark is a lecturer and priest. He’s the author of several books and his latest, Wine, Soil and Salvation, explores the use of wine throughout the Old and New Testament.

Planet Earth viewed in totality from space. Africa and Arabia are visible under some cloud in the south.

Captured by Apollo 17, the Blue Marble image is credited with influencing how humanity viewed our home.

NASA.

In 1972 the United Nations commissioned a report called Only One Earth: The Care and Maintenance of a Small Planet. Its authors chose a cover image which captured the earth from space. The bright blue marble-like planet sits majestically against the black background of the vast universe. The beauty and simplicity of the image was a reminder of the unique habitat we share on this planet and the need to care for it.

Over fifty years after the authors raised concerns about a future ecological crisis, we do not find ourselves in any less critical circumstances. Average temperatures around the globe continue to rise, deforestation and pollution of water carries on and the land still suffers from over-farming and the use of harmful chemicals. These are only a few of the ways the planet has suffered.

The tone of the book, and the tone of the dialogue since then, often depicts environmental issues as a problem to be fixed. Rather than changing our own habits, many seek to maintain our current quality of life by coming up with green solutions that satisfy our levels of consumption.

The trouble with this kind of thinking is that we can reduce the beautifully complex and dynamic ecology of our world to a problem that requires a technical solution. The environment becomes common matter or stuff that can be used as a commodity to be bought, sold or traded on the market. This promotes the idea that the world around us is nothing more than material to be mastered through technological innovations by the ingenuity and determination of the human will. But is it just a matter of time before advanced technologies will solve all our environmental problems? Or is it possible that reframing the environmental crisis through a theological lens could help us see that the problem might not only be technology or industrialization, but that it might be something deeper in our souls?

Looking at creation through a different lens

In 2014 Pope Francis wrote an encyclical (a letter to the Catholic Church) called Laudato Si (‘Praise to you’). The title comes from a song of St. Francis of Assisi to celebrate creation - ‘Praise be to you, my Lord, through our Sister, Mother Earth, who sustains and governs us, and who produces various fruit with coloured flowers and herbs.’ The saint’s hymn of praise celebrates creation as a living being, a partner, a sister, a mother that sustains us and reveals the glory of God. And this is what Pope Francis sets out to remind his readers—that creation is not merely a commodity to be used or a problem to be solved. Instead, the natural world is sacred because it was created by God, is sustained by God, and is filled with his divine glory.

Francis writes,

‘We have come to see ourselves as her lords and masters, entitled to plunder her at will…This is why the earth herself, burdened and laid waste, is among the most abandoned and maltreated of our poor.’

The ecological demise and poor health of our environment reflects our misunderstanding of humanity’s role within an integrated ecology. Francis warns that if we fail to see the deepest spiritual roots of our problem, we won’t be able to work out how we are to live within creation.

Rather than focusing on rising sea levels or changing weather patterns, Francis asks us to step back and see the larger picture through the lens of how God relates to his creation and to our role as human beings.

‘Ecological culture cannot be reduced to a series of urgent and partial responses to the immediate problems of pollution, environmental decay and the depletion of natural resources. There needs to be a distinctive way of looking at things, a way of thinking, policies, an educational programme, a lifestyle and a spirituality which together generate resistance to the assault of the technocratic paradigm.’

The globalization and technologization of the world have led us to believe that our relationship to the environment is not a complementary one that is mutually sustaining. Yet Pope Francis reminds us that all of life is bound together in an ‘integral ecology’ and that we live in a vast meshwork of living organisms that sustain and support each other. In an integral ecology these interrelations are fully entwined so as we look to address environmental concerns we also examine our own spiritual health as well as addressing social, economic and political issues in order to build and sustain heathier communities especially for the vulnerable and the poor.

An age of gluttony

To look with new eyes at the environmental crisis, however, humanity must also look within. Over the centuries the Christian tradition has highlighted some of the most destructive habits for human beings. These can have a disastrous impact on us and on those around us. In the church these are sometimes called the ‘seven deadly sins’ which outline the most common ways that human beings end up destroying themselves and the world. One of the sins is gluttony.

Gluttony is often associated with overeating or excess. Though excessive consumption may reflect outward signs of gluttony, the real root of it is connected to our desire for more than we need and a fear that we don’t have enough. Consuming more than we need (out of anxiety or for whatever reason) always comes at the expense of the needs of those around us. When we are driven by gluttony, we forget about our interdependence in the world, in our communities or in our families. Instead, we become consumed with satisfying our own needs and making sure that we have enough.

Rowan Williams sums up the dangers of gluttony by saying that we fail to grasp something fundamental in how we relate to others and to creation. ‘Gluttony, as the spiritual tradition approaches it, is another way of losing touch with our createdness: so much comes back to this. We lose touch with what it is to be a created being, and so lose touch with the basic truth that we are because God is.’ When we forget that we are God’s creation, living within an integrated ecology, we forget how we relate to all living things around us. Losing our idea of being created within God’s creation begins to unveil some of the spiritual roots of the current ecological crisis.

Part of what Pope Francis is saying is that a Christian approach to the environment is one that recognizes the spiritual and ethical implications of our actions in the world. A lack of attention to our spiritual condition can result in the abuse of the poor and the exploitation of the earth. When we fail to recognise God’s presence in each person and in his creation we mask the true problems behind extreme global consumerism that seduce us into wanting more without considering the needs of others.

Francis goes on to write,

‘The current global situation engenders a feeling of instability and uncertainty, which in turn becomes “a seedbed for collective selfishness”. When people become self-centred and self-enclosed, their greed increases. The emptier a person’s heart is, the more he or she needs things to buy, own and consume.’

The ecological issues we face today are not problems that can ultimately be solved through technology. They require a change of heart, a change of vision and the ability to see the presence of the divine once again in the world we inhabit.

The re-enchantment of creation

The word ‘re-enchantment’ has seen a recent surge in popular cultural language recently. Indeed, this website uses it to describe its flagship podcast! The word expresses the desire of many to move away from the purely scientific and material approach to the world in order to recapture something that the secular age seems to have lost.

Though the word ‘enchantment’ can often conjure up images of fairies and magical forests, its Christian use is a way to describe how we see God’s divine presence in creation. Both Christians and Jews historically have understood that God inhabits the whole of the cosmos.

This is not some type of pantheism where all things that exist are god. Instead, God’s life and his Spirit sustains all things and brings all life into existence. To see the divine presence in creation is to recognize that the world is not just a material commodity but, rather, as Francis of Assisi understood, it is our companion that sustains us, nurtures us and journeys with us through life.

The re-enchantment of the world has also found its voice through non-Christian environmental approaches that have leaned towards pagan ideas around Gaia. They argue that nature, or Gaia, is something that should be honoured, worshipped and preserved. Philosopher Mary Midgley wrote, ‘The idea of Gaia—of life on earth as a self-sustaining natural system—is not a gratuitous, semi-mystical fantasy. It is a really useful idea, a cure for distortions that spoil our current worldview.’

Though these ideas for creation care move in the right direction, the Christian faith claims that worship should be offered to God alone. To treat the creature as the Creator is a mistake. God is not Gaia. God is the only creator and the creation is filled with his glory.

To see the world through re-enchanted eyes is to see the divine presence radiating through all things—an ocean wave, the sand, soil, trees, streams, birds, insects and animals. All creation breathes with the breath of God. The ancient Israelites understood God’s presence in the wonder of the created world and yet they also saw themselves fully integrated into the life of that world both physically and spiritually. Rather than thinking of God as some eternal entity or ‘thing’ that exists apart from creation, Christian tradition understands that he inhabits his world and sustains all life.

Pope Francis is right—our environmental challenges are not a technological problem to be solved, they’re a spiritual problem that effects all of humanity. Technology can certainly help address some of the issues that we’ve created and move us towards a healthier future, but if we’re serious about an environmental response it needs to include a spiritual change. If we are called to cherish, keep and live in God’s creation, we will first need to change our hearts and our habits. To grow as participants in God’s integral ecology we begin with an understanding of who we are and our inclination towards things like gluttony. Then we can begin to recognise who we are as God’s creatures and how we can live beneficially and generously in our communities, in relation to our neighbour and to the natural world.

Christianity does not offer some ‘heavenly spirituality’ that detaches our lives from the natural world. Instead, it believes in a God who got his hands dirty in the soil of Eden to make human beings. This a God who fashioned his creation and inhabits his creation through his divine presence and his breath of life. This is also a God who inhabited flesh like us in the incarnation. He is a God who brought all things into beings, sustains all things, and invites us to participate and bring hope to a world fully integrated in the peace, justice and mercy of his love.

Weekend essay

Attention

Creed

Generosity

17 November 2023

8 min read

Your attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity

Eighty years after her death, Simone Weil’s wisdom is a vital challenge to today’s attention economy. Justine Toh explores her life and thinking.

Justine Toh

Justine Toh is Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Public Christianity in Sydney, Australia.

A monotone street mural of a young woman looking fiercely at the viewer.

Street art image of Simone Weil, Berlin.

Your attention is a fragile thing.

Trouble is, we only learn this after it’s been frayed – as realised by anyone who’s ever emerged, bleary-eyed and regretful, from watching one too many Instagram reels. Not that our inability to look away is entirely on us. In an attention economy, trillions of dollars are to be made through exploiting our attention. It’s why some, like social critic Matthew Crawford, call upon us to preserve the “attentional commons” by treating attention as a public good like fresh air and clean water. His point: let’s use the not-so-renewable resource of our attention wisely. Be careful about what you pay attention to.

If you struggle with sustained focus – and, given corporate assaults upon it daily, how could you not – then it’s even more vital that you, well, attend to the life and work of Simone Weil (1909-1943).

The French philosopher, labour activist, and not-quite-Catholic mystic wrote passionately about the importance of attention and even the “miracle” of its occurrence when directed, deeply and lovingly, towards another person. Reading Weil against the chronic distraction of our times – the real product flogged by that attention economy – makes clear that even eighty years after her death, Weil couldn’t be more relevant.

But for Weil, ideas needed to be lived and experienced.

Weil’s life was short and difficult – often by choice. She grew up the younger sister of math prodigy André Weil in a comfortably middle-class, non-observant Jewish family in Paris. She had a first-rate education that set her up for a fairly cushy life as a teacher. But an encounter with then-classmate Simone de Beauvoir suggests a saint-in-waiting quality to the teenage Weil. Ever the idealist, she desired to feed the world’s starving millions. De Beauvoir, who recalls the exchange in her biography, was disinterested: finding the meaning of mankind’s existence was more important, she declared. “It’s easy to see you’ve never gone hungry,” retorted Weil.

They weren’t empty words, either: Weil often did go hungry out of solidarity with suffering others. (Indeed, her refusal to eat more than her French compatriots under occupation likely hastened her death). But for Weil, ideas needed to be lived and experienced. Her determined attempt to identify deeply with the plight of working people meant she put herself forward for repetitive, fatiguing factory work or manual labour on farms, even though, sickly and clumsy, she often became a liability.

There were other misadventures too: frustrated attempts to assist the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War and, later, the French resistance during WWII. Few of these endeavours were fruitful but Weil was nothing if not committed to doing something, anything. Even if the outcome was uncertain and one wasn’t exactly fit for the task.

For Weil, to attend well to other people meant making their welfare and wellbeing central to our concerns.

It is in Weil’s writing about attention that we glimpse, perhaps, something of what drove her to put herself at the (frequently extreme) disposal of other people and causes she fervently believed in. In a now-famous essay on school studies, Weil makes a startling claim: the point of school is to teach us to pray – by which she meant: to attend, deeply, to whatever is before you.

The idea was that students would apply themselves to an endeavour that wouldn’t reveal its secrets so easily. As Weil saw things, wrestling with algebra and trying to follow its impossible logic simultaneously flexed and trained, if you like, our attentional muscles. Even if the equation was still impenetrable after an hour, “this apparently barren effort,” Weil declared, would still bring “more light into the soul”. Teaching students to persist through difficulty, she believed, would pay off far beyond the mastery of any school subject. It would, in fact, prepare people for the real business of life: paying attention other people. Not least because, as we learn soon enough, they can be way more infuriating than maths.

Even though Weil casts attention as prayer, God wasn’t to be the singular object of our attention. The plight of our neighbours was also to fill our gaze. For Weil, to attend well to other people meant making their welfare and wellbeing central to our concerns and bestowing on them the honour, love, and dignity they were due. It meant granting them the strange compliment of being real – or being a real person in the way we experience ourselves as real people – and then putting our own real selves at their disposal. This is why Weil called attention the “rarest and purest form of generosity”. It required the attentive person to, in a vivid phrase borrowed from Pope Francis, “remove our sandals before the sacred ground of the other”.

The experience of suffering and misfortune seems to exile someone from the rest of humanity, to undo them in some essential way that strips them of their humanness.

But the power of this attentive gaze goes still further. It has the power to rehumanise the dehumanised. As Weil writes:

The love of our neighbour in all its fullness simply means being able to say to him: “What are you going through?” It is a recognition that the sufferer exists, not only as a unit in a collection, or a specimen from the social category labelled “unfortunate,” but as a man, exactly like us, who was one day stamped with a special mark by affliction.

The experience of suffering and misfortune seems to exile someone from the rest of humanity, to undo them in some essential way that strips them of their humanness. Weil would go on to describe such a state as one of affliction – one she experienced, firsthand, as a factory worker. In a letter known as Spiritual Autobiography, she writes of the exhausting and gruelling nature of the work:

“There I received for ever the mark of a slave, like the branding of the red-hot iron which the Romans put on the foreheads of their most despised slaves.”

Affliction, then, is the person reduced to a “thing” by the experience of suffering and oppression. But here is the transformative power of attention: it is precisely what enables someone to recognise that the afflicted other is a person “exactly like us”.

Take, for instance, Weil’s reading of Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan, a tale perhaps broadly familiar to some. It describes an act of unexpected and radical compassion by a Samaritan, a social and ethnic outsider to a Jewish man robbed and left for dead.

Christian commentators often pay close attention to the attentive care the Samaritan shows to the beaten man: for them, the true test of the Samaritan’s neighbourliness. But Weil has a different focus. For her, the critical moral act was the fact that the Samaritan paid attention. He stopped and looked at the man who had become less of man and, nonetheless, gave “his attention all the same to this humanity which is absent”.

Weil calls this an act of “creative attention… [that gives] our attention to what does not exist.” Everything that then follows – the Samaritan pouring oil on the man’s wounds, taking him to a place where he will be cared for, and paying in advance for his keep – is almost beside the point, because it all depended on this first act. To be a neighbour, suggests Weil, is first of all to see.

Perhaps this is why Weil writes that paying attention to the suffering of another “is a very rare and difficult thing; it is almost a miracle; it is a miracle.” Attention, then, enacts a kind of a resurrection because it can bring the almost dead back to life.

The power of paying attention is that it can transform a lump of anonymous, misshapen flesh lying by the side of the road into the other person who is “exactly like us”, the other person who is as real as we are. The person who requires, from us, all the compassion we would wish to be shown if we were set upon by robbers on a lonely road.

Our entire attention economy is organised around helping us avoid the demands of other people. How many of us have retreated to the comfort of our screens to soothe our social anxiety

We’ve travelled a long way from where we started: with our difficulty focusing in an age of distraction and the all-too-familiar experience of giving our attention – which, as Weil has taught us, also means giving ourselves – to things that don’t always deserve it. But our own travails with attention have much to learn from Weil’s account of the moral, political, and spiritual charge of attention.

For one, she illuminates for us the determined inattention of our time. Our entire attention economy is organised around helping us avoid the demands of other people. How many of us have retreated to the comfort of our screens to soothe our social anxiety, or to numb the guilt we feel at failing to show up for people? It turns out that the loss of our focus and ability to concentrate is just the tip of the attentional iceberg. Also at stake is our ability to be present to the people we love, and even to be present to ourselves – and our pain.

Beyond that, there are many contemporary equivalents of the man of Jesus’ parable, first afflicted by suffering and then afflicted by the ease with which that suffering can be ignored. I write from Australia, in the recent aftermath of a defeated referendum on an Indigenous Voice to Parliament: an invitation, issued from the nation’s first peoples to their fellow citizens, to see their unique circumstances and grant them representation over policy matters directly affecting them. Lives are in the balance: the life outcomes of Aboriginal people are drastically worse than other Australian citizens. Now, to the loss of language, culture, country, and pride, comes a further blow: they will not be listened to, either.

They are not the only people we struggle to see. The lady with Alzheimer’s Disease, the illegal immigrant, the victim of family violence, the modern-day child slaves forced to mine cobalt to power our smartphones. It is profoundly difficult – and costly – for us to see them and recognise their claims upon us. To love others, as Jesus once enjoined his followers, as we love ourselves.

The vulnerable have always risked being overlooked and ignored. But Weil gives us eyes to see all this – and asks that we do not look away. “Those who are unhappy have no need for anything in this world,” she writes, “but people capable of giving them their attention.”