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.

Explainer

Creed

Theatre

20 April 2023

7 min read

How Shakespeare seasoned justice with mercy

As Shakespeare’s birthday approaches, Anthony Baker explores how the playwright let two ancient enemies fight it out on stage – justice and mercy.

Anthony Baker

Anthony Baker is a theology professor at Seminary of the Southwest in Austin, Texas. He is currently exploring the intersection of classical accounts of Christian holiness with current issues in ecology.

A line illustration of a theatrical play scene showing a crowd waiting on standing and sitting judges to make a decision

A scene from Measure for Measure, The Spirit of the Plays of Shakspeare (sic), Howard (1828-33).

Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

In order to act with mercy toward someone, must I forgo a sense of justice? If I decide to act justly, have I decided to leave mercy behind? These are questions of philosophers and theologians. They also provide some of the thickest philosophical and theological ponderings of William Shakespeare.

A studied contemplation of mercy and justice does not, of course, originate with the Elizabethan playwright. For as long as humans have pondered how to order their civic spaces, they have puzzled over the demands of each. Around 500 B.C.E, Rabbi Yehudah is recorded as having said that God spends three hours a day on a throne of justice before getting up and crossing over to a throne of mercy, on which he spends an equal length of each day. 200 years later, when Plato devoted his most famous dialogue to the question of justice, he gave only the slightest nod to mercy, acknowledging that the just ruler would need a reputation for generosity.

Though many of Shakespeare's plays notice the interaction, or lack of interaction, of these two qualities (The Tempest and nearly all of the history plays, for instance), he penned two for what seems to me the explicit purpose of letting these two ancient enemies fight it out on stage. I'll focus on one of these and return briefly below to the other.

Justice Unbound

The first, Measure for Measure, takes its title from a line from Jesus' sermon on the mount. This is a signature move of the Bard, to take a religiously charged line, doctrine, or even person, and make theater out of them. While some have argued that this was all he was doing with religion or theology, I have suggested that he is doing more. He is mining the depths of faith language to see if he can find gems that we might be missing if we only pay attention to the identity politics of Reformation era England. "Grace is grace despite of all controversy," one character in this play says. That could be the tagline for Shakespeare's theological interventions.

We see Shakespeare having some of his typical fun with religion in Measure for Measure. The Duke of Vienna gives away his power in order to go abroad, as he claims, for a piece of international politics. In fact, he sneaks back into the city immediately, now disguised as a friar (a member of a religious order like the Franciscans). He tells the friar who lends him the robes that he is doing this because he has made an irresponsible practice of letting the city's "strict laws and biting statues slip." He has, that is to say, been more of a merciful father than a just ruler. He doesn't want to unbind this "tied-up justice" himself, since he fears this would cause his people to question his integrity. ("But you've always been so merciful before now!") So, he contrives a plan to deputize one of the nobles, Lord Angelo, to be the hammer of justice in his stead. He also hints that there are other reasons for his disguise. I'll come back to that bit of foreshadowing.

Angelo immediately finds an episode in need of his firm hand. A gentleman named Claudio has got his girlfriend, Julietta, pregnant. There are in fact circumstances that seem worth considering: the two are engaged and are only waiting for her to receive her dowry - arranged before they go to church. But Angelo will not hear of clemency. He is severe, one noble remarks. This is as it should be, a wise old Lord responds. "Mercy is not mercy that oft looks so," he says, perhaps angling gently at a critique of the Duke's mode of operation.

Justice only deals with what it can see, in other words. We pick up a jewel on the ground only when it catches the light; buried or soiled, we walk right past it or even trample it.

Merciless Secrets

At this point in the play we have our two adversarial qualities in neat, separate containers. One container, called The Duke, is only merciful. But this container must be removed from the state so the other, called Angelo, can display its contents of merciless justice.

But, as this is Shakespeare, things quickly begin to get messy. Angelo turns out to be hiding secrets. The old Lord, having hinted that the Duke is over-merciful, now suggests that Angelo is being a bit hard on Claudio. He cautiously suggests that, had time and place given opportunity, Angelo himself might have come to the wrong side of the law. Angelo's response says more, perhaps, than he means to:

"What's open made to justice,/ That justice seizes."

Justice only deals with what it can see, in other words. We pick up a jewel on the ground only when it catches the light; buried or soiled, we walk right past it or even trample it.

This is our first hint of Shakespeare's subversion of the polarized containers. Listening to Antonio's speech, we've begun to wonder if, lacking the slightest trace of mercy, justice doesn't in fact begin to look a little unfair.

And then we see Angelo acting on his theory. Claudio's sister comes to him to beg for her brother's life. Angelo is quickly captivated by her beauty, and soon offers her a deal. If she will meet him for sex in the garden—secretly of course, so that the crime cannot be "unjust"— he will let Claudio free.

This offer obviously shows the rot in his theory of justice, as he is forming a contract, a just bond, around blackmail and rape. But it also ruins mercy, since his proposed pardon of Claudio is not merciful at all, but simply the meeting one end of a "just" bargain.

The Kiss

Our neat containers have nearly dissolved around their contents. "Mercy is not mercy that oft looks so," but justice is not justice that only looks so. Justice as merciless as Angelo's turns out to be unjust, in the same way that mercy without justice turns up bereft of mercy. This is why the Duke left, and it's why Angelo fails as his deputy.

But the Duke has returned, and now we begin to see what his secret purposes are. He goes to visit Claudio for confession and counsel, and also goes to Claudio's sister for comfort and advice. Here is one of the delightful places where Shakespeare plays with religious stereotypes. The "controversy" of grace that I mentioned above, is for Shakespeare's audience an all-too familiar one, over whether God saves us through our works, and so through a contractual justice, or through grace, which is to say through an act of unearned mercy. The Catholic Church was generally (though not often accurately) associated with the former, the Protestants with the latter. But here it's a Catholic friar (or at least a disguised one!) who enters as the personified mercy.

The Duke/friar devises a plan, and it nearly goes as awry as the more famous friar's plan in Romeo and Juliet. Which is to say that our comedy nearly becomes a tragedy. I won't give away the ending, if you've forgotten or never made it through. But I'll offer a hint: the Duke, on his return, is no longer an embodiment of unjust mercy as he was before. Now he sees clearly that true mercy is just, and true justice is mercy. The two must kiss, as the Psalm puts it. His clever idea for a resolution is all about allowing mercy and justice to exchange a kiss.

When Mercy Seasons Justice

The more familiar play in which Shakespeare lets us watch the battle of justice and mercy is The Merchant of Venice. Here we find the story of maybe the strangest contract made since the dawn of commerce: if a merchant defaults on his loan, the moneylender will claim an entitlement to "a pound of flesh." Is this mutually agreed-upon contract unjust, or simply merciless?

The religious fun is rampant in this play as well. The lender is a Jew and the merchant is a Christian. But the Jew's strict call for commercial exactitude gets tempered by his excessive love for his daughter, and the Christian's supposed reputation for grace is in fact an excuse to practice favoritism. Eventually we have on stage such a confusion of religious stereotypes that someone asks which character is which.

Well, the poor merchant can't pay, as we knew already at the moment he made the foolish contract. And so, Portia, this play's mercy persona, comes—also in disguise—from the fairytale land of Belmont with a clever trick to save her beloved merchant. While her solution involves a highly questionable interpretation of the law, she manages to persuade the ruling authority.

As Portia is making her case, she offers one of the most explicitly theological speeches in all of Shakespeare's works. Earth's rulers might think they are most godlike when they enact the law with authority, she says. But "mercy is above this sceptered sway." In fact, mercy is "an attribute of God himself." She concludes, much as the Duke concludes, that "earthly power doth then show likest God's/ When mercy seasons justice."

In plays like these we see displayed one of his most enduring gifts to us: the ability to play with the familiar and make it strange and new.

Shakespeare, had he indeed been "for all time" as a contemporary put it, would be celebrating his own 459th birthday this week. In plays like these we see displayed one of his most enduring gifts to us: the ability to play with the familiar and make it strange and new. He gives us philosophical and religious figures and themes, and then just as we assume we know who and what they are, he surprises us by showing what sort of dish you can make if you but swirl the ingredients.

Our best efforts at justice, whether of the personal or political sort, must be seasoned by mercy. Our acts of mercy, if not ultimately just acts, will turn out to be merciless. Would we have noticed this if no one had had let it happen on stage in front of us?