Creation
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HEGE Series
Rabbit-Hole 01
See — Cosmology, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
Capitalism, Communism and the end of Nature
Enchanted April | Wikipedia
Echanted April | Google Books
Enchanted April (1991 film) | Wikipedia — Featured Clips
Vacationers from England at San Salvatore castle in Italy are transfigured by the natural beauty of the landscape (sea, shore and hillside) and gardens, finding it to be a "tub of love".
Fr. Maximos Constas
See — Fr. Maximos Constans
Sister Ioanna
Orthodoxy and the Material World
Orthodoxy’s life-affirming and world-affirming view of the material world is in radical opposition to the prevailing Western secular attitude — that the material world is for us to subjugate, dominate and exploit, and its resulting lack of reverence for life. Where does this Western attitude towards the material world come from — what are its sources? We can readily identify three sources. The first source is the prevalence in the West of the many centuries-old belief that the material world is bad [gnosticism], as reflected in early Christian heresies, and reinforced in the 16th century by the Protestant Reformation’s doctrine of the total depravity of man. The second source is Humanism’s human-centered set of values and priorities (“Man is the measure of all things.”), with its accompanying profound alienation of persons from themselves, from God, and from the rest of creation. These ideas exploded into Western European culture during the Western Renaissance of the 14th and 15th centuries, and have been spreading and expanding since then, down to our own day. The third source comes from the highly significant Western misunderstanding of the meaning of the word “dominion,” as when in Genesis (1:26 & 28) we are told that God gave “dominion” over the animals and the world of nature to Adam and Eve. Our modern western English meaning of the word “dominion” implies “dominating” and “subjugating,” which gives way to exploitation, pollution and abuse of the material world, and general lack of reverence for life. But the English word “dominion” is derived from the Latin word “Domine,” which means “Lord.” Therefore, for humans to have “dominion” over the animals, nature and the whole material world does not mean to subjugate them like a tyrant— it means to relate to them in the same way as the Lord relates to His creation. This attitude is the exact opposite of subjugation — it means to treat all of creation with the love, caring, respect and reverence for life that the Lord has towards His own creation, which is the Orthodox view.
To help us better understand the reasons for today’s proliferation of the lack of reverence for life, and the exploitation, subjugation, pollution and abuse of the created world, let us look a little closer at the first source mentioned above, that stems from the West’s inherited tendency of embracing various material-world-rejecting and denying beliefs. Upon reflection, we see that if the physical world is bad or evil, then one can respond in either of two different ways. (1) On the one hand, a religious person might seek to escape from the material world precisely because it is evil. This attitude reflects the Western tendency since the 4th century to accept Arianism and some of St. Augustine’s thoughts, which are further exalted in the Protestant Reformation’s concept of the “total depravity” of human nature and the Protestant rejection of the corrupt material world, which cannot participate in salvation precisely because it is hopelessly corrupt. (2) On the other hand, if the material world is evil, then one can readily reject any responsibility whatsoever to protect, preserve and respect the material world, and one can then do whatever one wants with it. We clearly see here that how we act is a direct consequence of what we believe. This distorted attitude has been growing for centuries.
The Protestant concept of the depravity of the material world of the 16th and 17th centuries, then combines with the 18th century Enlightenment’s religious concept of Deism. Deism denies the belief that God is involved in everyday life — God created the world, but like a great clock-maker in the sky, he winds up the world and it runs on its own without His involvement. The vitally significant consequences of these beliefs are that if God is not involved with man’s everyday life, then many evil practices can be justified — from the slave-trade in the 18th and 19th centuries, to today’s rampant abortion and destruction of the natural world for profit, convenience, or “fun.” Today we have inherited centuries of justifying that we can do whatever we feel like with the material world — people, animals, forests, water, air and the rest of creation — and it doesn’t make any difference. This is a powerful example of how bad theology results in bad behavior. And it is then a very tiny step to go from the belief that God is not involved with the world and daily life, to the belief that God does not exist at all, and that everything exists by accident. And then it is yet another tiny step to the belief that if a non-material God does not exist, then nothing non-material exists: reality consists only of material things — if it is real, it can be seen, touched, measured and comprehended by science and the human brain. Once the reality of God and the non-material spiritual realm is discarded, then the basis of morality is likewise eroded, and one can justify doing whatever one wants and believing whatever one wants — there is nothing absolute — moral or otherwise! Consequently, bad is good and good is bad; truth is false and falsehood is true. This certainly describes much of today’s society’s attitudes.
Ecumenical Patriarchate
Vespers for the Preservation of Creation
The World As Sacrament The Theological and Spiritual Vision of Creation: His All Holiness Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew
Bartholomew I: Message for World Day of Creation
Archimandrite Vassilios Papavassiliou
Seeing the Wood for the Trees
The ‘salvation’ of the natural environment falls to man. He alone has the power to determine not only his own fate but also that of the natural environment. Far from Christianity being the one that surrenders nature to the arbitrary will and power of humanity, it is the non-Christian view that does this with astounding self-righteousness.