Logos and Garden: Joseph Ratzinger—Benedict XVI on Eco-Theology

Abstract

The Logos has made a Garden. That short sentence might sum up the ‘eco-theology’ (or, as some would have it, theo-ecology) of Joseph Ratzinger—Benedict XVI. It is ripe for unpacking, by considering not only his general approach to the God–world relation (always presupposed as this is in his comments on environmental issues) but also how his theological insights into the created realm, understood as humanity’s common home (oikos), might now be taken further in the great pope’s footsteps, drawing on the doctrinal and hagiographical traditions of the Church.

1. Introduction

Long before he had offered a set of reflections specifically on the theology of creation, and even longer before he had become known in certain quarters as the ‘green Pope’, Benedict had made the Logos concept the basis of his account of the God–world relationship.1 That is true both of his noetics—his theory of how we register the intelligibility of the world—and of his ontology, his account of how the world actually is. And, as one might expect, his sources were both philosophical, in the Hellenic tradition of thought from Heraclitus to the Stoics, and theological, in the Greek patristic development, classically in Athanasius of Alexandria, of the great foundational claim of the prologue to the Gospel of John.

He does not forget such Logos thinking when he turns his mind to ecology. In the ‘Garden of God’ anthology assembled by Maria Milvia Morciano, Benedict calls the world the ‘product of creative Reason that speaks and communicates itself’, a paraphrase of ‘Logos’ characteristically expanded into the formula ‘creative Reason, love and freedom’ (Benedict XVI 2014). The latter couplet, ‘love and freedom’, is added not only to point ahead to the chief messages of the Trinitarian economy, an economy marked by charity (love) and gratuity, but also to underline the implications of the original glossing of ‘Logos’ as ‘creative Reason’. He thus sets his face against any interpretation of the cosmos that would find it the product of ‘chance and necessity’, while remaining oddly respectful of the French biologist Jacques Monod who made this binary the key to grasping the universe—over against the claims of not only intelligent design theory but even the most basic teleology of the kind any student of organisms might recognise (Monod 1971).

Commenting on that superlative expression of early Franciscan spirituality the Canticle of the Sun (otherwise known as the Laudes Creaturarum)2, and this time without explicitly using Logos terminology, Benedict hails the Canticle as ‘chiefly a prayer that teaches the heart to see in every created being the expression of the great heavenly Artist’ (Ratzinger [2005] 2011). The introduction of the language of ‘artistry’ draws attention not only to the primordial intelligibility of the cosmos, a cosmos freely issuing from a love-intent. It also introduces a new note, that of beauty—for Benedict a key factor, along with the holiness of the saints, in evangelization and apologetics. Of course he knew that his predecessor John Paul II had already (in 1979, thus in the first year of his pontificate) declared Francis of Assisi the patron saint of ecology.3 In this essay, some theological reflections are offered by way of explication and prolongation of Benedict’s view of ‘Logos and Garden’ alike.

2. Anxiety About the Disappearance of Creation Theology

Even as early as 1979, as archiepiscopal homilies from the 1970s indicate, Benedict had been concerned that, in the professional guild of theologians, interest in the theology of creation4 was evaporating.5 That might sound unconvincingly alarmist: surely no article of the Creed could simply disappear from view? But it could also be called a perfectly understandable development if history rather than ontology—salvation history, rather than concern with nature and grace—was meant to be the chief fulcrum of Catholic theological culture in the wake of the Second Vatican Council. After all, not a few progressive theologians in the Concilium school regarded the Council’s appeal for careful scanning of the ‘signs of the times’ as its single most important feature. Theologies married to the social sciences rather than to metaphysics were increasingly the order of the day. For the purposes of the doctrine of creation such theologies were not user-friendly. As Benedict wrote, ‘Theology has been seeking its truth more and more in “praxis”; not in the apparently unanswerable problem, “What are we?” but in the more pressing “What can we do?”’. (Ratzinger [1986] 1995, pp. 80–81). Yet, he asked, what on earth would credal Christianity look like with the foundational theme of creation excised?

Clearly, this would not do: a negative conviction which theologians of the Communio type shared with Thomists of every hue. In The Garden of God his concern to revive a theology of creation comes through in a typical way when he speaks of the biblical account of creation as leading up to the Sabbath of God, to a covenant climax which embraces at once God, the human being, and the non-human cosmos (Benedict XVI 2014, p. 69). In language which combines the Hellenism of Christian Scholasticism with the distinctive vocabulary of Neo-Orthodox dogmatics in the German Protestant world—borrowed, perhaps, via Hans Urs von Balthasar from Karl Barth—Benedict calls the covenanted telos of creation creation’s ‘inner ground’—an inner ground found, however, not in the aboriginal creation covenant but in the New and Everlasting Covenant of Jesus Christ.6 That must be so since the real ‘goal’ of creation is the new creation of the Resurrection. The seventh day, the Sabbath of the old creation, is transformed for the Church into a (new) first day, the ‘day of encounter with the risen Lord’ (Benedict XVI 2014, p. 69).

Benedict’s anxiety was not simply that theologians were displacing the topic of creation by an exclusive concern with salvation history. Nor was it even that, in a further stage still, salvation history itself had been truncated, by way of a supposed culmination in a (Schillebeeckx-like) Easter-reconciliation experience—eliding, by reduction to all-too-human and indeed subjective proportions, the ultimate outcome of the Cross and Resurrection in the full-scale cosmic transformation of a new creation. More than these, in the wake of Darwinism (in its various forms), Benedict was also concerned lest evolution thinking displaced creation thinking altogether.

As early as 1968 Ratzinger had been thinking through the issue of creation in its relation to evolution (Ratzinger [2005] 2011, pp. 131–42). Nineteenth century biological and geological discoveries revolutionized the sense of time, as Copernicus had the sense of space. The result was utterly dramatic. ‘[B]ecoming replaces being, evolution replaces creation, and ascent replaces the Fall’ (Ratzinger [2005] 2011, p. 132). Certainly, he thought, the notion of the invariability of species, those ‘individual structures of reality’, will have to be abandoned. But, he opined, the upshot might actually be to clarify, in a helpful way, the profile of the concept of creation itself. The creation question asks not what things there are so much as why there is something rather than nothing. ‘Philosophically, then, one would say that the idea of evolution is situated on the phenomenological level and deals with the actually occurring individual forms in the world, whereas the belief in creation moves on the ontological level, inquires into what is behind individual things, marvels at the miracle of being itself, and tries to give an account of the puzzling “is” that we predicate of all existing realities (Ratzinger [2005] 2011, p. 133). Admittedly, that means that the notion of creation is more or less useless for the purposes of evolutionary thinking. And it would (in any case) be premature just to take it for granted that the idea of creation, the larger concept of the two, can give the idea of evolution, house and home. For there is a sticking-point: namely, the emergence of homo sapiens.7

Here Benedict flagged up what would become a hallmark of his thinking on ecology—the inseparability of general ecology from human ecology, and, concomitantly, the undesirability of reducing man—the personal creature—to the level of other animals, which, however, advanced as they may be by various criteria of behaviour and even consciousness, are essentially sub-personal in character, lacking as they do the uniqueness of individual human beings in the nexus of relationship made possible by their inborn faculties of spiritual knowing and love.8 In this he remained incorrigibly ‘species-ist’. Alongside the ‘ecology of nature’, commentators need to recognise a distinctive ‘human ecology’, and indeed a ‘social ecology’ with high claims of its own to make on ecological energies (broadly conceived) (Benedict XVI 2014, p. 15). The Canticle of the Sun is not simply a paean to the variety of species but, with the prominent place it ascribes to human fraternity, a ‘multifaced ecology of peace’ (Benedict XVI 2014, p. 14). Where the verses of the Laudes Creaturarum on Earth’s human members are omitted, ‘environmental justice’ soon becomes oblivious to ‘environmental caritas’ (Taylor 2011, p. 585).

It is in the face of the threat from reductive anthropologies that a question must be posed to the variants of Darwinism, and that in the name both of man and of God. If man as a whole has evolved in the same manner as other present-day species, does not that abolish the distinctiveness of Geist, ‘spirit’, in its superiority, indeed primacy, compared with matter, and in so doing does not the theory of evolution imperil the chief prerequisite of the doctrine of creation: the existence of an uncreated (and hence divine) version of spirit? Benedict did not feel entirely satisfied with the somewhat facile solution that the human body may have evolved but not the human soul. Does that do justice to the intimate organic unity of the two dimensions? He took comfort in the fact that, within the period represented by the biblical corpus, cosmologies had changed several times. The cosmology of the Ancient Near East was not that of the Hellenistic era, though both influenced Israel whose faith did not so much consist in those cosmologies as make instrumental use of them so as to declare itself. Perhaps the same could happen to evolutionary theory which—so runs the implication—the Church should seek neither wholly to co-opt nor entirely to oppose but to make use of in strategic fashion. Put more metaphysically, if ‘being is understood dynamically, as being-in-movement’, in a universe seen as utterly temporal in its constitution, then the way is cleared for seeing being as also (pace Monod!) ‘something directed’ (Ratzinger [2005] 2011, p. 138). That would mean, for Benedict, directed (albeit, no doubt, with detours en route) towards Adam, towards humankind. That, in turn, would enable us to make good use once again of Logos-thinking: to approach the doctrine of creation not primarily on the model of the divine Artisan and his artefacts, but, rather, of the creative divine Thinker. And the witness of the Bible is, in fact, that ‘the world as a whole… comes from the Logos, that is, from creative mind, and represents the temporal form of its self-actuation’ (Ratzinger [2005] 2011, p. 139).

That, by itself, does not tell what the meaning of the universe is, only that it has one. But that in itself is an enormous breakthrough: the world does come from Creator Spiritus after all. Spirit comes first and matter is a moment in its history—not vice versa—as, for example, the ‘dialectical materialism’ of classical Marxists would hold. An ‘advancing movement’ in the world of matter reaches a point where the goal uncreated Spirit has for the cosmos is at last reached, whereupon created spirit can come to be. The reader will notice that the realm of angelology has been omitted. Yet the conclusion is valuable enough where the physical universe is concerned: ‘[A]nthropogenesis is the rise of the spirit, which cannot be excavated with a shovel’, i.e., by natural scientists (Ratzinger [2005] 2011, p. 142).

In the context of ecology, Benedict was not less on his guard against intellectual error than elsewhere in his theological service of the Church. There are doctrinal errors encountered precisely in the context of ecology itself, notably what he terms ‘biocentrism’ and ‘ecocentrism’, both of which deny the special place of the humanum in the world (Benedict XVI 2014, p. 51). Where a metaphysical foundation for these mistakes is attempted, a new pantheism threatens, not without debts of its own to neo-paganism, the all-immanence religious culture of Antiquity.9 Furthermore, failure to link ecology to human ecology compounds the harm done to the latter by ‘relativism’ (and thus the absence of a shared truth about man) in the modern democracies (Benedict XVI 2014, p. 57). Even without such anthropological heresies as the attack on the biological basis of difference between the sexes (Benedict XVI 2014, p. 58), it is still necessary to warn civil authorities, and their public intellectuals, against engaging only ‘the symptoms of social fragmentation and moral confusion’, rather than underlying principles and causes (Benedict XVI 2014, p. 99). Here, in the context of establishing an adequate account of the human being, Benedict found encouragement in a move towards collaboration between disciplines, a ‘complementarity [that] allows one to avoid the risk of a widespread genetic reductionism which tends to identify the person exclusively in terms of genetic influence and interactions with the environment’ (Benedict XVI 2014, p. 113).

3. The Biblical Hermeneutics of Creation-Belief

In lectures delivered in Carinthia on the eve of his appointment as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (as in the homilies, already mentioned, which share so much of their material) Benedict had explored further dimensions of the Genesis creation narratives.10 The contemporary exegetical distinction between the form and the content of the biblical message, found not least in his Munich masters Michael Schmaus and Romano Guardini (and officially licensed in the Roman Church by Pius XII’s encyclical Divino afflante Spiritu), while successfully defending the Genesis accounts from attack by the more envenomed of scientific critics, could also give the impression of a certain evasiveness. As a ressourcement theologian, on the model of Henri de Lubac and Balthasar, Benedict needed to explain how his approach to the creation concept was faithful to the deep mind of Scripture and the Fathers. He believed it corresponded to that mind thanks to his unitary reading of the various biblical texts that reiterate, if at times fragmentarily, the notion of creation. His was, furthermore, a reading which, while recognising the variety of the Old Testament witnesses, saw their testimonies as converging Christologically on the affirmation of the creation of all things in the Word (compare the Prologue of St John’s Gospel). That was the easier to say in as much as, like the Church Fathers, he did not consider Israel ever to have lacked creation-belief. Declining to support the noted Heidelberg Old Testament scholar Gerhard von Rad, who had sought to show that Israel’s creed was at first purely soteriological, concerned with salvation history, and only later included a concept of creation, he sided with von Rad’s rival, Claus Westermann (Westermann 1974), for whom ‘the theme of creation was present throughout the entire Oriental world and far beyond it, even in cultures that had no contact with one another at all, exhibiting the same basic structure’, and who held that ‘Israel, too, had always partaken of this basic idea’ (Ratzinger [2009] 2022, p. 25).

But the idea itself became ever more refined, over and against its pagan competitors, eliminating all trace of polytheism, recognising the finitude of cosmic powers, and the origination of all things from nothing. ‘Thus we can see how the Bible itself constantly re-adapts its images to a continually developing way of thinking, how it changes time and again in order to bear witness to the one thing that has come to it, in truth, from God’s Word, which is the message of his creating act (Ratzinger [1986] 1995, p. 15). Finally, that developing way of thinking comes to a climax in the notion, already encountered, of Creative Reason, which or who, by becoming incarnate in Jesus Christ, revealed itself as simultaneously uncreated Love. Reverting to a favoured interlocutor: whereas the depiction of the character of the cosmos by the French biologist Jacques Monod, for whom the universe is a fortuitous combination of ‘chance and necessity’, might be the best scientific description available, it was unreasonable of Monod to exclude a priori the truth claims of Christian faith to the effect that, behind the data, Creative Mind was at work, operating in a goal-directed fashion. That was not in itself, of course, a scientific hypothesis. Yet it allowed scientific hypotheses to make more sense than they could without it. ‘The reasonableness of creation derives from God’s Reason, and there is no other really convincing explanation (Ratzinger [1986] 1995, p. 17). The way in which the intelligent analyst meets an intelligible reality perfectly suited to his or her comprehension—otherwise, technological results would be impossible—testifies indisputably to this primordial dependence.

Texts gathered in The Garden of God reiterate this point from the individual standpoint of the practicing natural scientist. ‘The scientist’s experience as a human being is … that of perceiving a constant, a law, a logos, that he has not created but he has instead observed: in fact, it leads us to admit the existence of an all powerful Reason, which is other than that of man and which sustains the world’ (Benedict XVI 2014, p. 123). Here was an opportunity for Benedict to invoke another of his favourite themes: the need for a more generous view of than simply the Positivist rationality of scientific experimentation, or the ‘instrumentalist’ rationality of technological manipulation of matter. ‘Scientists themselves’, he claimed, ‘appreciate more and more the need to be open to philosophy if they are to discover the logical and epistemological foundations of their methodology and their conclusions’ (Benedict XVI 2014, p. 123). But those ‘foundations’ must themselves not be too narrowly conceived. How, then, asks Benedict, can ‘reason rediscover its true greatness without being sidetracked into irrationality’? (Benedict XVI 2014, p. 131). When we think of the epistemic medium needed by the reasoning subject in this connexion we realise that a similarly exigent question is posed to the object as well: ‘How can nature reassert itself in its true depth, with all its demand, and all its directives?’ (Benedict XVI 2014, p. 131.) One answer to that might be found in the work of the prematurely deceased English Catholic layman Stratford Caldecott, who stressed that for natural science in a contemplative mode the use of the analogical (meaning: neither univocal nor equivocal) imagination is needful. In a post-lapsarian situation, this requires considerable noetic re-adjustment. ‘When Adam fell from grace, the whole creation was somehow dis-graced, or put out of joint. The healing of the world therefore cannot be envisaged without a reordering and a healing of the inner world of the imagination, intelligence, and will. This insight is easy to relate to the modern study of ecology and to the broader development of a more holistic worldview in postmodern science’.11 The bitter fruits of Nominalism have been harvested in a world denuded of metaphysical form, final causality and divine providence, thereby excluding a contemplative science, at any rate as Caldecott understands that term (Caldecott 1998). In such a world, nature is rendered only too vulnerable to the will-to-power in the (early modern) scientific revolution’s goal of mastering matter.12 The exercise of analogical imagination—doing justice both to the difference and to the identity of things, and in that way avoiding sheer univocity and mere equivocity alike—is, Caldecott considered, in no way antithetical to the mathematical equations of hard science. He greatly appreciated the account of Pythagoras’ visit to a smithy where, through investigating the laws of harmony implied by causal analysis of the different tones sounding around him, the Ionian philosopher and polymath at once invented scientific methods and laid the foundations for Western music.13 For, as Balthasar, one of Caldecott’s masters (along with Chesterton and Tolkien) laid out in his fundamental ontology, occupying as this does the first volume of his theological logic, things—even non sentient things—are intrinsically epiphanic. They give themselves to our sensuous apprehension for our construal of them as characteristic inhabitants of a world deriving from the Logos of God where everything is, in however modest a way, revelatory (Balthasar 2001).

4. Liturgical Worship as the Key to Creation-Indwelling

Ratzinger’s own exegesis of Genesis 1 led him to think that, so far as man was concerned, the goal-directedness of creation had its high point in ‘cultic worship’—a cult that crowns the moral order of life rather than, as in much Protestant biblical scholarship, usurping its primacy. Just as the ten occasions on which the divine Word says, ‘Let it be done’, whereupon the cosmos is made, are echoed in the Ten ‘Words’ (Commandments) of the religious and moral Torah, so the seven days of creation, echoing the seven phases of the lunar cycle, culminate in the Sabbath rest, thus presenting the Sabbath, with its invitation to worship, as the ‘ultimate goal of creation’.14 For a Logos-thinker that must mean that homo sapiens is not only a reasoning animal but a worshipping one. In the midst of a world filled with logoi from the Logos, ecology—which gathers up those logoi in the hearth and home of a common sensibility—is, therefore, inherently related to liturgical acts. In his own liturgiology Benedict makes much of the multiple material media used by the sacred Liturgy through vestments, vessels, icons, and music (Ratzinger [2009] 2022, pp. 217–38). But the order of creation as a theme in its own right (and not simply the provider of orchestration for themes of redemption and consummation) can also be drawn into Christian worship, not least as the setting and presupposition for the work of salvation that is that worship’s heart. The Roman Missal (Sacramentary) of Pope St Paul VI contains Votive Masses for times of seed-planting and harvest, while the post-Conciliar Book of Blessings (Benedictional) provides texts for the blessing of animals (including flocks), and fields (including seeds for planting) as well as thanksgiving for harvest (Atkins 2015, p. 67). The largely accidental omission of contemporary versions of the seasonal Ember Days and the agriculturally focused Rogationtide (after the Second Vatican Council these were left to the tender mercies of national or regional Conferences of Bishops) is surely ripe for emendation. Less traditional than these is the notion of a specific liturgical ‘season of creation’, pioneered by the Ecumenical Patriarchate of the Orthodox Church and timed to match the initiation of the Byzantine Church year at the start of September. Now included in calendars west of Ravenna, this has the advantage for Western Christians of including, or terminating with, the Latin Church feast of St Francis (4 October). Benedict himself was inclined, however, to regard the feast of Pentecost as the true feast of creation (echoing, perhaps unconsciously, the decoration of churches with green branches on that day in the Greek Liturgy), for the ‘great Pentecostal hymn with which we begin [First] Vespers’ calls on the Third Trinitarian Person precisely as the ‘Creator Spirit’: Veni Creator Spiritus!. ‘Pentecost is not only the origin of the Church and thus in a special way her feast; Pentecost is also a feast of creation’ (Benedict XVI 2014, p. 4).

5. Christian Responsibility for Ecological Degradation

Some ecologists, impressed by the thesis of the American historian Lynn White, that Judaeo-Christianity is the principal culprit in the de-valuing of nature (White 1967), might consider that such liturgical occasions should primarily be penitential. For his part, Benedict was aware that, for ecologically minded critics of Christianity, the rape of the earth by industrial processes and the exploitation of other species were as far as could be imagined from his own quasi-liturgical view of man’s place in the cosmos. But he issued a robust denial that these ills could be laid at the door of the Church. Only with the Renaissance, distancing itself from the patristic and mediaeval heritage, and the Enlightenment, both rationalist and Marxist, did the Genesis vision disappear.15 The human ‘dominion’ envisaged in the opening chapter of the Bible was not the sort that eventually came. In Caritas in Veritate he insisted that Genesis, and its Jewish and Christian readers, had not licensed exploitation. In the light of biblical revelation, the work of creation contains, he wrote, a “grammar” which sets forth ends and criteria for [nature’s] wise use, not its reckless exploitation’ (Benedict XVI 2014, p. 183). Man, made bodily from the ‘dust’ of the earth, is expected, as a consequence of this unpretentious, not to say unpropitious, beginning, to practice humility (the etymology of the word derives after all, from humus)—notwithstanding the fact that the divine image in man, result of God’s inbreathing of his Spirit, gives him a ‘personal adjacency to God’: the inviolable foundation of the dignity of each human being who is indeed a very special animal in the commonwealth of creatures (Ratzinger [2009] 2022, p. 71). Benedict should not be misunderstood as endorsing a simple anthropocentrism. Man is given a central place in the cosmos so that he can refer the whole creation to God. In words from the title of a celebrated monograph by the Swedish patrologist Lars Thunberg, he is to be ‘microcosm and mediator’ (first as Adam, then as Christ) of a God-reconciled world (Thunberg 1999).

For Benedict, the accumulated series of post-mediaeval waves of rebellion against divine revelation reaches its apogee in the claim of the Frankfurt School Marxist Ernst Bloch that humans—essentially, in the latter’s view, self-creators—are called to re-create nature itself in a ‘concrete utopia’ (Ratzinger [2009] 2022, pp. 59–61; [1986] 1995, pp. 82–92). In this regard Benedict contrasts the Jewish agnostic Bloch’s ‘The Principle of Hope’ with the Catholic believer Josef Pieper’s antithetical study ‘In Tune with the World. A Theory of Festivity’.16 Only the latter is worthy of our common home. The concept of creation, eclipsed in present-day thinking, is replaced by a trio of unfortunates: a ‘nature’ understood in physico-chemical or, at best, behavioural terms; resentment at the spoiling of the environment at the hands of a human race now characterized as a pathogen (a recipe for nihilism if ever there was one); and a false theological ‘monism’ in which grace takes the place of creation, thus undermining grace itself by depriving it of its proper foundation (Ratzinger [1986] 1995, pp. 92–95). Theological attacks on nature/grace dualism, a staple of nouvelle théologie disprizing of the Neo-Scholastics, can go too far.

The task of assessing how in practice to locate nature in relation to grace belongs to ascetical theology. Here is an area where a ‘Benedictine’ view of ecology might benefit both from Eastern Orthodox thinking about the ascetic life and from a Western Catholic theology of the virtues—most notable the virtue of Temperantia. An Orthodox writer on ‘eco-theology’, Elizabeth Theokritoff, offers a foundational comment for invoking the ascetic way in this context: ‘If our bodily nature is a bridge linking man with the rest of creation, then asceticism is the undergirding which allows the bridge to function properly; without it, the bridging structure becomes on the one hand a means of “exporting our fallenness” to the rest of creation, and on the other a tie which us relating to material things in freedom’. (Theokritoff 2003) Asceticism involves a fast from creation when disordered human appetites have made us gluttons for the sensuous realm. But it also entails a fast for creation, a cleansing of the eyes of perception and re-ordering of desires, such that the Russian priest-philosopher Pavel Florensky could call asceticism a being ‘in love with creation’, citing the case of his spiritual father, the Elder Isidore, whose care for nature extended to broken branches and uprooted weeds (Florensky 1987, p. 71).

And for a Catholic woman writer to complement this Orthodox figure, one might consult the praise of Temperantia offered by Sister Margaret Atkins in her introduction to a Christian ecology, Catholics and Our Common Home. Among all the virtues, ‘temperance’, is the most pertinent to this subject, owing to its diametrical opposition to a careless consumerism (as well as to a joyless rejection of the goods). Since the standard translation of the Latin (and behind that, the Greek) term for this virtue may possibly mislead, Sister Margaret proposes a periphrastic equivalent: ‘having a disposition to desire pleasant things in moderation, in a way suitable for health and well-being’ (Atkins 2015, p. 26). She points out the close connexion of Temperantia with other virtues or quasi-virtues, listing not only moderation (already mentioned, at least adverbially) but also ‘frugality, simplicity, abstinence and self-restraint’ (Atkins 2015, p. 54). Christians, who live with ‘a higher world in mind’ should be able to ‘tread lightly on this earth’ (Atkins 2015, p. 26).

6. A Christological Development of Logos-Thinking

The Logos is not only in the context of theological reflection on ecology the pre-existent eternal Word. The Logos is the Father’s only-begotten Self-expression as become incarnate when united with an instance of our human nature as Jesus Christ. In The Garden of God Benedict does not fail to advert to this, even if his own Logos-thinking, concerned as it is with the creative Reason that is the Alpha of the universe, does not always reach beyond to the Omega—the incarnate Word in whom all things on earth as in heaven are to come together in the End. Nevertheless, for Benedict, the ‘Countenance’ of the Logos, the humanly manifested prosôpon that is the reflection of his eternally constituted hypostasis and thereby the expression of the Father, the primordial Source of Son and Spirit, is the holy face of Jesus.17 ‘I invite you to direct your gaze toward Christ, the uncreated Word, and to recognise in His face the Logos of the Creator of all things’ (Benedict XVI 2014, p. 124).

The ‘divine Project’ would certainly collapse were it not that the Creator God is also the Redeemer God who alone, by entering into his own world, can restore the alienation from the many-sided relationality of divine creation that man was made to share. In the recapitulatory ‘countermovement’ of redemption, the One who is subsistent relationality—both as Logos and as the New and Final Adam—restores relationships with God and the cosmos in his Paschal Mystery (Ratzinger [2009] 2022, p. 107). The Tree of Life, in Ratzinger’s imagistic account of salvation, is planted again in the Garden of God (Nichols 2023, p. 120). That means the re-establishing of a divine dependence that actually ‘constitutes our freedom, because it is truth and love’ (Ratzinger [2009] 2022, p. 109).

Here, Benedict’s thinking can usefully be extended in two regards. Firstly, there is need for fuller reference to a reading of the Logos foundation of the world specifically in terms of the Word incarnate Jesus Christ. ‘If the Word is “embodied” in the logoi of created things…, then this movement awaits its fulfilment in the literal embodiment of the Word when he clothes himself in the matter of this world’. (Theokritoff 2003, p. 226). In the Greek patristic tradition by far the most subtle and sophisticated form of this claim is that furnished by the great seventh century theologian St Maximus the Confessor18, whose work enjoys a deservedly high place in modern Orthodoxy.19 What may well be Maximus’ most celebrated statement of the ‘Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ’ runs thus: ‘The mystery of the Incarnation of the Logos is the key to all the arcane symbolism and typology of the Scriptures, and in addition gives us knowledge of created things both visible and intelligible. He who apprehends the mystery of the Cross and the Burial apprehends the inward essences of created things, while he who is initiated into the inexpressible power of the Resurrection apprehends the purpose for which God first created everything’.20

In terms of modern (rather than ancient) Catholic (rather than Orthodox) dogmatics I would invoke here the recent study—positively in its Maximian complexity—Christ, the Logos of Creation, by John R. Betz of the University of Notre Dame. For Betz, ‘Christ is not just the incarnate Logos but also and at the same time the Logos of creation who reveals creation’s own meaning and destiny: to exist as he eternally exists from the Father’ (Betz 2023, p. 485). And if that idiom perhaps belongs with what Betz would call the ‘more austere and schematic theology of Aquinas’, then the ‘more dramatic and Romantic theology of Balthasar’ also has its say in his work (Betz 2023, p. 492). As we read, ‘[I]t is in his kenosis (and not otherwise) that the Logos gives himself to be found and in his kenosis (and not otherwise) that we see God the Father—no longer in analogies drawn from creation but in what is nearest to us, our own humanity, in the flesh and blood of Jesus of Nazareth, who is the Logos of all things not simply because he is our beginning but also because he is our end; moreover, because his death is our life and because his Spirit gathers up all things into one’ (Betz 2023, p. 456). What transpires is not only a Christocentric theological anthropology but a Christocentric theological cosmology as well. Balthasar himself, in the ’Epilogue’ to his great ‘Trilogy’, had already pointed out that the embodiment (Verleiblichung) of the Logos is the ‘midpoint’ for the New Testament hymns (John 1, Ephesians 1, Colossians 1), whether we look from the standpoint of the original creation or that of the final redemption, and that here Paul’s distinction between the ‘Body of Christ’ as the Church (and humanity) and his Lordship over all things is ‘only intelligible within a mutual relatedness of these two magnitudes’ (Balthasar 1987, p. 80).

Secondly, in keeping with Benedict’s own Christology (typical in this of much of the best writing of the nouvelle théologie authors to whose ‘second generation’ he belongs), a Christocentric theology of creation at large will take as its axis—as the last of my citations from Betz, indeed, already suggests—the Paschal Mystery of the Lord, pointing on as this does to the glorious Parousia and thus the new heavens and new earth. In Benedict’s terms in The Garden of God, the ‘indivisible relation between God, human beings, and the whole of creation’ (Ratzinger [2009] 2022, p. 51), is properly Christianised only when the cosmos is seen in light of the Trinitarian economy, itself to be interpreted in view of the Parousia of the Lord (Ratzinger [2009] 2022, p. 52). Nature is destined to be recapitulated in Christ at the end of time.21 This was easy for Pope Benedict to write: he had only to think back to the Christocentrism—and notably the ‘Staurocentrism’ or Cross- centredness—he had discovered as a young priest through the study of the writings of St Bonaventure (Nichols 2023, p. 77). If the Cross were, in the Bonaventurian context, the centre of all history, then it could also be, for certain ancient Christian writers22, the centre of the cosmos likewise. In Christ ‘all the fulness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross’ (Colossians 1:19–20, RSV). Imagistic or mythopoetic language aside, for a ‘strong’ version of the ‘anthropic cosmological principle’, the galaxy—indeed, the universe—may have no other (non-physical) story to tell than our own (Barrow and Tipler 1986).

And here one can scarcely forbear to refer to the theological dogmatics of Benedict’s friend Balthasar, whose funeral oration he pronounced at Lucerne: the kenosis of the Lamb of God reflects a super-kenosis in the Holy Trinity who is eternal sacrifice, and in this way presents the key for understanding creation as it issues from the Father by the two ‘hands’ (in Irenaeus’ term) of Son and Spirit. ‘Die and become’ is the law of the cosmos, including the human being.23 The Paschal Mystery has left its cues scattered through the planet’s history and its present.

The American Ratzinger scholar Matthew J. Ramage, in the spirit of the Greek patristic commentaries on the Hexaemeron, has assembled a host of examples of these cosmic echoes of the Sacrifice carried on eternally in God and coming to expression in human history in the Cross (and therefore the Resurrection, which is the Sacrifice as accepted) of the Saviour. As Ramage puts it, the entire cosmos images the incarnate Lord through its cruciform and paschal (and, he would add—bearing in mind the Latin theology of the ‘vestiges’ of the triune God in creatures—Trinitarian) character (Ramage 2024). Beginning with the most lowly of echoes of resurrection-through-death, the decomposition of creatures forms soil rich in nutrients, while animal excrement helps the dispersal and development of the seeds of fruit-bearing plant life. In the world of insects, the caterpillar must digest itself to emerge a butterfly (a comparison already made by Teresa of Avila in the comparable case of silkworms24). On the interface between the mineral world with the vegetable and animal realms, the cataclysmic activity of volcanoes, earthquakes, meteorites, floods, is undoubtedly destructive but also permits new life forms to emerge. Thus, in the Permian–Triassic epoch, a majority of the then extant species are believed to have perished; yet by the same token ‘ecological opportunities’ opened up in that epoch for the ancestors of mammals to exploit. And on the largest scale of cosmic beings, supernovae bring with them the destruction of stars but concomitantly the release of elements that render life possible. And since the incarnate Word is the Exemplar of all creatures (that at any rate is the seeming implication of the Pauline and Johannine texts on the ‘cosmic Christ’25), it ‘stands to reason that his life, death and resurrection should in some way be reflected in the created world modelled after him’ (Ramage 2024). There is, after all, Dominical warrant for this approach in the Saviour’s own references to the pruning of vines (John 15:1–21) and the burying of wheat grains in the soil (John 12:24): images of the life-giving power of seeming negativities in the physical world.26 The isomorphism between the cosmic trajectory and the Redeemer’s destiny increases wonder at the character of the world. It also consoles for the extinction of species and renders more precious the proleptic signs of fulness to come in those species that survive, not least through human stewardship.

7. A Coda: The Role of the Saints

For Benedict XVI, the saints enjoy, in their lives and not just their words, a special place as interpreters of the biblical revelation. If the saints are, in that way, the privileged hermeneuts of Scripture, may they not also be acclaimed as distinguished ‘readers’ likewise of God’s ‘other’ book, the book of created nature? There would seem to be need for a corporate hagiography of the Communion of Saints along those lines—something for which an excellent beginning was made as long ago as 1934 by the Irish Presbyterian translator of ancient, mediaeval (and also Chinese) texts Helen Waddell (Waddell [1934] 1996). More material is at hand, for Eastern and Western saints in, respectively, a chapter of Elizabeth Theokritoff’s Living in God’s Creation. Orthodox Perspectives on Ecology (Theokritoff 2003), and similar anecdotal material in Deborah Jones, The School of Compassion. A Roman Catholic Theology of Animals (Jones 2009). Another promising theme is the accounts of the ‘virtues’ (behavioural cues to model actual virtues) of various species in the animal—and conceivably, also the vegetable—creation found in commentaries on the Hexaemeron27, in the mediaeval bestiary tradition (Clark and McMunn 1990; Hassig 1995, 1999), and here and there in a multitude of texts from the theological and spiritual tradition.28 All these are testimonies to the Christian hope for the cosmos as hymned by St Ephrem:

• At our resurrection, both earth and heaven will God renew,
• Liberating all creatures, granting them paschal joy, along
• with us.
• Upon our mother Earth, along with us, did he lay disgrace
• when he placed on her, with the sinner, the curse;
• so, together with the just, he will bless her too;
• this nursing mother, along with her children, shall he who
• is Good renew.
(Brock 1990, p. 136)

As a higher authority than the ‘harp of the Holy Spirit’, the Edessa deacon, has told Holy Church: ‘The creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and obtain the glorious liberty of the children of God’ (Romans 8:21, RSV).