The status of the world, indeed the state of the world, it hardly needs emphasising, is one of the key concerns of modern life. The current environmental crisis is a pervasive aspect of contemporary consciousness. So much so in fact that, as a matter of some urgency, even religious leaders have been entering the debate about the threat to humanity’s long-term prospects in a world seemingly overheating year by year.
The response to the crisis is often framed in terms of the moral obligation we are assumed to have to care for the world, our ‘common home’, to borrow a designation of planet earth favoured by Pope Francis. In 2016, he included in his six New Beatitudes one aimed specifically at this burning question: ‘Blessed are those who protect and care for our common home.’
In drawing attention to the reactions the world can evoke from human beings, Pope Francis is tapping into a very ancient Christian tradition. The early Christians made common cause with important strands of pagan culture that saw the universe as a ‘cosmos’ (a term meaning ‘order’) to be marvelled at, rather than an unmitigated catastrophe to be lamented. The latter view was held by the so-called ‘Gnostics’, who saw no difference between ‘creation’ and the ‘fall’. The emergence of the world was, as far as they were concerned, itself the ‘fall’.
The idea of the ordered beauty of the world is found later, explicitly, in the 12th century thinker Adelard of Bath who claimed “that if humans neglect coming to know the beauty of the universe in which they live, they would deserve to be cast out from it like guests incapable of appreciating a home in which hospitality is offered them”.
So far, so good. But the word ‘home’ in a Christian context might give pause for some thought. The Letter to the Hebrews tells us that “this world is not our permanent home; we are looking forward to a home yet to come” (Hebrews 13:14). St Paul assures us that “our citizenship is in heaven” (Philippians 3:20). And Jesus himself famously replied to Pilate during his trial that his “kingdom is not of this world” (John 18:36).
Then there is the witness of so much Christian tradition which sees (or, at least, used to see) the world as a place of ‘exile’ for the “poor banished children of Eve”, toiling in “this vale of tears”, to quote from the hymn Salve Regina (Hail Holy Queen). And the prodigiously gifted French thinker, Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), wrote that “the only good thing in this life is the hope of another life”.
To which side of this perennial dilemma – either to celebrate this world’s glories or to highlight its agonies – should or can precedence be given? At a purely human level, the answer, albeit unsatisfactory, can surely only be, as in mainline Christian tradition it always has been: to neither and to both.
Both are true, but neither gives the ‘full story’, because the ‘full story’, like God, lies beyond our comprehension. The ambiguities inseparable from Christianity, as from life itself, are palpably present in the dilemma outlined and are one exemplification of Christianity’s weakness (and perhaps also its strength), its failure or inability to deliver ‘knockout’ answers to humanity’s profoundest questions.
Why, however, should any of this matter? It matters because the status of the world is central to the dominant concern of the Christian faith, which is redemption. If that status changes, so inevitably does our understanding of Christianity.
For all their common cause with some ancient thinkers on the question of the world’s fundamental goodness, the early Christians held a view of creation that also significantly separated them from their pagan contemporaries. It was, apparently, the Christian doctrine of creation that struck sophisticated pagans, whom the Church was trying to win over to the new faith, as the most difficult doctrine to accept. Rather than, as one might have expected, doctrines like the Incarnation or the Resurrection.
For Christianity, there is an impenetrable, insoluble mystery at the very source or beginning of the world, a mystery which can only be held by faith, but cannot be flushed out into the full light of day by human reason
The idea that the world was called into being from beyond itself, that it was created ‘out of nothing’, and so was not without beginning — this notion was quite alien to a culture which considered as a matter of settled fact that the world was, by nature, eternal. It simply went too incredibly against the intellectual grain of the time to be readily entertained. And subsequently this view was supported by no less a thinker than Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) who argued that there was no way of proving philosophically that the world was not eternal.
For Christianity, there is an impenetrable, insoluble mystery at the very source or beginning of the world, a mystery which can only be held by faith, but cannot be flushed out into the full light of day by human reason.
And so, while it may seem foolishness to accept the goodness of life, despite its frequently harrowing shortcomings, faith in the fundamental goodness of life’s source can sustain people on their various odysseys.
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And just as the origin of this world is hidden from us, but is believed to be real and good, so the end of this world, for Christian faith, is also hidden, but is no less real and no less good for all that.
Hence, whatever about the verdict of reason alone on the status of the world, the verdict of faith will always have to be one that affirms the higher, because eternal, reality of that other world Pascal pointed to and which Christian tradition, until fairly recently, has consistently emphasised as paramount and as ultimately justifying our endurance of this world.
There is, however, a possible danger that the current ‘climate crisis’, notwithstanding its seriousness – indeed precisely because of it – could obscure from view the primordial significance of Christianity’s focus on redemption, somewhat in the way the sun blocks out our awareness of the stars.
Martin Henry, former lecturer in theology at St Patrick’s College, Maynooth, is a priest of the diocese of Down and Connor
