Earth Day: The Green Pope

This Monday is Earth Day. Despite the fact that it is not, as far as I can tell, a very favored holiday in my community, Earth Day brings back fond memories for me. At Hope College, Earth Day was the first day of the year that you could really count on to be Spring, and we used to enjoy it by sitting out on the lawn, enjoying fair-trade coffee brought by Lemonjello's, the local hipster coffee shop, and listening to outdoor performances from local bands.

In any case, as a traditionalist Catholic I have always been fascinated by the relationship between the traditionalist movement as a movement committed to "conserving" the liturgy and the movement to "conserve" natural resources and beauty. These movements seem to me to be perfectly harmonious with one another, since both have their source in the same essential virtue: gratitude. A traditionalist looks at the liturgy that he has received, realizes that what he has received is so beautiful and so multi-layered in meaning and possible applications, and responds with gratitude. He does not seek to manipulate it to his own purposes. To use Heideggerian language, he does not treat the liturgy as a "standing reserve" which needs to be "enframed" into modern applicability (vid. Question Concerning Technology). Rather he treats it rather like the environmentalist treats the earth, as something in essence mysterious.

It seems to me like no coincidence that Pope Benedict XVI, the same pope who gave wider permission for the traditional liturgy, was also one of the most outspoken religious leaders in environmental issues. In his various works, he points out that it is the failure of humanity to depend on God for its subsistence that makes us instrumentalize, and thus destroy, the earth and its resources (Jesus of Nazareth, vol. 1, ch. 9--I think). I apologize that I don't have the book with me at the moment to give the exact quote.

Likewise, in Caritas in Veritate, Pope Benedict spends several pages explaining a rather developed theology of ecological action on the part of Catholics. He treats it as an example of "inter-generational justice", whereby  Catholics owe to their children a beautiful and bountiful natural world such as they have received. He also points out, however, that a love for the environment helps to develop just between persons. In one of his more moving quotes from the encyclical he says,

"Every violation of solidarity and civic friendship harms the environment, just as environmental deterioration in turn upsets relations in society. Nature, especially in our time is so integrated into the dynamics of society and culture that by now it hardly constitutes an independent variable."

At the same time he ties it to traditional Catholic morality. I don't imagine many Greens would agree with him when he says,

"If there is a lack of respect for the right to life and to a natural death, if human conception, gestation, and birth are made artificial, if human embryos are sacrificed to research, the conscience of society ends up losing the concept of human ecology and, along with it, that of environmental ecology....The book of nature is one and indivisible: it takes in not only the environment but also life, sexuality, marriage, the family, social relations: in a word, integral human development."

So much for Benedict as being out of touch with the modern world. The truth is, as he points out, that modernity, with its lust for consumption and the manipulation of the human person, is out of touch with the world itself.

How does this come back to liturgy? In his book, The Spirit of the Liturgy, Benedict situates man's worship of God within the traditional Platonic concepts of reditus and exitus. The exitus of creation, that is, God's "going out", is completed by the reditus of man's worship, the worship of God by a free being. I think it is not too far a leap, even though Benedict never quite comes out and says it, to acknowledge that the liturgy, conceived of as the public worship of God, is therefore the end and purpose of Creation, it is the locus in which man achieves his ultimate purpose, and therefore Creation achieves its ultimate purpose.

Now, if this is the case, it seems to me that liturgy and creation become analogous concepts. Just as we behave towards the earth, as a matter of justice, because the earth is God's natural revelation of himself towards man, we ought to behave towards the liturgy and towards the Holy Scriptures, as God's supernatural revelation of himself through Tradition and Holy Writ. Is the reverse also true? I'm not sure I can exactly put my reasoning into words, but it would seem to me that if we accept that God slowly and mysteriously unfolds to us the full knowledge of himself in supernatural revelation, we ought to expect that he does so in the natural world as well, and that if knowledge of Him is our ultimate goal, we must respect the mysterious nature of this unfolding and not seek merely to exploit it to our own purposes. In other words, we must seek to uncover the beauty of the liturgy and the beauty of the earth, not merely to make it more useful to our purposes, which our fallen nature corrupts. We must seek to understand its essence, not "enframe" it.

Well, this is just my initial foray into this line of thought. Perhaps others who have spent more time researching these topics would be able to find even better references and respond to some of my intuitions on the subject.