In the encyclical Laudato Si’, Pope Francis discerns beneath the imminent threat of ecological catastrophe an existential affliction of the human person, who is lost in the cosmos, increasingly alienated from self, others, nature, and God. Pope Francis suggests that one must reimagine humanity’s place in the created cosmos. In A Theology of Creation, Thomas S. Hibbs provides the basis for just such a recovery, working from Laudato Si’ to develop a philosophical and theological diagnosis of our ecological dislocation, a narrative account of the sources of the crisis, and a vision of the way forward.
Whatever its limitations, Maritain’s writings on the creative process continue to be embraced by artists—from Flannery O’Connor to Seamus Heaney. Perhaps the most interesting contemporary example of his ongoing influence can be found in the work of the Japanese-American painter, Makoto Fujimura, who also includes Rouault among his sources of inspiration. Fujimura’s accent on “culture care” resonates with a number of themes from Laudato Si. The title of his book on this topic (Culture Care: Reconnecting with Beauty for our Common Life) calls to mind the themes, and even the title, of LS: common home, common life. The implicit argument of LS, namely, that ecological imagination requires an aesthetic education is made explicit in Fujimura’s work. Culture care provides for “our culture’s soul… so that reminders of beauty—both ephemeral and enduring—are present in even the harshest environments where survival is at stake.”
Like Maritain, Fujimura discovers in Rouault an artist who was attuned to the threats of meaningless and the dislocations of human persons in the modern world; immersed in the currents and techniques of contemporary art; and able to draw upon traditional theological and artistic resources in a way that could speak to, and in the language of, contemporary culture.
In a quite different medium and in a quite different spirit, the poet William Everson produces a body of work that wrestles with the dislocation of modern person, from self, other, cosmos and God. Everson was a mid-century Beat poet, then—after his conversation to Catholicism and his entrance into the Dominican Order—a religious poet. During his time at St. Albert’s in Oakland, living as a Brother under the name Brother Antoninus, he produced a remarkably body of poetry, the quality of which has led the literary scholar Albert Gelpi to call him the second greatest (behind T.S. Eliot) religious poet of the 20th century. His chief influence is the California nature poet, Robinson Jeffers, often called the poet laureate of the environmental movement.
It is the contention of this book that these artists have much to teach us about the sources of our dislocation and about how we might come to see and speak in a discourse that recovers a sense of our place within the whole. They avoid the mutually exclusive extremes of anthropocentrism and biocentrism. Even here they complicate matters; for, they see that hitting and maintaining a clearly defined mean between the two is going to be elusive. What they often present or display in their art is the right sort of tension between the two.
They can also help us to overcome certain limits to the standard Catholic genealogical critique of modernity. A fundamental problem with this standard story is that it fails to take note of what Pierre Manent calls the difference between the causality of ideas and the causality of motives. It assumes that undesirable changes in modern life can be traced to the emergence of new, erroneous ideas or malformed theories: nominalism, mechanism, determinism, anthropocentrism and so forth. But, as Manent notes, an idea by itself is not a motive. The standard Catholic genealogy fails to account for why the ideas were so readily embraced. In the case of LS, for example, it seems at times to fall prey to a naively Romantic conception of nature, as harmonious, pacific and naturally calling forth the virtues of wonder and gratitude. But one of the reasons anthropocentrism, with its promise of technological mastery, gained such traction is that nature is in many ways inhospitable to human desire and aspiration. As a number of theologians sympathetic to the project of LS have noted, the document itself seems too often to embrace such a naively Romantic view of nature. It thus fails to reckon with the role of violence in nature. A related criticism of the document has to do with its relative neglect of the role in nature of contingency and chance, highlighted in modern evolutionary theory. Of course, there are theological and philosophical resources that can aid us in developing a more capacious theological account of the created universe. The artists to which we will turn resisted the reductionistic accounts from the very start.