Pope Francis tells a new story
The Pope is not at COP26. But as humanity faces its greatest existential crisis, he is transforming the way Catholics think of their place in Creation
What did Laudato Si’ do? Did Pope Francis’s groundbreaking encyclical, now six years old, mobilise global church institutions to disinvest from fossil fuels, capture carbon and turn their roofs photovoltaic? Did it create the momentum for world leaders to deliver the historic 1.5 degree pledge at COP21 in Paris in December 2015, which remains the global benchmark, even now, for COP26 in Glasgow? Did it melt the ice between science and religion? Did it reframe relations between rich and poor countries in terms of an “ecological debt” owed by the former to the latter? Did it offer our troubled age a distinctive Catholic vision – “integral ecology” – of common political and social action, comparable to the way that a century ago “integral humanism” paved the path to post-war Christian democracy?
The answer is, of course, that it did all of these things, yet how far is still too soon to measure. It is too soon to judge the impact of history’s fattest, most read and most talked about social encyclical. But not too soon, I suggest, to make this claim: that in helping humanity face its greatest existential crisis, Laudato Si’ performed a huge shift in the thinking and outlook of the Catholic Church.
And that this shift, which goes to the heart of humanity’s story – our place in creation, who we are before our Creator – has such truth-telling power that it gives the Christian narrative a new birth in our time. Theology, spirituality, catechetics – even the vision of a synodal Church – have yet to reflect its impact.
To talk of a huge shift is to create unease: what of development within continuity? Laudato Sì’ quotes Francis’s predecessors to show he stands on the shoulders of St Paul VI, St John Paul II and Benedict XVI, who warned of ecological catastrophe as result of technology moving ahead of morality, and who reminded us of our duty of care, for God has entrusted the world to us to nurture, not to plunder. They even diagnosed the problem: “Man does not create himself. He is spirit and will, but also nature,” said Benedict.
This awakening was in turn a big leap from the technocratic paradigm of the nineteenth century, when industrial-age popes said nonhuman creatures had no rights and human beings no duty towards them. The stress then was on God giving human beings sovereignty over creation, to subject its unruliness to our paradigms – even if that meant inflicting pain on animals for our own recreation. Such a departure from Scripture and the medieval sensibilities of monks and friars shows the extent to which the technocratic paradigm – as documented in Romano Guardini’s 1950 classic The End of the Modern World – had reshaped modern theology.
Yet even when they corrected that distortion, Francis’ predecessors continued to operate within an anthropocentric frame: Creation should be protected for the sake of human beings, not for its own sake; we have a duty of care to creatures by virtue of our dominion, not their value. “Our duties towards the environment flow from our duties towards the person, considered both individually and in relation to others,” Benedict said in his 2010 World Day of Peace, an idea he repeated in Caritas in Veritate, that “when ‘human ecology’ is respected within society, environmental ecology also benefits”.
As now seems obvious, this was not yet the needed shift. In stressing human duty to a passive Creation, the teaching remained within the modern paradigm. And because the teaching was in terms that stressed obligation and duty without challenging prevailing models of production and consumption, there was little incentive for most Catholics to respond. The libertarian right could continue to obsess about same-sex marriage and abortion while seeing environmentalism as woke, or for wimps. As Francis would later write in Laudato Si’, “an inadequate presentation of Christian anthropology” concealed “a Promethean vision of mastery over the world, which gave the impression that the protection of nature was something only the faint-hearted cared about”. Little surprise that of the 1,500 organisations taking part in the global climate march in New York in 2014, there were just one or two linked to the Catholic Church.
Laudato Si’ shattered this complacency, critiquing not just modern anthropocentrism in general, but that of papal teaching. In stressing the interconnectedness of Creation and Creator, and the intrinsic value – even dignity – of non-human creatures, every one of whom has within it “the Spirit of life”, Francis recast the natural world as an expression of God’s gift of self. No longer did we humans stand proudly above Creation; we were joined by “bonds of affection” to all creatures, called into a “sublime communion” with all living things. The connection was visceral, even painful. “God has joined us so closely to the world around us that we can feel the desertification of the soil almost as a physical ailment, and the extinction of a species as a painful disfigurement,” he wrote. And we were responsible for that pain: the disappearance of creatures because of our recklessness meant they no longer gave glory to God by their existence.
Francis had two big drafting challenges. The first was how to capture the urgency and magnitude of the crisis without tipping people into despair at the enormity of the task. The second was how to retell the old story of the harmonious vision so clear from Scripture and medieval thinking without falling into the biocentrism – a dark pessimism about human beings or sentimentality about nature – that is sometimes found in the ecological movement. In a sense, the second challenge was the answer to the first. In rejecting the old – in reality, post-medieval – Christian story about man’s dominion, Francis had to tell a new story, one that told the truth about who God is, who we are, what sort of thing is Creation and how they all fit together. And while we would be shamed at the realisation that we had failed to see the earth as a moral subject, we would also see the beauty and necessity of conversion, on the other side of which was not just a better way to live, but a way to live that better reflected who we truly are.
Enter, at this point, Erich Przywara SJ (1889-1972), a German Jesuit virtually unknown these days but a towering figure in the pre-war world: a prolific, brilliant contemporary of Romano Guardini, and a major influence on the group of Jesuits – especially Hans Urs von Balthasar (later to leave the order), but also Gaston Fessard and Henri de Lubac – who were key to Jorge Mario Bergoglio’s formation. In 1932, Przywara published his great Analogia Entis, or “Analogy of Being”, which reformulated in contemporary metaphysical terms what had been deeply grasped by medieval theologians such as Bonaventure, who is quoted more than once in Laudato Si’.
The “Analogy of Being” is an attempt to narrate – more than explain – the basic structure of creaturely existence, summed up in the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215: Inter creatorem et creaturam non potest tanta similitudo notari, quin inter eos maior sit dissimilitude notanda. The formula – “God and Creation are like one another, and yet even in this resemblance ever more unlike each other” – houses a dynamic polarity: we creatures derive our being from infinite being (the principle of similiarity) yet are wholly transcended by it (the principle of dissimilarity). The glorious unresolvable tension between these two is energetic, life-giving – indeed, is life itself. You can look at a sunset and grasp something about the beauty and majesty of God, while also seeing God’s utter ungraspability; or see animals, and their Creator, and us in them, and learn something vital about ourselves. Francis in Laudato Si’ quotes Bonaventure on St Francis, that “from a reflection on the primary source of all things … he would call creatures … by the name of brother and sister.”
The Analogia Entis is unmentioned in Laudato Si’, yet irrigates it like an underground stream. Przywara saw it not as an abstract principle but the basis for all kinds of Catholic ways of thinking and behaving, so it makes sense for Francis to use it to develop a new narrative of our belonging to the oikos. On the one hand, it makes us humble: the dissimilarity between ourselves as creatures, who are finite and transitory, and the Creator, who is infinite and absolute, is vast; and such humility can lead us to an awareness of the creatureliness of others, which is the basis for fraternity and solidarity. (It works, in other words, both for Laudato Si’ and for Fratelli Tutti.) On the the other hand, there is the similarity, the special role for humans as collaborators, “co-creators” with God, whose unique dignity and autonomy and capacities give us special responsibility for “the act of cooperation with the Creator”, as Laudato Si’ puts it. Yet when we mistakenly view other living beings as mere objects, sources of profit and gain, we violate the essential harmony underpinning the universe – and pay the price.
The “analogy of Being” allows Laudato Si’ to critique anthropocentrism that is “misguided”, “tyrannical” or “excessive”, but not to jettison the vital significance of human beings in the Creation story – for better or for worse. This, then, is the great contribution of Laudato Si’, to both Church and world: to reject the distorted story modern Christians had begun to believe, and to embrace the truth they had abandoned. And by inviting us to embrace the analogy (in both similarity and difference) between the role of God in Creation and our own, Francis has given us a new (yet old) story, one that calls us to see and treat the world a little as God does, to contemplate it and learn from it, in a way that gathers up and includes all creatures, seeing that each has its place; to respect its rhythms, heal its wounds and reap its fruits.
It is a story that tells the truth about us, and our time. Most of us no longer need to be persuaded that violence to the earth is a sure way of losing it; but the good news is that, as Jesus says in Luke’s second Beatitude, the gentle – those who treat the created world as gift, not commodity; who work not just off or on but also with the land – will indeed inherit the earth, and relish its abundance. Laudato Si’ allows us to go deep green, but in a way faithful to our best tradition: to reject the complacency and corruption of the status quo, and urge conversion, yet without falling into the enragé pessimism of much environmentalism. Best of all, we can tell this new/old story without imposing it, because it is true, and will attract by its own internal force. Laudato Si’ allows us to say that human beings are indeed special, not by virtue of their sovereignty but by their unique responsibility. We are tasked by God to bring Creation to fulfilment, while finding our own fulfilment in the process: in fraternity, solidarity and the joyful mission of caring for our common home.
Austen Ivereigh is the author of Wounded Shepherd: Pope Francis and His Struggle to Convert the Catholic Church (Henry Holt, £21.25; Tablet price £19.12), and collaborated with the Pope Francis in the writing of Let Us Dream: The Path to a Better Future (Simon & Schuster, £10.99; Tablet price £9.89).