Orthodoxy & Creation
Trees of Life
The Missing Link in the Modern Christian Worldview
Boston, MA - September, 2000
Civilizations stand or fall on the foundations of their metaphysics and cosmologies. If the latter are false, then such civilizations are built “upon sand,” and ultimately they will be unable to withstand the tumults of life.
Cosmology links man, through his reason, with God and nature. In the biblical account of creation, Adam is the overseer of Eden, who names the creatures. Cosmology also links nature with the Divine through man as he was in the beginning and as he is restored by Jesus Christ, the Renewer of the cosmos (John 3:17; Rev. 21:5). According to such biblical passages, the Word of God entered creation, not only to save humanity, but through human nature restored beginning with and through Himself as God and Man to redeem the whole created order.
Restoration of creation is therefore the fundamental vocation of Christians. As mankind is the macrocosm, each of us is a microcosm. We will be judged by our deeds (Rev. 20:12). What each of us does either builds up or tears down the natural and social fabric. These two must be seen as one fabric, seamless, like the vesture of Christ, lest we fall into a dualism which is the antithesis of Christianity (cf., the First Epistle of John). Cosmology is therefore inseparable from real economics (from the Greek economia, “household,” or “the whole world”). Thus, St. Paul could tell his disciple Timothy, and all of us:
“...godliness with contentment is great gain [so much for the profit motive!]. For we brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out. And having food and raiment, let us be therewith content. But they that will be rich fall into temptation and a snare, and into many foolish and hurtful lusts, which drown men in destruction and perdition” (I Timothy 6:69).
Jesus tells us to “consider the lilies of the field...[for] Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these” (Matt. 6:28,29). This means that we must go beyond the outer surface of things to apprehend their qualities, their spiritual significance, in the literal sense of that word: for everything is a sign or symbol of a heavenly principle or archetype. That is why the above passage from the Sermon on the Mount is concluded by the command to “seek... first the kingdom of God and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you” (v. 33).
The World’s Forests
To understand the destruction of the world’s forests, we must place this problem in its wider context as symptom of a malady that is afflicting not only the biosphere, but also our souls. The difficulty which Christians encounter when engaging the environmental “movement” is that environmentalists have yet to realize that neither the problem nor the solutions are in the facts, but in ourselves and especially in our worldview. At issue are our fundamental beliefs about who and what we are, and our place in and therefore our responsibilities to the natural order.
If we are to understand the root of deforestation, we must also understand the nature and meaning of trees, and from that discern our proper relationship to them. What does it mean that the forests of our country are so recklessly being cut down and destroyed? This question leads to a more basic question, what is a tree?
To start a tree is a living thing. If we have any reverence for life and for our providential destiny, it is therefore worthy of our respect and care. Trees are mirror images of the Tree of Life, which was in the midst of Eden and again in the redeemed cosmos, whose leaves “were for the healing of the nations” (Rev. 22:2). Trees mirror the cosmogenic process in that they are rooted in the ground and grow unto the heavens; whereas the universe is rooted in heaven and extends into the densest matter. In growing toward the heavens, trees also reflect “the earnest expectation [of creation]... for the manifestation of the sons of God” (Rom. 8:19). These are those who have made peace with God (Matthew 5:9) by submittting to His holy will and way; and thus are at peace with God’s creation, as witnessed by St. Jerome’s faithful lion and by St. Seraphim of Sarov’s friendly bear.
And most certainly the righteous reverence the trees. The Irish saint Columba of Iona proclaimed, “Though there is fear in me of death and of hell... I have more fear for the sound of an axe over in Doire” (a forested region near his monastery, which he built without cutting down a single tree).
In his compendium of patristic teaching, St. John of Damascus declared, “It is possible to understand by every tree the knowledge of the divine power derived from created things.” This is the consciousness of the Christian, who should perceive that creation is an epiphany, a “showing forth,” of the Creator, and that every creature exults in its Maker:
“...break forth into singing...O forest, and every tree therein....” (Isaiah 44:23)
How can anyone walk through a grove of oldgrowth redwoods and not sense that he is in a sacred space, and join with the trees in uplifting his heart to God? Only greed and arrogance can harden our hearts to such beauty, which soars far beyond the utility of trees.
As J.R.R. Tolkien described:
“...He laid his hand upon the tree...: never before had he been so suddenly and so keenly aware of the feel and texture of a tree’s skin and of the life within it. He felt a delight in wood and the touch of it, neither as forester nor as carpenter; it was the delight of the living tree itself.”
The Test of Trees
The manner by which we deal with God’s creation always tells us how we are choosing between the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, the fruit of which has been so dearly bought. The former is the Cross of Christ and Christ Himself.
St. Ephraim the Syrian recounts that God created the first trees as a judge for how Adam would relate to His commands. If Adam obeyed God, this would be reflected in how he related to the trees before him.
“The Tree was to him like a gate; its fruit was the veil covering that hidden tabernacle.... Even though all the trees of Paradise are clothed, each in its own glory, yet each veils itself at the Glory; the Seraphs with their wings, the trees with their branches,....” (Hymn III: 12-15)
Here St. Ephraim draws an amazing parallel between angels with their wings and trees with their branches. Trees are to the Christian cosmological consciousness “angels” of the natural world, bestowing blessings upon the created order similar to what angels bestow upon the universe as a whole: the tangible blessings of Christ’s life, light and love.
Therefore Christianity, the Self-revelation of the ineffable God, singularly solves, or defines by its nature, the “problem” of creation. It reveals to us, not why God created, but how He manifests His unmanifest Being. Therefore Christianity, rather than offering explanations about space, time, and matter, and techniques for bypassing them as obstacles to spiritual realization, uses them. For by entering into these, the Logos both redeemed and transfigured the cosmos, and made them living icons, windows into divine knowledge. Instead of being veils over divinity, space, time, and matter they are now the images of the Infinite, Eternal, and Real.
Getting to the Point
We have been so inundated by the media with “crises” that it is difficult to come to grips with an issue that has been with us for so long. The threat to the biosphere has been growing at least since the onset of the Industrial Revolution; in fact, it began with the Fall. Perhaps it would be better to see the ecological dilemma not primarily as a matter of urgency (though it is becoming ever more so), but as a crisis in the true sense: literally, a cross or choice between divergent paths and destinations. Jesus taught that at every moment we stand at a crossroad, one leading to life and the other to destruction (Matthew 7:1314). While most Christians may understand this in terms of their souls, it is also true of our relationship to creation: we are either replenishing, as mankind was first commanded to do with the Garden, or despoiling and abusing that is, destroying. And we will be judged by such choices.
From the Christian point of view, the first discernment which has to be made is that there are no technical solutions to the ecological dilemma. This does not mean that there can’t be new or improved means of providing for our necessities. It simply means that the issue must be understood and addressed at its root which is in us, not only morally, but more precisely, theologically and cosmologically. It is trust in our own abilities, which works out to manipulation of circumstances, hence natural laws, that is at the core the problem. Therefore, to put our trust and best efforts in the political realm is to overlook that politics is the “art” of compromise. Some matters are too great or fundamental for compromise.
Both secular environmentalists and the despoilers they rightly oppose stand on common ground. Both function primarily in social and political arenas, and both hold similar basic assumptions about the issue. That is, they share a common perception of nature. They differ only in the political solutions or economic interests which they advocate. Thus, the process of awakening and change breaks down over peripheral “red herrings” issues such as the importance of jobs or the habitat of endangered species. In this spirit, one of our more popular recent presidents said, while serving as governor of California, “If you’ve seen one redwood tree, you’ve seen them all.” In a truly Christian society, such a remark would be recognized as symptomatic of a deep spiritual sickness that poses a threat to the wellbeing of all.
“The earth also is defiled under the inhabitants thereof; because they have transgressed the laws, changed the ordinance, broken the everlasting covenant [i.e., established with Noah]. Therefore hath the curse devoured the earth, and they that dwell therein are desolate....” (Isaiah 24:56)
In the Apocalypse (Greek, “to uncover or reveal”), the consequences of such an attitude are clearly seen:
“...Thy wrath is come, and the time of the dead, that they should be judged, and that thou should give reward unto thy servants, the prophets, and to the saints, and them that fear thy name, small and great; and shouldest destroy them which destroy the earth” (Rev. 11:18).
The earth is destroyed, forests are wantonly cut down, for the sake of “filthy lucre,” because modern people on both sides of the environmental issue see a tree as merely “a tree.” But
“...their delectable things shall not profit... they see not, nor know.... And none considereth in his heart, neither is there knowledge nor understanding to say... shall I fall down to the stock of a tree?” (Isaiah 44:9,19)
The Witness of the Christian Tradition
St. John of Damascus wrote, “the whole earth is a living icon of the face of God.”
St. Bernard of Clairvaux confessed: “Believe one who knows: you will find something greater in woods than in books. Trees and stones will teach you that which you can never learn from masters.”
Bernards’s contemporary biographer William of St. Thierry wrote that “he confesses that whatever competence he has in the scriptures, whatever spiritual sensitivity he has for them, stems mainly from his meditating or praying in woodland or field. And he jokes merrily of having no other masters for such lessons but the oaks and beeches.”
More recently, St. Nikephoros of Chios (17501821) declared that “if you don’t love trees, you don’t love God.” He declared, “in the future men will become poor because they will not have a love for trees....”
These examples of Christian monks are not isolated. Monasticism, which serves as the standard bearer of Christian spirituality, originally held to the necessity of keeping close to nature. This is because of the monastic striving and necessity of humility (from the Latin humus, “the ground”), and because of a recognition that we are part of “the great chain of being.” This principle means first that we humans are integral to the whole of nature and second that the cosmos is in us as well as beyond us.
“And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground.... And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.” (Gen. 2:7,19)
It is because man is made of the same substance as all other creatures that he is able to name them, that is, to discern and articulate their nature vis a vis the chain of being. This means that Adam apprehended the essence of created things, what the nature of their unfoldment or becoming is, and their place in the great chain. Man is therefore the central link of this chain: he is so placed in it that he mediates between created things and their Creative Source and end or fulfillment. When he no longer fulfills this function either through ignorance or abuse of it then the whole system of creation goes awry, as Alexander Pope wrote:
“...One step broken, the great scales’ destroy’d:
From nature’s chain whatever link you strike,
Tenth or ten thousandth, breakes the chain alike.
And if each system in gradation roll,
Alike essential to th’ amazing whole;
The least confusion but in one, not all
That system only, but the whole must fall.”
Hence, the ecological “crisis.”
The Missing Link
As with all of the breakdowns that we find so alarming whether of public morality, civility, the family or the sanctity of life, Christians must first face their own culpability. To do otherwise, such as to accuse others or blame external forces, is utterly contrary to the spirit and teachings of Jesus Christ. It is stubborn refusal to confront the question of how all this social and ecological chaos occurred on our “watch” (that is, if we are in truth a Christian people). But it is not our religion that is faulty, but ourselves and, most importantly, our contemporary understanding and practice of Christianity. The fact is, there is a missing rung in modern Christianity that not only stunts it spiritually, but makes it complicit in the despoliation of nature. That missing element is cosmology: a comprehensive vision of the created order and the place of mankind as a whole in it.
But the cosmological dimension is missing without being missed. It has been usurped by an antimetaphysical (and therefore antispiritual and antihuman) scientism. It is also of broader dimensions than one might first think: it extends to our whole social and economic life. Therefore, the full scope of the problem requires more than reclaiming the ground surrendered to onedimensional “science,” or something which can be corrected by legislation alone.
As Wendell Berry wrote some years ago:
“What our politics and science has never mastered is the fact that people need more than to understand their obligation to one another and to the earth. They need also the feeling of such obligation, and the feeling can come only within the patterns of familiarity. A nation of urban nomads, such as we have become, may simply be unable to be enough disturbed by its destruction of the ecological health of the land, because the people’s dependence on the land, though it has been expounded to them over and over again in general terms, is not immediate to their feelings.”
Let us at least begin to rearticulate a sacred cosmology, and as we do, we will see its social and economic ramifications. Everything we experience and know in this world is a reflection, or “embodiment,” or “condensation” (the terms can only be suggestive) of a divine principle or archetype. This means that we live in a world of shadows (cf., I Cor. 13:12), if you will, but that even so,
“that which may be known of God is manifest in them.... For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead” (Rom. 1-19-20).
Therefore, the whole created order serves as a ladder of spiritual realization, but only to the extent that one becomes conscious of the true nature of things and his relationship to them, which is one of being a servant or husbandman (Gen. 1:28; Mark 12:1-11).
This is why our traditional monastic brethren have lived apart from civilization in wilderness areas. They have affirmed that it is not possible (with a few exceptions) to ascend to contemplation of theological matters without being grounded in right understanding of the visible world. “Knowledge becomes spiritual,” St. Peter of Damascus said, “after we are firmly established in the contemplation of sensible realities” (italics mine). This is the patristic consensus. Therefore, nature was understood in Christendom, and not ony by holy men or women such as Bernard of Clairvaux, as “the second scripture.” That is, we will not rightly understand nature apart from the Revelation recorded in the Bible; but neither can we understand the Bible without a correct perception of the cosmos.
As Fr. Georges Florovsky declared, our times therefore simultaneously require a return to, or a restoration of, “the lost scriptural mind,” and “a Christian philosophy... a sacred philosophy... a philosophy of the Holy Spirit.” He writes,
“...a clear knowledge of God is impossible for man, if he is committed to vague and false conceptions of the world and of himself. There is nothing surprising about this. For the world is the creation of God and therefore, if one has a false understanding of the world, one attributes to God a work which he did not produce; one therefore casts a distorted judgment on God’s activity and will.”
In a similar spirit, St. Basil the Great wrote, “A single plant, a blade of grass or one speck of dust is sufficient to occupy all your intelligence in beholding the art with which it has been made.” We have devolved so far from this realization that a national leader can say “If you’ve seen one tree, you’ve seen them all,” or that forests translate either into “habitats” or “jobs.” This sort of statement can happen only because we have lost the native cosmology which gives context to our Christian faith.
Cosmology therefore must be the vocation of all Christians.
Restoring a sense of the sacred
Only when the cosmological framework of the ancient Church is restored to modern Christianity can we effectively address at their root the social and ecological problems of our era. Christianity is not an “ism,” an ideology, or a belief system made by men (II Peter 1:16). Neither is it an institution, nor even a “society of believers.” And it certainly is not the residue of Christianity that passes for the whole of it in these latter days. It is nothing less than the fullest embodiment of the Revelation of God, the highest and (w)holiest expression of the Truth. For Christians, the latter is neither a philosophical concept nor an abstraction that one is ever seeking, but a Person. This Person was (and is) with the Absolute “before the world was,” but in these last days (of the fallen world) entered into the conditions of the world in order to redeem and sanctify it.
Our Lord Jesus Christ was crucified on a tree, making it (His Cross) the source of life for those who believe. As we follow Christ, He restores in us “the sense of the sacred.” This is the first thing that must be recovered in order to resolve the seemingly insoluble dilemmas that confront us. Until we awaken to see in the towering living pillars we call trees a manifestation of the goodness and glory of God, they will continue to be seen merely as habitat, or perhaps dollars waiting to be harvested.
“Yellow metal fever,” is how the Sioux medicine man Black Elk wisely diagnosed the plague spread by false and post-Christians. Its effect is insanity. “The white man is crazy,” the Indian chief says in the film Little Big Man. “He believes that everything is dead.” Christ says we cannot serve God and Mammon. This must be the first and most obvious realization that will lead to ecological healing, beginning with the bridging of the fissure in our own souls, and between our souls and bodies. In true Christianity there is not only no dichotomy or separation between these, they are healed and made whole for Christ our God Who destroyed death by His own death.
We will not be able to act rightly and effectively without apprehending the meaning and purpose of our own lives and the life of the creatures placed in our care.
“Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.”
Jesus Christ united in himself and thence imparts to us genuine knowing or consciousness with an ethos and morality that alone are viable in this and every age.
Authentic belief in God means “to seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness” (Matthew 633). To take up this posture of discipleship, of learning from the Master of all, is to rid ourselves of the all-destroying passions of consumerism, of conquest of nature and others for our supposed benefit, and of conflict, political and ecological.
The conflict over jobs and endangered habitats, for example, is reconfigured by the sense of the sacred. This is where cosmology touches our most protected presumptions. We would then see that it is ourselves, not the whales or spotted owls, which are the most endangered species... not biologically perhaps, but in terms of what it means to be human, and to fulfill our necessary and central role in the natural order. For our dignity and destiny can only be upheld and fulfilled by right livelihood. Here the understanding of Ananda Coomaraswamy is indispensable:
“In the normal society...occupation is vocational. It is intended that every man shall be engaged in the useful occupation for which he is best fitted by nature, and in which therefore he can best serve the society to which he belongs and at the same time realize his own perfection.... Everyone makes use of things that are made artfully, as the designation ‘artefact’ implies, and everyone possesses an art of some sort, whether of painting, sculpture, blacksmithing, weaving, cookery or agriculture....
“An integrated society of this sort can function harmoniously for millenia, in the absence of external interference. On the other hand, the contentment of innumerable peoples can be destroyed in a generation by the withering touch of industrial civilization; the local market is flooded by a production in quantity with which the responsible maker by art cannot compete; the vocational structure of society, with its guild organization and standards of workmanship, is undermined; the artist is robbed of his art and forced to find himself a ‘job’; until finally the ancient society is industrialized and reduced to the level of such societies as ours, in which business takes precedence of life.”
“The man who has a ‘job’ is working for ulterior motives, and may be quite indifferent to the quality of the product, for which he is not responsible; all that he wants in this case is to secure an adequate share of the expected profits. But one whose vocation is specific, that is to say is naturally and constitutionally adapted to and trained in some one or another kind of making, is really doing what he likes most; and if he is forced by circumstances to do some other kind of work, even though more highly paid, is actually unhappy. The vocation, whether it be that of the farmer or the architect, is a function; the exercise of this function as regards the man himself is the most indispensable means of spiritual development, and as regards his relation to society the measure of his worth....
“It is the tragedy of a society industrially organised for profit that this justice to each man in himself is denied him; and any such society literally and inevitably plays the Devil with the rest of the world.”
Ananda Coomaraswamy, Christian and Oriental Philosophy of Art, Dover Publications)
It should be clear in this light that right livelihood links what we do with our rightful dignity and destiny; which in turn has everything to do with right relationship to trees and indeed all of creation. Unless we are willing to face this situation squarely, the degradation of the environment will inevitably overwhelm us, in spite of our best intentions. And from the religious point of view, our “faith” will continue to be shallow and of no effect, either in terms of spiritual development (as Coomaraswamy points out), attaining “the kingdom of God,” or in “seeking His righteousness,” expressed in good stewardship over His creation.
Therefore, the primary task of any who would heal the wounds we have inflicted on the world and ourselves is to restore the sense of the sacred. To try to do this apart from the spiritual Tradition imparted to us by the grace of God, is to refuse to face one’s blindness in attempting to see. For
“...the mission of all the prophets from the beginning has not been so much the pointing out of heavens or hells as primarily the pointing out of the earth.
“Religion has had to provide that longest and strangest telescope -- the telescope through which we could see the star upon which we dwell. For the mind and eyes of the average man this world is as lost as Eden and as sunken as Atlantis. There runs a strange law through the length of human history -- that men are continually tending to undervalue their environment, to undervalue their happiness, to undervalue themselves. The great sin of mankind, the sin typified by the fall of Adam, is the tendency, not towards pride, but towards this weird and horrible humility.
“This is the great fall, the fall by which the fish forgets the sea, the ox forgets the meadow, the clerk forgets the city, every man forgets his environment and, in the fullest and most literal sense, forgets himself.... It is a strange thing that many truly spiritual men... have actually spent some hours in speculating upon the precise location of the Garden of Eden. Most probably we are in Eden still. It is only our eyes that have changed.”
G.K. Chesterton, The Defendant
________________________________________
Fr. Benjamin Teitelbaum was a priest and theologian of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, Boston, Massachusetts. He wrote this article while terminally ill with advanced liver cancer. He reposed in the Lord on November, 9th, 2000.
