I recently toured colleges that feature environmental science programs with my daughter. I was struck by a contrast in manifestations of students’ relationship to nature at various institutions. Most of the students at the college where I teach study applied biology in disciplines such as wildlife, forestry and agriculture. Through their long term, direct engagement with organisms, often in the context of natural habitat, students can’t help but to build holistic mental models of organisms. Sugar maples have a certain nature that makes them sugar maples and goats have their own nature. No amount of cell and molecular biology (which they also deeply study) can overcome the sense that each organism has an integrity and is striving to flourish as the being that it is. The agency of these creatures demands attention, and these students see the goal of their work as a harmonious relationship between culture and nature.

Contrast this with the students we met at some other institutions. In one, we met several very bright, very focused students positively delighting in genetic modification of organisms for no purpose but to show that it could be done. Others, with a tone of deconstructive irony that would make Derrida and Rorty blush, mocked a squirrel fooled by their robotic squirrel simulacrum. Driving away, I was relieved at my daughter’s one word response to my now expected waddayathink inquiry: “Creepy.” At another institution, one with some of the finest indoor lab and field study resources I have ever seen, I asked a professor whether she had a sense that students in her environmental science program felt a mission to make the world a better place. She responded that her institution was quite costly, and that parents expect their children to go out and make a lot of money as soon as they graduate. These graduates, harnessing the power of reductionism as primary rather than a sense of the Good, may become more of the problem than the answer.

 Immersion in real farms and forests has imbued my students with another sensibility that is not found on any list of “learning outcomes” that form the college’s official program. For these students, forestry and farming have the quality of art as well as science. This is increasingly rare in applied science fields. A couple of the most published ecologists I know take “systems thinking” very seriously. As ecologists they can explain how “everything is connected.” In contrast to our students, however, for these scientists the complex connections of nature are seen as so complicated that prescriptions for operating in nature must be turned over to experts who will treat the matter as an engineering problem. These scientists might be missing what my students intuitively grasp: getting to know an organism is just as important as knowing about an organism, and we often miss the former in science and in our popular outcomes-based approach to teaching.

Once or twice a year I take a more philosophical turn from my otherwise applied science lessons, attempting to ground sustainability science with the observations above. My students inevitably ask for more. Likewise, young farmers I work with have asked the editor of our organic farming news magazine to cover more “spirituality,” even when most have a difficult time further explaining what they mean by the term. Both communities lack the conceptual resources to reconcile the reductionism in the essential scientific aspects of their work with their direct experience of nature. Like them, I seek a Theory of Everything that would bring together my phenomenological “thrown into” experience of the world—cultural and natural—with the science that I study and teach.

An early modern attempt to understand the big picture involved imagining a dualistic world of facts and meaning, and assigning questions to either science or religion. For contemporary environmentalism, assigning any questions to religion would not seem like to most fruitful place to start. After all, the environmental spectrum in most churches spans a very narrow bandwidth from ambivalence to climate denial. A most obvious concern for those of us working in environmental fields is that, as a demographic, evangelical Christians continue to question climate change, evolution, and science in general; and they have subsumed a libertarian capitalism into their world view as if it was rooted in the gospel. The national significance of their anti-science stance is exemplified by the election of Donald Trump.

And yet, as a lay person exploring contemporary theology, I have been quite intrigued at what the history of the Western tradition has to offer.

In this essay I introduce some developments in theology that may be familiar to students of theology, but that seem to me to have particular relevance to contemporary environmentalism. Collectively, I’m going to combine the work of many philosophical theologians under the rubric, “The Recovered Tradition.” Importantly, the theologians I’m drawing from do not fit the traditional categories of conservative or liberal. They come from all streams of the church—Roman and Anglican Catholic, Orthodox, and a few Protestants. They are united by certain understandings of classical theism common to many religions, an emphasis on pre-modern metaphysics and theology, and a general consensus about junctures where theology took turns that need to be corrected. While they can identify common motivations and historical influences underpinning their work and their current collaborations, there is a high degree of “convergent evolution” from different starting points in their work. 

A Problematic Dualism Shared by Religion and Science

According to this Recovered Tradition, the dominant theology of the past 400 years has emphasized a strong separation between the order of nature and the order of grace, the secular and the sacred, the natural and the supernatural. In these schools—versions of which are present in Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox traditions–the natural world is seen as a fixed order, imposed on nature from an external, designing God.¹ As illustrated by the insistence of American evangelicals on Christianity’s compatibility with capitalism, economics is also seen as the result of the unfolding of inevitable scientific laws, undoubtedly revealing the thinking of a cosmic designer.² John Locke moved God to a distant place where we might encounter him at final judgment, and Jefferson slightly reworked Locke’s philosophy to move the Engineer-Designer so far from his creation to make him obsolete once the laws of nature are grasped.³  Public arguments between theists and scientists focus on whether the natural world is the inevitable result of a pre-planning God or the inevitable result of natural selection and other natural laws.

The negative consequences of this dualism—either in its Christian or scientific usage—is widespread. Whether you first recognize the problem as an environmentalist, a biologist, a social justice worker, or a churchgoer, the root misconception is the same. Some examples of this flawed theology include…

• In January 2019, the president of Liberty University defended President Trump’s moral failures, personal and political, using the modern dualism I have described: In heaven we are to treat people as we would want to be treated ourselves. On earth, however, the task of a president is to do what is in the interest of the nation, not the heavenly kingdom.⁴ 
• In some schools of the Roman Catholic world, the strict separation of the orders of nature and of grace, earth and heaven, with the church as the gatekeeper between the two, has exacerbated the disenchantment of nature, reduced the church sacraments to superstitions, and made a creator God seem obsolete.⁵ The exit doors are crowded as parishioners find implausible the narrative that abusing priests get into heaven but the abused who flee from the church lose their ticket in when they abandon the bread and wine.
• Within American Christianity, fundamentalists endeavor to make Christianity safe for capitalism. Like the modern picture of a world of inert atoms ruled by extrinsic laws, atomized citizens are subject to the “hidden hand” of economic laws which operate best if not interfered with so letting a libertarian capitalist greed rule the day would be for the good of all.
• Bioethicists operate under a worldview where we don’t have to worry about violating the “nature” of a goat because such a nature doesn’t exist, only abstract parts and processes.
• Systems biologists are making progress in our understanding of how larger systems influence the genome, but this progress continues to be slowed by biologists stuck in the mental model that brought us the selfish gene and the central dogma that information flow moves only from the genes outward.⁶ 
• Philosophers of mind, anxious to get rid of the mind-body dualism are resorting to the extreme theory that the mind doesn’t really exist.⁷ 

As John Milbank points out, this religious and scientific dualism will increasingly foster the conviction that we need to turn all of our environmental and economic decisions over to the “experts.”⁸  In the face of runaway climate change and economic collapse, in a world governed by complex natural laws, naturally or divinely imposed, the everyday citizen is ill-equipped to make decisions that are necessary for our survival. A technocracy that tells us exactly how much water we can use and how much carbon dioxide we can emit will be seen as our only hope whether we derive our prescriptions from the physics textbook (advocated by most mainstream religions and nonreligious alike) or the bible read as a technical manual (advocated by a few fundamentalists). 

David Bentley Hart uses similar examples to show the two common approaches to overcoming the dualism of modernity: either somehow balancing the two sides or eliminating one side or the other.⁹ 

In the contemporary recovery of patristic and medieval theology, theologians claim that the dualism cannot be overcome in this way. In the Recovered Tradition, nature and grace, the natural and the supernatural, the sacred and the secular can be distinguished but make no sense if separated. Truth, Beauty, and Goodness (names of God, ultimately convertible with one another) are infinite. All finite reality exists by participation in them, and, while we cannot fathom reality comprehensibly (i.e., we cannot tame its wildness) the world’s intelligibility and our ability to reason about it have the same source. We encounter the supernatural in our everyday world.

The Paradigm Shift to Modern Dualism

In early Christianity as well as natural philosophy (as early science was called) any extrinsic purpose—such as given by God to the cosmos or given to human made objects by their artisan—always included giving to those things their own intrinsic purpose—or rather, their purpose defines what each particular thing is.¹⁰  We could say that the actuality (the reality) of the oak tree lies in potentiality in the acorn, or the purpose of the acorn is the oak tree. A good acorn produced a good oak tree. Truth and goodness were intrinsic to the things themselves. In a hierarchically-ordered way, each thing had agency (with humans having more agency than, say, insects). Freedom was defined as the ability of an agent to flourish as the type of being one was.

In the early modern period, however, purpose was seen to come to objects solely extrinsically—from God or human minds.¹¹ Objects were simply “stuff” until their purpose was imposed on them. God was no longer simultaneously immanent and transcendent, but instead became the clockmaker God of deism. Today’s fundamentalists, reaching back only as far as the fundamentals of the modern era and the birth of science, accept this dualism. The result is Intelligent Design theory or other forms of deistic creationism.

To better understand how the paradigm shift to modernity undermined theology and science, a genealogical sketch may help.

The tale told by Simon Oliver and others in the Recovered Tradition, starts around 1300. Whereas in early Christianity God’s Truth and Goodness were seen as primary, under the influence of theologians such as Duns Scotus and William of Ockham, will and power became the dominant principles associated with God. God could define the Good however he wanted as we his subjects were to be obedient to his “inscrutable” and “sovereign” will.¹² Gone was the earlier Christian idea that the goodness of things was inextricably linked to their intelligibility; goodness was now extrinsic to the things of nature.    

Michael Hanby has described in detail this transition.¹³ Voluntarism, as the position advocating dominance of the will is known, was the beginning of an ever-stronger separation of nature and grace. God was no longer seen as Infinite Being but as a mechanical engineer imposing extrinsically the brute facts of design onto inert matter, building the machine we call the universe and stepping aside. Purposes were voluntaristically imposed by God on nature and by humans on their artifacts “from the outside” so to speak. We could learn how nature is designed (the laws of nature), but the Good they manifested was reduced to the extrinsic criteria of their human utility rather than their successful manifestation of their own intrinsic nature. As Simon Oliver describes, early modern scientists struggled to find the human usefulness of seemingly useless organisms such as wood borers. (God made them to enhance international trade. They ruin British ships, thereby creating the necessity of purchasing wood from France!).¹⁴ 

The unfortunate result of the modernist turn is that, as moderns, we all, theist or atheist, tend toward a mechanistic mental model of nature. Christians tend to see the soul as a Cartesian “ghost in a machine.” As exemplified in Neo-Scholastic tradition, nature exists in one order, heaven in another, and the church lies at the border administering the sacraments as the ticket to cross. The clockmaker god of Deism followed the 17th century beginning of modern science and has now been given a modern gloss in Intelligent Design. This Newtonian God-As-Engineer supposedly took the atoms of nature and organized them with nature’s laws. Locke, substituting persons for Newton’s atoms, claimed that our economics and politics also obey hidden laws written by a deistic designer God.

Thus today, if the world is a machine, then if God exists, he is the one who created the laws of nature and forced them onto matter. Fundamentalist Christians argue that this God exists and that we owe this God gratitude. Atheists argue that this God does not exist, and the designs attributed to him can be explained by natural selection or cosmology. Still others can’t help feeling that if this is all God is, he’s obsolete once we have learned the laws ourselves, so God has become an uninteresting question. (Once my house is built, what thought do I give the architect? Maybe, if I’m well brought up, send her/him a Christmas card expressing my gratitude now and then?) Environmentally-minded pastors and priests struggle to emotionally connect their flocks to nature when nature is simply a clever artifact of a now obsolete builder rather than revealing something of God in its intrinsic truth, beauty and goodness. 

Intrinsic Teleology and Transcendent, Infinite Good

Theologians of the Recovered Tradition call for recovery of patristic and medieval versions of Aristotle’s system of “causes,” which David Bentley Hart points out were more like descriptions of rational relations than what today we think of as causes.¹⁵ In this system, describing what a thing is means describing what it is made of, how it is formed, its nature or essence, and, included as part of its nature, what it is finally oriented towards, i.e., its teleology. As in the earlier example, the acorn is innately oriented towards growing into an oak tree. Criteria for identifying the “Good” is found within a given thing. The “good” and the “true” are discerned together by the intellect because in created beings the degree of goodness is judged by how something fulfills its telos i.e., its purpose or goal. The good to which a thing is ordered is intrinsic to what that something is, its true being. A good tree grows, spreads its branches, gives shelter to the wildlife around it. A good meal is tasty and nourishing. Form and telos are intrinsic, belonging to the thing itself, so to speak, regardless of the co-presence of any extrinsic goal imposed as with human made objects.

For theologians of the Recovered Tradition the individual organism is a manifestation of its essence and its relationships with its neighbors. All of the parts of nature express their inner telos in relation and so have agency. Our human nature is part of nature and yet also transcends it, giving us special responsibility as to how we interact with the other agents of nature.  

Human consciousness, as part of nature, points beyond our experience to the transcendent.¹⁶ In our human nature we experience an intrinsic, intentional, purposiveness. These intentions to know nature, to desire, to will anything in immanent reality are enfolded in a desire to know truth itself. And every desire, even the simplest or most self-centered, is always a desire for some “good.” Every recognition of truth, goodness or beauty implies a scale of experience, the infinite horizon of which we can conceive but never reach of our own accord because it lies transcendent of our immanent, finite experience.

Because truth, beauty and goodness are infinite in their depth, the holistic intelligibility of the world, then, is beyond our full comprehension. We can work toward the Good, letting limited goods point us in the right direction, but because there is no set plan then, as John Milbank points out, our intuitions, hunches and ability to feel our way toward the Good are going to be more successful than technocratic prescriptions.¹⁷  Preserving both the intelligibility and the unfathomability of the world, the Recovered Tradition fosters wonder over mere curiosity and instrumental reason.¹⁸ 

Unlike the dualistic theology and science of the modern era, in the Recovered Tradition, creation ex nihilo, creation from nothing, means that God’s original gift of creation gives to creation its existence and its agency to continue creation through its own activity. Freedom is the ability of agents to strive toward greater fulfilment of this natural flourishing rather than the untethered “freedom as the unobstructed power to choose” that dominates our thinking today.¹⁹ Freedom is more than the power to choose and is not increased by more choices. It is inextricably bound up with the good whose beauty attracts us.

Our freedom, and our nature, and our very existence are gifts; “a gift to a gift of a gift,” as theologian Simon Oliver, following on the work of John Milbank, puts it.²⁰ The origin and end, where Truth, Beauty, and Good converge, the early theologians called “God.” This God is not a hypothesis used to fill in a gap in scientific discovery but a logical conclusion, an uncaused cause, the transcendent Good that our immanent, everyday experience points to but that lies beyond our reach.

My students want to protect the goatiness of a goat or the mapleness of a sugar maple as they work with them. They want to work in conversation with nature. The Recovered Tradition, where one’s intrinsic telos is a gift, justifies their intuition that each thing has a nature or an essence. Further, students have moments of wonder—astonishment, admiration, awe—which are dismissed today as merely subjective emotional states. If we accept the insights of the Recovered Tradition, however, then wonder becomes an intelligible, rational reaction to nature as a finite, immanent expression analogous to an infinite, transcendent source.

In Summary

A duality was created, first in theology and then in natural and social science, in the early modern period. On one side was purpose, intentionality, God, mind, grace. On the other side was the physical world, irrational matter, and mechanical causation. As technology, democracy and capitalism mature, the flaws in this dualism become clearer, and the environmental consequences more severe. The fundamentalist response is to take us back to the 16th century for answers, but the Recovered Tradition encourages us to look back to the 4th through the 13th century, before the era of the mechanical philosophy.

In the Recovered Tradition nature is already sacred. Theologians of this tradition are working to place the laws of nature and economics, which have been abstracted from a larger reality during the modern period, back in that larger context where they will not blind us to the reality of mind, intentional purpose, ethics, agency, and teleology. Nature is then seen as a gift, evoking wonder and respect. An intuitive sense of beauty and goodness finds application in environmental sustainability or the development of a healthy rural economy alongside scientific models.

Nonbelievers may see in the work of this movement some helpful corrections to fundamentalist intransigence on environmental issues, and, maybe, insight into how the mechanistic mental model that pervades scientific inquiry and economic thought should be reconsidered.

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