GREEN ORTHODOXY
I love my adopted country;
after all I've lived here nearly twenty years. However, by no stretch of the
imagination can love for the environment be called a characteristic Greek
trait. Although things are changing slowly, especially among the young, there
is still illegal burning of forests for building land; boats still carelessly
flush out their bilges, polluting the sea with petrol; many people still throw
litter wherever they feel like it; in most municipalities, recycling is still a
joke. This is astonishing, given the regard for the environment implicit in
Orthodoxy from the earliest times.
As early as the fourth
century, St. Basil the Great was writing, “In the beginning, God created a
wonderful order …. A most desirable beauty. … You are now able to conceive the
invisible through what is visible in the world … so that the earth, the air,
the skies, the rains, the night and the day – in fact, everything that you can
see – may be traces of the Creator … I want the created order to penetrate you
with so much admiration that everywhere, wherever you may be, the least plant
may bring to you the clear remembrance of the Creator.” This theme of the
created world being an image of God has continued through the ensuing seventeen
centuries. For example, in the nineteenth century, St. Silouan the Athonite
wrote succinctly that “The heart that has learnt to love, has pity for all
creation,” while Dostoyevsky had his character Zossima, based on St. Tikhon of
Zadonsk, say, “Love all God’s creation, the whole of it and every grain of
sand. Love every leaf, every ray of God’s light! Love the animals, love the
plants, love everything. If you love everything, you will perceive the divine
mystery in things. And once you have perceived it, you will at last come to
love the whole world with an abiding, universal love.”
In recent years, however,
concern for the way we treat God's work has been expressed more explicitly by
Orthodox theologians. Fr. John Chryssavgis, for example writes in “Beyond The
Shattered Image”, “Every single thing on the face of the earth tells of the
love of the Creator: it speaks aloud of the unity of God and of the at-one-ment
between heaven and earth. That is, if it is allowed, if it is heard …. Indeed,
there is a very vital sense in which everything in this world not only reveals
but even fulfils the Kingdom of God. ….. This world, in spite of its shattered
image, remains a completion of the heavenly kingdom. For, just as we are
incomplete without the rest of animal and material creation, so too the kingdom
of God remains incomplete without the world around us.” (By the way, I strongly
recommend this book for anyone interested in a much more detailed study of the
topic than these brief notes.)
In 1989, Ecumenical
Patriarch Dimitrios designated 1st September, the beginning of the Orthodox
ecclesiastical year, as a “day for the protection of the environment,”
confirming once and for all the deep respect for the environment that is
central to Orthodox belief. Orthodox theology has never interpreted man’s
‘dominion’ over the created world as an excuse for tyranny or pillage. Rather,
since the world was given to us by God, it is our duty to protect and enhance
it. We are the custodians of the world, not its rulers and Patriarch Dimitrios
makes this crystal clear: “Let us consider ourselves, each according to his or
her position, to be personally responsible for the world, entrusted into our
hands by God. Whatever the Son of God has assumed and made His body by His
Incarnation should not perish. But it should become a eucharistic offering to
the Creator, a life-giving bread, partaken in justice and love with the others,
a hymn of peace for all creatures of God.”
His All Holiness
Bartholomaios has continued the environmental work of the Patriarchate and, in
1997, summed up the Orthodox view of environmentalism succinctly: “To commit a
crime against the natural world is a sin. For humans to cause species to become
extinct and to destroy the biological diversity of God’s creation; for humans
to degrade the integrity of the earth by causing changes in its climate, by
stripping the earth of its natural forests, or destroying its wetlands; for
humans to contaminate the earth’s waters, its lands, its air and its life with
poisonous substances – these are sins.” Never one for words rather than
action, the patriarch has been deeply
involved in many environmental projects, details of which can be found on the
Patriarchate website http://www.patriarchate.org/environment .
It's an uphill struggle,
however, and maybe we'll just have to wait for the “new Heaven and new earth”
foretold in the Bible to see a clean, unpolluted, sanctified world where “the
wolf also shall dwell with the lamb and the leopard shall lie down with the
kid.” C. S. Lewis, in his wonderful Christian fable ‘The Chronicles of Narnia’, describes
the new creation charmingly: “Every rock and flower and blade of grass looked
the same but as if it meant more.” In the meantime, we need to accept that care
for the environment is not just a matter of self-preservation, important though
this may be, but our Christian duty. To quote John Chryssavgis again, “I know
that I should not treat people like things; but I need also to learn not to
treat things like things. My presence in this world must enhance and embrace
nature, not threaten or destroy it. … With regard to the environment, we are
not the ‘good Samaritan’ but the ‘highway robbers.’” Fr. Amphilochius, one of
the most outstanding monks of the 20th century was even more blunt: “Whoever
does not love trees, does not love Christ.”
Could this be the battle cry for a new movement of ‘Green Orthodox’?
