Why the Environment Needs Bonaventure
Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash
This week on Wednesday, the Church marked the feast day of my favourite Church Father, St. Bonaventure. I fell in love with his thought after introducing him to my students in medieval philosophy when teaching at Campion College, and letting them know that Aquinas was not the only scholastic show in town.
Another reason why I found Bonaventure fascinating was introducing a way to think through a problem I picked up from tutoring environmentalism in a course on political ideologies many years before. The thinkers introduced in that course alerted us to a levelling of the human species vis a vis other animals, and some equated the protection of the natural environment (as distinct from the built environment) with reversing what was called “anthropocentrism”, or keeping the human species at the centre of all political thought. Some of the thinkers blamed Christianity for making such anthropocentrism possible, while some went further to equate the protection of the environment with adopting a hostile posture towards the human species as a whole.
Whilst I believed the Christian ought to be concerned for the welfare of the natural environment, I was wary of buying into the anthropophobic premises some of the strands of environmentalism. Reading Pope Francis’ Laudato Si’ and being reminded of the concept of “human ecology” in Catholic Social Teaching, suggested that the Christian should not be left with the reductionist choice of either anthropophobia on the one hand and the unfettered anthropocentrism on the other, both of which presume an inherent conflict between the human species and the rest of creation.
What reading on Catholic Social Teaching and Bonaventure alerted me to was that the key lay in finding a new form of anthropocentrism, a picture of the environment with humanity at its centre, which at the same time resists a voraciously consumerist humanity.
To get past this tension, the notion of the stewardship of man is very often put forward by Christian greens as the solution to keeping that anthropocentrist vision of the environment. Yet, the question remains: what is the content of stewardship? Without any positive content, stewardship becomes a slippery term that can run the risk of affirming that very consumerist notion of anthropocentrism.
A way forward can be gleaned with a read of Illa Delio’s book Simply Bonaventure, a chapter of which looks into Bonaventure’s Trinitarian theology. For Bonaventure, the outpouring of the Trinity within creation leaves a mark of the Godhead within each and every creature, both animate and inanimate. There is thus a mark of the holy in every creature, but this sacralisation resists the pantheism that is characteristic of strands of today’s environmentalism. This is so for two reasons. First, their sacralisation is not of the environment per se, but emerges from the relationship between the cosmos and the God who made it. Secondly, rather than remain as they are, all creatures have within them a spiritual pull towards the God who made them, to return to the source from whence they sprung forth. This sets in train a procession of the cosmos towards its Creator, with each creature undergoing a process of perfection the closer it gets to God.
Bonaventure writes that each creature undergoes this process of perfection not of their own volition, but by a process of following “models”. These are higher forms of creatureliness that are more advanced in the path towards the return to God. Bonaventure draws on Scripture and neoplatonic philosophy to get to this insight, and sees this in the biblical accounts of creation where more and more complex lifeforms are created with each passing day. In addition, Bonaventure sees in each creature a world of potential for transformation to other higher lifeforms (a principle he calls hylomorphism). The notion of perfection and the following of models suggests not a conflict, but a profound harmony within creation, with an order and telos – namely the Triune God.
However, Bonaventure writes that creation’s return to God can only be properly modeled by a creature that is a composite of material and spiritual nature, which returns to God by its own free will rather than by instinct. For Bonaventure, only the human creature, who is a composite of body and rational soul, can lead the cosmos on this return to God. This is the reason why Bonaventure considers humanity as the center of creation. Humanity is given the charge of all of creation to lead that creation’s return into the Trinitarian economy. Thus, in the writings of Bonaventure, humanity retains his privileged position in the order of creation.
At the same time, however, that privileged position is qualified by his awareness of every creature’s destination towards the Triune God and the need for that universe’s perfection, which can only come from God (even though it is mediated by the human species). This anthropocentrism therefore is one that is grounded in the worship of God rather than the worship of man. To shift the worship away from God to the human creature, Scripture equates to a state of original sin where humans deign to become “like gods” (Gen 3:5).
Though Bonaventure himself does not say this, this kind of redeemed anthropocentric environmentalism is a Eucharistic one. As Catherine Pickstock reminds us, the Eucharist dedicates to God not just bread and wine, but all the materials that are used in their making – wood, stone, wax, plants, flesh and air. This Eucharistic reminder that it is God that gives us these gifts, is what prevents the confusion between the perfection of Creation in its Godward pilgrimage, and the human subjugation of creation to satisfy its own insatiable appetites. Such appetites are insatiable precisely because they point to the infinite and transcendent dimension of the human species which, when ordered rightly, should point us in turn to the infinite and transcendent God who made us.
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