Spirit astir in the world: Wendell Berry's sacramental poetry

IN the thirty-two years since historian Lynn White, Jr., first described Christianity as "the most anthropocentric religion the world has seen," Christian environmentalists have responded. by articulating their faith in various shades of green (1205). Among such apologists, the Kentucky writer and farmer, Wendell Berry, has assumed a leading role in guiding Christians past centuries of institutionalized misconceptions toward a scriptural basis for environmental ethics. Berry's primary aim is to reverse our historical tendency to desacralize the material world and nonhuman beings, which has left them open to exploitation. He does so by arguing that the earth and all of its aspects are invested with intrinsic value-not only as creations of God, but as vibrant expressions of divinity. Berry's vision is most explicitly described in a number of essays, especially "The Gift of Good Land" ( 1981 ), "God and Country" ( 1990), and "Christianity and the Survival of Creation" (1992). It is his poetry, however, that best demonstrates what it means to dwell in a holy community of ongoing creation. A careful reading of selected poems will reveal a great deal about the particulars of Berry's Christian ecology, and it will also suggest how nature poetry in general functions as ritual in an age of environmental crisis.

Our culture's willingness to abuse our environment depends on the earth and its nonhuman processes being perceived as fundamentally secular, possessing no inherent value higher than that determined by their utility to humans. Berry recognizes the danger of believing in an inanimate world, and in fact he describes the "greatest disaster of human history [as the] one that happened . . . within religion: that is, the conceptual division between the holy and the world" (Continuous 6). While most historians agree that a secular view of the world developed long before Christianity arrived on the scene-perhaps as early as our first experiments with agriculture-there has been a tendency within the environmental community to blame this ontological justification of environmental abuse on our Judeo-Christian heritage. Of course, even if the Hebrew and Christian faiths were not initially responsible for the Western tradition of an inanimate earth, few would deny that they have frequently been interpreted in ways that legitimate the devaluation and exploitation of our sustaining ecosystems.

The contemporary debate over Christianity's culpability in encouraging environmental exploitation began in the spring of 1967, when White's essay, "The Historical Roots of our Ecologic Crisis," appeared in Science. White, then a professor of medieval and renaissance history at UCLA, describes how Hebrew and Christian cosmologies have been used to justify human disregard for the nonhuman world in several interrelated ways. To begin with, the biblical account is often understood to depict the human species as inherently separate from the material earth by virtue of a transcendent soul. This perception fosters the belief that our experience in this world is merely a temporary separation from our heavenly home; thus, what happens to this material stage on which we enact the drama of spiritual salvation is of little consequence. There is, of course, considerable ecological danger in contrasting an ephemeral planet to an eternal afterlife, as was poignantly illustrated when former Secretary of the Interior, James Watt, argued that "we need not preserve the forests because God would be coming soon to end the world" (Sanders 281). Furthermore, many Christians have interpreted the biblical creation story to read that the nonhuman world has been provided solely for human benefit; and thus our excessive demands on natural systems often presume a religious sanction. Finally, for centuries Christian missions have effaced other cultures' traditions of a sacred earth, and White contends that "by destroying pagan animism, Christianity made it possible to exploit nature in a mood of indifference to the feelings of natural objects" (1205). Although his article is too often mistaken for a blanket condemnation of Christianity, White-who is himself a Christian--concludes with a call for reformation of the church based on the model of St. Francis of Assisi. Whatever his intentions, there is no question that White's article effectively established Christianity's role as a scapegoat in many environmental circles.

In the years following the publication of White's essay, his charges have been reiterated and rebuffed dozens of times. While some resistance from Christian ecologists has been primarily reactionary, most have paused to grant that the organized church has indeed neglected the care of creation before attending to White's specific charges. The most common point of contention between Christian and non-Christian ecologists remains the legitimacy of human dominion over the world, especially since so many in the environmental movement espouse an ecocentric philosophy-a belief in the nonhierarchical interdependence of organisms within an ecosystem. The debate centers on the divine mandate given Adam to "be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth" (Genesis 1.28).