Fruit of the Earth and Work of Human Hands: Connecting the Eucharist and Regenerative Agriculture 1

The Mechanical Mind and the Technocratic Paradigm as Forms of General Bias

At the heart of today’s ecological crisis lies the breakdown of the global agricultural system. On the one hand, the last 100 years have witnessed a massive agricultural shift away from fallowing and a reliance on animals for organic fertilizer. On the other hand, this era has witnessed a shift towards synthetic fertilizers, mechanized methods heavily reliant on fossil fuels, intensive seed selection, chemical weedicides and pesticides, and the excessive use of genetically modified plants. As a result, observes Massy, ‘the entire landscape [has] been modified to suit modern agriculture’s giant machines and technologies.’ ⁸ Stemming from the West, these intensive methods have spread rapidly across the globe, through both commerce and colonialism.

The results have been disastrous, for both earth and humanity, for both natural and human ecologies. ⁹ The heavy use of fossil fuels and the excessive emission of greenhouse gases like methane make the current agricultural system one of the largest contributors to climate change. Chemical runoff from pesticides and synthetic fertilizers pollutes streams. The intensive, extractive methods of industrial farming deforest woodlands and erode the soil, leading to droughts and floods. Monocultural farming undermines biodiversity and devastates ecosystems. ¹⁰ Animals suffer abuse and mistreatment. Inhumane working conditions endanger the lives of poor laborers who have no other employment options. The dominance of mega-farms disempowers local communities, as family-owned, small-scale farms approach extinction. Every day, yet another study confirms the unhealthiness of processed foods that saturate the market, the empty carbs that fail to sate stomachs. ¹¹ Most ironically, exacerbated by unequal distribution and overconsumption, this system has not fed the world; a seventh of the world’s population suffers from hunger and malnutrition and millions die each year of starvation. ¹² Not only does contemporary industrial agriculture devastate human and natural ecologies alike, but so too does it fail to achieve its ostensible purpose.

These symptoms are described by many. What distinguishes Massy’s treatment of such agricultural malaises is his belief that ‘all the research and technology in the world [will] not rescue us when the solution [lies] inside our heads: in the worldviews that gover[n] our and society’s behavior.’ ¹³ Underpinning the contemporary agricultural—and, by extension, ecological—crisis is a misguided worldview that Massy identifies as ‘the Mechanical Mind.’ As he tells it, bolstered by the confidence of modern industrialization, the Mechanical Mind emerged as a replacement for the previously regnant, more animistic ‘Organic Mind.’ Whereas the Organic Mind viewed creation as a place of wonder and awe, the Mechanical Mind views creation ‘as a place where matter and nature were inert constituents of a new, machinelike world—one capable of manipulation.’ ¹⁴ This worldview separates human beings from nature and sets them over and against it. It renders persons blind to the complexity and dynamism of ecological systems, privileging convenience and easy profit instead. Underlying this worldview is a ‘mechanistic view that complex systems consis[t] of linear, machine-like entities (even if somewhat complicated),’ rather than self-organizing, organic, and cyclic entities. ¹⁵ That is, husbandry comes to focus on, say, the application (however complex) of more and more chemical fertilizer to a monocultural field for increased production. Massy catalogs a litany of ominous -isms accompanying the Mechanical Mind:

These comprise: Materialism (human needs being met via consumption of goods and services); Anthropocentrism (that nature belongs to humans, not humans to nature): Contempocentrism (a focus on the present and a discounting of the future): and Technocentrism (a belief that more-complex, energy-intensive technologies, aligned with humankind’s inventiveness, will solve all problems and will deliver all human needs). ¹⁶

Writing from his Australian context though applicable to many others, Massy likewise highlights the racist and imperialistic legacy of this mindset as it clashed with and conquered the more organic worldviews of indigenous populations. ¹⁷ Nonetheless, as the devastating effects of mainstream agriculture illustrate, this worldview continues to dominate. As Massy laments, the Mechanical Mind so ensnares society that it appears almost impossible to escape. ¹⁸

Massy’s prognosis mirrors Pope Francis’s identification of the ‘technocratic paradigm’ in Laudato Si’. By describing the technocratic paradigm as an ‘epistemological paradigm,’ a ‘certain way of understanding human life and activity . . . gone awry,’ Francis joins Massy in identifying a distorted worldview as the root cause of the devastation wrought on our common home. ¹⁹ This paradigm extends the reductionistic, dissecting, and extractive tendencies of modern technology and science to all areas of living. The result, Francis observes, is ‘a loss of appreciation for the whole, for the relationships between things, and for the broader horizon.’ ²⁰ Mirroring the anthropocentrism of the Mechanical Mind, the technocratic paradigm privileges human convenience and efficiency, buttressed by a ‘practical relativism’ that classifies ‘everything as irrelevant unless it serves one’s own immediate interests’ and so renders people blind to, say, the effects of climate change across the globe or the effects of short-sighted agricultural practices on local bioregions. ²¹ Accompanying this anthropocentrically fueled apathy is ‘a Promethean vision of mastery over the world’ that takes the form of ‘a disregard for the message contained in the structures of nature itself.’ ²² Finally, as the recent Vatican Synod on Pan-Amazonia showed, the suffering of indigenous communities exhibits the extractive violence of the technocratic paradigm towards both human and natural ecologies, leading the poor and the earth to cry out together. ²³ Like the Mechanical Mind, the technocratic paradigm has imperialized not only parts of the globe, but all facets of living. To use Francis’s phrase, it has an ‘ironclad logic’ that admits of no alternatives. ²⁴

Both the Mechanical Mind and the technocratic paradigm are forms of what Lonergan called ‘general bias’ over 50 years prior. Massy’s reference to a Mechanical Mind and Pope Francis’s description of the technocratic paradigm as an epistemological paradigm confirm Lonergan’s conviction that distortions of human knowing disfigure not only human authenticity but also progress in history. Lonergan names such distortions ‘bias,’ an egoistic skewing of human knowing and deciding toward the immediate that takes both personal and communal forms. Of particular concern for Lonergan is the cultural form of bias he calls ‘general bias.’ ²⁵ This bias arises from the nature of ‘common sense,’ the practical know-how that guides most of human living and resolves the immediate needs that arise within it. As so narrowly focused, however, this type of knowing cannot recognize itself as merely one form of knowing among others and therefore is ‘incapable of coming to grasp that its peculiar danger is to extend its legitimate concern for the concrete and the immediately practical into disregard of larger issues and indifference to long-term results.’ ²⁶ The excessive privileging of profit over sustainability, the blatant disregard for how our actions affect our common home, and the anthropocentric narrowing of our horizons to personal convenience all typify general bias; indeed, in naming these dynamics, Massy and Francis capture the inherent violence of bias. For Lonergan, it is this same biased logic that leads one to privilege one’s own group over other groups; the racism and colonialism so often intertwined with mechanistic technocracy exemplifies what Lonergan calls ‘group bias.’ ²⁷ Finally, Lonergan helps capture why, as forms of general bias, the Mechanical Mind and the technocratic paradigm entrench themselves so firmly on a cultural level. The general bias of common sense necessarily dismisses alternatives to its claim of omnicompetence since, precisely as alternatives, they are deemed impractical. ²⁸

Reading Lonergan’s account of bias in tandem with the concerns of Massy and Francis lays bare some veiled agrarian impulses of Lonergan. That Lonergan was interested generally in agricultural questions is clear from his 1978 review of the book, Food First: Beyond the Myth of Scarcity. ²⁹ In the 1950s, Lonergan lamented how the redirection of science to techno-industrial ends perpetuates ‘the notion that the panacea for all human ills lies in a minutely designed organization both of human energy and of natural resources to secure . . . maximum productivity.’ ³⁰ Consequently, when technological possibility comes to ‘settl[e] every aspect of the individual’s private living, of the conditions of [one’s] living,’ Lonergan says elsewhere, the result is ‘an estrangement of [one’s] world from [oneself].’ ³¹ General bias estranges people not only from the broader world of meaning, but also the natural world. Untethered from the limitations of nature, the result, as Lonergan commentator Robert Doran has contended, is a ‘mechanomorphic imperialism’ wherein the ‘rhythms of cosmic process, which once were hypostasized as intracosmic gods, lose our allegiance completely . . .[,] transmuted beyond recognition by our passion for mastery, control, and instrumental exploitation.’ ³² Domination, rather than participation, comes to mark humans’ relationship to nature. In a 1942 book review, Lonergan proposed something of an agrarian solution to these technocratic forces: ‘Undoubtedly the organic and integral mentality fostered by a life in touch with nature has to spread through the whole fabric of society and completely oust the mechanist and fractional thinking that has landed us where we are.’ ³³

An Organic and Integral Mentality: Regenerative Agriculture and Emergent Probability

Lonergan’s call for an organic and integral mentality has proven prophetic. In Laudato Si’, to counter the devastation of the technocratic paradigm, Pope Francis calls for an ‘integral ecology,’ encapsulated best in the phrase, ‘everything is interconnected.’ ³⁴ On the one hand, an integral ecology sets forth a vision of interconnectedness: whether it be the relational character of the world order, the many dimensions of the environmental crisis, or the intertwining of love of neighbor, creation, and God. On the other hand, Francis suggests that this vision can only arise out of a conversion he calls ecological, that—contra the violent illusions of tyrannical anthropocentrism—asks humanity to change its living to reflect this connectedness, to care for our common home. However, as Matthew Philipp Whelan admits, Pope Francis ‘does not develop at great length’ the agricultural implications of this call. ³⁵

Massy’s work, especially read in tandem with Lonergan, can fill this lacuna. Massy tenders that the salvation of agriculture depends on precisely the type of conversion that an integral ecology demands. In The Call of the Reed Warbler, Massy recounts a series of conversion stories—including his own—away from the mechanical mind and towards the alternative worldview underpinning regenerative agriculture:

. . . the story of their minds opening came down to three key things. The first was they began to understand how the key landscape functions and entire ecological system worked, and how all were indivisibly connected: that none could function in isolation. The second was they got out of the way to let nature repair, self-organise and regenerate these functions. And the third and vital factor was they had the humility to ‘listen to the land’, to then change but also continue to learn with that same openness. ³⁶

Whereas the mechanical mind is marked by reductionism, fragmentation, and myopia, this alternative mindset is marked by attentiveness, interconnectedness, and capaciousness.

Lonergan too makes conversion central for a life of authenticity, inviting one to move away from the myopia of bias and towards the much broader world of meaning that ultimately opens toward God. At the foundation of this call stands Lonergan’s admonition to ‘be attentive’ in people’s experiencing of themselves and of the world. ³⁷ Whereas bias imposes a procrustean bed of practicality on all existence, the conversion called for by Lonergan begins with a vulnerable, open, and humble listening. As Robert Doran suggests, this attentiveness should connect people more deeply with not only their own consciousness, but also their corporeal connectedness to the rhythms of nature, that they are adamah’, ‘of the earth.’ ³⁸ It is this attentiveness that can open one up in wonder—the movement of life—to the gifted, magnificent, and interconnected complexity of the world.

Lonergan and Massy together name both this complexity and our place within it. In Insight, as a counter to the mechanistic tendencies of technocracy, Lonergan develops a worldview he dubs ‘emergent probability.’ ³⁹ As mentioned previously, Massy submits that industrial agriculture simplifies natural processes to a linear input and output; against this oversight, a key insight of emergent probability is recognizing how statistics and probability govern these processes. Whereas classical laws (like the law of thermodynamics) express a systematic, regular relationship with the implication, ‘all other things being equal,’ statistical laws ascertain how often those conditions occur. Statistical laws presume that world processes do not occur along ‘iron laws’ but instead depend on other contingent conditions from which classical laws abstract. As Massy stresses, more intensive agriculture does not equal more food production in the long run; sustainable food production depends on certain other conditions being met (discussed below), conditions likely ignored by the reductionistic biases of the Mechanical Mind. The recognition of statistical processes on a given landscape demands attending to its local, contingent particularities.

The governing role of probability also explains why natural processes so often take a cyclical, rather than linear, shape. The chances of a causal sequence transpiring increases significantly when it forms a cycle, as the occurrence of any given event within the cycle launches the entire sequence of events. Lonergan calls these self-organizing sequences ‘schemes of recurrence.’ Because of their stronger likelihood to arise, these schemes fill nature; for Massy, regenerative agriculture rests on five ‘crucial landscape functions or processes,’ which can be understood as schemes of recurrence:

. . . (1) the solar-energy function (focused on maximising the capture of solar energy by fixing as many plant sugars, via photosynthesis, as possible); (2) the water cycle (focused on the maximisation of water infiltration, storage and recycling in the soil); (3) the soil-mineral cycle (focused on inculcating biologically alive and healthy soils that contain and recycle a rich lode of diverse minerals and chemicals); (4) dynamic ecosystems (focused on maximum biodiversity and health of integrated ecosystems at all levels); and (5) the human-social aspect (focused on human agency triggering landscape regeneration by working in harmony with natural systems). ⁴⁰

Massy organizes Call of the Reed Warbler around these five landscape processes, each of which must function as a recurring scheme for a sustainable, productive, and regenerative agriculture. For instance, harnessing the water cycle—a scheme of recurrence also referenced by Lonergan ⁴¹ —means ensuring that rain soaks into the soil, which means richer soil and more water absorption by plants, which leads to the release of more water to the atmosphere through plant transpiration, which facilitates climate control through more regular rainfall. Everything is interconnected! Mired in its mechanistic myopia and seduced by a one-dimensional understanding of production, meanwhile, the Mechanical Mind is blind to the importance of such a cycle; the result is more run-off and erosion, more floods and droughts, fewer minerals in the soil and less plant growth. ⁴² To recognize these cycles as statistical phenomena points to the real possibilities of the breakdown of the scheme if any of the elements that comprise it are disrupted significantly. ⁴³ Cognizant of this contingency, regenerative farming consists in setting the conditions of possibility for the recurrence of all these ecologies, of all these landscape functions.

So too does it consist in recognizing the interdependency of these ecologies, a key component of an emergently probable worldview. An effective water cycle depends upon the solar-energy function, while an effective water cycle strengthens the solar-energy function; likewise, the water cycle ensures an effective soil-mineral cycle and supports the biodiversity needed for a dynamic ecosystem. Again, everything is interconnected! As Massy notes,

These processes of self-organisation are why this new systems-thinking is such a challenge to the old reductionist Mechanical mind. We have here the creative, spontaneous cooperation of many parts in an organism or ecosystem but without the need for any external regulating principle. In a nutshell, therefore, self-organisation . . . is a bottom-up process where complex order spontaneously emerges at multiple levels from the interaction of lower-level entities. ⁴⁴

Lonergan too speaks of how simpler schemes of recurrence condition the emergence of more complex schemes of recurrence. In a relationship he would later refer to as ‘sublation,’ these more complex schemes depend upon simpler schemes and, while preserving the nature of lower schemes, bring them to a fuller realization capable of more complex functions. ⁴⁵ In fact, Lonergan cites an ecological example: certain chemical cycles allow for the possibility of plants, plants allow for herbivorous animals, herbivorous animals allow for carnivorous animals. ⁴⁶ The world, to use Lonergan’s words, is ‘a pyramid of schemes resting on schemes in a splendid ascent of novelty and creativeness.’ ⁴⁷ The irreducible complexity of the rhythms of nature attests to this splendid ascent.

As befits an integral ecology, emergent probability also situates human personhood within our broader common home. The fifth landscape function named by Massy is the human-social aspect; without the right functioning of the other functions, this level would collapse. At the same time, human creativity can realize the latent potentialities of these schemes. Lonergan characterizes this creativity in an emergently probable fashion, as grounded in and yet transcending simpler schemes of recurrence: from subatomic particles, to chemical compounds, to cells, to biological organisms, to neurological movements. ⁴⁸ Experiencing builds upon though goes beyond neurological movements; the same relationship marks the understanding that arises out of experiencing, the judging that arises out of understanding, and the deciding that arises out of judging, all in increasing complexity. No matter their complexity, though, all levels of human intentionality ultimately depend on those non-human schemes of recurrence that sustain human existence, a fact exemplified no more clearly than in the act of eating. ⁴⁹ For Lonergan, human society—insofar as it arises out of human intentionality—also reflects this creative tension. Itself an ecology, ⁵⁰ the social order goes beyond and yet depends on various biological schemes of recurrence. ⁵¹ While the Mechanical Mind severs the human from the natural, and industrial agriculture severs eating from natural processes, ⁵² an emergently probable worldview integrates these distinct ecologies.

This integrated worldview intimates a form of authenticity, an ethic that accords with an emergently probable universe. Writes Massy,

. . . it has become clear to me that the best description for the new, post-Mechanical mind exhibited by regenerative farmers is the ‘Emergent mind.’ By this, I mean a mind that combines elements of the previous Organic mind with the best of the Mechanical mind and modern science, but in addition has a capacity to respect and encourage the processes of self-organisation, open-ended creativity and thus emergence. ⁵³

Whereas the biases of the Mechanical Mind impose a reductionism onto the complexity of world processes, the Emergent Mind attends to these cycles in their full particularity and guides them towards a fuller realization of their natural capacities. The Emergent Mind, to use Pope Benedict XVI’s phrase, works with, not against, the ‘grammar’ of creation. ⁵⁴ Read through this lens, the conversion called for by Lonergan and Massy is to at once attend to one’s dependency on these lower orders and yet also to bring them to a fuller realization by surrendering oneself to the eros of the human spirit, the innate wonder that grounds authentic creativity. ⁵⁵

Furthermore, Lonergan posits, this human capacity for transcendence finds its fulfillment in ‘God’s love poured onto our hearts’ (Rom 5:5), ⁵⁶ ‘the Love’—as Dante mused—‘that moves the Sun and other stars.’ ⁵⁷ The emergently probable worldview of Lonergan indicates the ways that human intentionality finds its full realization only in some supernatural sublation, a ‘religious conversion’ that simultaneously includes who one is—including those lower orders that in part constitute one’s identity—and yet carries all of who one is beyond oneself. ⁵⁸ So too can this supernatural elevation heal the many biases, broken relationships, and sins that disfigure the complex, emergent, and progressive dynamism of the world order.

‘Fruit of the Earth . . . Work of Human Hands’

Though he expresses an ambivalence towards Christianity, ⁵⁹ Massy insists on a general spirituality that can support the capaciousness of the emergent mind, ‘a new, higher level of moral consciousness [that] requires unconditional love.’ ⁶⁰ Tantalizing in its brevity, Massy signals here the indispensable role of a certain religious consciousness in the renewal of agriculture. Lonergan, for his part, stresses the need for a supernatural healing that can liberate human creativity from the biases that corrupt it, especially given the colonizing tendencies of general bias. ⁶¹ Furthermore, for Lonergan, this higher sublation of moral consciousness has a Christian shape and so Lonergan can do what Massy strains to do, namely, to situate the emergent mind within a larger theological framework. ⁶² Pope Francis puts forth a similar claim; without a broader moral framework, he submits, any proposed solution to the ecological crisis risks replicating the very technocratic distortions it hopes to surmount. ⁶³ Thus, Francis positions care for our common home on a supernatural plane; in his words, ‘Rather than a problem to be solved, the world is a joyful mystery to be contemplated with gladness and praise.’ ⁶⁴

This call to praise shapes the integral ecology of Laudato Si’. Translated into English as ‘Praise Be!,’ this title is taken from a doxological hymn penned by Saint Francis of Assisi: ‘Praise be to you, my Lord, through our Sister, Mother Earth, who sustains and governs us, and who produces various fruit with colored flowers and herbs . . ..’ ⁶⁵ Throughout Laudato Si’, Pope Francis ascribes this doxological orientation to creation. He cites various psalms as a scriptural warrant for this claim. ⁶⁶ The encyclical locates the intrinsic value of all creatures in their ability to ‘give [God] glory.’ ⁶⁷ This belief implies a call: ‘[w]hen we can see God reflected in all that exists, our hearts are moved to praise the Lord for all his creatures and to worship him in union with them.’ ⁶⁸ Pope Francis calls humankind to follow in the steps of St Francis in channeling forth this praise of creation: ‘Just as happens when we fall in love with someone, whenever [Saint Francis] would gaze at the sun, the moon or the smallest of animals, he burst into song, drawing all other creatures into his praise. He communed with all creation, even preaching to the flowers, inviting them “to praise the Lord, just as if they were endowed with reason.”’ ⁶⁹ Nevertheless, as evidenced in the ecological crisis, this charge to draw all creatures into one’s praise of God stands under threat. In decrying biodiversity loss, the pope laments that ‘thousands of species will no longer give glory to God by their very existence . . ..’ ⁷⁰ If creation finds its proper end in the praise of God, the idolatrous, excessively anthropocentric illusion that creation finds its end in oneself (or humankind) constantly threatens to suffocate creation through human biases and egoism. ⁷¹ Laudato Si’ thus ends the way it began, with a call to praise: ‘Praise be to him!’ ⁷² To care for our common home is to live out this call to praise God, both participating in and elevating the praise sung by creation.

Lonergan too shares this doxological focus, even if it remains subtle. God’s elevating gift of love finds manifestation in the ‘new, higher level of moral consciousness’ (to use Massy’s language) that Lonergan names ‘religious conversion’: a ‘total being-in-love’ that grounds and effects ‘all self-transcendence, whether in the pursuit of truth, or in the realization of human values, or in the orientation [one] adopts to the universe, its ground, and its goal.’ ⁷³ This otherworldly love pulls one beyond oneself to rest in the God in whom one alone can find rest, thus fulfilling the restless, emergent eros of the human spirit. The ecstatic character of religious conversion explains why Lonergan posits that ‘[r]eligious conversion is transferring oneself into the world of worship . . ..’ ⁷⁴ Moreover, as Lonergan likewise makes clear, religious conversion is mediated through the Loving Word God spoke in Christ and the glory (doxa) of God he enfleshed (Jn 17:1–5). To be religiously converted is, by the grace of God, to participate in Christ (Gal 2:19–21) and his own praise of the Father through the Spirit, even at the cost of one’s life. ⁷⁵ Religious conversion, lived in the concrete, offers all that one is, the gift that one is—including the many schemes of recurrence that constitute who one is—as a ‘sacrifice of praise’ (Heb 13:15) to God, Giver of all good things (cf. Jm 1:17). If, as Lonergan asserted above, religious conversion entails a certain orientation to the universe, its ground, and its goal, then this orientation—filtered through the faith that the fullness of life is found in self-transcendence—views the universe as enflamed by God’s love, charged with God’s grandeur, and thus revelatory of God’s glory.

To understand religious conversion through emergent probability and its self-transcending dynamism affords a way to systematize theological claims about the praise of creation. The interdependency of world process as well as the universe’s drive towards increasing, emergent complexity reveals its ‘finality’: in Lonergan’s words, ‘the objective universe is not at rest, not static, not fixed in the present, but in process, in tension, fluid,’ ⁷⁶ and is marked by an ‘upwardly but indeterminately directed dynamism towards the ever fuller realization of being.’ ⁷⁷ The world, asserts Lonergan elsewhere, has a ‘passionateness’ in the way it constantly transcends itself towards this ever fuller realization of being. ⁷⁸ The doxological vocation of the human person, as a higher order, reveals that this dynamism, fluidity, and passionateness of the universe is a straining towards God. ⁷⁹ Human praise, being in love unrestrictedly, brings the finality of these lower levels towards their fuller realization, orienting their passionateness explicitly towards God (cf. Rom 8:22). And yet so too does an emergently probable worldview assert that the emergence and effective functioning of higher orders depend on the right functioning of lower orders. There can be no genuine human praise of God without the right ordering and preservation of lower schemes of recurrence, without their giving glory to God, without their praise. ⁸⁰ Read in this light, human praise participates in the broader passionateness of the whole ecology of the universe, that ‘pyramid of schemes resting on schemes in a splendid ascent of novelty and creativeness.’ The emergent mind, perfected in religious conversion understood doxologically, both joins with and brings forth creation’s hymn of praise.

For the Christian tradition, as Virgil Michel had hinted, at no place is this intersection between the ecstatic passionateness of natural ecology and the ecstatic passionateness of human ecology clearer than at the Eucharistic table. Eucharistic participation conforms those gathered into Christ’s own cosmic priesthood wherein he offers all creation to God the Father through the Spirit. It is for this reason that Pope Francis includes an extended meditation on the Eucharist in Laudato Si’. ‘It is in the Eucharist,’ he declares, ‘that all that has been created finds its greatest exaltation . . .. In the Eucharist, fullness is already achieved; it is the living centre of the universe, the overflowing core of love and of inexhaustible life. Joined to the incarnate Son, present in the Eucharist, the whole cosmos gives thanks to God. Indeed, the Eucharist is itself an act of cosmic love.’ ⁸¹ ‘All you have created rightly gives you praise,’ reads the Third Eucharistic Prayer. ⁸² The Eucharist manifests uniquely the passionateness of the universe, and all the many schemes of recurrence that comprise it, towards God. ⁸³ Laudato Si’ suggests that the sacraments in general ‘are a privileged way in which nature is taken up by God to become a means of mediating supernatural life . . .. Water, oil, fire and colours are taken up in all their symbolic power and incorporated in our act of praise.’ ⁸⁴

In the Eucharist, the incorporation of bread and wine into this act of praise carries particular significance from an agricultural perspective. The Eucharist, as a meal, makes holy a vital intersection between natural and human ecologies. The Prayer During the Preparation of the Gifts reads,

Blessed are you, Lord God of all creation, for through your goodness we have received the bread we offer you: fruit of the earth and work of human hands, it will become for us the bread of life . . .. Blessed are you, Lord God of all creation, for through your goodness we have received the wine we offer you: fruit of the vine and work of human hands, it will become our spiritual drink. ⁸⁵

Befitting an integral ecology, offered in the Eucharist as a ‘sacrifice of praise’ is both the fruit of the natural world (and the natural schemes of recurrence that enable that fruit, from the solar-energy function to the soil-mineral cycle) and the work of human hands (the human-social creativity that should cooperate with those natural schemes), both the wheat and grapes and the labor that cultivates them to produce food and drink. The Eucharist, as ‘thanksgiving’ (Eucharistia) invites those who celebrate it to recall their radical dependency on these schemes and recognize the gift character of the earth. In offering these gifts at the Eucharistic table, the liturgical celebration brings these schemes to their fullest realization, as directing these gifts to the Father and as inviting the Spirit to transform them into the very presence of the Son, all for the sake of manifesting God’s glory. That is, as Norman Wirzba asserts, ‘The Eucharist isn’t simply a spiritual or ecclesial reality. Centered as it is on the material elements of bread and wine, it also preserves and reorders the whole material world from which these elements come.’ ⁸⁶ Just as it does for humanity, the Eucharist incorporates creation into Christ’s praise, cosmic in breadth (cf. Col 1:15–20). In this way might those who celebrate the Eucharist ‘whether [they] eat or drink, or whatever [they] do, do everything for the glory of God’ (1 Cor 10:31).

Nonetheless, the technocratic disruption of natural and human schemes of recurrence—whether through a disregard for landscape functions, disregard for labor conditions, or disregard for holistic-minded approaches to farming—impoverishes this Eucharistic praise insofar as their highest realization in part depends on the proper functioning of lower schemes of recurrence. ⁸⁷ Indeed, as Massy’s description of the Mechanical Mind and Francis’s description of the technocratic paradigm make clear, much contemporary agricultural practice obscures the glory that natural and human schemes of recurrence are called to give God. Thus, in a fallen world, to give glory to God also entails repenting for the ways that human sin—and the relationships it fractures—undermines the doxological vocation of creation. ⁸⁸ For Lonergan, redemptive life in Christ entails not only a participation in his glorification of God, so too does it entail a participation in his ‘utmost detestation for all sins and . . . extreme sorrow for all offense against God,’ sins that also include offense against neighbor and the rest of creation. ⁸⁹ Religious conversion involves not only being in love unrestrictedly, but is also ‘ever a withdrawal from unauthenticity.’ ⁹⁰ Whether in the cry for mercy, the enactment of reconciliation, or the ‘dangerous memories’ contained in the paschal mystery, the Eucharist can evoke this penitential conversion, shattering indifference. ⁹¹ To live the Eucharist means, as Lonergan admonishes, to ‘be attentive’ and, as Pope Francis admonishes, to ‘care’ with love about the many ways that contemporary industrial agriculture devastates our common home and, through this repentance, to live a reconciled life—with the earth, with others, and with God—that resists those divisive practices. To live the Eucharist demands supporting those regenerative agricultural practices that more clearly give glory to God, such as those named by Massy. Pope Benedict XVI once wrote, ‘A Eucharist which does not pass over into the concrete practice of love is intrinsically fragmented.’ ⁹² Viewed from the lens of an integral ecology, as understood through emergent probability, a Eucharist which does not pass over into the concrete care for the origins of food is also intrinsically fragmented. The fruit of the earth, the work of human hands, and the glorification of God by one’s life are of a piece. Everything is interconnected.

A somewhat recent ecclesial document specifies this claim. In 2008, commissioned by the United States Catholic Conference of Bishops and the United Methodist Church, a group of Catholic and Methodist theologians published a joint statement on the ecological significance of the Eucharist. The document anticipates many of the Eucharistic themes of Laudato si’. It too speaks of the Eucharist as a cosmic gathering, wherein ‘[a]ll creatures have their own unique voice, and as a uni-verse, creation joins in one chorus of praise,’ and people, summoned to ‘Lift up your hearts,’ exercise a uniquely priestly role in hearing and mediating this praise to the Creator. ⁹³ With these theological presuppositions, and in a way that Laudato Si’ does not, the document underscores the agricultural implications of the preparation of the gifts:

Bread and wine are necessary for the Eucharist, but wheat and grapes may come from oppressive agricultural practices. Nevertheless, a vigorous Eucharistic theology and practice would require us to care about agricultural practices, and not only for wheat and grapes. Because bread and wine are manufactured, the issues of safe and suitable work environments and just wages are at the heart of the church’s social justice concerns as derived from our Eucharistic practice . . .. We call both Methodists and Catholics to attend more carefully to the production of the sacramental bread and wine both in itself and as a sign of the interconnection of worship, economy and nature. To participate in the Eucharist without discerning these interconnections is the result of indolence and may lead to diminished communion with the Lord. ⁹⁴

The framework developed above intensifies the power of this passage. Genuine Eucharistic worship, as the sacrament of communion, requires the right and just functioning of both natural and social schemes of recurrence insofar as it depends on those lower schemes. Insofar as it implies the doxological orientation of natural schemes of recurrence, the Eucharistic offering of the fruit of the earth and work of human hands should drive those who celebrate the Eucharist to consider how their food is prepared, whether agricultural practices respect the grammar of creation and creation’s capacity for praise. To worship without perceiving these connections jeopardizes the integrity of the Eucharist and risks dividing liturgy from life in its full earthiness; liturgical repentance, one hopes, might shake one from the slumbers of indolence. Wendell Berry once wrote that eating ‘is inescapably an agricultural act, and how we eat determines, to a considerable extent, how the world is used.’ ⁹⁵ To eat Eucharistically should lead subjects to transform culture such that it locates the telos of creation not in reckless domination but rather in the glorification of God. Elevating these agricultural questions into the broader vocation to praise recovers their full urgency; conversion to an emergent mind makes the link clear.

Conclusion

This essay began by pondering Virgil Michel’s suggestion that ‘a more truly natural life’ is ‘indispensable’ for ‘participation in the corporate supernatural life of Christ,’ especially as embodied in a Eucharistic form of life. Informed by the radical call of Laudato Si’, this conversation between Massy, Lonergan, and Francis substantiates Michel’s provocative claim. The congruences between Massy and Lonergan’s work, on the one hand, unearth the agricultural dimensions of Lonergan’s account of emergent probability. On the other hand, Lonergan’s placement of emergent probability within a broader theological—and, as interpreted through Laudato Si’, doxological—context reveals the supernatural relevance of agriculture in a way that Massy does not. Together, these sources can systematically capture the inextricability of the Eucharist and agricultural practices in a way that overcomes the biases of the technocratic paradigm, befits an integral ecology, and shows how care for agriculture is an essential part of Christian discipleship. ‘[T]he urgent challenge and question for humankind is,’ Massy states boldly in The Call of the Reed Warbler, ‘Can we rapidly enough shift our modern, industrial, economic-rationalist, selfish, consumeristic, non-biophilic world view to one that nurtures instead of destroys?’ ⁹⁶ The framework developed in this essay captures how Christians pray for the same when they plead to God, ‘Teach us the meaning and value of creation, so that we may join its voice to ours as we sing your praise.’ ⁹⁷