Abstract
The task of explicating the ‘religious grounds for an ecological ethic’ is urgent. The global scale and the complexity of the problem require multilateral cooperation from all levels of society, including the world’s religious traditions. Moral resources within each tradition to motivate a recalibration of the relationship between humanity and the biosphere—in so far as they exist—need to be unlocked. Furthermore, as the political will to face up to environmental limits continues to languish, religious traditions must face the question as to whether they are part of the problem. Do they provide ideological succour for a destructive alienation from the natural environment, or foster forms of escapism that stymie remedial action? Any book that helps Christians face these questions, re-animate debate in local churches, exert informed political pressure, and embark on concrete action should be warmly welcomed.
Scheid’s monograph attempts a response to the realities of climate change and runaway ecological depletion that draws on the tradition of Roman Catholic social teaching, in the spirit of Pope Francis’s 2015 encyclical, Laudato Si’ (pp. 1–2). As such, there is an effort to retrieve and repair key notions that have marked this tradition from Leo XIII onwards, such as ‘human dignity’, ‘the common good’, ‘participation’ and ‘subsidiarity’ (pp. 19–35). Scheid is adamant that their scope must be broadened beyond reference to merely human flourishing in order to embrace a moral vision on a planetary scale. This is a work very much at home in the context of a liberal, post-Vatican II Catholicism in the United States, with a ‘hermeneutic of suspicion’ applied to the inheritance of Catholic teaching in the first half, and an effort to engage with other religious traditions occupying the second. Kant’s name is not one that appears in the index, but I can’t help but see some parallels in terms of the emphasis given to moral imperatives arising from rational self-apprehension, together with the subordination of particular claims of revelation within the Christian tradition in the face of a purportedly more inclusive and universal ethical vision.
The Cosmic Common Good offers a manifesto that proclaims the intrinsic value of existence and the moral imperatives that arise from it. Balancing this positive claim is an unrelenting rejection of all tendencies towards anthropocentrism or transcendentalism in so far as they are judged to detract from a full-orbed response to the environmental crisis (pp. 2–5). I use the term ‘manifesto’, not because this is how Scheid describes his book, but because it is at times sermonic, repetitive and declaratory in a way that gives the impression that premises are self-evident or the situation is too grave and urgent to be unduly pre-occupied with setting up the argument with the deep philosophical or doctrinal care that discerning readers might expect. The limitations of the book come about due to its rather too-ambitious scope and what could be labelled its ‘idealism’. For all its claims to be responding to a concrete crisis, with some notable exceptions the prose often floats above the world of particular suffering, tragic compromise and realpolitik. The result is an uneven argument that only someone sympathetically inhabiting the author’s US liberal Catholic milieu could find entirely unproblematic.
In the book’s first section Scheid establishes the terms for the ensuing argument. Central here is the author’s attempt to promote the notion of the ‘Catholic Cosmic Common Good’ (CCCG), which seems to be a localised vehicle for the more fundamental and universal ‘Cosmic Common Good’ (CCG) (pp. 25–43). The CCCG is an idea of vast scope and Scheid wants to put it to work in multiple ways. For instance, he finds in it the conceptual space to promote ‘ethical non-anthropocentrism’, and so to effect a balancing act between the secondary instrumental value and the primary intrinsic value of non-human nature, and also to ensure that religious practice serves an ethical end (i.e. the CCG) (p. 5). The notion is designed to be universal in scope and ‘load bearing’ for a global project of moral animation and regeneration. For Scheid, we should accept CCG as the natural law basis of CCCG. Presumably the former is an insight that any reasonable person should be able to apprehend from experience: the CCG reflects the fact that the non-human or ‘more than human world’ is the ‘fullest setting for human life’ and that its ‘vitiation [is] a loss for the greater community of which we are a part’ (p. xiv).
Scheid turns to Augustine and Aquinas as representatives of the Catholic tradition to find traces of the CCG and also to exorcise the tradition in so far as it is judged as having undermined the CCG (pp. 45–63). He notes that Augustine and Aquinas ‘exhibit and indeed helped establish the anthropocentric orientation of most Catholic theology, so their basic worldview clearly limited the common good to the human community’ (p. 45). Scheid then goes on to note that the ‘appeal to them here to outline a theocentric non-anthropocentrism does not represent a strictly historical representation of their positions’ (p. 45).
The way the author articulates his approach to reading Augustine and Aquinas here seems clumsy and it causes problems as the argument unfolds. What he finds in these thinkers’ respective contributions to the doctrine of creation is an encouraging affirmation of the cosmic common good, but also a compromised anthropocentrism in their articulations of the imago dei. Additionally, Scheid argues that overall ‘their cosmic vision is … close to a creator-centrism, rather than a creatio-centrism’ (p. 79). The charge is thus twofold: Augustinian and Thomistic anthropology diminishes the comparative stature of the natural environment by default, and this is worsened by the fact that humans find their ultimate value and salvation in God alone.
In response, we might emphasise that there should be no argument to counter the obvious point that Aquinas and Augustine were not writing in situations of global environmental crisis comparable to our own and that, resultantly, any moral theologian of the Anthropocene will have both to repair and to expand their offerings for the debate unfolding here and now. I cannot help but think, however, that Scheid offers his readers ‘straw men’ and is not doing justice to the nuance that these doctors of the church bring to bear on the question. Indeed, it is deeply problematic to look at doctrines of creation that emphasise all things finding their beginning, end and value in relationship with the Creator, but not also reflect on the ways in which Augustine’s and Aquinas’s writings on the incarnation, the Trinity, or the cosmic redemption that Christ’s resurrection prefigures, might also be essential. I suspect that the result of not doing this more careful exploration is Scheid’s discovery of a false dichotomy between ‘creator-centrism’ and ‘creatio-centrism/anthropocentrism’; this leads him to seek the assistance of Thomas Berry.
Berry purportedly laments that ‘The Bible … is unfortunately no longer a functional story of humanity’s place in the universe, even for Christians’ (quoted on p. 67) and offers an evolutionary eco-theology that sails very close to the pantheist wind. By drawing on Berry, the imbalance that Scheid sees in the creation/creator divide in Augustine and Aquinas, by which the moral significance of the former is at risk of dissolution in the latter, is, in turn, at risk of reversal. The impression conveyed is that both the position being rejected and that being adopted imply that creator and creation are competing for space in a zero-sum game at the centre of our moral theology. To the extent that this is true, recourse to Berry is regressive for Scheid’s argument, not only because Berry’s appeal emerges in the context of Scheid’s limited reading of the tradition, but also because it results in further neglect of the most obvious biblical resources for the development of ecological ethic. Indeed, it results in baffling statements such as this: ‘The journey of the universe offers a comprehensive worldview for the cosmic common good, which in turn can provide us with the psychic energy to undertake the massive lifestyle shifts we need and a meaningful way to discuss the intrinsic value of creatures and of the cosmos as a whole’ (p. 71).
While any cosmological account of the ‘journey of the universe’ undermines anthropocentrism in any form, thus supporting Scheid’s overall point, moral theologians would, in the present climate, do better to avoid such vague notions as some of those here and focus rather on the need for metanoia in light of the fact that ‘the Earth is the Lord’s’ (Ps. 24:1).
After his engagement with Berry, the author moves to focus on the more promising field of the development of Catholic social teaching in the direction of ‘earth solidarity’ and ‘earth rights’. Scheid explicates ‘solidarity’ in the context of wider traditions of virtue ethics, and ‘earth rights’ as an expansion of a discourse already established in Catholic theology, most notably in the writings of John XXIII (p. 101). Earth solidarity pertains to the expansion of our empathic capacity and it seems straightforward enough. The invocation of earth rights is somewhat more fraught. Common objections, particularly those that focus on the analogical expansion of rights claims to life forms and abiota that have no responsibilities, are brushed aside rather too quickly (pp. 103–104, 111). Additionally, Scheid could have acknowledged the work already done by scholars contributing to movements such as the Global Network for the Study of Human Rights and the Environment. Such concrete engagement could have led to a healthy moderation in the author’s simply-expressed optimism as to how conflicting ‘rights claims’ might be adjudicated (pp. 107–108). Indeed, what is missing in Scheid’s work is an attempt to bring these ideas ‘down to earth’ in terms of reference to legal and political frameworks adjudicated by national and international bodies. Also missing is a realistic appraisal of the likelihood of continued tragic conflict as rights claims compete in a world of growing scarcity and extremes.
It is easy to imagine a quick reversion to anthropocentrism when ‘the going gets tough’. It is also possible to imagine corporations adopting notions such as ‘solidarity’ and ‘earth rights’ in vision statements, and politicians invoking this language on campaign trails, without it making the slightest difference to the onward march of ecological breakdown. Scheid would not be to blame of course, but one gets the impression on reading this book that if only we got our concepts right, i.e. accepted the notions of solidarity and earth rights, then real solutions would materialise. In this vein, his argument needs to be moderated by a dose of Northcott’s scepticism regarding the likelihood that an adequate response will emerge from the resources of liberal cosmopolitanism, which arguably is the lens through which Scheid reads Catholic social teaching (Michael Northcott, A Political Theology of Climate Change, Eerdmans, 2013, pp. 161–200).
The second half of the book engages in the task of ‘comparative theology’ and focuses on evidence for the CCG in Hindu, Buddhist and American-Indian religious traditions. The task is noble enough: to model a conversation for a ‘circle of religious intellectuals’ who can encourage a transformation of the Earth–human relationship (p. 126). The tension implicit here lies in the attempt to hold together the underlying assumption that each religion will contain an analogue of CCCG and the desire to avoid ‘the domestication of difference’ (p. 121). Scheid finds what he is looking for in the particular sub-strands and figures on which his attention fixes and I leave it to those imbedded in these traditions to judge his effectiveness as an inter-religious observer and listener. Each chapter here could be a monograph in its own right and each holds illuminating insights for those of us too fixed in Western contexts. At times Christianity is compared negatively to other traditions and these points could have been made more convincingly had a better survey of biblical and patristic resources been achieved earlier (pp. 166–69). The chapter on American-Indian approaches to environmental ethics is a particular highlight: the author’s passions are engaged and sensitivity to concrete suffering comes together with a striking post-colonial self-awareness. This results in a moral realism and tragic sensibility that are lacking in much of the book to this point.
This is an uneven work: the scope is rather too ambitious and the premises weakly established. Even so, the C/CCG represents moral concepts whose time has surely come and there remains plenty of scope for others to deepen and strengthen the case.