은(恩)으로 혐오 넘어서기 : 지구인문학으로서 원불교학 - 은혜철학 이주연

은(恩)으로 혐오 넘어서기 : 지구인문학으로서 원불교학



은(恩)으로 혐오 넘어서기 : 지구인문학으로서 원불교학Going beyond Hatred by Fourfold Grace : Won-Buddhist studies as Globalogy




원불교사상과 종교문화

2021, vol., no.89, pp. 159-184 (26 pages)


발행기관 : 원광대학교 원불교사상연구원
연구분야 :
인문학 >
종교학 > 한국종교 > 원불교학
이주연 /Lee Ju youn 1


1원광대학교 원불교사상연구원

초록 


이 연구에서는 혐오를 넘어서기 위해 우리에게 어떤 관점이 필요한지를 논 의한다. 혐오는 오염으로 인해 자신이 완전무결하지 못하고 낮은 존재가 될 수 있다는 무의식적 불안감에서 유발된다. 요즘은 지구화시대의 가속화로 인해 혐오가 더욱 중층적이고 복합적인 형태로 나타나고 있다. 타자의 존엄성을 고 려하지 않았던 제국주의 시대에 새로운 사유법으로 등장했던 타자철학은 타 자의 절대성에 주목했다. 그리고 지금의 지구화시대에는 바로 지구인문학적 관점이 전 지구적 존재들의 존엄함과 평등성에 주목함으로써 ‘지구적 혐오현 상’의 해법으로서 그 역할을 할 수 있다. 

지구인문학은 토마스 베리의 주장처럼 지구에 매혹될 것을 권유하는데, 

신유물론자들과 포스트휴머니스트들, 그리고 한국의 종교가와 사상가들이 이 지구인문학적 사유법을 제시해왔다. 

특 히 원불교의 은(恩)사상은 모든 존재들의 긴밀한 상호의존관계를 바탕으로 서 로의 은혜에 보답할 것을 권장하고 있어, ‘실천학’으로서의 지구인문학이라 할 수 있다. 

다만 우려되는 점이 있다면 ‘법신불(法身佛)’과 ‘사은(四恩)’에 대한 균형 감 있는 신앙이 필요하다는 것이다. 이러한 신앙이 바로 ‘혐오를 포기케 하는 유토피아’로 우릴 안내할 것이다.


This study discusses what viewpoint is required for going beyond hatred. Hatred is caused by unconscious anxiety that men may become people of low ability who are absolutely perfect due to corruption. Hatred has appeared in more multi-layered and complex forms due to the era of accelerated globalization these days.Philosophy for others that appeared as a new thinking method in the era of imperialism which did not consider others' dignity focused on their absoluteness. And the viewpoint of globalogy plays the role as a solution of 'global abhorrence phenomena' by focusing on dignity and equality of global beings in the present era of globalization. Globalogy recommends people to be fascinated by the earth like Thomas Berry's arguments and new materialists, post humanists, and Korean religionists and thinkers have presented thinking methods from the viewpoint of globalagy. Especially, grace thought is globalogy as practical learning as it recomends people to repay each other's kindness based on all beings' close independent relationship. But one concern is that beliefs balanced between ‘Dharmakāya Buddha’ and ‘Fourfold Grace’ are required. These beliefs will lead people to ‘utopia to make them give up hatred’.


키워드열기/닫기 버튼
혐오,
지구인문학,
원불교,
은사상,
신유물론,
포스트 휴머니즘

Hatred, Globalogy, Won Buddhism, Grace thought, New materialism, Post humanism

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[새책소개] 한국 자생종교인 원불교의 창시자 소태산이 새롭게 선언한 

• 사은(四恩)사상, 즉 천지은, 부모은, 동포은, 법률은의 네 가지 은혜에 관한 철학은 이 우주만물이 본래 서로가 없어서는 살 수 없는 은혜의 관계로 얽혀 있으며 
• 그것이 우주 만유의 존재의 본질을 가장 잘 드러내는 진리 언어임을 새롭게 발견해 가는 여정을 담아낸 책이다. 
• 
  
• 사은은 우주의 존재론, 그 창조성, 그리고 생명성을 보여주는 
• 핵심 패러다임으로서 생명 근원, 무한 긍정, 평화 공생의 의미를 통해서, 
• 혐오, 소외로 대표되는 현대사회의 위기와 기후위기나 인류세 등으로 대표되는 전 지구적 위기를 극복하고
•  수양과 불공의 겸전을 통해 자기완성을 추구해 나가는 밑바탕의 원력이 됨을 탐구한다. 
• 또한 이 은혜철학으로써 타자와 대화하고 생태학과 대화하며 세상을 새롭게 보고, 읽고, 듣고, 말하자고 제안하는 책이다.

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지구인문학의 시선-갈래와 쟁점(지구인문학총서 03)

저자 : 박치완,김석근,박일준,이주연,김봉곤,야규,마코토,이우진 ㅣ

출판사 : 모시는사람들 ㅣ
2022.03.31 ㅣ 256p

 
이 책은 전 지구적으로 기후위기나 그에 따르는 기상이변, 팬데믹이 현실화, 일상화하는 인류세 시대에 즈음하여 지금까지 인류가 안주해 온 ‘인간 중심의 시선’을 지구환경 문제로 확장하는 것을 넘어서, 근본적으로 그 방향을 전환해야 한다는 요구를 반영하여 ‘지구의 시선’으로 인간과 지구를 들여다보는 지구인문학의 최신 쟁점과 관점을 소개한다. ‘지구인문학’은 인문학의 종결자로서, 디스토피아의 징후를 보이며 다가오는 ‘지구시대’를 살아가는 지혜와 삶의 방식을 모색하는 내용으로 구성되었다. 현재 ‘형성 도상에 있는 지구인문학’을 구체적인 현장에서부터 귀납하여, 그 의미와 지평을 열어내는 책이다.

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[목 차]

제1장 ‘장소’의 지구철학: 세계철학의 신(新)구상 / 박치완 … 15
1. 우리는 ‘어디’에서 학문을 하는가? … 18
2. 제3세계가 중심이 된 지구학의 구성과 그 방법론 … 24
3. 제3세계 지식인들의 연대와 ‘장소감’의 증진이 필요한 이유 … 45

제2장 ‘사이’와 ‘너머’의 지구정치학 / 김석근 … 53
1. 지구인문학과 새로운 사유 … 55
2. 지구와 인간 그리고 인류세(Anthropocene) … 59
3. 지구정치, 지구정치학, 지구공동체 … 66
4. ‘지구정치학’을 향하여(AD TERRA POLITIKA) … 78

제3장 ‘공생’의 지구정치신학 / 박일준 … 85
1. 정치신학의 주제로서 지구와 공생 … 87
2. 좌절된 미래와 분노의 정치 … 91
3. 미래 이후 시대의 정치신학: 언더커먼스의 정치신학 … 97
4. 비존재적 집단체(the collective)의 정치적 가능성 … 106
5. (성공)보다 나은 실패(a failing better)로서 정치신학적 투쟁 … 113
6. 지구의 존재 역량을 정치적으로 신학하다 … 122

제4장 ‘은혜’의 지구마음학 / 이주연 … 127
1. 혐오의 시대 … 129
2. 은혜로 혐오 시대 넘어서기 … 136
3. 지구마음학, 그 현장의 소리 … 151

제5장 ‘실학’의 지구기학 / 김봉곤·야규 마코토 … 163
1. ‘세계’에서 ‘지구’로 … 165
2. 최한기의 지구 인식 … 167
3. ？？지구전요(地球典要)？？와 새로운 지구학 … 176
4. 만물일체(萬物一體)와 ‘천인운화(天人運化)의 효(孝)’ … 184
5. 지구 내 존재 … 194

제6장 ‘미래’의 지구교육학 / 이우진 … 199
1. ‘되기(become)’ 위한 배움 … 201
2. 고귀하지만 결함이 있는 세계시민교육 … 207
3. 여전히 인간 중심적인 생태시민교육 … 217
4. ‘미래 생존을 위한 교육’으로 … 225
에필로그 … 235

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지구인문학의 시선으로 인간, 사물, 세계를 논한다

2020년, COVID-19가 전 세계를 강타했다. 인도네시아 자카르타에 큰 홍수가 발생했으며, 2019년부터 시작해 이듬해까지 이어진 호주 산불은 막대한 피해를 야기했다. 같은 해 터키에는 지진이 일어났고, 한국에선 54일간 장마가 이어진 데다 태풍도 줄줄이 찾아왔으며, 중국에는 폭우로 인한 홍수가 있었다. 모두 2020년 한 해 동안 우리 인류를 찾아온 위험들이었다. 묘하게도 같은 해에 지구인문학이 태동하기 시작했다.

지구인문학자들이 함께 저술한 이 책, ？？지구인문학의 시선？？에서 다루는 논점들은 지구의 관점에서 인간과 만물과 세계를 바라보는 시선을 분야별로 다룬 것이다. 지금까지 우리는 인간의 시선, 서구의 시선으로 살아오며 자본주의를 보편적인 프레임으로 공식화함으로써 지금 우리가 당면한 팬데믹에 도달하고 말았다. 인류세와 기후위기 현상이 요청하는 것은 기존의 시선을 새로운 시선으로 바꾸는 것이다. ？？지구인문학의 시선？？에서는 더 이상 인간의 시선이 아닌 ‘지구인문학의 시선’을 상상하고, 탐색한다.

지구인문학자들이 새로운 삶의 방식을 소개한다

1장 ‘장소의 지구철학’은 ‘장소의 존재’로서 인간이 지구를 자신이 살아갈 수 있는 지속 가능한 생존의 장소로 구성해낼 수 있는 방법을 타진한다. 그 방법이란 다름 아닌 ‘제3세계성, 즉 억압당하고 배제당한 자의 눈으로 지구를 재구성하는 것’이다.
2장 ‘사이와 너머의 지구정치학’은 명사적 존재로 가득한 인간의 정치와 철학을 넘어, 그 ‘사이’의 존재들에 주목하고, ‘사이 너머’를 사유하는 지구정치학을 구상한다. 기후변화와 생태위기이 국면에서 지구가 보여주는 다양한 양상과 반응이 바로 지구의 정치적 행위임을 재발견한다.
3장 ‘공생의 지구정치신학’은 ‘함께-만들기’ 혹은 ‘공동생산’으로서의 ‘공생’에 주목하여 제도권 정치로부터 정치적 행위 주체성을 부여받지 못한 존재들의 정치적 잠재력에 주목하고 이들의 연대를 꿈꾸는 정치신학을 제안한다.
4장 ‘은혜의 지구마음학’은 ‘은혜’라는 키워드로 카렌 바라드의 ‘모든 존재들의 얽힘’을 재서술하면서 지구상의 모든 존재, 특히 나는 모든 존재로부터 은혜를 입고 있음을 호소한다. 모든 존재를 아우르는 마음 바탕 위에서 우리는 비로소 지구의 마음을 읽어낼 수 있다는 것이다.
5장 ‘실학의 지구기학’은 조선 후기 실학자 최한기의 기학이 “‘세계’로부터 ‘지구’로의 시선의 전환”을 통해 성립된다, 즉 “인간과 만물이 관계를 지구적 차원에서 사유하는 시도가 일찍이 조선사회에 형성되었음”을 주목한다. 최한기는 ‘만물이 일체로 얽혀 있음’에 주목하면서, 천지를 섬기는 ‘천륜적 효’를 제안한다. 이는 인간의 행위주체성을 지구적으로 확장하는 사유라 할 수 있다.
6장 ‘미래의 지구교육학’은 미래교육의 방향성을 ‘지구교육학’의 지평에서 조망한다. 이는 ‘세계시민교육’과 ‘생태시민교육’의 한계를 극복하면서 지금 우리에게 절실한 ‘생명적 사유’에서 “비생명적 존재들과의 얽힘도 사유할 수 있는” 교육으로 나아가야 함을 역설한다.

인류세 시대 인문학의 방향을 새롭게 정립한다

지구위기 문제들을 한국사상과 비서구적 관점에서 사유하기 위해 기획된 이 책은 인간과 유럽 중심의 근대인문학의 한계를 극복하고 지구와 만물까지 인문학의 범주에 포함시켜, 인간과 지구가 공생할 수 있는 다양한 논의들을 모색한다. 당면한 기후변화와 팬데믹을 극복하기 위해서는 인간 중심의 사유체계를 탈바꿈시켜야 한다는 절박함은 학문 영역뿐 아니라 문화, 정치, 예술, 교육 등의 영역 전반에 널리 공명하고 있다.

특히 우리 삶의 근원적인 문제를 탐구하는 인문학 사조들은 인간의 인식에 근본적인 변화를 가져오지 않으면 - 인류세 시대가 본격화됨에 따라 압도적으로 현상화된 - 지금의 위기를 돌이킬 수 없다는 점에 주목한다. 지구인문학은 이러한 과제에 적극 응답하며 ‘지구를 바라보는 우리의 시선’이 ‘우리를 향한 지구인문학의 시선’을 닮아야 한다는 점을 깊이 파고든다. 이것을 통해 문명의 전환을 이룸으로써 지구적 전환 속에 인간의 자리가 없어지지 않도록 하는 길을 모색하는 것이다.

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지구와사람-토마스베리강좌

지구와사람-토마스베리강좌

토마스베리강좌


토마스베리강좌는 지구법학(Earth Jurisprudence)과 생태대(ecozoic era)의 비전을 제안한 생태사상가 토마스 베리를 중심으로 생태문명론의 연구와 교육사업을 진행합니다. 토마스 베리는 지구의 운명을 위협하고 있는 생태 파괴의 원인을 인간의 자연 착취를 조장하는 세계관과 우주관에서 찾고 있습니다. 그는 인간 문명이 지금과 같은 파괴적인 상황에까지 이르게 된 과정을 규명하고, 생태적 회복을 위해서 인류가 취해야 할 방향을 제시하고 있습니다.

토마스베리강좌는 토마스 베리의 저작들을 중심으로 전통과 현대의 생태학과 우주론(Ecology &Cosmology)에 관한 심화학습을 진행합니다. 기술대를 넘어 생태대로 나아가는 올바른 세계의 비전을 세우고 교육하는 아카데미를 지향합니다.토마스 베리
Thomas Berry, 1914~2009

토마스 베리는 자연 세계와 인간 간의 관계에 관한 세계의 주요 사상가 중 한 사람이다. 수도승이자 철학자이며 문화사학자면서 작가이기도 한 그는 스스로를 신학자라기보다 ‘지구신학자’(Geologian) 내지 ‘지구학자’(Earth scholar)로 여겼다. 유창하면서도 정열적인 지구의 대변인으로, “우리 시대 가장 탁월한 문화사학자 중 한 사람”으로 소개되고 있는 그를 뉴스위크지는 새로운 유(類)의 생태신학자 중 사고를 가장 자극하는 인물로 기술한 바 있다. 1934년 가톨릭 예수 수난회에 입회했고, 연구하고 성찰하며 가르치는 데 자신의 생애를 바쳤다. 역사학으로 박사학위를 취득한 뒤 1940년 후반 중국에서 중국어와 중국 문화를 공부했고, 1950년 유럽에서 군목으로 종사했다. 이후 시톤 홀과 포드햄 대학에서 인도와 중국 문화사를 가르쳤다. 포드햄 대학과 뉴욕 그리고 리버델 종교연구센터에서 종교사 프로그램을 개설하기도 했다. 작품으로는 <지구의 꿈(The Dream of the Earth)>, <우주 이야기(The Universe Story)>(과학자 브라이안 스윔과 공저), <위대한 과업(The Great Work)>, <황혼의 사색(Evening Thoughts)>(메리 이블린 터커 편집)이 있다. 향년 94세를 일기로 사망할 때까지 미국 노스 캐롤리나의 남부 애팔래치아의 언덕 마을에서 살았다.약력1934수도원 입회(예수고난회)1948Catholic University of America, 서구문명사 전공, 박사
(The Historical Theory of Giambattista Vico)1948중국과 미국에서 중국학 연구, 인도의 산스크리트어와 종교적 전통 연구
Seton Hall University 아시아학센터
Saint John's University 아시아학센터1966-1979Fordham University 종교사 대학원 프로그램 소장1970-1995Riverdale Center of Religeous Reserch 창립 소장1975-1987American Teiihard de Chardin Association 회장1995Greensboro North Carolina한국어 번역 출간서신생대를 넘어 생태대로 – 인간과 지구의 화해를 위한 대화토마스 베리, 토마스 클락 공저, 김준우 옮김, 에코조익, 2006토마스 베리의 위대한 과업 - 미래로 향한 우리의 길토마스 베리 지음, 이영숙 옮김, 대화문화아카데미, 2009우주 이야기 – 태초의 찬란한 불꽃으로부터 생태대까지토마스 베리, 브라이언 스윔 공저, 맹영선 옮김,
대화문화아카데미, 2010그리스도교의 미래와 지구의 운명토마스 베리 지음, 황종렬 옮김, 비오로딸, 2011지구의 꿈토마스 베리 지음, 맹영선 옮김, 대화문화아카데미, 2013황혼의 사색 – 성스러운 공동체인 지구에 대한 성찰토마스 베리 지음, 메리 에블린 터커 편저, 박 만 옮김,
한국기독교연구소, 2015

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2019 토마스베리강좌 개최2019년 3월 16일(토)부터 시작된 제 4차 토마스베리강좌가 11월 25일(토)까지 7회에 걸쳐 열린다. 토마스베리강좌는 맹영선 선생의 지도와 최선호 변호사의 진행으로 더욱 탄탄한 교육프로그램으로 자리잡았다. 이번 강좌는 생태사상가 토마스 베리의 〈지구의 꿈〉과 〈위대한 과업〉을 함께 공부하는 시간을 갖는다. 11월까지 월 1회 토요일 유재에서 오후 2~5시에 진행된다. 첨부 파일을 통해 자세한 강의 내용을 살펴볼 수 있다.2019/04/11
2018 토마스베리강좌 개최세 번째 토마스베리강좌가 2018년 3월 24일부터 시작됐다. 지난 해에 이어 이번 강의 역시 토마스 베리 저서를 번역한 바 있는 맹영선 강사가 맡았다. 강좌에서 함께 공부할 책은 토마스 베리와 브라이언 스윔이 1992년에 쓴 〈우주 이야기 : 태초의 찬란한 불꽃으로부터 생태대까지〉(The Universe Story: From the Primordial Flaring Forth to the Ecozoic Era – A Celebration of...2018/05/14
2017 토마스베리강좌 개최창립 이래 두 번째로 열리는 토마스베리강좌가 2017년 8월 19일부터 시작됐다. 서울시 NPO 지원센터 2층 받다홀에서 진행하는 이 강좌는 2018년 1월까지 총 8회 열린다. 강의를 맡은 맹영선 강사는 토마스 베리의 저서 〈지구의 꿈〉, 브라이언 스윔과 함께 쓴 〈우주 이야기〉를 옮긴 번역가로, 식품 화확과 환경 신학을 공부한 후 지구와 우리 자신을 위해 구체적으로 무엇을 어떻게 해야 하는지 계속 공부하고 있다.이번 강의에서는 토마스 베리...2017/08/21

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지구와사람
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지구법강좌
토마스베리강좌
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Thomas Berry: A Biography eBook : Tucker, Mary Evelyn, Grim, John, Angyal, Andrew: Amazon.com.au: Kindle Store

Thomas Berry: A Biography eBook : Tucker, Mary Evelyn, Grim, John, Angyal, Andrew: Amazon.com.au: Kindle Store

Thomas Berry (1914–2009) was one of the twentieth century’s most prescient and profound thinkers. As a cultural historian, he sought a broader perspective on humanity’s relationship to the earth in order to respond to the ecological and social challenges of our times. This first biography of Berry illuminates his remarkable vision and its continuing relevance for achieving transformative social change and environmental renewal.

Berry began his studies in Western history and religions and then expanded to include Asian and indigenous religions, which he taught at Fordham University, Barnard College, and Columbia University. Drawing on his explorations of history, he came to see the evolutionary process as a story that could help restore the continuity of humans with the natural world. Berry urged humans to recognize their place on a planet with complex ecosystems in a vast, evolving universe. He sought to replace the modern alienation from nature with a sense of intimacy and responsibility. Berry called for new forms of ecological education, law, and spirituality, as well as the creation of resilient agricultural systems, bioregions, and ecocities. At a time of growing environmental crisis, this biography shows the ongoing significance of Berry’s conception of human interdependence with the earth as part of the unfolding journey of the universe.

A Prophetic Voice: Thomas Berry | Center for Ecozoic Studies

A Prophetic Voice: Thomas Berry | Center for Ecozoic Studies

A Prophetic Voice: Thomas Berry

by Herman Greene

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A Prophetic Voice: Thomas Berry

By Marjorie Hope and James Young

Introduction

Whenever Thomas Berry looks out over the Hudson River from his home at the Riverdale Center for Religious Research, he experiences anew “the gorgeousness of the natural world.” The Earth brings forth a display of beauty in such unending profusion, a display so overwhelming to human consciousness, he says, that “we might very well speak of it as being dreamed into existence.”

But this Passionist priest and cultural historian—who calls himself a geologian—also reflects on the disastrous damage humans have wrought on the Earth. What is happening today is unprecedented, it is not just another change, he says. We are changing the very structure of the planet. We are even extinguishing many of the major life systems that have emerged in the 65 million years of this, the Cenozoic era—an era that has witnessed a spectrum of wonders, including the development of flowers, birds, and insects, the spreading of grasses and forests across the land, and the emergence of humans.

The Earth is changing, and we ourselves, integral aspects of the Earth, are being changed, he says. Religion must now function within this context, at this order of magnitude. But Western religion has been assuming little or no responsibility for the state or fate of the planet. Theology has become dysfunctional.

As a member of a Roman Catholic order, Berry directs much of his criticism at the tradition he knows best, Christianity. But his intention is to address people of any belief, and his searching mind and wide acquaintance with Chinese, Indian, Southeast Asian, Native American, and other cultures ‐ indeed, the entire pageant of cultural history ‐ make him catholic in the, non‐ sectarian sense of the term. His whole lifetime has been devoted to pursuing an understanding of the human condition and the condition of other beings on this planet.

Of course, he is thinking of present‐day human beings who live under the spell of Western culture when he writes: “We have lost our sense of courtesy toward the Earth and its inhabitants, our sense of gratitude, our willingness to recognize the sacred character of habitat, our capacity for the awesome, for the numinous quality of every earthly reality.” For Berry, the capacity for intensive sharing with the natural world lies deep within each of us, but has become submerged by an addiction to “progress.” Arrogantly we have placed ourselves above other creatures, deluding ourselves with the notion that we always know best what is good for the Earth and good for ourselves. Ultimately, custody of the Earth belongs to the Earth.

In the past, the story of the universe has been told in many ways by the peoples of the Earth, but today we are without one that is comprehensive. What is needed is nothing short of a new creation story, a new story of the universe, he asserts. Creation must be perceived and experienced as the emergence of the universe as both a psychic‐spiritual and material‐physical reality from the very beginning.

Human beings are integral with this emergent process. Indeed, the human is that being in whom the universe reflects on and celebrates itself in the deep mysteries of its existence in a special mode of conscious self‐awareness.

Everything tells the story of the universe ‐ the wind, trees, birds, stones. They are our cousins. Today it is harder to hear them. Berry has concentrated over the years on listening to the story told by the physical sciences, the story narrated by human cultures, the story recounted through cave paintings, visions of shamans, the pyramids of the Egyptians and Mayans. Each narrative is unique. But ultimately, they all tell the same story too.

We need a narrative that will demonstrate that every aspect of the universe is integral with a single organic whole, he insists. Its primary basis is the account of the emergent universe as communicated through our observational sciences. The universe as we know it today not only has cyclical modes of functioning, but also irreversible sequential modes of transformations. From the beginning of human consciousness, all cultures experienced the cyclical modes: the ever‐renewing sequence of seasons, of life and death. But today scientists and some others have begun to move from that dominant spatial mode of consciousness to a dominant time‐ developmental mode, time as an evolutionary sequence of irreversible transformations. We are beginning to recognize that our might can do temporal damage that is also eternal damage.

The new narrative will encompass a new type of history, a new type of science, a new type of economics, a new mode of awareness of the divine—in the very widest sense, a new kind of religious sensitivity. Such ideas as these do not always sit well with traditional Christians, nor with the followers of some other religions.

We realized on our first meeting with him at the Riverdale Center that Berry does not fit the common image of a nonconformist. A man with a gentle smile, bright eyes, and tousled whitening hair opened the door of the three story brown house and introduced himself simply as “Tom Berry.” It was a little hard to imagine that this retiring man, dressed in an old shirt and subdued in his speech could write so passionately of the dance, song, poetry, and drumbeats through which human beings have expressed their exultation and sense of participating in the universe as a single community. He led us through the inside of the house, which appeared to be one vast library with special collections of books, many in original languages, on Hindu, Confucian, Buddhist, Shinto, and Native American cultures. He then seated us on the plant‐ filled sun‐veranda overlooking the Hudson. Despite his shy manner, he responded easily to our questions, and sometimes took the initiative.

Noticing that our eyes had been drawn to the majestic red oak outside the window, he told us that it had endured more than four hundred years of nature’s buffets, and had withstood even human‐made disasters, like the massive tremors from a gas tank explosion that uprooted its fellow oak several years ago. To him it stood as a symbol of hope. Indeed, it was to this tree that he had dedicated The Dream of the Earth: “To the Great Red Oak, beneath whose sheltering branches this book was written.”

As we listened, occasionally looking across the river at the Palisades, we sensed that the Riverdale Center, set in the valley that had witnessed a story that included the emergence of the Palisades, the appearance of trees and birds and bears, then the long habitation by Native Americans, is a fitting place to contemplate the fate of Earth. It seemed fitting, too, that scientists, educators, environmentalists, and people of many faiths from all over the world would gather here, in small groups, to dream a new vision of the Earth into being.

Although clearly reticent about personal matters, he told us that his own life story began in 1914 in Greensboro, North Carolina. The third of thirteen children in a middle‐class Catholic family, he managed to develop a congenial relationship with his parents, but at the same time a certain distance.

This trait of distance, combined with a growing attachment to the land, surfaced often as he talked of his boyhood. The family had a horse, cow, chickens, and dogs; he felt close to the animal world. He often roamed the hills alone, except for the companionship of a collie, sensing the freedom of the woodlands and delighting in the clear streams, the songs of the birds, the subtle smells of the meadows. “But even at the age of eight,” he recalled, “I saw that development was damaging nature. At nine, I was collecting catalogues for camping equipment, canoes, knives, all the things I’d need to live in the Northwest forest. I felt the confrontation between civilization and wilderness, and I was acting on it.”

At nineteen, Berry went on, he decided to enter a religious community that would offer the best opportunity for contemplation and writing. He wanted to “get away from the trivial.” Sometimes he has wondered how he got through religious life, but he did, and yet managed to maintain that certain distance between himself and the establishment all the way.

After ten years in various monasteries, he pursued a doctorate in history at Catholic University in Washington, D.C., then spent a year studying Chinese in Beijing. After teaching at the Passionist seminary college, he became a chaplain with NATO in Germany; traveled in Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East; and went to England to meet the distinguished historian of cultures, Christopher Dawson, who had helped awaken him to the role of religion as a powerful factor in shaping culture. Later he taught Japanese history at Seton Hall University, helped found a seminar on Oriental thought and religion at Columbia University and an Asian Institute at St. John’s University, built up Fordham University’s history of religions program, and for eleven years served as President of the American Teilhard Association. During these years he continued his search to discover how people find meaning in life. Always drawn to Native Americans because of their sense of integrity and freedom, their bond with the riches of nature, he came to know many, including Sioux chief Lame Deer, Onondagan leader Oren Lyons, and the poet Paula Gunn Allen. He continued his studies of history and philosophy, and aided by knowledge of Sanskrit and Chinese, deepened his exploration of Eastern religious traditions. Over the years he also published a large number of papers and books on subjects ranging from Buddhism to the religions of India, the creative role of the elderly, the spiritual transformation of Carl Jung, and the thought of Teilhard de Chardin. Philosophers ranging from Confucius to Thoreau and Bergson; poet/visionaries extending from Dante to Blake and Chief Seattle; ecologists and scientists from Rachel Carson and Ilya Prigogine to Anne and Paul Ehrlich, all came to influence his conception of the Earth Community.

“But Teilhard had the greatest influence on what might be called your ecological vision?”

“Yes. As a paleontologist as well as philosopher, he had a grasp of the need for healing the rift between science and religion. I would say that he appreciated the important role of science as a basic mystical discipline of the West. He was the first great thinker in the modern scientific tradition to describe the universe as having a psychic‐spiritual as well as a physical‐material dimension from the very beginning. Teilhard had a comprehensive vision of the universe in its evolutionary unfolding. He saw the human as inseparable from the history of the universe. Also, he was keenly aware of the need in Western religious thought to move from excessive concern with redemption to greater emphasis on the creation process.”

“And Teilhard’s thought inspired you to delve into science?”

He nodded. “I needed some general knowledge of geology, astronomy, physics, other sciences. But I must emphasize that in an ecological age, Teilhard’s framework has its limitations. Remember, he died in 1955. He believed in technological ‘progress,’ and saw the evolutionary process as concentrated in the human, which would ultimately achieve super‐human status. He could not understand humans’ destructive impact on the Earth. When others pointed it out, he could not see it. Science would discover other forms of life! Well, his work remains tremendously important. The challenge is to extend Teilhard’s principal concerns further, to help light the way toward an Ecozoic Age.”

“Teilhard posed the greatest challenge of our time: to move from the spatial mode of consciousness to the historical, from being to becoming. The Church finds difficulty in recognizing the evolution of the Earth. For a long time it wouldn’t accept even the evolution of animal forms. To this day there is no real acceptance of our modern story of the universe as sacred story. As a child I was taught by the catechism that Earth was created in seven days, 5000 years ago. There was no sense of developmental, transformative time in the natural world.”

“And the church, as so often, is behind the times instead of leading?”

He looked at us for a long moment. “There is some concern, of course, but it does not go far enough,” he said slowly. “The Vatican, for example, makes vague statements on being careful about the environment, but there is emphasis on making the natural world useful to human beings. So far, the most impressive Catholic bishops’ statement comes from the Philippines. It’s called ‘What is Happening to our Beautiful Land?’“ Over lunch we learned more about the ever‐widening scope of Thomas Berry’s activities and about some of the people who are helping to carry out his work. He told us that on occasion he spoke at New York’s Cathedral of St. John the Divine, which has become the most ecologically‐ minded church that he knows of, largely because of the enthusiasm of its Dean, James Parks Morton. He speaks on occasion at gatherings at Genesis Farm, a religiously‐based center seeking to develop a model of bioregional community; at the California‐based Institute in Culture and Creation Spirituality, headed by radical priest Matthew Fox; and at Grailville, an educational center and laywoman’s community stressing ecological living. He also has spoken at Au Sable Institute where practical and theoretical programs in ecology are integrated with biblical studies. He has participated in many conferences, including the seminal 1988 meeting of the North American Conference on Christianity and Ecology, the first (1988) Global Conference of Spiritual and Parliamentary Leaders on Human Survival, and international gatherings in Costa Rica at the United Nations University for Peace. He helped the Holy Cross Center in Port Burwell, Ontario build an institution for spirituality and ecology. In Puebla, Mexico, a Jesuit group has founded the Institute for Ecological Personalism based on his ideas. Letters come in continually from people in countries all over the world.

During the afternoon our talks continued, touching on animism, Taoism, and Buddhism, as well as Buddhist ideas for human habitats, which Berry considered models of ecological functioning because they disturb the natural world very little.

Pulling the Strands of Berry’s Thought Together

Since that day we have met Berry several times, studied his more recent writings, and gradually gained a clearer picture of the transforming vision he presents.

In 1988 Berry brought out a collection of his essays in a volume entitled The Dream of the Earth. In 1991 he and Jesuit priest Thomas Clarke published a dialogue, Befriending the Earth: a Theology of Reconciliation Between Humans and the Earth, which had appeared as a thirteen‐ part series on Canadian television. Years earlier, in 1982, he teamed up with Brian Swimme to begin a decade of work on a daring venture: The Universe Story: From the Primordial Flaring Forth to the Ecozoic Era, which was published in 1992.

Their partnership has been an unusual one. Swimme, a physicist and a mathematical cosmologist, is younger, and lives thousands of miles away, on the West Coast. Brian Swimme’s early book is entitled The Universe is a Green Dragon. Now they have written the story of the universe as a single comprehensive narrative of the sequence of transformations that the universe has experienced. Grounded in present‐day scientific understanding, it parallels the mythic narratives of the past as they were told in poetry, music, painting, dance, and ritual. Nothing quite like this coupling of science and human history has been published before..

Planet Earth is surely a mysterious planet, say Swimme and Berry. One need only observe how much more brilliant it is than other planets of our solar system in the diversity of its manifestations and the complexity of the joy of its development. Earth appears to have developed with the simple aim of celebrating the joy of existence. Through this story, they hope that the human community will become present to the larger Earth community in a mutually enhancing way. Our role is to enable Earth and the entire universe to reflect on and celebrate itself in a special mode of conscious self awareness. We have become desensitized to the glories of the natural world and are making awesome decisions without the sense of awe and humility commensurate with their impact. We need a new mystique as we move into the Ecozoic era, and this process will need the participation of all members of the planetary community.

The various living and nonliving members of the Earth community have a common genetic line of development, the authors tell us. It begins with the Beginning: the primordial Flaring Forth of the universe some 15 billion years ago. It starts as stupendous energy, and evolves into gravitational, strong nuclear, weak nuclear, and electromagnetic interactions. Before a millionth of a second has passed, the particles stabilize. From this point we are carried through the seeding of galaxies, and the appearance of galactic clouds, primal stars, the first elements, supernovas, and galaxies. These are magnificent spiraling moments, carrying the destiny of everything that followed. They are moments of grace. Some five billion years ago the solar system forms, and a billion years later, the living Earth. We travel through the Paleozoic Era (in which vertebrates, jawed fishes, and insects appear); the Mesozoic Era (witnessing the first dinosaurs, birds, and mammals), and the Cenozoic (beginning with the emergence of the first rodents and bats, and carrying through to the arrival of various orders of mammals and humans), up to today.

After the emergence of the first humans, Homo habilis, some 2.6 million years ago, the new species evolves to Homo erectus, and then to Homo sapiens, with its marvelous new gifts of expression—ritual burials at first, then language, musical instruments, cave paintings, and other skills and artifacts that we associate with human civilization. Homo sapiens evolved through periods of the Neolithic village, classical civilizations, the rise of nations, and the “modern revelation.”

The latter refers to a new awareness of how the ultimate mysteries of existence are being manifested in the universe. This revelation, a gradual change from a dominant spatial mode of consciousness to perception of the universe as an irreversible sequence of transformations, might be called a change from “cosmos” to ever‐evolving “cosmogenesis”. It can be seen as beginning with the discoveries of Copernicus, and embracing those of Kepler, Galileo, Francis Bacon, Descartes, Newton, Kant, Darwin, Einstein, Whitehead, Teilhard, Rachel Carson, and many other scientists and philosophers.

Throughout the book the two men write from a unified point of view as they present some cardinal principles. Among them, that the birth of the universe was not an event in time; time begins simultaneously with the birth of existence. There was no “before,” and there was no “outside.” All the energy that would ever exist erupted as a single existence. The stars that later would blaze, the lizards that would crawl on the land, the actions of the human species, would be powered by the same mysterious energy that burst forth at the first dawn. Another cardinal principle is that the universe holds all things together, and is itself the primary activating power in every activity. It is not a thing, but a mode of being of everything. Recent scientific work has shown that it is not workable to think of a particle or event as completely determined by its immediate vicinity. Although in practical terms their influence may be negligible, events taking place elsewhere in the universe are directly related to the physical parameters of the situation. It is beyond the scope of this summary to present the authors’ account of this phenomenon. However, it underlines their conclusion that “since the universe blossomed from a seed point, this means that a full understanding of a proton requires a full understanding of the universe.”

Articulating the new story so that humans can enter creatively into the web of relationships in the universe will require, to some degree, reinventing language and the meaning we attach to words. For example: what is gravitation? In classical mechanistic understanding, it is a particular attraction things have to each other. Newton called it force, and Einstein, the curvature of the space‐time manifold. But the bond holding each thing in the universe to everything else is simply the universe acting. Therefore, to say “The stone falls to Earth” misses the active quality of that event. To say that gravity pulls the stone to Earth implies a mechanism that does not exist. To say that Earth pulls the rock misses the presence of the universe to each of its parts. It is more helpful, say Berry and Swimme, to see the planet Earth and the rock as drawn by the universe into bonded relationship, a profound intimacy. “The bonding simply happens; it simply is. The bonding is the perdurable fact of the universe, and happens primevally in each instant, a welling up of an inescapable togetherness of things.” Thus we can begin to grasp what is meant by the statement that gravity is not an independent power; it is the universe in both its physical and spiritual aspects that holds things together and is the primary activating power in every activity. We can begin to understand the idea that the universe acts, that it is not a thing, but a mode of being of everything. Each process, then, is ultimately indivisible.

Primal peoples of every continent understood this bonding, this intimacy, although obviously not with the tools and complex theories developed by modern science. Recent centuries have witnessed a concerted effort to rid scientific language of all anthropomorphisms. Instead, it has become mechanomorphic and reductionist. But let us consider the Milky Way. Its truth cannot be realized by focusing only on its early components, helium and hydrogen. Its truth also rests on the fact that in its later modes of being it is capable of thinking and feeling and creating—of evolving into creatures such as human beings. The Milky Way expresses its inner depths in Emily Dickinson’s poetry, for Emily Dickinson is a dimension of the galaxy’s development. In the long process of evolution, the sensibility of a poet derives from the Milky Way, and her or his feelings are an evocation of being, involving sunlight, thunderstorms, grass, mountains, animals, and human history. They are the evocation of mountain, animal, world. Poets do not think on the universe; rather, the universe thinks itself, in them and through them.

Thus, the vibrations and fluctuations in the universe are the music that called forth the galaxies and their powers of weaving elements into life. Our responsibility is to develop our capacity to listen. The eye that searches the Milky Way—the eye of humans or that of telescopes—is itself an eye shaped by the Milky Way. The mind searching for contact with the Milky Way is the very mind of the Milky Way searching for its inner depths.

The appearance of humans on this planet brought with it a new faculty of understanding, a consciousness characterized by a sense of wonder and celebration, and an ability to use parts of its external environment as instruments. Even in the time of Homo habilis (2.6 million to 1.5 million years ago), an intimate rapport between humans and the natural world was developing. And in the much later period of classical civilizations (3500 BCE to 1600 CE), the human social order was integrated with the cosmological order. Neither was conceivable without the other.

Yet while there was a great deal of teaching about humans’ relationship with the natural world in the Western, and especially the Eastern classical civilizations, there was also great devastation. Many Chinese philosophers and painters, for example, depicted that intimacy in eloquent terms, but endless wars and stripping the forests for more cultivation despoiled the countryside.

In the West, particularly, there developed an exaggerated anthropocentrism. When the Plague struck Europe in 1347, this changed to theocentrism, for since there was no germ theory to explain such a calamity, humans concluded that they must be too attached to Earth and should commit themselves to salvation from the Earth, absorption into the divine. Anthropocentrism and theocentrism, however, both denied the unity between the natural, human, and divine world. The mystical bonding of the human with the natural world was becoming progressively weaker. Closely associated with this insensitivity to the natural world was an insensitivity to women; patriarchal dominance reigned.

Since the late eighteenth century, the West has considered its most important mission to be that the peoples of Earth achieve their identity within the democratic setting of the modern nation‐state. Nationalism, progress, democratic freedoms, and virtually limitless rights to private property are the four fundamentals of this mystique. That unless their limits are recognized, these might bring catastrophe upon the natural world was not even considered. Land became something to be exploited economically rather than communed with spiritually. Wars of colonial conquest were related to the mission of propagating Western bourgeois values.

The “modern revelation”—characterized as it is by gradual awareness that the universe has emerged as an irreversible sequence of transformations enabling it to gain greater complexity in structure and greater variety in its modes of conscious expression—is a new mode of consciousness. This change in perception from an enduring cosmos to an ever‐transforming cosmogenesis has awesome implications that humans have not yet come to grips with. Our predicament is itself the result of a myth—the myth of Wonderland. If only we continue on the path of progress it tells us, happiness will be ours—happiness virtually equated with the ever‐ increasing consumption of products that have been taken violently from Earth or that react violently on it.

We need a new myth to guide human activity into the future. It should be analogous to the sense of mythic harmonies that suffused the fifteenth century Renaissance. At the beginning of the scientific age, the universe was perceived as one of order and harmony, in which each mode of being resonates with every other mode of being.

Somehow this sense of an intelligibly ordered universe has directed the scientific quest, say Swimme and Berry. But only recently have we been able to comprehend the depths of these harmonies, and thus fully recognize the mission of science. The scientific meditation on the structure and functioning of the universe that began centuries ago has yielded a sense of what can be called “the curvature of the universe whereby all things are held together in their intimate presence to each other.” Each thing is sustained by everything else.

We are on the verge of the Ecozoic era. What will it mean? This is a question explored in The Universe Story and Befriending the Earth, and in essays on economics, technology, law, bioregionalism, education, and planetary socialism in The Dream of the Earth. The basic answer begins to be found when we question some of our implicit assumptions:

 The assumption that we need constant economic growth, for example. How could we believe that human well‐being could be attained by diminishing the well‐being of the Earth? That we could achieve an ever‐expanding Gross Domestic Product when the Gross Earth Product is declining? Since the threat to both economics and religion comes from one source, the disruption of the natural world, should economics not also be seen as a religious issue? If the water is polluted, it can neither be drunk nor used for baptism.

 The implicit assumption that we could cure sick people by technologies and by focusing on their present problems. How can we have well people on a sick planet?

 The widespread idea that the primary purpose of education is to train people for jobs. We need jobs, certainly, but is it not more important for people to be educated for a diversity of roles and functions? Is it not more realistic, in the long run, to view education as coming to know the story of the universe, of life systems, of consciousness as a single story—and to help people understand and fulfil their role in this larger pattern of meaning? Even in the arts, rather than focusing on producing specialized professionals, would it not be better if all of us played music, if all children painted and wrote poetry?

 The conviction that a democracy that is exploiting the natural world is the highest form of governance. The anthropocentrism of the word is implicit in the root; “demo” refers to people, not to all beings on Earth, beings whose fate we are controlling in the name of human life, liberty, and happiness. We need a biocracy, a rule that will emerge from and be concerned with all the members of the community.

Re‐evaluating these and other “truths” that we hold as “self‐ evident” should enable us to realize that Earth is primary, while the human is secondary; that the universe is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects. We should be enabled to step back a little from our diligent efforts to impose our will on life systems. We will then be free to listen to the natural world with an attunement that goes beyond our scientific perceptions and reaches the spontaneous sensitivities in our own inner being.

All human professions need to recognize that their primary source is the integral functioning of the Earth community. It is the natural world that is the primary economic reality, the primary educator, the primary governance, the primary technologist, the primary healer, the primary presence of the sacred, the primary moral value. The professions do not have the words for the type of transformation required; we need a new language. We need to transform the legal profession, for instance, and invent a new language in law, and then move from the ideal of democracy toward the more comprehensive paradigm of biocracy. One example: a constitution that recognizes not only the human on this continent, but the entire North American community, including animate beings, geographical structures, life systems.

Religion needs to appreciate that the primary sacred community is the universe itself. Our ethical sensitivities need to expand beyond suicide, homicide, and genocide, to include biocide and geocide.

Interwoven in all this is the need to fully recognize women’s gifts and their roles in the future, both for themselves and for the well‐being of Earth. The need to limit human population is modifying the traditional roles of women and men, indeed the entire human situation. As women are liberated from the oppressions they have endured in most traditional civilizations, a new energy should be released throughout the Earth.

Albeit slowly, changes are already happening, as divisions of learning begin to overcome their isolation. Fundamental to a real sea‐change, however, will be the move from a human‐centered to an Earth‐centered language. Words like good, evil, freedom, society, justice, literacy, progress, praise should be broadened to include other beings of the natural world.

A basic principle of the emerging Ecozoic era is that the universe requires two modes of understanding: it has cyclical modes of functioning, yes, but also irreversible sequential modes of transformation. The law of entropy must evoke a certain foreboding in human consciousness.

The Cenozoic era emerged quite independent of human influence, but Homo sapiens will enter into virtually every phase of the Ecozoic era. We cannot create trees, fish, or birdsong, but they could well disappear unless we choose to temper our awesome power with humility. We must follow three basic axioms in our relations with the natural world: acceptance, protection, fostering: Acceptance of the given order of things. Protection of the life‐systems at the base of the planetary community. Fostering a sense of active responsibility for the larger Earth community, a responsibility that devolves upon us through our unique capacity for understanding the universe story.

Our fundamental commitment in the Ecozoic era should be to perceive the universe as a communion of subjects rather than as a collection of objects. A major obstacle to this is our reluctance to think of the human as one among many species. Moreover, the change in consciousness required is of such enormous proportions and significance that it might be likened to a new type of revelatory experience.

In the new era we shall need to recapture the basic principle of balance. Its prototype lies in the awesome reality that the expansive original energy of the primordial Flaring Forth keeps the universe from collapsing and gravitational attraction holds the parts together, enabling the universe to flourish. So, too, on Earth: The balance of containing and expanding forces keeps the Earth in a state of balanced turbulence.

In the industrial age, however, humans have upset the equilibrium. In the Ecozoic era the task will be to achieve a creative balance between human activities and other forces on this planet. When the curvature of the universe, the curvature of the Earth, and the curvature of the human are in proper relation, then the Earth and its human aspect will have come into celebratory experience that is the fulfilment of Earthly existence.

Where does God fit into this story? This is a word that Berry rarely uses. It has been overused, and trivialized, he says. The word has many different meanings to people. His principal concern is to reach the larger society, including people who would not call themselves religious.

Although Berry does not say it in so many words, he implies that in the West, especially, we spend too much time defining God and arguing over definitions rather than recognizing—in both theological and experiential ways—the ineffable. The term “God,” he says, refers to the ultimate mystery of things, something beyond that which we can truly comprehend. Many primal peoples experience this as the Great Spirit, a mysterious power pervading every aspect of the natural world. Some people dance this experience, some express it in song, some find it in the laughter of children, the sweetness of an apple, or the sound of wind through the trees. At every moment we are experiencing the overwhelming mystery of existence.

Berry prefers to speak of the Divine, of the numinous presence in the world about us. This is what all of us, child or elder, Christian or Muslim or Buddhist or agnostic, can experience; this is the ground that all of us can truly know.

Since the universe story is the way the Divine is revealing itself, humans become sacred by participating in this larger sacred community. The gratitude that we feel in this experience, we call “religion.” For Berry, it would seem, all this is more real and less abstract than theology, because it emanates from experience of the emergent universe, an experience so basic that it is shared by other members of the Earth community.

Perhaps because of his comprehensive Weltanschauung, embracing non‐theistic faiths, Berry never speaks of a God who commands, judges, rules over a paradisiacal afterlife, or watches over human actions. He does not go into traditional religious questions like good, evil, Heaven, Hell, or individual salvation. Yet he points out that his position follows quite directly from Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Romans. In the first chapter Paul declares that “Ever since God created the world, this everlasting power and deity—however invisible—have been there for the mind to see in the things He has made.”

CES Monthly Musings – September‐October, 2013 Page 29 of 45

In our discussions with Berry, he has stressed that his primary interest is that humans come to see the visible created world with whatever clarity is available. In his writings he does not go into all the basic theological questions like that of ultimate origins, but the first step, as Saint Paul suggests, is perception of the created world. In Berry’s view, God is not our first clear perception. Rather, the sense of God emerges in and through our perception of the universe. Just how the divine is perceived obviously varies among different peoples. In any case, it seems that the divine is perceived “in the things He has made.” The knowledge of God emerges in the human mind not directly, but through this manifestation.

Perhaps a major difficulty for many believers lies in Berry’s view that the universe is not a puppet world without an inner power through which it functions. Rather, God enables beings to be themselves, and to act in a way to bring themselves into being—not independently of deity, but still with a valid inner principle of life and activity. This activity of creatures is known as Second Cause, while the deity remains First Cause. These causes are not “real” in the same way, nor do they function in the same manner. But to deny the reality of the created world and the validity of its proper mode of activity, is to deny the capacity of the divine origin of things to produce anything other than ephemeral appearances. Ultimately our perception of the divine depends precisely on our perception of the reality of the visible world about us.

Speaking of the universe as a single multiform sequential celebratory event and of the human as that being in whom the universe reflects on and celebrates itself in a special mode of conscious self‐awareness, is speaking in and of the “created” order. That it says nothing directly about “God,” does not to Berry indicate any denial of the divine. It is, rather, the proper way of speaking to our times without getting into a preaching mode that would do more damage to religion than anything else. Humans can participate in the great celebration that is the universe itself, and the celebration is ultimately the finest manifestation of the divine. It is our way of seeing the divine “in all things that are made.” This great celebration might also be considered the Grand Liturgy of the universe, the shared liturgy that we enter into through our own humanly contrived pluralistic liturgies.

As we have seen, Berry is highly critical of many aspects of Christian doctrine and practice, since all of Western civilization has been profoundly affected by the biblical Christian tradition. Thus Christianity is involved not as a direct cause of our ecological crisis, but as creating the context. To summarize briefly:

 Thefirstproblemistheemphasisonatranscendent,personaldivinebeing,asclearly distinct from the universe.

 AsecondrelatedproblemisChristianity’sexaltationofthehumanasaspiritualbeingas against the physical nature of other beings—the human is so special that the human soul has to be created directly by God in every single case.

 Thethirdproblemisthatredemptionisseenassomekindofout‐of‐this‐world liberation.

 Thefourthistheidea,developedparticularlybyadevoutChristiannamedDescartes, that the world is a mechanism.

CES Monthly Musings – September‐October, 2013 Page 30 of 45

All these “transcendencies” ‐ transcendent God, transcendent human, transcendent redemption, transcendent mind—foster entrancement with a transcendent technology which shall liberate us from following the basic biological laws of the natural world. In this manner we create a transcendent goal, a millennial vision harkening back to the Book of Revelation, with which to go beyond the human condition, says Berry.

While the Christian tradition until the Renaissance included elements of seeing the natural world as having a soul, since the time of Descartes, particularly, there has been a progressive loss of the cosmic dimension. Although there have always been strands in the tradition that deal well with the natural world, this is not emphasized in Christianity as it is preached. There is no adequate emphasis in the catechism, or Biblical commandments concerning the natural world.

The Bible introduced an emphasis on the divine in historical events. Its historical realism stimulates a dynamism toward developmental processes.

Like many other religions, Christianity, with its intense monotheism, tends toward narrowness. Among religious people, the more intense the commitment, the more fundamentalist they tend to be. What is needed today is not intensity, but expansiveness. By the same token, humans should have moved beyond the idea that any one religion has the fullness of revelation.

Narrowness also is evident in the traditional Christian hostility to animism. Saint Boniface, for example, cut down sacred oak trees. Today that would seem absurd. Could we not entertain the idea that instead, the future of Christianity will involve assimilating elements of paganism?

In view of all this, Berry makes the startling suggestion that we consider putting the Bible on the shelf for perhaps twenty years, so that we can truly listen to creation. One of the best ways to discover the deep meaning of things, he says, is to give them up for a while. Thus, we would be able to recover the ancient Christian view that there are two Scriptures, that of the natural world and that of the Bible. We would be able to create a new language, more adequate to deal with our present revelatory moment. Unfortunately, at present we are still reading the book instead of reading the world about us. We will drown reading the book.

Organized religion is frequently a destructive force—yet religion in the more basic sense is an important part of our being, he asserts. Among other things, it brings us together in celebration, and gives us the gift of delighting in existence.

We must recognize that the revelations of most religions as they are practiced today are inadequate to deal with the task before us. The traditions of the past cannot do what needs to be done, but we cannot do what needs to be done without all traditions. The new story of the universe does not replace them; it provides a more comprehensive context in which all the earlier stories can discover a more expansive interpretation.

It is of pivotal importance, Berry says, to be open to ongoing revelations, including those emerging from the scientific venture. Science does not reduce the mystery of the world, but actually enhances it. Indeed, in a broad sense scientific understanding is the key to the future of religion.

It is too early to appraise Berry’s influence, especially in a period when economic growth, land development, invention of mega‐technologies, and winning computerized wars against Third World upstarts continue to define our nation’s measures of might and our sense of personal power. The full import of Berry’s message may not sink in for many years.

But some of his influence is clearly visible. He cannot keep up with requests for speaking engagements. The demand for his writings grows every year, and his work is now being translated into other languages. During the course of our own travels, in conversations with people as diverse as Buddhists in Japan, Muslims in Egypt, and agnostics in Russia, speaking of Berry has always provoked great interest and requests for copies of his work.

One criticism of his thought is that he exaggerates the extent to which the Bible provides a context for an exploitative attitude toward the Earth. Another is that the challenges we face are more complex than rediscovering an integral relationship with Earth, and inevitably involve specific, personal, economic, and political questions about our own communities. A frequent objection is that his biocentric vision denies the chosen status of “man,” vice‐regent of God. Berry listens to such criticisms, sometimes adapts his thought to accommodate them, and sometimes replies with a helpful rejoinder.

Even critics admire his realism, sweeping synthesis, imaginative insights, and courage to confront the narrowness of traditional theology. They also respect the fact that although he often uses abstract terms, he always lends them a vivid—at times biting—concreteness. He describes environmental, economic, and political problems with down‐to‐earth examples. When looking to the future, he illustrates his ideas with examples ranging from methods of appropriate technology to bioregionalism or steady‐state economics. He even proposes, not entirely tongue‐in‐cheek, running every other truck on our highways into a ravine. It is not that he eschews all technological advances. But our new technologies must harmonize with natural processes, which operate on self‐nourishing, self‐ healing, self‐governing principles.

It is our observation that Berry, contrary to conventional wisdom, is becoming not less but more radical as he advances in years—and sees the time left for saving the planet running out. He is “radical” in the original sense of the word, harkening back to the Latin word radices, roots. It is as if he is driven by the thought “They just don’t get it. They don’t comprehend how deeply rooted it is, the crisis that confronts us!”

Sometimes one can hear the anger in this gentle man as he speaks of “the order of magnitude of the present catastrophic situation.” It is, he says, “so enormous, so widespread, and we don’t know what we are doing.” The people who built the automobile, the people who built the nuclear program, the people who dreamed up the Green Revolution in agriculture, were unable to make the connection between these and their adverse effects. Vandana Shiva says the Green Revolution initially produced great increases in India’s food supply, but in the end, it devastated the whole agricultural system. We made 50,000 nuclear bombs, and now we don’t know what to do with them!

We fool ourselves into thinking that recycling cans and papers will do it. Of course we must recycle. But basically that is designed to keep the system going. It can help mitigate the problem, but only until we can do the fundamental changes. Meanwhile, when ecology groups try to protect the last bit of our first‐growth forest, the entrepreneur types say these radicals are trying to do away with jobs. If these are the only jobs we can imagine, it is a sick society, and we need cultural therapy. We can’t solve this crisis by meliorism.

Yet Berry sees hope in the upwellinging of movements and modes of perception that suggest an awakening. He points to the growth of bioregional movements, Green political organizations, and confrontational movements launched by activist groups such as Greenpeace and Earth First! He talks about shifts of consciousness revealed in New Age thinkers, countercultural writers, and feminist, antipatriarchal movements. On the international level, he has been encouraged by shifts within the World Bank toward more viable programs, and the addition of an environmental department; the spread of vital information through organizations like The International Union for the Conservation of Nature, the World Resources Institute, the Worldwatch Institute, and various United Nations programs; and even stirrings among some national and multinational business organizations.

Our awesome power spells our danger, but it also presents our opportunity, an unparalleled opening to a larger creativity, he observes. The danger lies in the mystique that pervades our patriarchal, plundering industrial society. It is a mystique that could propel us not into an Ecozoic era, but into one that could be called Technozoic, led by people—epitomized in the corporate establishment—who are committed to an even more controlled order. In the future. The dominant struggle will be the struggle between entrepreneur and ecologist. Our task is to reinvent the human, at the species level. Basic to this task is creating a new integration of the human with the forces of the natural world, and celebrating that integration.

Who will lead us into the future? The intimacy with the cosmic process that is needed describes the shamanic personality, a type that is emerging again in our society. As in earlier cultures, today the shaman may be woman as well as man. Certainly, to fulfil the function of healers, shamans must represent the feminine principle, embodied in the growing scientific perception of our planet as a single organism, alive, self‐governing, self‐ healing. True, nurturance is not the only role for women. Nurturing roles, however, are the key to the future; they are epitomized in the archetype of woman but reside in the capacities of each one of us.

Taking our cues from earlier peoples, we can create, or recreate, renewal ceremonies. We need to celebrate the great historical moments in the unfolding of the universe, cosmic events that constituted psychic‐spiritual as well as physical transformations. Such celebrations might begin with the primordial Flaring Forth and the supernova implosions, moments of grace that set the pattern for emergence of this planet. They might go on to include the beginning of photosynthesis, followed by the arrival of trees, then flowers, then birds, and other aspects of this wondrous evolution.

CES Monthly Musings – September‐October, 2013 Page 33 of 45

Once we begin to celebrate this story we will understand the fascination that draws scientists to their work. Without entrancement in this new context it is unlikely that humans will have the psychic energy needed for renewal of Earth.

That entrancement comes from the immediate communion of humans with the natural world. We are rediscovering our capacity for entering into the larger community of life. Every form of being is integral with this story. Nothing is itself without everything else.

Berry’s shamanic voice raises a challenge. Is the human species viable, or are we careening toward self‐destruction, carrying with us our fellow Earthlings? Can we move from an anthropocentric to a biocentric vision—and more importantly, actualize it in a biocracy? How can we help activate the intercommunion of all members of the Earth community? What shall we be leaving the children—the young of our own families, our own species and of other species whose fate we share?

Can we find the guidance we need in religions as they exist today?

References

Berry, Thomas. 1991. The Dream of the Earth. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books.
Berry, Thomas with Clarke, Thomas. 1991. Befriending the Earth. Mystic: Twenty‐Third

Publications.

Swimme, Brian and Berry, Thomas. 1992. The Universe Story. San Francisco: Harper, San Francisco.

Copyright retained by author(s)

This article has been reprinted from Trumpeter (Vol. 11, No. 1, 1994), ISSN: 0832‐6193. Marjorie Hope and James Young, deceased, are the authors of The Faces of Homelessness, Macmillan/Lexington, 1986; The South African Churches in a Revolutionary Situation, Orbis, 1982; The Struggle for Humanity, Orbis, 1977. This paper, “A Prophetic Voice,” was intended to be a chapter of their book‐in‐progress, tentatively entitled The New Alliance: Faith and Ecology.

The Dream of the Earth Audiobook | Thomas Berry | 1988

The Dream of the Earth Audiobook | Thomas Berry | Audible.com.au



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The Dream of the Earth
By: Thomas Berry
Narrated by: Thomas Berry
Length: 2 hrs and 52 mins
Abridged Audiobook
Release date: 13-11-2019
Language: English
Publisher: Phoenix Books
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Drawing upon the wisdom of thinkers from Buddha and Plato to Teilhard de Chardin and E. F. Schumacher, from ancient Chinese philosophy and Native American shamanism to contemporary astrophysics, Berry forges a balanced, deeply felt declaration of planetary independence from the sociological, psychological, and intellectual conditioning that threatens the death of nature, offering a path that will avert ecological catastrophe and move our traumatized planet toward health.

Berry builds his case on a comprehensive review of the history of ideas, and he points toward a transformation of consciousness that is needed, if mankind and the planet are to survive. The Dream of the Earth provides the insights, inspiration, and ethical guidance for us to move beyond exploitation and disengagement and begin a restorative, creative relationship with the natural world.
©1988 Sierra Club Books (P)1992, 2019 Audio Literature, Phoenix Books
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C. Haubner
14-03-2021

Powerful book

This is a wonderful book. It’s dense and intense, but it provides invaluable insight to our current condition as humans. A must read.
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Essays discuss the Earth's evolution, our changing relationship with the planet, the ethics of ecology, and the future of the world

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Publisher ‏ : ‎ Sierra Club Books (1 September 1988)

Customer Reviews: 4.6 out of 5 stars    52 ratings

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5 star 79%

The Dream of the Earth
The Dream of the Earth
byThomas Berry

52 global ratings | 25 global reviews
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Mark Adams
5.0 out of 5 stars Great!
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 5 February 2016
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Great!
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Anita M. Nicholson
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
Reviewed in Canada on 3 October 2017
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A true visionary. Berry is remarkable!
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stew
5.0 out of 5 stars Great thanks. Got here in good time too
Reviewed in Canada on 23 June 2017
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Great thanks. Got here in good time too.
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Redhawk
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
Reviewed in Canada on 9 December 2016
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love the writing!! a read for everyone.
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Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars Highly Recommend!
Reviewed in Canada on 16 August 2016
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Absolutely Fantastic!! Thomas Berry speaks with so much depth!! I am in awe!
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Amazon Customer
3.0 out of 5 stars The best message I got from this book was that all ...
Reviewed in the United States on 2 November 2015
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Almost done with this book and although it has some inspiring notes, I found it to be rather repetitious throughout.
It kind of goes in circles about how humans are damaging the earth and how we need to do something about it.

The best message I got from this book was that all the elements of our cultures and personalities come from nature. We basically create our consciousness from our perception of animals, plants, smells, etc....this is a powerful thought because the more species we lose each year limits and basically shrinks our consciousness. The less there is to perceive, the less our cultures can evolve.
12 people found this helpful
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Nancy Flinchbaugh
5.0 out of 5 stars Beautiful prose, a plea for the earth
Reviewed in the United States on 16 September 2012
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Thomas Berry writes beautiful prose, in this incredibly vibrant plea for our struggling planet. If you've never read Berry, this would be a good way to start. He will awaken your admiration for creation and call you out to enter into this, our Eco Age. I hope you will join the ever growing community of those who are working to build a better, sustainable future for the People of Earth. This, he says, is our "Great Work." It's amazing to me that this book, written almost 25 years ago now, explains the challenges of our reality. A Catholic priest, who dedicated his life to this work, lives on in his remarkable writing.
3 people found this helpful
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Bugs
5.0 out of 5 stars A Fine Guide To Earth/Universe Connectivity
Reviewed in the United States on 13 February 2004
Verified Purchase
Thomas Berry has put together in this one book what a thousand other writers have attempted and that is: a complete format for human perception of reality that should and can pervade through all our earthly activities, esp. religion, politics and economy. Let Earth and it's biolgical processes teach and guide us to a rational, sustainable, regenerative, healthy existence.

There are many potent passages all through this work and I picked out one that I felt was inclusive of the gist of the book.

..."This universe itself, but especially the planet Earth, needs to be experienced as the primary healer, primary commercial establishment, and primary lawgiver for all that exists within this life community. The basic spirituality communicated by the natural world can also be considered as normative for the future ecological age."- Page 120


This is an excellent treatise on reverence for the creative life forces that sustain us and treat us daily to a plethora of interactive life processes and our need to acknowledge this gift by treating it with the awe and respect it deserves.
48 people found this helpful
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Annie Dragonfly
5.0 out of 5 stars The Epitome of Deep Ecology
Reviewed in the United States on 26 September 2009
Verified Purchase
This is THE book on deep ecology. It is beautifully written, requiring slow thoughtful reading - I found myself chewing each sentence 22 times, wishing I could write out each thought and pin it on the wall to consider in every waking moment. In this masterpiece of environmentalism and spirituality, Berry tells how we got Earth into this mess, and how our collective thinking must change to save our one and only Home. It cannot be said any better than this. While I try to rotate other books so as not to hoard wisdom, this cherished book will stay in my library permanently and be read again and again.
7 people found this helpful
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Jim
5.0 out of 5 stars Berry knew we are Nature.
Reviewed in the United States on 15 September 2011
Verified Purchase
Thomas Berry knew we had to work with Nature itself rather than dictating our needs to Nature. A new book, The Awakened Earth, teaches us how to form a partnership with Nature to heal environments out of balance. It does what Berry said we must do, listen to Nature, then co-create solutions with Nature to rebalance and heal stressed environments. Indigenous people as well as American Indians knew this and did listen as they saw they were part of Nature itself, not a dominator of Nature as many now behave. Berry's principles are realized in The Awakened Earth. (It too, is for sale on Amazon as well as its own website.)
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The Dream of the Earth by Thomas Berry

 4.20  ·   Rating details ·  302 ratings  ·  42 reviews

This landmark work, first published by Sierra Club Books in 1988, has established itself as a foundational volume in the ecological canon. In it, noted cultural historian Thomas Berry provides nothing less than a new intellectual-ethical framework for the human community by positing planetary well-being as the measure of all human activity.

Drawing on the wisdom of Western philosophy, Asian thought, and Native American traditions, as well as contemporary physics and evolutionary biology, Berry offers a new perspective that recasts our understanding of science, technology, politics, religion, ecology, and education. He shows us why it is important for us to respond to the Earth’s need for planetary renewal, and what we must do to break free of the “technological trance” that drives a misguided dream of progress. Only then, he suggests, can we foster mutually enhancing human-Earth relationships that can heal our traumatized global biosystem. (less)

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 Average rating4.20  ·  Rating details ·  302 ratings  ·  42 reviews

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Emily Crow

Apr 15, 2017Emily Crow rated it really liked it

Shelves: nonfiction, read-in-2017, nature-writing, modern-life

It took me forever to get through this relatively short book, due to both the dry, academic prose and the sheer number of interesting ideas per page. Although it is a challenging read--and, in some ways, a bit dated--it is definitely worth the attention of anyone with a serious interest in environmental philosophy.

The core of the message is simple: We absolutely have to find a new way of relating to the earth, or we will destroy it, and thus destroy ourselves. All of our current modes of being--in economics, religion, science, politics--are not only insufficient, but contributing to the problem.

Or as Barry puts it: "Our secular, rational, industrial society, with its amazing scientific insight and technological skills, has established the first radically anthropocentric society and has thereby broken the primary law of the universe, the law that every component member of the universe should be integral with every other member of the universe and that the primary norm of reality and of value is the universe community itself in its various forms of expression, especially as realized on the planet Earth."

I enjoyed how he broke down his argument into different segments, such as how science and commerce and our own historical world view (the latter going back to the Middle Ages in the beginnings of this pathology, which provided a new and interesting perspective for me), but the most convincing argument was, for me, the spiritual one:

"We should be clear about what happens when we destroy the living forms of this planet. The first consequence is that we destroy modes of divine presence. If we have a wonderful sense of the divine, it is because we live amid such awesome magnificence." Yes, this!!! A million times over!

I did find it interesting that, although the author was a Catholic priest of the Passionist order, his religious views are quite nonconformist and would probably upset many main stream Christians. He believes that the emphasis on personal salvation and the insistence that we live in a fallen world detract from the experience of our connection with natural world--the sort of nature mysticism of traditional Native American religions, for example. He shows how this view helped to lead to the industrial plundering of the earth (sorry about all the quotes in this review, but Berry just says things so much better):

"Just as the doctrine of divine transcendence took away the pervasive divine presence to the natural world, so the millennial vision of a blessed future left all present modes of existence in a degraded status. All things were in an unholy condition. Everything needed to be transformed. This meant that anything unused was to be used if the very purpose of its existence was to be realized. Nothing in its natural state was acceptable."

And:

"The Christian world is the world of the city. Its concerns are primarily supernatural. The rural world is the world of the pagan. The natural world is to be kept at a distance as a seductive mode of being."

Actually, I would be extremely interested to read a thoughtful, ecologically aware Christian response to these arguments, as my gut instinct says that Berry's view would be considered heretical, and yet I know that many Christians are concerned about the environment. I would hate for the Ann Coulters and Sarah Palins of this world to drown them out. And yet Coulter and Palin are obviously building upon a dynamic--and extremely destructive--cultural foundation when they so vociferously insist that the earth exists only for our consumption. I wonder what Berry would say about them if he were still alive today.

I copied down pages upon pages of quotes from this book--the author's insights were just that amazing. It's tempting to keep sharing more of them, but instead I'll recommend that everyone who loves the earth read this book. My one quibble with it (besides the stilted prose) was that I found it to be a complete downer (probably one of the reasons I could only read it in small doses). Writing in 1988, Berry seems to believe that we were on the cusp of a new ecological paradigm. If anything, the opposite is true. Every day I am bombarded with depressing news about more and more drilling, mining, fracking, and logging carried out on public lands. Entire mountain tops are being blown sky-high in Appalachia for coal production. The keystone XL pipeline has just been approved by one of the most aggressively exploitative presidents in history. Native rights are being trampled at Standing Rock and elsewhere. It is enough to make one weep, and I sometimes do. Unfortunately, some thirty years later, Berry's Dream of the Earth seems just that, a lovely dream that never came true. (less)

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Erik Akre

Mar 14, 2016Erik Akre rated it liked it

Recommends it for: visionary ecologists; shamanic personalities

Shelves: ecology, human-ecology

My first impressions of this book were that it is not particularly "well-written." I had a hard time gelling with Berry's writing style, and I never did quite get the hang of it. It had the feel of being second-rate. I shouldn't say that first off, but there it is.

That said, I must also say that its ideas are powerful and compelling. I will explain by listing the ways it inspired me, the things it inspired me to learn more about:

1. the sequence and detail of the galactic cosmology

2. the sequential phases of human development, from Paleolithic to ecological (into which we are currently transitioning)

3. the great classical cultures of the world and their achievements

4. the scientific-technological phase of human development itself, considering power, harms, helps, and ramifications

5. the possibilities of the new ecological age

6. the rediscovery of foundations for human values

The book provoked a lot of interest in the above, and there are many, many references to further reading in these and other areas. If for no other reason, these inspirations are worth the read. In the midst of everything else in my life, it took me years to explore these things further, but I have in my way, and I still do. I owe something to Berry for the motivation I still have.

In the end, Berry concludes that we need more visionary consciousness and less blind reliance on reason. This conclusion ties things together well. It is the "shamanic personalities" that must be the guides as we move forward to a new relationship with the earth. (less)

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Andrea McDowell

Feb 05, 2013Andrea McDowell rated it it was ok

Shelves: green, life-is-too-short

I have tried so hard to like Thomas Berry.

I give up. I can't do it. Dense, unreadable prose based on the sketchiest types of half-evidence, stitched together with such slender chains of reasoning that a good sneeze could rip it apart. Nice ideas. Lovely philosophy. A wonderful world would result if, indeed, there were any basis for his proposals or if they were implementable by animals with the sorts of brains human beings have. But they're not, and I can't waste one more second of my life believing that there is anything useful to be learned from a book that makes the argument that there were pre-partriarchal women-ruled societies in which the environment was treated well. Mr. Berry, you meant well, and I respect you as an ally; but to all his successors, I beg of you, please sully yourself with some form of actual evidence, and stop confusing "fact" with "someone else's opinion that you found in print." (less)

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Eddie Black

Jan 05, 2009Eddie Black rated it it was amazing  ·  review of another edition

Shelves: pagan, philosophy, environment

We need more voices like Thomas Berry.

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Sev

Nov 07, 2013Sev rated it really liked it

Shelves: library

It's strange reading a fervent environmental call to action almost thirty years after its publication, sitting in a world worse off than the one which inspired its writing. An important book. (less)

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Ingrid

Apr 05, 2018Ingrid rated it it was amazing

Very insightful ideas regarding the connections with our planet. I found Thomas Berry's explanations for the dream of the earth and the solutions to our current ecological crisis innovative and encouraging. ...more

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Elizabeth

Sep 26, 2009Elizabeth rated it really liked it

Recommends it for: psychologists and adult devt

now I own it

from the library computer:

Publishers Weekly Reviews

This first volume in a new series, the Sierra Club Nature and Natural Philosophy Library, explores human-earth relations and seeks a new, non-anthropocentric approach to the natural world. According to cultural historian Berry, our immediate danger is not nuclear war but industrial plundering; our entire society, he argues, is trapped in a closed cycle of production and consumption. Berry points out that our perception of the earth is the product of cultural conditioning, and that most of us fail to think of ourselves as a species but rather as national, ethnic, religious or economic groups. Describing education as ``a process of cultural coding somewhat parallel to genetic coding,'' he proposes a curriculum based on awareness of the earth. He discusses ``patriarchy'' as a new interpretation of Western historical development, naming four patriachies that have controlled Western history, becoming progressively destructive: the classical empires, the ecclesiastical establishment, the nation-state and the modern corporation. We must reject partial solutions and embrace profound changes toward a ``biocracy'' that will heal the earth, urges the author who defines problems and causes with eloquence. (October) Copyright 1988 Cahners Business Information.

(less)

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Cambridge Programme for Sustainability Leadership

Dec 22, 2010Cambridge Programme for Sustainability Leadership rated it it was amazing

Shelves: the-top-50-sustainability-books

One of Cambridge Sustainability's Top 50 Books for Sustainability, as voted for by our alumni network of over 3,000 senior leaders from around the world. To find out more, click here.

The Dream of the Earth is a collection of essays which all advance a deeply spiritual and ecological interpretation of the world, its current woes and potential solutions. Berry believes we understand and interpret the world and our role within it based on our 'story of the universe', our dream or world-view. The story is the source of a society's collective psyche and not only explains the past, but also guides our future. While other animals have their behaviour embedded in their DNA, we humans need stories to find our way and understand what to do.

The underlying theme of the book is that our vision, or dream, of progress has brought a lot of good, but is now sowing the seeds of its own destruction. This is because we have lost our connection to the planet, a connection that has existed since ancient times and today remains only with some indigenous communities. Our story has become corrupted, or empty of deep meaning. (less)

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Wendy Babiak

Sep 28, 2009Wendy Babiak rated it it was amazing  ·  review of another edition

Shelves: books-that-made-me-a-better-person

Thomas Berry, a monastic who chose to use his solitude to study everything from comparative religion and philosophy to agricultural production and particle physics, has synthesized his wide and deep knowledge in this volume with a thoughtfulness rare in this or any age. The book is a call to awaken to a new and more productive geopolitical paradigm involving a recognition of the rights of the earth and all its inhabitants. Reading it is like being blessed with a new set of eyes with which to see the world. (less)

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Jonathan Wichmann

Jun 16, 2012Jonathan Wichmann rated it it was amazing  ·  review of another edition

Recommended to Jonathan by: Bill Plotkin

Wonderful to read -- he writes with the language of a philosopher, though I think it's clearer and more direct than most people think of as philosophy. I found it beautiful and inspiring. Probably my favorite part is that he reminds us every three pages that humans are closing down the basic life systems of the planet. Awful, but it's surprisingly nice to hear someone say it how it is.

His ideas can be challenging, but I think they're right on. (less)

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Joshua

Jun 13, 2009Joshua added it

Shelves: hippie, summer09

I would rate this as a better book that "The Great Work", if only because it is more prescient (written a decade earlier), as it contains all of the main ideas, developed sufficiently enough.

I am considering using Chpt 8, "The American College in the Ecological Age" (pp. 89-108) as a reading for a freshman seminar discussion. It is as timely now as it was 20 years ago.

...more

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David Weber

Feb 12, 2012David Weber rated it it was amazing

Berry's eyes, mind, and heart were wide open. He could see the connectivity of everything, he had the ability to convey the unity of all things eloquently, and thus he enabled us to know better the love of the Other in which all must fully live, move, and have our being.. (less)

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JeanAnn

Aug 28, 2020JeanAnn rated it it was amazing  ·  review of another edition

Shelves: morning-coffee

“We can understand this Peace of Earth, however, only if we understand that the earth is a single community composed of all its geological, biological, and human components. The Peace of Earth is Indivisible. In this context the nations have a referent outside themselves for resolving their difficulties. The earth fulfills this role of mediator in several ways. First, the earth is a single organic reality that must survive in its integrity if it is to support any nation on the earth. To save the earth is a necessity for every nation. No part of the earth in its essential functioning can be the exclusive possession or concern of any nation. The air cannot be nationalized or privatized; it must circulate everywhere on the planet to fulfill its life giving function anywhere on the planet. It must be available for the nonhuman as well as for the human lifeforms if it is to sustain human life. So it is with the waters on the earth. They must circulate throughout the planet if they are to benefit any of the lifeforms on the planet.” (less)

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Ann

Jul 16, 2017Ann rated it really liked it  ·  review of another edition

Shelves: conservation

This collection of essays broadly addresses the ecological despair facing all the Earth, how humans are causing this despair and the ways in which it will impinge on human existence. Rather than offer specific analysis or solution, Berry presents some themes of underpinning philosophy arising from Christianity, Western culture and economics in particular that have lead to this state of despair and changes or new directions for creating a viable future. He connects the human past, in historical, cosmological, and genetic senses, as a starting point for this future. These essays are worth a consideration on all counts. (less)

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Walt

Aug 30, 2018Walt rated it really liked it

This is a very interesting set of essays, outlining the patterns of life in the world, demonstrating the problems associated with modern cosmology, and proposing a new cosmology. While some essays have become outdated as our understanding of evolution and anthropology changes, the majority have become even more relevant and important to the situation we find ourselves in. The need for a story which integrates us into the community of life on Earth has only grown since this was written. I would recommend this to anyone concerned with spiritual or ecological issues facing the world. (less)

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Emma

Sep 29, 2020Emma rated it liked it

"As Chief Seattle once said of us and our cities: 'When the last Red Man shall have perished, and the mystery of my tribe shall have become a myth among the White Men, these shores will swarm with the invisible dead of my tribe, and when your children's children think themselves alone in the field, the store, the shop, upon the highway, or in the silence of the pathless woods, they will not be alone.'" (less)

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Eileen

Dec 17, 2019Eileen rated it liked it

Shelves: non-fiction

© 1988 ***½. Early book on the subject of ecology and the place of humans in the biosphere. Explains well how a bioregion works as a unit and how all life is dependent on humans working together with the natural forces of the earth. Acknowledges the dignity and respect due to the planet as a whole, and to the awesome diversity of life present here and nowhere else for light-years around.

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Aidan Owen

Nov 16, 2017Aidan Owen rated it it was amazing

Shelves: mysticism, spirituality, 2017, contemplative-ecology

Extraordinary. If you haven't read this book, read it NOW. If you have, read it again. It changed the way I see myself as a part of the universe and not separate from it, and has helped me to articulate my own vocation. Absolutely essential reading. (less)

 

Joe Moreno

Jan 15, 2018Joe Moreno rated it it was amazing  ·  review of another edition

A theological basis for environmentalism. Great book!

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Autumn

Apr 27, 2018Autumn rated it it was amazing

Shelves: favorite-books

This is one of the most powerful books I have ever read, shining light on humanity’s place in the cosmos and our role in manifesting a world in which all things thrive in communion and love.

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Joyce

Aug 13, 2018Joyce rated it it was amazing

A thoughtful view of where we are on planet Earth, how we got here and what we need to do in order to save our beautiful Mother.

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Martha

Jan 22, 2019Martha rated it liked it

Affirmed my view of the living universe. It was depressing that the warnings about species extinction and the destruction of our home were issued in the 80s! Have we passed a point of no return?

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Brian

Aug 18, 2019Brian rated it really liked it

Read this so long ago I've forgotten when, and the details. ...more

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S Holthaus

Feb 12, 2017S Holthaus rated it really liked it

Relevant for anyone interested in environmental issues

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Lauren

Dec 19, 2014Lauren marked it as abandoned

Fuck it. I've had this out from the library for probably months now and I'm not any closer to finishing it. It wasn't terrible, in fact many of his ideas were very inspiring, but also I just found it to be pretty samey compared to similar books I've read or skimmed through. Which reflects a thousand times worse on them than it does The Dream of the Earth, TDotE being very influential in its field and kind of the jump start for all the Green politics, philosophy, religion etc that you see today that spawned such similar books.

I feel pretty peeved at these successors, actually. Like, when Thomas Berry asked people to recycle I'm p sure he didn't mean that with regards to his own work. Say something new, you hacks. Or at least talk about the parts that haven't aged well in this book. Does the world really need another self-indulgent chapter about your grudge against technology? No. Really, no. Thomas Berry was a visionary and I realise the ideas and questions he poses have no simple answers, but you could at least try to answer them. Or bring new ideas to the table. I'd prefer an attempt at answers, frankly, because so many books of this kind are filled with too much hand-wringing over capitalism and the state of our environment and not much attention given to anything but the same vague, trotted out solutions. Sometimes I think these authors would have a better impact on the environment if they just didn't publish their books in the first place. Save all that paper and resources for a book that isn't pretending to give a shit. It'll be much less hypocritical that way.

So yeah, I'm regretful that I couldn't finish this. Maybe it would have been the same old echo chamber stuff anyway, but if you're going to read it at all it might as well come from the person who wrote it first and, in all likelihood, best.

Oh well. (less)

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Nicholas Brink

Nov 21, 2015Nicholas Brink rated it it was amazing

The Dream of the Earth has become very central to my own writing. Berry's belief that the avenue to become one with the Earth is through dreaming, waking visions and regaining our shamanic personality I believe is most directly gained through ecstatic trance for which I am a certified instructor and about what I have been writing. Berry makes it clear that where we go wrong in healing the Earth is our belief that we are superior to everything of the Earth and have dominion of the Earth. We forget that we are dependent upon all that is of the Earth and have much to learn from all life, all flora and fauna. All other life have powers that we do not have and in those ways are superior to us. When realizing this, how can we place ourselves superior to all other life and the culmination of evolution? We can't, we are no better than and need to experience ourselves as one with all other life on Earth. (less)

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Frank Aaskov

Jan 18, 2012Frank Aaskov rated it it was ok

I initially decided to read this book as it was on a list of most important environmental book out something. However I was really disappointed.

The author outlines where he believes there is a disconnect between current philosophical thought and environmentalism / green philosophy, which is an noble task. But he gets lost in loose rambling, vague criticisms, and his love of mysticism. Often he states that we should respect earth/plants/animals/etc for their mystic nature (??), and his causal relationships and explanations are difficult to follow. He furthermore puts great emphasis on theories that even at the time of writing (late 1980s) were disputed such as the population bomb.

Overall, I don't really get why this made any list. It might have made a wave in some parts of the environmental movement when published, but it has certainly not stood the test of time. (less)

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scherzo♫

Apr 22, 2013scherzo♫ rated it really liked it

Shelves: mundane-fic

p.30 "The ecological vision that we are proposing is the only contexte that is consistent with the evolutionary processes that brought the earth and all its living beings into that state of flourescence that existed prior to the industrial age. Because this earlier situation made serious demands upon the human for the benefits given, the industrial age was invented to avoid the return due for the benefits given. The burdens imposed upon the human in its natural setting, generally referred to as the human condition, established a situation unacceptable to an anthropocentric community with its deep psychic resentment against any such demands imposed upon it, hence the entire effort of the industrial society to transform the natural world into total subservience." (less)

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Kate

Jun 11, 2016Kate rated it liked it

Shelves: non-fiction, library-books

It was a redundant read for me. This book makes for a good introduction for those who are unaware of the why and how the human communities across the globe are screwed, but only vaguely. Too many references to other books and not enough direct quotations from said books to make the message of the book as a whole stronger. I wanted to know why those books were important, not just that they are deemed important by the author.

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“The Dream of the Earth” by Thomas Berry

written by springmagazine

Published on January 12, 2020

https://thespringmagazine.com/2020/01/12/the-dream-of-the-earth-by-thomas-berry/

When the Catholic priest Thomas Berry died in 2009, obituaries were not sure what to call him. “Cultural historian” was the preferred title. “Theologian” didn’t quite encompass his work, and he had preferred the term “geologian” instead. Born in Greensboro in 1914, Berry studied Asian languages and religions, Native American culture, founded the graduate program on religions at Fordham University, among other studies and work throughout his life — all in the search of a spirituality that combines religion and nature.

In “The Great Work,” Berry wrote about his profound spiritual experience at a meadow when he was 11 years old. The experience was the basis for his spiritual development and intellectual thought for the rest of his life. “Whatever preserves and enhances this meadow in the natural cycles of its transformations is good, what is opposed to this meadow or negates it is not good,” he wrote.

Berry’s writing is soft yet powerful. It flows, and is difficult to quote and pull from. You end up reading the whole book but not being able to describe what you just read, and not wanting to either, but instead just to let the writing settle. The writing flows gently like water or like a breeze, and you delight in his love of the word “numinous.” 

Here is an excerpt from “The Dream of the Earth,” by Thomas Berry, published in 1988.

We are returning to our native place after a long absence, meeting once again with our kin in the earth community. For too long we have been away somewhere, entranced with our industrial world of wires and wheels, concrete and steel, and our unending highways, where we race back and forth in continual frenzy.

The world of life, of spontaneity, the world of dawn and sunset and glittering stars in the dark night heavens, the world of wind and rain, of meadow flowers and flowing streams, of hickory and oak and maple and spruce and pineland forests, the world of desert sand and prairie grasses, and within all this the eagle and the hawk, the mockingbird and the chickadee, the deer and the wolf and the beer, the coyote, the raccoon, the whale and the seal, and the salmon returning upstream to spawn — all this, the wilderness world recently rediscovered with heightened emotional sensitivity, is an experience not far from that of Dante meeting Beatrice at the end of the Purgatorio, where she descends amid a cloud of blossoms. It was a long wait for Dante, so aware of his infidelities, yet struck anew and inwardly “pierced,” as when, hardly out of his childhood, he had first seen Beatrice. The “ancient flame” was lit again in the depths of his being. In that meeting, Dante is describing not only a personal experience, but the experience of the entire human community at the moment of reconciliation with the divine after the long period of alienation and human wandering away from the true center.

Something of this feeling of intimacy we now experience as we recover our presence within the earth community. This is something more than working out a viable economy, something more than ecology, more even than Deep Ecology, is able to express. This is a sense of presence, a realization that the earth community is a wilderness community that will not be bargained with; nor will it simply be studied or examined or made an object of any kind; nor will it be domesticated or trivialized as a setting for vacation indulgence, except under duress and by oppressions which it cannot escape. When this does take place in an abusive way, a vengeance awaits the human, for when the other living species are violated so extensively, the human itself is imperiled.

The Dream of the EarthIf the earth does grow inhospitable toward human presence, it is primarily because we have lost our sense of courtesy toward the earth and its inhabitants, our sense of gratitude, our willingness to recognize the sacred character of habitat, our capacity for the awesome, for the numinous quality of every earthly reality. We have even forgotten our primordial capacity for language at the elementary level of song and dance, wherein we share our existence with the animals and with all natural phenomena. Witness how the Pueblo Indians of the Rio Grande enter into the eagle dance, the buffalo dance, and the deer dance; how the Navajo become intimate with the larger community through their dry-paintings and their chantway ceremonies; how the peoples of the Northwest express their identity through their totem animals; how the Hopi enter into communication with desert rattlesnakes in their ritual dances. This mutual presence finds expression also in poetry and in story form, especially in the trickster stories of the Plains Indians in which Coyote performs his never-ending magic. Such modes of presence to the living world we still carry deep within ourselves, beyond all the suppressions and even the antagonism imposed by our cultural traditions.

Even within our own Western traditions at our greater moments of expression, we find this presence, as in Hildegard of Bingen, Francis of Assisi, and even in the diurnal and seasonal liturgies. The dawn and evening liturgies, especially, give expression to the natural phenomena in their numinous qualities. Also, in the bestiaries of the medieval period, we find a special mode of drawing the animal world into the world of human converse. In their symbolisms and especially in the moral qualities associated with the various animals, we find a mutual revelatory experience. These animal stories have a playfulness about them, something of a common language, a capacity to care for each other. Yet these movements toward intensive sharing with the natural world were constantly turned aside by a spiritual aversion, even by a sense that humans were inherently cut off from any true sharing of life. At best they were drawn into a human context in some subservient way, often in a derogatory way, as when we projected our own vicious qualities onto such animals such as the wolf, the rat, the snake, the worm, and the insects. We seldom entered their wilderness world with true empathy.

Thomas_Berry

Berry

The change has begun, however, in every phase of human activity, in all our professions and institutions. Greenpeace on the sea and Earth First! on the land are asserting our primary loyalties to the community of earth. The poetry of Gary Snyder communicates something of the “wild sacred” quality of the earth. In his music Paul Winter is responding to the cry of the wolf and the song of the whale. Roger Tory Peterson has brought us intimately into the world of the birds. Joy Adamson has entered into the world of the lions of Africa; Dian Fossey the social world of the gentle gorilla. John Lilly has been profoundly absorbed into the consciousness of the dolphin. Farley Mowat and Barry Lopez have come to an intimate understanding of the gray wolf of North America. Others have learned the dance language of the bees and the songs of the crickets.

What is fascinating about these intimate associations with various living forms of the earth is that we are establishing not only an acquaintance with the general life and emotions of the various species, but also an intimate rapport, even an affective relationship, with individual animals within their wilderness context. Personal names are given to individual whales. Indeed, individual wild animals are entering into history. This can be observed in the burial of Digit, the special gorilla friend of Dian Fossey’s. Fossey’s own death by human assault gives abundant evidence that if we are often imperiled in the wilderness context of the animals, we are also imperiled in the disturbed conditions of what we generally designate as civilized society.

Just now one of the significant historical roles of the primal people of the world is not simply to sustain their own traditions, but to call the entire civilized world back to a more authentic mode of being. Our only hope is in a renewal of those primordial experiences out of which the shaping of our more sublime human qualities could take place. While our own experiences can never again have the immediacy or the compelling quality that characterized this earlier period, we are experiencing a postcritical naiveté, a type of presence to the earth and all its inhabitants that includes, and also transcends, the scientific understanding that now is available to us from these long years of observation and reflection.

Fortunately we have in the native peoples of the North American continent what must surely be considered in the immediacy of its experience, in its emotional sensitivities, and in its modes of expressions, one of the most integral traditions of human intimacy with the earth, with the entire range of natural phenomena, and with the many living beings which constitute the life community. Even minimal contact with the native peoples of this continent is an exhilarating experience in itself, an experience that is heightened rather than diminished by the disintegrating period through which they themselves have passed. In their traditional mystique of the earth, they are emerging as one of our surest guides into a viable future.

Throughout their period of dissolution, when so many tribes have been extinguished, the surviving peoples have manifested what seems to be an indestructible psychic orientation toward the basic structure and functioning of the earth, despite all our efforts to impose on them our own aggressive attitude toward the natural world. In our postcritical naiveté we are now in a period when we become capable once again of experiencing the immediacy of life, the entrancing presence to the natural phenomena about us. It is quite interesting to realize that our scientific story of the universe is giving us a new appreciation for these earlier stories that come down to us through peoples who have continued their existence outside the constraints of our civilizations.

Presently we are returning to the primordial community of the universe, the earth, and all living beings. Each has its own voice, its role, its power over the whole. But, most important, each has its special symbolism. The excitement of life is in the numinous experience wherein we are given to each other in that larger celebration of existence in which all things attain their highest expression, for the universe, by definition, is a single gorgeous celebratory event.

The Dream of the Earth Quotes

The Dream of the Earth Quotes Showing 1-3 of 3

“Tell me a story, a story that will be my story as well as the story of everyone and everything about me, the story that brings us together in a valley community, a story that brings together the human community with every living being in the valley, a story that brings us together under the arc of the great blue sky in the day and the starry heavens at night, a story that will drench us with rain and dry us in the wind, a story told by humans to one another that will also be the story that the wood thrush sings in the thicket, the story that the river recites in its downward journey, the story that Storm King Mountain images forth in the fullness of its grandeur.”

― Thomas Berry, The Dream of the Earth

tags: community, language, myth, nature, story, wild4 likesLike

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“We must, however, reflect on what is happening. It is an urgent matter, especially for those of us who still live in a meaningful, even a numinous, earth community. We have not spoken. Nor even have we seen clearly what is happening. The issue goes far beyond economics, or commerce, or poetics, or an evening of pleasantries as we look out over a scenic view. Something is happening beyond all this. We are losing splendind and intimate modes of divine presence. We are, perhaps, losing ourselves.”

― Thomas Berry, The Dream of the Earth

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“For people, generally, their story of the universe and the human role in the universe is their primary source of intelligibility and value. ... The deepest crises experienced by any society are those moments of change when the story becomes inadequate for meeting the survival demands of a present situation.”

― Thomas Berry, The Dream of the Earth