2021/07/30

‘한국信연구소’ 를 세상에 알리다! 이은선.이정배 부부교수!

‘한국信연구소’ 를 세상에 알리다! 이은선.이정배 부부교수!
지난 7월13일 오후, 한국기독교회관 조에홀에서

2020년 07월 16일 (목) 13:16:11 이필완

얼마 전 은퇴한 세종대 명예교수 이은선 교수가, 몇 년 전 감신대에서 자원은퇴 했던 이정배 교수와 함께, [한국信연구소]의 출발을 널리 알리면서, 동시에 3권의 출판기념회가, 7월13일 오후4시 한국기독교회관 조에홀에서 열렸다.

이은선 교수는 일찍이 신학을 전공했으나, 그동안 세종대에서 교육학을 가르치며 여성신학자로 틈틈이 활동하다가 은퇴 후, 본격적인 여성신학자로 자리매김 하는 모임 자리에, 코로나19에도 불구하고 한국여신학자협의회, 한국여성신학회, 생명평화마당, 감리교여성지도력개발원, 보인회, 해천우회, 3,1종교개혁연대 등 후원단체들 회원들과 지인들 150여명이 모여 축하했다.

이날 개소식은 단해교회 하태혁목사의 사회로 '찬송 393장 오신실하신 주'를 부르고, 한국여신협 실행위원 신선 교수가 기도하고, 보인회 회원들이 “經 앞에 바로서기-믿음(信)에 관한 증언들”을 낭독하였고 함께 묵상했다.

이어 한국信연구소 소장 이은선 교수가 ‘한국信연구소’를 설립하게된 동기와 취지, 과제를 발표하였고(*기사 하단 전문 참조) 전 한국여성신학회 회장 최만자교수와 YMCA전국연맹 김흥수 이사장이 축사를 했다.

거문고 병창(거문고 박소연, 장구 고성진) “출강”의 축하공연 후, 이 날 같이 출판된 3권의 책 중, 이은선 쓴 ‘사유하는 집사람의 논어읽기'(도서출판 모시는 사람들)은 한국전통문화대 이선경 교수가 서평하고, 이은선 쓴 '동북아 평화와 聖性誠의 여성신학'(동연)은 감신대 김정숙교수기 서평했으며, 이정배 쓴 '유영모의 歸一신학'(신앙과지성사 밀알북스)는 한국예종 임종수 교수가 각각 서평했다.

그리고 작은이의벗친구교회 이학산 목사의 인도로 “담쟁이” 노래를 함께 불렀고, 현장아카데미 원장 이정배 교수가 개소식 이후의 이정배.이은선 부부가 함께 하는 '한국信연구소 개소식 그 이후' 미래 계획을 밝히면서 인사한(* 기사 하단 인사말 전문 참조) 후 ‘함께하는 축복기도’로 마쳤다.
‘하늘 부모님의 사랑과 은총으로 한국信연구소가 탄생했습니다. 그 뜻을 잘 받들어 잘 해 나갈 수 있도록 이 곳에 모인 모두가 함께 기도합니다. 같이 할 친구와 동지들을 보내주시고, 이로써 한반도와 온 세계의 삶이 더욱 편안해지고 사랑과 은혜로 넘쳐 나기를 기원합니다. 아멘

(*사진은 서산갈산교회 안인철목사가 찍었다. 현재 유튜브 위한 풀동영상을 편집 중!)

2020.7.13. 한국信연구소 개소식 및 출판기념회

<한국信연구소를 열며>

이은선(한국信연구소 소장, leeus@sejong.ac.kr)

1. 왜 한국信연구소를 시작하려 하는가?

이렇게 어려울 때 함께 오셔서 축하해 주시고 뜻을 모아주시니 우선 송구한 마음이 큽니다. 하지만 그래도 오늘 저희 생각을 나눌 기회를 주신 하나님과 함께하신 모든 분께 감사드립니다. 많이 망설였습니다. 2년여 전 세종대학교를 떠나면서 “이제 온전히 신학자로 살겠다”라는 선언과 함께 그동안 ‘한국信연구소’라는 이름 아래서 지내왔는데, 오늘 이를 다시 공적으로 공표한다고 하는 것이 어떤 의미가 있는지, 오늘과 같이 여러 가지로 어려운 때에 무슨 유용이 있으며, 제가 이 이름 아래서 진정으로 하고자 하는 일이 무엇인지를 다시 곰곰이 생각해 보았습니다.

최근에 또다시 읽은 책이 있습니다. 제가 1980년대 유럽에서 유학하면서 만난 독일 인지학자(人智學) 루돌프 슈타이너의 『어떻게 더 높은 세계를 인식하는가?』 가 그것입니다. 이 책의 마무리에는 우리 삶과 죽음의 경계에 관한 이야기가 나오고, 그 경계(문지방)를 지키는 두 수호령에 관한 이야기가 나옵니다. 거기서 만나는 첫 번째 수호령과 문지방은 한 커다란 죽음을 의미하는 것으로 거기서의 수호령이란 지금까지 무수히 반복되는 우리 삶에서 행한 온갖 거짓과 잘못, 죄과가 누적된 모습입니다. 그래서 그 문지방을 넘고 첫 번째 수호령을 만난다는 것은 바로 그러한 끔찍하고 부끄러운 자신의 과거와 만난다는 것이고, 그 앞에 적나라하게 서는 일이지만, 그래도 그 문지방을 넘는 일은 그런 부끄러움과 두려움을 넘어서 그럼에도 앞으로 나아가는 일을 말합니다. 오늘 한국信연구소를 공적으로 드러내고자 하는 일이 어쩌면 저에게는 그렇게 두렵고 떨리는 일인지 모르겠습니다. 두 번째 문지방을 넘는 일은 우리가 이후 더 높은 세계를 향한 인식의 길에서 마침내 도달하게 되는 초감각과 초자아의 참 자유의 세계로 들어가는 일입니다. 거기서 만나는 수호령은 우리에게 묻습니다. 이제 너의 감각적 자아를 구성하던 사고(thinking)와 감정(filling), 의지(willing)의 상호 연결이 분리되면서 초감각과 초자아의 세계로 들어가는데, 그러나 그러한 너의 해방에도 불구하고 여전히 남아있는 세상의 불행과 고통을 어찌하려는가? 네가 해방을 위해서 얻은 모든 지식과 좋은 것이 바로 그들 덕분인데, 그들을 그냥 두고서 이 문지방을 넘어서려는가? 한국信연구소를 여는 일이 이렇게 초자아의 해방의 길로 가는 것을 놓아두고서라도 다시 나누고자 하는 일이 있어서인지, 또는 내가 여전히 자아로 남아있으면서도 밝히고자 하는 일이 있어서인지를 묻고 또 물었습니다.

2. ‘한국적’(Korean)이라는 것

한국信연구소의 이름을 영어로 ‘Institute of Korean Feminist Integral Studies for Faith’라고 지었습니다. 이 이름을 구성하는 한 자 한 자가 바로 저의 그러한 소망과 의지가 여전히 가닿는 주제인 것 같습`니다. 먼저 ‘한국적’(Korean)이라는 것과 관련해서입니다. 이번 세계적 코로나 사태를 겪으면서 들은 많은 말 중에서도 『공감의 시대』의 저자 제러미 리프킨이 한국이 이번 사태에서 어느 나라보다도 훌륭히 대처할 수 있었던 것은 바로 한국 사람들은 자기가 병에 걸리는 것보다 자신으로 인해서 남에게 피해를 주는 것을 더 못 견디어서 하는 속성이 있기 때문이라고 밝혔다고 합니다. 저는 이 말을 들으면서 매우 기뻤고, 바로 이처럼 한국인에게 잘 드러나지 않았고 언술 되지 못한 고유한 자질이 한 외국인에 의해서 밝혀진 것이 좋다고 생각했습니다. 이렇게 저는 저의 학적 물음을 처음 시작할 때부터 어떻게든 ‘한국적’이라는 민족적 물음을 놓지 않은 것 같습니다. 저의 가계의 오랜 정신적 선험성을 생각하기도 하지만, 가장 직접적으로는 아버지 이신 목사님의 기독교 ‘환원 운동’을 생각합니다. 저희 아버지는 우리가 비록 기독교를 서구로부터 늦게 받았지만, 거기서 기독교의 현실은 온갖 교리적 분파와 분열로 얼룩져 있다고 여기셨습니다. 그래서 그는 그 본래의 원형적 모습을 한국 사람의 손으로, 한국인들의 의식으로 다시 찾기를 원했습니다. 여러 시각과 시도로 기독교의 ‘근본’을 찾기를 원했고, 그런 가운데서 ‘한국 그리스도의 교회 선언(1974년)’을 단행하기도 했으며, 그러한 일을 위해서 길지 않은 생에서 고통을 감내하셨습니다. 이렇게 한반도 주변에는 새로운 문명과의 만남에서 항상 그 ‘원형’과 ‘근본’과 거기서의 ‘토대’를 찾고자 하는 사람들이 있습니다, 신라의 원효가 그랬고, 고려에서 ‘단군고기’(檀君古記)를 간직해서 전해주고자 했던 목은 이색의 스승 행촌 이암(杏村李岩, 1297-1364) 선생이 있었으며, 조선 유교에서도 비록 ‘소중화’로 표현하기는 했지만, 한국인의 의식 속에는 끊임없이 ‘원형’과 ‘근본’, ‘참’에 대한 추구가 있었음을 보면서 오늘 한국信연구소도 그러한 사상의 젖줄에 기대어서 참 한국적인 신앙과 믿음의 본 모습을 찾고자 합니다. 오늘 21세기 한반도 현실의 삶에서 강하게 야기되는 남북통일과 동북아 평화의 물음도 저희에게는 그러한 맥락에서 성찰되는 일임을 말씀드리고 싶습니다.

3. ‘여성주의적’(feminist)이라는 것

어떤 대상이나 일에서 감각적인 눈에는 잘 드러나지 않는 원형을 찾고자 하는 사람들의 처지는 어렵습니다. 눈에 보이는 것에 몰두하는 삶의 중앙에서는 그것이 잘 보이지 않으므로 중앙의 기득권과 불화하고, 그로부터 멀리 떠나 변방으로 가기 때문에 힘든 삶을 살아갑니다. 하지만 그런 변방인과 이방인(pariah)들이 있지 않고서는 현실은 개조되지 않고, 개혁되지 않으며, 생명은 새로워지지 않습니다. 일찍이 함석헌 선생도 이러한 생명의 예민한 내적 원리를 간파하셨고, 그것을 우리 민족의 ‘고난의 역사’로 의미화하셨으며, 저는 그 원리를 다시 21세기를 살아가는 한국 페미니스트 여성신학자로서 세계 문명사의 맥락에서 증거 하고 싶습니다. 한국信연구소 영문 이름의 두 번째 형용사가 되는 ‘여성주의적’(feminist)이라는 말도 이러한 맥락에서 저는 이해합니다. 주지하듯이 오늘 페미니즘의 시대에는 자기희생과 헌신, 자기 비움과 이름 없음이 그렇게 순수하게 받아들여지지 않습니다. 그 이름 아래서 지금까지 여성들이 어떤 고통과 아픔을 겪어왔는지를 잘 알기 때문입니다. 하지만 앞의 두 번째 수호령의 이야기에서도 들어보았고, 지금까지 인류의 모든 종교적 성찰은 한결같이 바로 그러한 길이 궁극의 구원의 길이라고 지시합니다. 그렇다면 이러한 종교적 진실과 페미니즘은 영원히 함께할 수 없는 상극인가를 저는 묻습니다. 그러면서 이 둘 다 놓칠 수 없는 진실의 길을 어떻게든 서로 연결시키고, 어떻게 하면 그 간극을 메울 수 있나를 찾으면서 저의 미약한 삶에서, 논리에서, 믿음의 일에서 고투합니다. 이것을 저는 지금까지 서구 페미니즘을 넘어서 그와 다른 ‘한국적 페미니즘’, ‘한국적 포스트모던 영성’을 가져오는 일이라고도 했고, 그런 맥락에서 이른 시기부터 ‘공감’을 강조하며 ‘사기종인’(捨己從人)의 여성 리더십을 말하고, ‘모성’의 서구 페미니즘적 탈신화화를 넘어서 일종의 재신화화를 통해서 다시 그 본래를 강조하면서 초기 사회이론 중심적 페미니스트들과 갈등하기도 했습니다. 유사한 맥락에서 오늘 ‘집사람’을 강조하면서 ‘사유하는 집사람’을 말하며 그것이야말로 우리 생명 창조와 지속하는 문명을 위해서 필수불가결한 토대가 된다고 주창합니다.

지금 전 세계적으로 또한 대한민국의 민낯이 n번방 사태와 손정우 아동포르노 사태, 최숙현 철인 3종 팀 선수 폭행 사건 등으로 끔찍하고도 비참하게 드러나고 있습니다. 서구 근대 페미니즘 운동 덕분으로 우리 몸이 해방되었고, 성(sex)이 해방되었으며, 감각의 세계가 한껏 피어날 수 있었습니다. 하지만 이러한 모든 사태가 보여주듯이 거기서 생명의 또 다른 차원인 몸의 거룩성이 모두 탈각됨으로써 우리 몸과 섹스와 이생의 삶은 그저 무생명의 물질과 쾌락의 도구가 되었고, 무차별한 폭력의 대상이 되었습니다. 이 비참과 불의가 저는 단지 서구 페미니즘적 법적 정의의 회복만으로 치유되거나 해소될 수 없다고 봅니다. 보다 근본적이고 세계관적인 전이가 요청되는데, 여기서 뜻밖에도 동아시아의 오랜 신유교의 性 이해에서 그 한 가능성을 봅니다. 바로 오늘 우리 시간으로부터 그렇게 멀지 않은 조선 신유교에서의 性 이해는 우리 시대에서와는 달리 그 性이라는 언어로 오히려 우리 안의 깊은 내재적 초월의 차원과 하늘의 차원을 지시하면서 우리 몸과 감정, 성적 관계 등의 신체적 차원이 끊임없는 중용과 섬김, 삼감의 禮로 함께 보살펴지는 일을 강조했기 때문입니다. 물론 그 보살핌(禮)의 실행 주체가 주로 남성이었고 당시 계급사회에서의 양반이기는 했지만, 오늘 그러한 역사적인 차별의 장애가 많이 가신 상황에서는 우리 모두 한가지로 우리 몸과 性에 대한 존숭과 禮의 일을 실행할 수 있습니다. 다시 말하면 오늘 우리의 깊은 병폐인 몸과 性의 철저한 물화에 맞서서 다시 그 내재적 거룩성을 확보할 수 있는 길을 말하는데, 그것을 오늘 한국의 보수 교회에서처럼 세상 밖의 외재적 구원자에 기대서 하는 방식이 아니라 우리에게 더 오래된 동아시아 전통에서의 性과 몸 이해로 가능해지도록 하는 일을 말합니다. 저는 이것이 더욱 더 진정한 주체와 자유의 길이라고 여기고, 이 길을 더욱 밝히는데 애를 씁니다. 이 일은 앞에서 밝힌 대로 ‘한국적’(Korean)이라는 표제어 아래서 먼저 지금까지 서구 기독교가 독점해온 神과 거룩을 동아시아의 더욱더 보편적인 초월의 이름인 ‘聖’으로 해방시키고, 여기서는 또 다른 동아시아의 이름인 ‘性’을 가져와서 우리 몸과 성(sex), 가족적 삶과 모성 등의 사적 삶의 거룩성을 회복하는 일입니다. 모두 제가 다른 말로 많이 이야기해 온 ‘聖(거룩)의 평범성의 확대’의 일이라고 생각합니다.

4. ‘믿음의 통합학’(intergral Studies for Faith)라는 것

일찍이 20세기 서구 기독교 문명이 낳은 전체주의적 타락인 나치즘에 맞선 본회퍼는 “우리는 바라보면서 살지 않고, 믿음 속에서 살아갑니다. 역사가 존재하는 한, 언제나 그럴 수밖에 없습니다”라고 했습니다. 이것은 결국 삶의 ‘지속성’에 관한 이야기인데, 우리 삶과 역사가 지속하기 위해서는 결코 사실성만으로는 되지 않고 그 사실성 너머에 있는, 또는 근저에 있는 초월성에 대해 믿음이 요청된다는 것입니다. 그래서 사실성과 초월성, 세계와 하나님, 氣와 理, 身과 心(性), 과학과 종교 등의 두 영역과 측면이 어떻게든 어우러져야 한다는 것, 그 함께 어우르고 연결되도록 하는 일, 이것을 한국信연구소는 계속해서 추구하고, 수행하고, 이루려고 합니다. 이를 우리 존재와 삶의 온 영역에서 밝히고 드러나도록 하는 일을 ‘불이성’(不二性)과 ‘지속성’이라는 의미의 한국신연구소의 세 번째 형용사 ‘Integral Studies’(통합학문) 라는 말로 강조해 왔습니다. 또한 바로 ‘현장’(顯藏) 이라는 말, ‘나타나고 또 감추어진’이라는 표현이 동아시아의 오랜 생명 표현인 ‘道’나 ‘易’의 본래를 지시하는 귀중한 언어라는 것을 알고 얻어와서 그러한 저희 뜻을 표현하는 언어로 쓰고 있습니다. 이 우주, 만물, 아무리 하찮은 ‘물건’ 하나, 한 가지 ‘일’에서라도 이 두 차원이 없지 않고 함께 있고, 그래서 우리는 그에 대한 진심 어린 존숭과 겸손(敬)을 보내야 한다는 것을 말합니다.

그런데 저는 오늘 21세기 인류 문명의 다원화 시대에서는 이 불이성, 또는 간단히 표현하면 우주와 만물의 초월성을 이제 어떠한 언어로 표현하느냐의 문제는 많이 열려졌고, 심지어는 한국 기독교의 배타적 유일신론적 보수성도 많이 금이 갔다고 생각합니다. 하지만 오늘 이 이름의 다양성이 불러오는 갈등보다 더 심각한 문제는 기독교의 하나님 신앙도 포함해서 도무지 이러한 초월의 차원을 인정하는 일, 존재의 불이성을 드러내는 거룩성의 차원(敬)을 어떤 것이든 받아들이지 않는다는 것입니다. 즉 우리 시대의 핵심 관건은 더이상 神 이야기(God-talk)가 아니라 信, 믿음과 신뢰, 용기의 이야기이고, 그래서 어떻게 하면 사람들이 그렇게 사실성과 더불어 초월성, 그 둘의 불이성을 깨닫고 믿을 수 있도록 할까의 문제라는 것이며, 한국신연구소는 그 길을 찾아 나서고자 합니다. 무엇이 사람들로 하여금 그것을 믿지 못하게 하는지, 왜 우리 사이에서 신뢰와 믿음이 이렇게 어려운 일이 되었는지를 탐색하는 “믿음을 위한 통합학문”(Integral Studies for Faith)의 길을 가고자 하는 것입니다. 그런 의미에서 이 길은 예전 좁은 의미의 종교나 신학의 물음만이 아니라 우리 삶의 많은 영역의 일이 포괄되는 것을 말하며, 특히 제가 거룩의 ‘聖’ 자(字), 우리 몸의 ‘性’와 더불어 세 번째로 불러오고자 하는 ‘誠’의 언어로 강조하고자 하는 교육의 차원이 중시되면서 ‘한국적 聖·性·誠의 믿음의 통합학’을 말하고자 하는 일입니다.

앞에서 함께 읽은 ‘經 앞에 바로 서기’에서의 믿음에 관한 여러 문장은 주로 지금까지 써온 글에서 모아봤습니다. 이제 우리를 종이라고 부르지 않으시겠다는 예수의 선언을 21세기 오늘 한국 땅에서 다시 한번 정직하고 진실되게 사실화해보자는 의지, 그 예수보다 거의 4백여 년 전에 동아시아의 맹자는 먼저 초월에 대한 믿음이야말로 사람들이 진정으로 원하는 것이고, 그것이 善이며, 그 믿음은 바로 나에게서 나오고 내 몸에 두는 것이라는 사실을 밝혔습니다. 초감각적인 것이 먼저이고, 모든 형상적이고 감각적인 것은 거기서 나오는 것이지만 그것을 믿기 위해서는 감각의 몸으로 느끼고, 경험하고, 통과해야 하므로 이 감각의 기반이 참으로 긴요한 것을 강조합니다. 그래서 누구에게나 따뜻하고 친밀한 가족이 필요하고, 거기서 누구나 자신의 몸과 감정이 소중하게 대접받는 경험을 요청하고, 누구든지 이 지구라는 집에 태어났으면 모두가 평등한 주인이므로, 이곳의 선한 것을 공평하게 누릴 수 있어야 한다는 것, 그래서 우리 사회의 ‘기본 소득’을 말하고, 또한 누구든지 살던 집을 떠나갈 때 함께 했던 가까운 사람들의 배웅을 따뜻하게 받을 수 있도록 죽어가는 자의 고독을 다시 깊이 껴안는 사회적 孝의 일 등, 이런 모든 것이 한국信연구소, 현장아카데미가 깊게 관심하는 일입니다.

5. 내 소원은 진정 착한 사람이 많아지는 것(所願善人多): 박원순 시장의 죽음의 시대에

박원순 시장이 글을 쓰고 있는 동안 박원순 서울시장의 서거 소식이 올라왔습니다. 다시 몸과 정신, 이 세상과 저세상, 사실성과 초월성, 법과 부끄러움, 명성과 내재, 사적 개인과 공적 사회 등의 문제라는 것이 드러납니다. 어쩌면 그는 앞에서 언급한 『어떻게 더 높은 세계를 인식하는가?』 의 저자가 이야기하는 삶과 죽음의 경계, 거기서의 첫 번째 수호령, 자신의 끔찍한 과거와 이미 자신이 사실로 만든 형상 앞에서 좌절한 것인지도 모르겠습니다. 그것을 견디고 넘어서 두 번째 수호령도 만나고, 거기서 다시 우리 시대의 불행에 대한 큰 책임감을 느끼고 스스로 이곳 세상으로 돌아올 수 있도록까지 인내의 일을 지속할 수 없었고, 우리 사회적 삶의 환경도 그것이 좀 더 수월하게 이루어지도록 함께 마련되지 못한 것이 너무도 안타깝습니다. 만약 그랬다면 우리 시대가 여전히 그 현현을 고대하고 바라는 진정한 소셜 디자이너 박원순 시장을 참으로 만날 수도 있었을 텐데, 정말 마음이 아프고, 미안하고, 그의 남겨진 가족과 주변의 사람들이 그들이 그와 어떤 관계를 맺고 살았든 모두 안쓰럽습니다. 그래서 지속성(誠), 믿음과 신뢰(信), 그것을 ‘하늘의 도’(天之道) 라고 했고, 그것을 따르는 것을 ‘인간의 길’(人之道) 라 했으며, 한국信연구소가 우리 사이에서 누구든 이 길을 가는 일이 그렇게 홀로 외롭지 않도록 서로 이해하고(恕), 용서하고, 격려하고 이끌어주는 따뜻한 힘의 기반이 되었으면 좋겠습니다. 저는 그 일이 가능해지도록 우리 인간의 말을 들어서 그런 인간의 이야기에 봉사하며(執言奉辭) 길을 가겠습니다. ‘사실’은 인간적인 행위를 통해서 비로소 완성되고 이루어지는 것(成)이라고 했습니다. 또한 “진실은 다른 사람과 공유하는 현실이 없으면 그 의미를 잃는다”라고 했습니다. 그래서 오늘 드리는 말씀을 다음과 같이 16세기 퇴계 선생의 말씀으로 마무리하고자 합니다. “내 소원은 진정 착한 사람이 많아지는 것”(所願善人多). 그러면서 저의 유가에서의 첫사랑 같은 16세기 양명 선생의 언어로 저의 속마음을 드러냅니다. “저는 제 속의 착한 마음을 믿게 되었습니다. 그래서 저에게 옳은 것은 옳은 것이고, 그른 것은 그른 것이어서 이제부터는 더 솔직하고 과감하게 어떤 작은 것도 감추려 들지 않으면서 ‘광자’(狂者)와 같은 심경으로 천하의 모든 사람이 저의 행동과 말이 일치하지 않는다고 비난하더라도 꿋꿋하게 이 일을 지속해 보겠습니다.” 함께 해주실 것을 간청하고, 경청해 주셔서 감사합니다. 2020. 7.13일 이은선 드림

한국 연구소 개소식, 그 이후

이정배교수(현장아카데미)

이제 한국 신연구소 개소식 막바지에 이르렀습니다. 코로나 상황에서 귀한 발걸음 해주신 분들에게 거듭 감사를 표하며 특히 최만자, 김흥수 선생님의 축사를 비롯하여 서평(이선경, 김정숙, 임종수 박사), 기도(신선) 그리고 축주(가)로 자리를 빛내 주신 여러 선생님들께 고개를 숙입니다. 오늘 이 자리에 김경재 교수님, 정숙자, 박득훈 이면주 목사님을 비롯한 기독교계의 중요 분들이 함께 하셨습니다. 하중조, 조영훈, 주대범 장로님께도 감사말씀 드립니다. 물론 불교와 유교의 선생님들도 함께 해 주셨습니다. 성균관대 명예교수 이동준 교수님, 연세대 명예교수 이광호 교수님, 불교 재가자 대표 서강대 명예교수 박광수 교수님 고맙습니다. 이 분들 모두로부터 말씀을 청해 들어야 옳겠으나 시간이 허락 지 못함을 용서해 주시기 바랍니다.

주지하듯 우리는 유수한 역사를 지닌 신학관련 잡지, 연구공간들이 사라지는 현실을 목도 하고 있습니다. 진보성을 띨수록 사라지는 속도가 빠른듯하여 그 안타까움이 매우 큽니다. 신학자들의 경우 통합적 사유를 놓친 채 각자도생의 길로 접어들은 지 오래 되었습니다. 자기 분야에 함목되어 세상과 담을 쌓고 있습니다. 대형교회 목쇠자 분 아니라 생존이 힘든 목회자들 역시 저신들 삶의 뼈대가 되는 신학을 뒷전에 처박아 둔 채 신학의 무용성을 말하고 있습니다. 교파를 막론한 교계는 더욱 보수, 근본 화되어 타자 혐오적 모습(방식)으로 세상에 현존합니다. 코로나 정국 속에서 교회의 공적 역할은 사라졌고 자기 생존을 위한 이기적 집단으로 세상에 각인되었으니 그 미래가 걱정입니다. 코로나 이후 기독교의 몰락을 예견하는 학자들이 적지 않습니다.

하지만 다른 길이 있음을 믿고 추세를 거스르는 시도가 있어야 할 것입니다. 이를 위해 기독교와 만났던 초기 신앙 선배들을 소환하고 싶습니다. 이들 중에 기독교 신앙을 주체적으로 수용했던 토착화 그룹(최병헌, 윤성범, 유동식, 변선환), 민족 독립을 위해 사회주의 이념에 관대했던 지도자(손정도, 김창준, 전덕기, 장기천)들, 교파적 기독교를 버리고 그리스도에게로 향했던 환원운동가들(이용도, 동석기, 김윤석, 이신)이 있었습니다. 이들의 문제의식을 엮어 그들 에토스가 목하 현실에서 창조적으로 계승되기를 소망합니다. 이들을 기억하여 소생시킬 때 자본화된 종교적(사적) 집단으로 축소, 변질되는 오늘 추세에 작은 균열이라도 낼 수 있을 것입니다. 한국 신연구소는 이런 과제를 떠맡아 종교개혁 500년 이후 새로운 기독교 운동을 전개하겠습니다. 분명 코로나 사태는 다른 기독교를 우리에게 요구하고 있습니다. 새로운 환상 속에서 달리 믿고 다르게 살기를 명하고 있습니다. 그럴수록 코로나 이후 기독교의 생명(역동) 성을 위해 우리들 믿음, 상상력의 부패를 걱정해야 할 것입니다.

많이 부족하지만 이 소리에 응답하며 사는 것이 저희들의 할 일이라 생각했습니다. 이를 위해 저희부터 많이 달라지고자 애쓸 것입니다. 하늘 주시는 힘으로 동료, 후학들과 힘을 합쳐 연구공간을 재건하고 세상과 소통하는 신학 담론을 힘껏 제시하겠습니다. 온/오프라인을 통해 배워 알기를 원하는 이들과 ‘이후’ 기독교, ‘이후’ 신학, ‘이후’ 교회의 길을 토론하겠습니다. 새로운 기독교, 새로운 문명, 통일한국을 생각하는 값진 연구서도 출판해 낼 것입니다. 젊은 신학도들, 새로움을 갈망하는 신앙인들에게 작은 의지 처, 신뢰의 그루터기가 되고 싶습니다. 저희들만의 힘으로는 벅찰 것이며 길게 가지 못할 것입니다. 핮;만 저희가 기꺼이 마중물 이 될 것입니다. 탈진리(Post-Truth) 시대에 이른 지금 6개혁이란 것이 종교개혁 당대보다 훨씬 더 어렵겠으나 가야할 길이라 믿습니다. 이 도상에서 마음과 뜻이 합해지는 은총의 사건이 생길 것을 믿으며 이 여정에 감히 첫발을 내 닫습니다.

아시는 대로 이은선 교수와 저는 2016년 이후 시차를 두고 명예퇴직을 했으며 현장아카데미를 일궈 왔습니다. 사실 이 일은 횡성에 거처를 마련한 2000년 가을부터 꿈꿔 시작한 일이었습니다. ‘세상 안에서 세상 밖을 살아보자’는 새로운 수도원 운동을 염두에 두었습니다. 연구(독서)와 영성(예배) 그리고 노동(생산)이 아우러지는 공간이 되길 꿈꿨던 것이지요. 오늘 공식화된 ‘한국 신연구소’가 첫 영역, 연구 분야를 책임지고 이끌어 갈 것입니다. 여성적인 적인 것이 세상을 구할 것이란 말을 믿으며 한국 신연구소의 앞날을 진인사재천명의 심정으로 하늘에 맡겨드립니다. 기념해야 할 뭇 역사적 사건을 품고 있는 2020년, 그 후반기를 시작하는 7월에 한국 신연구소를 공식화하게 된 것이 참으로 뜻깊습니다. 이 자리에 여러분을 모신 것을 기쁨과 영광이라 여기며 저희들 말()이 이뤄지는() 세상을 선배, 동료, 제자 및 뭇 지인과 함께 믿고 기대하겠습니다. 오늘 모임을 위해 애써 주신 여러분들에게 머리 숙여 감사를 드리며, 끝으로 환희당 모임의 벗, 실상사 법인 스님이 한국 신연구소를 위해 보낸 <대승기신론>의 짧은 글 한 편을 가슴에 새기며 말씀을 갈음하겠습니다. 믿음도 타락할 수 있음을 늘 상 기억하기 위함입니다.
“믿음을 성취하는 일은 수행이 없으면 이룰 수 없는 과제인바, 믿음이 성숙치 못하면 연()을 만나는 순간 곧 퇴진하고 말 것입니다” (필자 변형)

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.

"Witness to an Extreme Century": An Interview with Robert Jay Lifton | History News Network

"Witness to an Extreme Century": An Interview with Robert Jay Lifton

Historians/History

by Robin Lindley

Robin Lindley is a Seattle attorney and writer. He contributes to the History News Network, Crosscut, Real Change, and others, on history, human rights, international affairs, law, politics, the media and arts.

Darkness is only driven out with light,
not more darkness.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Eminent psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton, M.D., now age 85, has spent his life at the often dark and bloody confluence of psychology and human history. He is perhaps most well known for his research on the character and human consequences of historic mass traumas such as the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, the Holocaust, and the counterinsurgency wars of the past half-century.

Dr. Lifton’s studies have revealed not only the immense capacity for human cruelty and inhumanity, but also the astonishing resilience of survivors. He has strived to create a model for humane behavior as he has warned of the dangers of “totalism” or totalitarian beliefs that preclude any independent thinking. Dr. Lifton’s profound understanding of pain and suffering led him to become a prominent voice against war and nuclear weapons while advancing constructive, life-affirming strategies for a more just and peaceful world.

In his new memoir, Witness to an Extreme Century (Simon and Schuster), Dr. Lifton traces his journey from his Brooklyn boyhood to his distinguished career in psychiatry. Anthropologist and author Mary Catherine Bateson wrote that the book “offers a model of the relationship between introspection and ethical commitment.”

As well as discussing his groundbreaking research, Dr. Lifton recounts his friendships with a range of influential intellectuals and artists from his mentor Erik Erikson, anthropologist Margaret Mead, and historian Howard Zinn to writers Norman Mailer, Kurt Vonnegut, and Kenzaburo Oe.

Kirkus Reviews honored Witness with a starred review and described the book as a “call for a moral awakening by a deeply compassionate chronicler of our time.”

Dr. Lifton is a Lecturer in Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and Distinguished Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry and Psychology at the City University of New York. His books include the National Book Award Winner Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima; Los Angeles Times Book Prize Winner The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide; National Book Award Finalist Home from the War: Learning from Vietnam Veterans; The Protean Self: Resilience in an Age of Fragmentation; and Superpower Syndrome: America’s Apocalyptic Confrontation with the World.

Dr. Lifton recently spoke by telephone from his home in Massachusetts about his life and innovative scholarship.

Lindley: Did you see yourself as a doctor when you were a little boy?

Lifton: I did not see myself as a doctor when I was a boy. I was always interested in history. It wasn’t clear to me how I would use history in later life. I wasn’t the type of kid who imagined himself in a white coat at a very tender age. That interest in medicine came later and was uncertain even as it developed.

Lindley: It seems your mother and father significantly influenced your views.

Lifton: All parents have a significant influence, and in my case my father in particular was concerned about social issues and was a progressive person. He had gone to City College of New York, and that was a great experience in his life. He never ceased being an advocate for free higher education. And my social and ethical concerns are part of those my parents had.

Lindley: Where were you when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor?

Lifton: I was fifteen years old in 1941. I was riding in a car with a close friend and his uncle was driving us from Long Island to Brooklyn. I remember being shocked when I heard about it. I understood it would mean war, but didn’t fully understand how widespread its effects would be.

Lindley: How did you react at age nineteen when you heard about the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

Lifton: When I was nineteen, I was already in medical school because of my accelerated education. I’m rather ashamed of it, but I was joyous at hearing the news because we had a new weapon that would help us win the war quickly and I wouldn’t have to fight in it. I quickly got over that response when I found out more about the atomic bomb, but my initial reaction was, unfortunately, a fairly conventional one at the time. It took me and many others a while to grasp what this new weapon meant. I spent the rest of my life atoning for that first response.

Lindley: At the time, American leaders believed the atom bombs would save hundreds of thousands of American lives. You disagree with that opinion.

Lifton: Very strongly. The use of the weapons was a grave mistake and the war could have been won quickly without them because Japan was absolutely annihilated. In the end, the treaty of surrender didn’t vary from what the Japanese were offering: unconditional surrender except for keeping the Emperor on the throne, which we eventually agreed to.

Lindley: Had you decided to go into psychiatry by age 19 in 1945?

Lifton: No. I had read some psychology, but had no idea that I was going into a psychological field or psychiatry. At medical school, I [had an] intellectual interest in psychiatry and helped organize a psychiatry club with medical students. It still wasn’t clear that I would become a psychiatrist, but over the course of medical school I made that decision.

Lindley: You’ve combined your interest in history with psychiatry in your examination of the major human traumas of the past seventy years. How did history shape your career?

Lifton: I was very interested in history as a kid and in high school, but I had no idea how important it would become for me. Later, when I began my research, it seemed natural to combine individual psychological interviews with evaluation of the larger historical forces. It was an intuitive feeling on my part. Also, my post-war intellectual generation was exposed to history with our country being thrust into new dimensions of historical involvement by the war and the post-war era, creating in many people in my generation an interest in larger history. And that was my experience.

I was sent to Japan in 1952. There was still an American occupation when I arrived. One was confronted by historical forces by being sent abroad as I was. All that contributed, I think.

Then later on, I came under the influence of Erik Erikson, who was one of the few psychoanalysts to immerse himself in history and look at larger questions rather than reducing history to psychiatric concepts. I had a strong interest in history before I met Erikson [but] he helped me channel that interest into a method or approach to history.

The method I used was a psychiatric interview highly modified to become a dialogue so I could get at individual psychological struggles but also take into account what I came to call a mosaic of larger social and historical influences. That became my method of research. My studies were on very different subjects, but they all required that combination of psychology and history. Of course, [my research] dealt with very destructive forces, but I emphasized aspects of resilience and hope as well.

Lindley: And you’re a master interviewer. Did your approach grow from Erikson and or did you develop it independently?

Lifton: I developed my own method in my first study before I had met Erikson. My approach was more hands on. I interviewed people who had been subjected to or brought about profound historical events. That general principle, which I came to call shared themes, was my own concept.

Erikson influenced me in terms of the concept of identity and of the idea of a psychoanalyst or psychiatrist connecting with the world stage. There was that suggestion in his work, although he didn’t go about his work in the same way I did.
I talk about Erikson using the great person approach, trying to evaluate the psychology of the great man or woman and then examining the interaction of that psychological struggle with the shared psychology of that era, whereas my approach of shared themes meant studying a group of people who had been through such events and doing it in a nitty gritty way in the field.

Lindley: You mention serving in the military in the wake of the war.

Lifton: I was in the military only during the Korean War and served two years because of the doctor draft.

Lindley: Although you critique authoritarian or “totalistic” institutions, you call your Air Force service a gift.

Lifton: My experience of the Air Force didn’t have anything in the way of basic training or of the intense control of a training process, which can have a totalistic element. I reported in, was sent to a hospital in Massachusetts and did psychiatric work, and hardly had any briefing. In that sense I was spared what could be the more totalistic influences.

I called it a gift because it brought me into the world and took me to Japan and Korea. I discovered Japan with my wife and [that was] an exciting and transformative experience for us, which influenced everything that followed. It was the Air Force that made possible my highly idiosyncratic work. It’s conceivable that without the Air Force I might not have taken such direction.

Of course, my last Air Force assignment was to interview returning prisoners of war who had been subjected to “thought reform” by the Chinese in North Korea. That work with POWs interested me in the thought reform process. Then in Hong Kong I interviewed people coming out of China who had been through that process, and that led to my very first study.

In a way, all of that stems from the Air Force assignment, which I was far from happy about. I didn’t want to go into the military and went because I was drafted. And I wasn’t happy about being sent abroad because I was comfortable working in Massachusetts in routine ways at Westover Air Force Base, but still that experience opened up a world for me and had an important bearing on my career, and that’s why I called it a gift.

Lindley: When you studied Chinese thought control or brain washing and totalism, wasn’t there an echo in the United States with the McCarthy persecution of suspected communists? Can you talk about totalism?

Lifton: Totalism is a psychological equivalent of totalitarianism and means an all or none system of belief and claim to ethical virtue, which leaves no room for opposition or for alternative views or approaches. So it’s a closing of the mind over a claim to absolute certainty. It is one of the gravest human dangers and it played a major role in all of the research studies of destructive behavior [and] became a leitmotif of my work in general.

My work on thought reform is not as well known as some of my other work, but it was extremely important because it gave me a chance to study a systematic process that illustrated totalism at its worst and taught me a great deal about its danger.

And yes, I did apply [it] to the United States. I [was] troubled when I was in Hong Kong by the extent to which groups could try to manipulate truth and impose falsehood on others in a totalistic practice like thought reform. Then I heard of not exactly systematic but parallel tendencies in the United States in relation to the McCarthyism of the fifties and the terrible atmosphere where friends were even afraid to subscribe to certain magazines or express critical views in public. I began to feel much of the world had gone mad in that totalistic direction.

Also in the George W. Bush years in particular—but not only during the Bush years—I was intent on looking at the relevance of my thought reform work for this country. Even though our behavior may not be as extreme as elsewhere, if destructive behavior on the part of others can illuminate relatively lesser transgressions on our own part, then it’s our responsibility as scholars to make those connections.

Lindley: Your anti-nuclear activism began even before you did the study of Hiroshima survivors in the 1960s.

Lifton: A prior experience helped bring me to Hiroshima. That is, in the late fifties I came under the influence of David Riesman in Cambridge, Massachusetts, when I had an appointment as a research associate at Harvard. He had been an early student of nuclear danger not only of what the weapons do, but how they influence the country, their impact on American society. It was a way of looking rather interpretively and profoundly and socially at nuclear weapons. And I tried to look at them psychologically as well.

When I was in Japan subsequently from 1960 to 1962 on a different study on the psychology of youth, I decided after that study to make a trip to Hiroshima. That decision was influenced by that prior influence of Riesman. In that way, one’s ethical and political influences can take one to the study rather than vice versa. And of course my Hiroshima study deepened my knowledge of what the weapon does and contributed to my anti-nuclear passion.

Lindley: You capture the difficulty of interviewing the Hiroshima survivors and mention their psychic numbing and your own professional numbing.

Lifton: I call it selective professional numbing. I found that I could talk to people in Hiroshima about the bomb and what it did. But once I started the actual psychological interview, which meant going over in detail every aspect of the experience and hearing about the extremity of suffering and the experience of a sea of death around them and injuries and burns—both what they themselves experienced and what they saw in others—[it] was an overwhelming process for me as an interviewer. After a few interviews, I was overwhelmed by that material and anxious and having bad dreams. I really wondered whether I could do the study.

A short time later, the anxiety diminished. I didn’t cease to be responsive to what survivors told me, but I found myself gaining a very minimum of detachment necessary in carrying out the study. It happened almost inadvertently because
I was very intent on doing the study and I sensed that I needed to combine compassion with a modicum of detachment to carry that out, and I call that selective professional numbing.

You can see parallels in psychiatrists who treat troubling and difficult psychotic patients, or even more so a surgeon who does a delicate operation who cannot afford to feel the emotions of people close to the patient. That selective professional numbing, as I call it, was crucial to the study.

Then I realized that numbing or the diminished capacity to feel is of course is an overwhelming response of survivors themselves, in which case it can be life saving. They needed some diminution of feeling just to survive mentally and physically.

Lindley: It’s striking that the survivors describe their reaction to the extreme horror of death and injuries as an out-of-body state.

Lifton: The extreme psychic numbing is a form of dissociation, or one part of the mind being separated from the rest of the mind. The numbing is a turning off of psychological experience. While most that I talked to were aware of the dreadful things happening in the city—that people were dying and something extraordinary of a highly destructive nature had taken place—what was turned off were the emotions or feelings ordinarily associated with such an experience and that served their capacity to take action and survive. If there was too much numbing, they’d be immobilized.

Lindley: Isn’t an overarching theme of your work death and the continuity of life, or the need for connection and continuity in the face of the inevitability of death?

Lifton: Yes it is. The Hiroshima study thrust me into death-related issues, and how to articulate them and use them to understand what I had witnessed in my Hiroshima interviews. Most psychological and psychiatric work had not extensively studied death-related ideas. There was the Freudian work on the death instinct or death drive, but in terms of placing death within one’s theory or interpretations, more was needed. I tried to draw upon what I could find.

I focused on death and the continuity of life as a model or a paradigm—the kind of model from which you understand the world or organizing principle in that sense. In a way, it’s a very obvious principle, but most psychoanalytic work before that focused on a paradigm of instinct and defense: certain instincts were sexual or destructive with various inner defenses against them that we try to mobilize in the self or ego.

I sought a more encompassing model with death and the continuity of life. There are others who didn’t necessarily call it that but work with that in different ways as in working with dying patients.

Lindley: In your book on Vietnam veterans, Home from the War, you describe combat survival and posttraumatic stress disorder.

Lifton: Yes. I spoke mostly in terms of survivor psychology and survivor struggles and pain. The later concept of posttraumatic stress disorder drew upon some of the work [from] my Hiroshima and my Vietnam studies. And I work on a small committee of psychiatrists which presented evidence for a concept of posttraumatic stress disorder.

The whole experience of being a survivor and of adult trauma has been very important in my work.

Lindley: Your Vietnam survivor work deals with death imagery and then how survivors move to a search for meaning.

Lifton: Yes. I developed a series of concepts about the psychology of survivors, but the overarching principle was the quest for meaning. I speak of all human beings as meaning-hungry creatures. We need meaning whether we express it or assume it in living out our lives as to why do this or that or how we treat our children or parents and what advocacies we make in the world and what we impose. That is all based on meanings that we live by.

A survivor often has had his or her meaning structure undermined or even overturned [and] spends much of his or her life seeking a meaning structure or trying to re-assemble or reintegrate meaning.

Some Hiroshima survivors define their meaning and mission in telling the world what that first atomic bomb did and warning the world about nuclear weapons. So that became a very important theme in my work: the idea of survivor meaning, then the idea of survivor mission that stems from survivor meaning.

Lindley: You speak of atrocity-producing situations in Vietnam—and that concept is now relevant with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Lifton: Yes. An atrocity-producing situation is so structured that very ordinary people who are in no way particularly bad can engage in atrocities and that can be the case because of the way the environment is structured. In terms of Vietnam, body counts, free fire zones, and search and destroy missions were military policy that made killing civilians all too easy. The kinds of experiences soldiers, especially angry grief they suffered [as] buddies were killed when they were unable to engage the enemy, [are] likely to occur in counterinsurgency wars where it’s hard to distinguish combatants from civilians.

The importance of the concept of the atrocity-producing situation is that it can apply in other environments of war, atrocity or destructive behavior. It certainly has applied in Iraq and Afghanistan as well. Both are counterinsurgency wars as we had in Vietnam, although they’re very different wars. All counterinsurgency wars present difficulty in distinguishing combatants from civilians. There can be this license to fire and this angry grief in terms of what one has experienced.

So the concept of atrocity-producing situations haunts us in various wars. Vietnam had much to teach us about that.

Lindley: In your study of Nazi doctors you move from victims to perpetrators, but many of the Nazi doctors presented themselves as victims and brought up the moral quandaries they faced. These interviews had to be especially challenging for you.

Lifton: Yes. I was drawn to the work because there had been little direct study of what went on in the psyches of the Nazis, and there was almost no study of the Nazi doctors. I came to recognize that Nazi doctors and others in the biologically related professions were key people in the Holocaust. The Holocaust was a biological vision of getting rid of bad genes and bad races in what I call the biomedical vision of healing the Nordic race by destroying those groups that had undermined it, especially the Jews but also other races.

The Nazi doctors was the first group for which I had less than sympathy for the people I was interviewing. I was caught in a paradox, but I encouraged the Nazi doctors I spoke with to tell me in full frankness about their feelings and their environment and even conversations among Nazi doctors in places like Auschwitz. As they told me that, I found myself seething because they were vicious ideas and so-called jokes, which would be extreme to anyone, and my being Jewish further intensified my feelings.

I was quite aware that I would be among those the Nazis designated as those they wished to kill. The very information and ideas that I so much needed for my research were a source of enormous pain to me. It was also difficult to control my anger and even rage at some of their own described behavior. So that study had its difficulties.

Lindley: It had to be difficult to hear their justifications, such as avoiding combat by working in a concentration camp.

Lifton: There were some Nazi doctors who had second thoughts about what they were doing at Auschwitz, which was [their] major role in the killing process. But those questioning thoughts were muted by the realization that, if they raised such questions, they could well be sent to the Eastern Front [where] there was an extremely high death rate. The irony was that the Nazi doctors probably could have refused to do the selections—part of the killing process—if they presented their refusal as a form of inability or even personal weakness on their part rather than a rejection of the Nazis themselves. They undoubtedly would have been transferred out of the situation because the Nazis liked their killing machines running smoothly, but if they had done that, they would have been sent to the front.

Lindley: Physicians have a special role and are admired in society. The Nazi biomedical vision of racial purity grew out of eugenics, which was taught in the United States in the early twentieth century.

Lifton: America was a leading center for eugenics [along with] Great Britain, and initially moved further in the direction of eugenics than the pre-Nazi Germans.

The idea of trying to control genetic transmission to build a more healthy and able race could be considered idealistic but, when there were abuses and deficiencies surrounding this in the United States and Great Britain, they could cease that focus on eugenics for, say, coercive sterilization, which was all too prevalent in the United States—but at least finally it could be stopped. That contrasted with Nazi Germany, which, as a totalitarian country, simply did what was ordered by Nazi leaders including Hitler in connection with a policy of forced sterilization and then what the Nazis falsely called “euthanasia” as part of what I call the creation of a biocracy. So the democratic possibility of changing one’s direction did not exist in totalitarian Germany.

Lindley: The Nazi T4 “euthanasia” program with the destruction of so-called “mental defectives” in Germany was a step toward the Holocaust.

Lifton: Most of the Nazi death camps where people were systematically killed in gas chambers were constituted by transfers from killing centers for the so-called “euthanasia program,” which doctors on the whole ran. Both equipment and personnel including doctors were transferred from the “euthanasia programs” [establishing] a concrete link from so-called “euthanasia” to the Holocaust.

Lindley: What lessons did you draw from your Nazi doctors study?

Lifton: There are many lessons. First, it’s important to confront this behavior in a scholarly way to learn exactly what it consists of and, as much as possible, what led to it. Also, take a stand against any claim, even claims of idealism, that promise an enlightened and improved time at the expense of another group when it comes to harming or killing another group because of the needs of the majority. When it comes to claims of the majority, one should be very suspicious. I would add that any group taking a totalistic direction should be looked at critically.

Lindley: You’re a leading anti-war and anti-nuclear activist. Where are we now with our two wars and continued maintenance of a nuclear arsenal?

Lifton: Not only my work but the work of many others has led to a national consciousness and a better understanding of the dangers of nuclear weapons, but that doesn’t mean we’ve cured ourselves of what I call the spiritual disease of nuclearism: embracing the weapons with an exaggerated dependency on them.

There’s a large number of nuclear weapons in the world, and there’s a grave danger that they’ll be used whether by us or by another country that possesses them. Even so-called smaller nuclear weapons, say the size of the Hiroshima bomb—which is very small by present standards—are still devastating and a danger.

Obama has improved the situation by speaking of nuclear abolition as a goal, but hasn’t followed through to the extent many feel he should.

Lindley: You’ve also been outspoken on medical complicity in war crimes and torture. Your work supports investigation of our own activities in war.

Lifton: Yes. I wrote a short piece a few years ago in The New England Journal of Medicine on American doctor collusion in torture in Iraq and elsewhere. It’s been a great disappointment to me that the Obama Administration that has refused to confront participation in torture and to make clear what we’ve done [to determine] historical and ethical responsibility. The fact that the administration has prevented that from taking place and the pursuit of the war in Afghanistan have been my major criticisms of the Obama Administration. I think they’ve improved a great deal on previous administrations.

Lindley: Where do you find hope? Is it in human resilience?

Lifton: On resilience, in the most extreme experiences, like Hiroshima or Auschwitz, there were people who managed not only to survive but to help others survive and renew their lives with extraordinary energy and find ways of living that could transform the very pain and suffering into some kind of insight and commitment to life-enhancing behavior.

Resilience is one issue related to what I call the protean self or the many-sided self. I see the individual self in contemporary experience as having many sides and a certain amount of flexibility and capacity to renew itself and avoid dead ends. That doesn’t guarantee anything, but at least it gives a psychological substrate to the possibility of changing and renewing and behaving in a resilient manner.

The Determining Features of the Ecozoic Era | Center for Ecozoic Studies

The Determining Features of the Ecozoic Era

by Thomas Berry

Earth is a communion of subjects not a collection of objects.
Earth exists and can survive only in its integral functioning. It cannot survive in fragments any more than any organism can survive in fragments. Yet, Earth is not a global sameness. It is a differentiated unity and must be sustained in the integrity and interrelations of its many bioregional modes of expression.
Earth is a one-time endowment. It is subject to irreversible damage in the major patterns of its functioning.
The human is derivative, Earth is primary. Earth must be the primary concern of every human institution, profession, program and activity. In economics, for instance, the first law of economics must be the preservation of the Earth economy. A rising Gross National Product with a declining Gross Earth Product reveals the absurdity of our present economy. It should be clear, in the medical profession, that we cannot have healthy people on a sick planet.
The entire pattern of Excellence functioning of Earth is altered in the transition from the Cenozoic to the Ecozoic Era. The major developments of the Cenozoic took place entirely apart from any human intervention. In the Ecozoic, the human will have a comprehensive influence on almost everything that happens. While the human cannot make a blade of grass, there is [liable] not to be a blade of grass unless it is accepted, protected and fostered by the human. Our positive power of creativity in the natural life systems is minimal, while our power of negating is immense.
Progress, to be valid, must include the entire Earth in all its component aspects. To designate human plundering of the planet as progress is an unbearable distortion.
The Ecozoic can come into existence only though an appreciation of the feminine dimension of Earth, through a liberation of women from the oppressions and the constraints that they have endured in the past, and through the shared responsibility of both women and men for establishing an integral Earth community.
A new role exists for both science and technology in the Ecozoic period. Science must provide a more integral understanding of the functioning of Earth and how human activity and Earth activity can be mutually enhancing. Our biological sciences especially need to develop a “feel for the organism,” a greater sense of the ultimate subjectivities present in the various living beings of Earth. Our human technologies must become more coherent with the technologies of the natural world.
New ethical principles must emerge which recognize the absolute evils of biocide and geocide as well as the other evils concerned more directly with the human.
New religious sensitivities are needed that will recognize the sacred dimension of Earth and that will accept the natural world as the primary manifestation of the divine.
A new language, an Ecozoic language, is needed. Our language is radically inadequate. A new dictionary should be compiled with new definitions of existing words and an introduction of new words for the new modes of being and functioning that are emerging.
Psychologically all the archetypes of the collective unconscious attain a new validity and a new pattern of functioning, especially in our understanding of the symbols of the Tree of Life, the heroic journey, death and rebirth, the mandala and the Great Mother.
New developments can be expected in ritual, in all the arts, and in literature. In drama especially, extraordinary opportunities exist in the monumental issues that are being worked out in these times. The conflicts that until now have been situated simply within the human drama are magnified considerably through the larger contours of conflict as these emerge in this stupendous transition from the terminal Cenozoic to the emerging Ecozoic. What we are dealing with is in epic dimensions beyond anything thus far expressed under this term.
Mitigation of the present ruinous situation, the recycling of materials, the diminishment of consumption, the healing of damaged ecosystems—all this will be in vain if we do these things to make the present industrial systems acceptable. They must all be done, but in order to build a new order of things.

Handout from the library of Santa Sabina Conference Center, San Rafael, California, 2004, except that Item 7 is from a similar list presented by Thomas Berry at an annual conference of the Center for Reflection on the Second Law held in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

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.”

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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.

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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.

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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.

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.