The Relation Between Religions in the Shadow of the Environmental Crisis [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

The Relation Between Religions in the Shadow of the Environmental Crisis
Professor Seyyed Hossein Nasr

This was the inaugural Autumn Lecture given by SEYYED HOSSEIN NASR,
Professor of Islamic Studies of George Washington University, USA. It was
held on Thursday 27 October 1994 at Manchester College,
Oxford.

When I was invited to come to Oxford to deliver a lecture for this very
important new International Interfaith Centre, I accepted with pleasure because
for much of my life I have worked in a humble way to try to achieve a better
understanding among religions. For that very reason I chose a subject for
today's discourse which combines this concern, about which I have spoken and
debated at Oxford several times, with another concern which I believe is central
to nearly all issues which will confront us now and in the future: the
environment.

Let me assert categorically that this is a challenge which
no serious person can avoid simply by delaying to confront it with the hope of
facing it later. There is no greater catastrophe than the lack of political will
of nations, whether they be leftist or rightist, democracies or dictatorships,
republics or monarchies, as well as individuals, to face this question. At any
point within the spectrum of political institutions throughout the globe one
sees the lack of will power to deal with issues which are absolutely crucial and
which must be faced now. This is precisely the point where the role of religion
must enter with its God-given intuitive grasp of truth, an intuitive power which
includes but is not limited to mere analysis of events.

For the
Rockefeller Lectures in 1966 in Chicago, I gave a series of lectures predicting
the environmental crisis, lectures which came out later as the book Man and
Nature, and which was avidly discussed at the time. My thesis was that the
environmental crisis is not simply the result of bad engineering or bad
planning, but is in reality a spiritual and religious crisis. This crisis will
not disappear simply through debate, such as the one you all read in the London
Times this morning concerning more roads or fewer roads. The subject of such
debates are symptoms of something much more profound. At the time of the
Rockefeller Lectures and later the publication of Man and Nature, my thesis was
strongly opposed by certain Christian theologians and writers on religion in
England, some of whom were writing very serious material on science and religion
themselves. I think there were two reasons for this: first, they may have
thought, "Who is this brash young man from the Middle East asking about these
things?" And second, "Why hold religion responsible?'' I did not myself hold
religion responsible, but at that time others did, such as Lynn White and Arnold
Toynbee, the famous British historian who, as you know, blamed Christianity
directly for the fact that it had rejected pantheism, which in turn resulted in
the desecration of nature and therefore in the environmental crisis. Now,
although I disagreed with the views of Toynbee, and also with White in his
seminal essay, 'The historical roots of our ecological crisis', which repeated
many of the points I had mentioned in Chicago- with the difference that he
tried to put the blame on Christianity, which I never did - I do share with
them the view of the significance of the role of religion in the environmental
crisis no matter how differently we interpret that role.

The last
thirty years have shown to many of those in the western world most concerned
with the religious dimension of human life, with the world of faith, how
significant is their mission in the environmental crisis. A plethora of works by
Christian and gradually by Jewish theologians on both sides of the Atlantic,
especially in the United States, are coming out on what is sometimes called
eco-theology, creation spirituality, earth theology, and all kinds of other
names that have been given to such questions lately. However, very little
attention has been paid so far to the significance of the role of religion in
interfaith and global setting regarding the environmental crisis.

As far
as I know, no one has seriously dealt on the deeper theological and
philosophical level until now with this issue although it is a extremely serious
matter. Why? First of all, because the majority of the peoples of the world
still live within a religiously bound universe. That includes a billion Chinese.
One should not be fooled by the fact that they are ruled outwardly by Marxism.
Their attitude toward mountains and trees, for example, is still very much that
of Confucian China. We have seen what happened after the death of the former
President of North Korea, the most Marxist state in Asia - people went to a
sacred mountain to pray for him. The attitude toward nature in most areas of the
world is still dominated by the question of religion. In the western world only
a small minority, so called the 'intelligentsia', along with a number of people
in large urban areas have divorced themselves totally from the religious
understanding of nature. This group now generalizes its attitude for the whole
of the globe as if the African, the Asian, the South American, and so on, and
even many less secularized Westerners, have the same philosophical and spiritual
attitudes toward nature as the cynical young philosophy or psychology student in
a Western university, or as an engineer in a big factory for whom the earth and
in fact the whole world are nothing but a big machine to be analyzed and
manipulated.

The religious dimension of the environmental crisis is much too serious
to neglect, especially since the crisis is a global one. I will not go here into
the factors which have caused it, although I believe that it was the creation of
a particular science based upon the reduction of nature to a mere material
object, to a simple 'it'. This attitude was then applied to a technology
aimed at gaining power and domination over nature, with the loss of the sacral
or sacred understanding of nature. Today, the crisis is not confined to the
West, although you all know that every child born in the so-called highly
industrial societies uses something between fifteen to thirty times as much of
the earth's resources until he or she grows up as a child who is born and
brought up elsewhere. But in the destruction of the globe everyone is sharing
together, from Muslims to Hindus to Buddhists to followers of the primal
religions in the Polynesian Islands or Africa, to Christians, Protestants,
Catholics, to agnostics and atheists. It is one of the very few things in which
the whole of the globe is sharing. The difference is that followers of most
religions still possess a religious attitude toward nature, although now
eclipsed by other factors, while secularized men possess a thoroughly
secularized view which is directly responsible for the rape and destruction of
nature by modern technology today.

In any case, it is one of the great
paradoxes that we fight about everything else, but we are agreed upon how to go
about destroying the globe. Dissenting voices belong to a very small number of
people and what they say is usually taken as a noisy nuisance and when action is
taken, it is mostly cosmetic. We therefore have a great paradox consisting in
the fact that this problem, which is of the most vital concern to the whole of
us, is one that we share but agree only not to solve. Instead, we are only
accentuating it from day to day and leading ourselves to the point where it will
become finally insoluble.

It is into this situation that the religions of the world, not wanting to
fall behind one another, have come now forward to join hands with each other and
also with secularist forces in making statements about the environmental crisis.
We have already had the Assisi Declaration named indirectly after St. Francis of
Assisi, among the best known of Christian saints, who spoke so often about the
importance of nature. At the conference in Assisi, representatives of all of the
religions came together to make an ethical declaration about the protection of
the earth, a declaration which has unfortunately done practically nothing to
change either the views of the World Bank or of the various countries selling
arms or of factories bellowing smoke into the atmosphere. It just made people
feel better for a while. We must consider why this is the case, and why we must
face in all honesty so much apathy in these matters. This problem is not like a
discourse about whether or not Homer wrote The Iliad. Rather, it is one which
has grown so rapidly and so far that we have very little time left to seriously
discuss the issue. We must be honest about the acuteness of the crisis and its
urgency.

It is interesting to note that except for some of the primal
religions such as the North American Indian or the Australian Aborigine, there
has been a peculiar reversal in the position of many of the followers of
non-western religions during the past few decades when they have in a sense
become even more impervious to the significance of the environment than they
were before. They have followed the call of rapid industrialization in order not
to be left behind. I am a Muslim and speak as a Muslim. How many people in the
Islamic world have been interested in the religious significance of the
environment recently? We could count those who have spoken seriously on
this crucial issue on the fingers of our two hands. In fact, for a long time I
was about the only person in the Islamic world who spoke about it openly
challenging the prevalent complacency. The same is true of Hindus in India, of
Buddhists in Burma and, of course, of Japan which has one of the most negative
environmental records in the world. The non-Christian religions of the world,
which had previously preserved their own views of nature much better than had
Christianity, have themselves fallen asleep, or did so until quite recently, as
far as this issue is concerned, and to this day they are for the most part only
trying to tag along in the effort to bring about a global awareness of the
relation between religions and their unified impact upon the environment and the
environmental crisis. It is precisely due to these factors that we are now faced
with a new situation.

During the last century all of the discussions
about interreligious understanding - interfaith groups, the World Congress of
Religions, the Parliament of Religions at Chicago, etc., involved for the most
part two central elements: first, the understanding of the Divine, which of
course is central for it is what religion is all about; and second, the nature
of humanity, human life, salvation, society, ethics and so on. The third grand
reality of human existence, namely the cosmos or nature, has been hardly ever
considered in an interreligious context. The great expositors of comparative
religion, from those who were purely historicists to those who were
phenomenologists, from those who tried to have a purely psychological
understanding of religion sometimes with some insights as in the case of William
James, to these expositors of the traditional doctrine of the truth of
religions, the great masters of metaphysics and cosmology, all paid most of
their attention to the question of the nature of Divine and human realities.
They focused their discussions on the issue of Ultimate Reality which determines
both us and the world of nature on the one hand and on man - by which I mean
anthropos, man and woman, the human state - on the other. Little was said about
this issue in comparative religion which considers how the meaning of nature and
man's relation to it should be studied across religious frontiers.

I am
almost certain that if we do not commit suicide by what we are doing to the
environment and if we are still around for some time to come, this issue will
become more and more important every way. In the same way that the grand masters
of the comparative study of religions have fortunately expounded the metaphysics
of religion on the level or that reality which we can identify as heaven, or the
spiritual pole of reality, we must now develop and expound the complementary
teachings for the earth. Unfortunately so many aberrations abound in this
domain. It is interesting, for example, to note that many of the people in the
West who are trying to talk about this subject, that is, the earth in a
universal, religious context, end up in some cult or are marginalized or even
expelled from their church. Many of them are not taken seriously by the
mainstream of the Christian and Jewish understanding of religion in the West.
The study of nature or the earth in a theological and spiritual context within a
universal framework must be carried out in such a way as not to allow this
marginalization and tendency toward the heterodox away from what remains of
traditional orthodoxy to occur.

Let me now turn briefly to the various
religions. If we are going to look at how to study the world of nature, we must
first ask if it is possible in fact to bring an accord among various religions
on this issue. There are those, like myself, who believe that there exists the
profoundest accord on the most important plane, that is the plane of the
Divinity, of the Real of Ultimate Reality. I have often repeated the doctrine
that the doctrine of Unity, which is also the foundation of Islam, is itself
unique (al-tawhid wahid). Not only is there one Ultimate Reality, but the
doctrine of that one Reality is ultimately one. Therefore one cannot have
religious truth which ends at the highest level of metaphysical knowledge in
multiplicity and not unity. The idea that there is no universal Truth which is
manifested in all authentic religions is absurd and its acceptance would create
a monstrous view of God, the Source of all reality. This view has been discussed
a great deal elsewhere and we need not deal with it here.

Let us now ask
if it is also possible in the light of the inner or 'transcendent unity of
religions', to use Schuon's well-known formulation, to develop a harmonious
doctrine of the cosmos, of the world of nature, of the environment, upon which
the religions could then have some kind of accord, rather than simply expressing
diplomatic niceties which have very little practical effect. Furthermore,
it is necessary to look at the living religions, because it is the followers of
the living religions who are now destroying the earth despite the persistence of
the religious view of nature within their minds and souls. While the religions
which are no longer living, such as the Egyptian and the Greek, are historically
very important and significant for their contribution to Christian theology,
they no longer have followers and therefore must be left aside at least here. We
shall turn our attention to those religions with large numbers of followers who
in fact are having the greatest impact upon the natural environment.

These various religions include between them approximately four main
categories of perspectives on creation and on the natural environment: First,
there are the primal religions, neglected until the last few decades and seen as
remnants of the primitive view which would soon disappear and which had already
been superseded by the so-called 'great' or 'higher' religions. These terms
rooted in l9th century evolutionary thought reflect the myriad pejorative ways
in which the primal peoples were treated until the last few decades since which
matters have changed a good deal. There are still about three hundred million
people who follow one form or another of the primal religions. Some of these
religions have decayed and therefore their adherents have begun to follow other
paths to God. One might say that the stream of grace has been cut from their
world which is why there are a large number of conversions among the followers
of these religions to both Islam and Christianity in many parts of the world,
especially Africa. Yet, some of these primal religions still survive in a living
form and have a view of nature which is of great significance for reasons which
have been often discussed by Christian and Jewish theologians, as well as by
philosophers of the environment, the eco-philosophers, who are now coming onto
the scene.

These religions are characterized by several traits. It must
be mentioned before anything else that they are not simply animistic - a term
which does not really mean anything if analyzed seriously ln reference to them.
They believe that the world is alive, that it is en-souled. St. Augustine also
believed that the world was alive, but that does not make him animistic. These
pejorative appellations do not in fact help us to understand anything in depth.
Primal peoples believe that the phenomena of nature are not only symbols of
higher realities, which a Muslim or Christian mystic would accept, but that the
symbol is also 'identified' with the higher realities in an essential way, that
is, the symbol and the symbolised are fused together in a concrete fashion in
their mentality. They do not rationally separate the object from the archetype
or idea of it which the object represents, and therefore they have a very
concrete view of the world of nature as sacred. This view has, of course, very
important consequences. It is the basis of their role as the great protectors of
nature, for nature is their sanctuary and the destruction of their natural
ambience also implies the destruction of their religion.

I live in
America now, a place in which one is always sad because of the tremendous power
of this civilization to destroy nature. Once I was told by a wise man, a
European of great depth, that in the twentieth century those who live in the
Orient are always sad because every day some beautiful remnant of traditional or
sacred art is destroyed. The West has destroyed practically everything it could
destroy in this domain and now especially in America it is destroying virgin
nature (a phenomena which is not limited to America, to say the least). When I
am in America, I always awake knowing that a whole forest might have been
removed by bulldozers overnight to achieve the goal summarised in that one magic
word: development. Now, that destruction, that remarkable destruction of virgin
nature in America, is possible today because for forty thousand years
civilizations lived there for which nature was their cathedral, their house of
worship, and thus they protected virgin nature providing modern Americans with
the opportunity to destroy it now whereas in many other parts of the world much
of virgin nature was destroyed long ago.

The national parks of the
United States, the most beautiful parks of America such as the Yellowstone
National Park, were centers of these ancient civilizations which preserved them
so well for tens of thousands of years that now one can turn them into national
parks and visit them. This is the great heritage which they have left as a
result of their way of being able to live with nature as custodians of the
earth. It is precisely this custodial ability which is corrupted by our habit of
taking the sacred out of the context of nature and usurping that context, as we
do in many forms of modern technology which violate and destroy nature. It is
interesting to note in this context the vast interest in Shamanism in the United
States today. The sacred rites and practices of the American Indians are
taken from their authentic Shamanistic context by young and old Americans and
sometimes 'packaged' as weekend Shamanistic retreats. In any bookstore one can
find numerous journals devoted to 'earth spirituality,' based to a large extent
upon ideas from the American Indians. This practice is seriously opposed by most
Native Americans who feel that it contributes to the continuing destruction of
the Native people - traditional Navajos are being threatened today almost as
much as they were three hundred years ago. Although it is extremely important
for the followers of other religions to understand this significant perspective
of the sacredness of the earth, this understanding cannot be accomplished by
abstracting random Shamanistic ideas from their authentic context. It can be
accomplished, however, by improving relations and dialogue across religious
boundaries. The second category of religious perspectives on nature and
the environment includes the Far-Eastern religions. I have in mind especially
Confucianism and Taoism, the two great traditions of China, which spill over
into Korea and South Asia, and to some extent into Japan whose own religion,
Shintoism, is much more closely aligned and related to the Shamanistic
religions. These two great traditions - one of which, Confucianism, is seeing a
remarkable revival today even within China - are based on a view of nature in
which the laws of nature and the laws of human existence are really the same, a
theme which is in fact also central to nearly all other traditional religious
understandings of nature. The Tao of nature and the Tao of human life are the
same. This is also true for Confucianism. The Chinese word li applies to nature
as well as to man, and to be natural is to live virtuously. In these religions,
the idea of virtue as human virtue, and naturalness go together.

These
religions differ, however, from other religions, including some of the primal
ones, in not ever speaking about the origin of nature, and the idea of cosmic
origination has little meaning for them. Confucianism never speaks about the
creation of the world, unlike the myths of Africa and the American Indians or
those of Hinduism, not to speak of the Abrahamic religions. These Far-Eastern
traditions start with the world of nature as a given reality so that the idea of
the createdness of creation, which is a very important theological category for
Christians, Muslims, Jews, Zoroastrians and some Hindus, does not exist in the
context of their thought. What does exist is the idea of the immutable cosmic,
divine law which penetrates through the whole of the cosmos, which we must
follow, and through whose following one can gain happiness. There is, in fact,
no breach, no separation, between man and the world of nature. Both Taoism and
Confucianism - Taoism more overtly, Confucianism in some of its later
developments - always speak of a bi-unity of man and nature in which it would be
inconceivable for the idea to arise of man dominating over nature, except in the
sense of dominating over his own passions or over his own lower soul.

The third category of views on nature comes from the vast world of India
which has produced, first of all, certain acosmic and so called other-worldly
philosophies which are not interested in the cosmos, and for which the world of
nature does not seem to be relevant. These include certain schools of Buddhism
and, of course, the great metaphysical school of Sankara, non-dualistc Vedanta.
Yet, if one delves more deeply one will see that even in the school of Sankara
there is always the idea of the world, maya being a term which means the cosmos,
not only as illusion also the creativity of the Divine Principle, and not just
illusion - but also as a reality possessing divine origination, although this
philosophy does emphasize the non-duality of reality. Furthermore, there are
many other schools of Hinduism, and even Buddhism, which deal very extensively
with the world of nature and which do so in a very different way from the
Abrahamic, or the primal religions or Confucianism. Indeed, India preserves a
kind of museum of various religious perspectives and possibilities ranging all
the way from the non-dualistic perspective to the Samkhya philosophy.

Some people have already written about how crucially important lt is to
understand that the present industrialization of the villages of India is, from
the point of view of the environment, one of the greatest tragedies facing the
earth right now, a tragedy whose future consequences will multiply beyond the
ken of imagination. This is already beginning now with the pouring of billions
of dollars into India precipitating an environmental crisis just around the
corner. What will happen if all the dung, just the dung, in the villages
of India is not recycled? We will have a situation like that in Delhi all over
India. If you have visited Delhi in the last few years, you know what has
happened. Despite this environmental crisis and the much greater crisis to come,
within Hinduism there is still a great significance in the fact that the
understanding of nature as sacred still survives. In traditional Hinduism there
is no form of nature which does not participate in the sacredness of life. It is
a great paradox that the religion which was always criticized by foreigners,
missionaries and the like, as being one of nature-worship, pantheism, cow
worship, etc., has turned against the very spirit of its religion for which it
was castigated and criticized for such a long time by its opponents.

Also, as far as the treatment of nature is concerned since independence,
India has turned its back against a main aspect of the teachings of the person
who brought about its independence, that is Mahatma Gandhi, namely, his doctrine
of ahimsa, cottage industries, and his total opposition to the industrialization
of India. Nearly everyone has talked about Gandhi while following policies one
hundred and eighty degrees opposed to his teachings, all in the name of the
betterment of the life of the Indian people. Whether that betterment has
actually occurred in India or elsewhere is a question for another day. The point
we wish to make here is that even in India where Hinduism has still preserved
the sacred view of nature to some degree, the environment is being destroyed.
There are, of course, attempts to resist this onslaught by appealing even to
Jainism, a very interesting case of an extreme form of environmentalism, for
Jains believe that one should not even protect nature. One should just leave
nature as it is. In any case, Jainism must be considered along with Hinduism and
Buddhism ln the rich tradition concerning nature to be added to those of the
Far-Eastern and elemental or primal religions.

Finally we come to the
Abrahamic world, the religions which probably are, or were, followed by most
people in this room. In the Abrahamic world of Judaism, Christianity and Islam
there are again, as in the case of Indian and the Far-East, many perspectives.
There is not one Jewish or one Islamic perspective on nature or the
environment. Within my own tradition, which is Islam, these views would
range all the way from that of the Ash'arites, who did not think that nature
even existed -what appears as nature is the result of Divine Will, there is no
law and nothing possesses a nature of its own - all the way to those, such as
certain Sufis, who talk about nature as theophany and as performing a basic
function within the divine economy. The same situation can be observed
mutatis mutandis in Christianity as far as the existence of different
schools of thought about nature is concerned. These schools were, however,
mostly eclipsed, a fact to which I shall turn in a moment.

By and large
the three Abrahamic religions have had historical and theological views
concerning nature which bear certain similarities to each other. First of all,
for them nature is not the ultimate reality. It is itself created without being
unconnected to the Source. It follows the laws which have been given by God
concern us as well as the world of nature. It is interesting to note that in the
pre-modern period members of the Abrahamic family of religions would have
understood each other perfectly well and would also have been in total accord
with the Confucian and Taoist view that the laws governing over human beings and
the laws governing over nature are interrelated, and not separated. In Arabic
the word al-Shariah, the Divine Law, is not only used for human beings, but bees
also have their own shariah. In this context, the Arabic word namus, which means
law, originally from the Greek nomos, is interesting since when it was Arabized
it became equated with the Quranic term al-Shariah. It is not only used as
laws brought by the different prophets but is also employed to mean the laws of
nature. The namus, or the law of the world of nature, is related to the namus
brought by various prophets, a view strongly emphasized by Quranic teachings.
Also in Christianity, the very development of the concept of natural law, which
received such a great elaboration in the Middle Ages in the hands of Thomas
Aquinas and other Catholic theologians, relates the law of human beings to the
law of nature.

So there are similarities in religious perspectives, as there are no doubt
differences, including the question of origination or lack thereof, and the
question of the Will of God governing the world of nature, between religions
which have a non-personalistic view of the Divine Origin, such as Taoism or
certain schools of Hinduism and Confucianism and those which harbor a theistic
concept. There is also the question of the divinization of nature versus its
sacralization. Many contemporary Muslims do not understand that Islam is not
against the sacralization of nature, but against its divinization for
theologically there is a very important distinction between the two.

There is no doubt that these and other differences and contending issues
exist which we cannot gloss over if we are going to have a serious comparative
study of the religious understanding of nature with the aim of creating real
accord. Serious metaphysicians take differences in religious formulations in
general into consideration without, however, believing them to be absolute, for
only the Absolute is absolute. In the same way, the differences in various views
of the world of nature are not to be glossed over. Nevertheless they represent a
remarkable harmony in certain very important areas. Putting aside modern
interpretations to which I shall turn in a moment - that is another world
whereas here I am referring to the religious world not as yet secularized -
nature is created by or originates from the same Source from which we originate.
Therefore a link with nature is not only physical but also metaphysical,
permeating all the other levels of reality going back to the Origin. This is a
very important principle. Nature is not only an 'it' and our relation with
nature is not only physical but has correspondences with all of the other levels
of our being, the psychological, the intellectual, the spiritual and so forth.
It is this truth which was expressed through the language of
macrocosmic-microcosmic correspondences that dominated Western thought for so
many centuries, and on which, in this very august University, so many treatises
were written up to the Elizabethan period. This University was one of the great
centers for the exposition of this cosmolog1cal doctrine in the English
Renaissance. In any case, whether we use this traditional language or not, these
correspondences are the first element which I think one would find to be nearly
unanimous in all of the different families of religions so far as the
understanding of nature in its relation to man is concerned.

Then there is the question of what we call moral law, the law according to
which human beings should live, and the fact that it should not, and cannot, be
totally divorced from the laws of nature. This view is of paramount importance
and is a deeply rooted heritage even in the modern world where although in that
world many people have ceased to believe in it, and it still survives everywhere
in the world where religion is still strong. It is interesting to observe in
this connection the differences in the responses to the earthquake in Los
Angeles two years ago and to the earthquake in Cairo about the same time. One
could make a serious sociological study about the differences in those
responses. Even in Los Angeles, where supposedly no one entertains the existence
of a nexus between an earthquake and how human beings live, a number of people
went to churches to pray to God for protection and the expiation of their sins.
The belief in the relation between human actions and natural events has not
totally disappeared even in a place such as Los Angeles although in the older
days such a belief was more widespread. In fact in the villages of Italy or
Sicily to this day, as soon as there is tremor of an earthquake, everyone begins
to recite the beginning of the Book of John in Latin. These people have not
still caught up with those of Los Angeles, while the rest of Europe stands
somewhere in between!

As for Cairo, almost the whole population, both Muslim and Christian, began
to pray and the sound of the calls to pray adhan covered the whole city soon
after the seismic shock. In any case, the idea that the laws that govern over
the world of nature and the laws which govern over human society are
interrelated is one of the universal elements of all of the different religions,
expressed in many different languages. Dharma, rta, shariah, and namus are all
key terms which express this interrelation. Also in African languages there are
terms used for both laws of human beings and laws of nature, reminding us
everywhere that the word 'law' continues in the minds of traditional people to
mean the laws which we should follow morally as well as the laws which govern
over nature.

Another important point which the religions share in common is that we have
responsibility towards nature. This responsibility is of a religious kind, no
matter how we define the word religious. Ultimately, this responsibility
involves us not only as earthly beings but in an ultimate and eschatological
sense. Now, some religions do not have the same kind of eschatological outlook
as others. Shintoism, for example, does not speak about eschatology whereas
Buddhism does. In Japan there are those who have developed an elaborate
eschatology which involves nature, while the Shintoists have not pursued such a
task. In our own world there has been the development in recent years,
particularly in Catholicism, of a kind of theology of the environment based on
the eschatological participation of nature with us. Somehow in our final end
nature plays a role and therefore religious people cannot simply destroy and
desecrate nature.

There are many, many other points in the views of various religions toward
nature to consider, and this lecture cannot but be an introduction to the issues
involved. There is a great deal of work to be done to bring out the many other
correspondences between religious beliefs in this domain. Although not
participating in the pure unity which belongs to the Divine Principle Itself,
these views of nature and natural phenomena do nevertheless participate in a
very profound unity and display a bond of interrelatedness. Furthermore, these
views can be the basis of an accord among religions for the protection of the
environment. They alone can reverse the tide of the 'accord' between followers
of various religions, as well as their opponents, concerning its destruction as
we see before us today.

Another important element to which I want to turn is that of all the
religions of the world, only one surrendered the cosmos completely to the
non-religious way of looking at it, and that is Western Christianity, not
Orthodox or Abyssinian Christianity, but Western Christianity - first
Catholicism and then Protestantism, which became 'acosmic' soon after Luther.
For several centuries Western Christianity did not care what view was
entertained about nature. Not only did it accept and even legitimize the
existence of a science of nature for which the religious view of nature was
irrelevant, but it even took great pride that such a science developed in its
midst. This attitude has a profound consequence for the relation among religions
today which I must mention to an audience such as this, despite its being very
delicate. I do not wish to be impolite but above all I wish to be truthful.
Since the nineteenth century there has been a great deal of Christian missionary
activity throughout the rest of the world. Now missionary activity has taken
place throughout history, including Buddhist missions to China. Muslims were not
missionaries in the Western sense but nevertheless there is a Muslim dawah which
took Islam to lands as far apart as the Ivory Coast and Indonesia. Since the
last century, however, Christian missionary activity has not been concerned
simply with the teachings of the Gospels and Christian charity, but also with
modern medicine and technology, the offering of better treatment of one's cow,
for example, or means of growing more rice through the use of chemicals. It has
often offered the riches of this world and a way of fitting more into a secular
society rather than the exalted spiritual message of Christ as the means of
propagating Christianity.

The consequences of this strange wedding for the environment, especially in
Africa and Asia, are very great, and the reasons for this are as follows: A
number of Asians have embraced Christianity in recent decades. If you ask why,
many say it helps them to have a religion while being able to fit much more
easily into the consumerist society, into the modern world than before, not
because they want to become close to St. Francis of Assisi or St. Maximus the
Confessor or to the poverty of Christ. The change has had much more with being
able to fit more into a lifestyle which is environmentally destructive and which
we have to be able to oppose from a religious point of view if we are to take
the traditional view of religion seriously. Only religion can create the
discipline necessary to stop the consumerism that is devouring us and that is
destroying the world. No other force can control the passions of the soul. Only
the Spirit can control the passions of the soul and nothing else. No external
social engineering can achieve the task as the history of Marxist Russia with
its frightful environmental and social consequences bears witness.

This way of interpreting Christianity, not as the great Christian tradition
which shared with Islam and Judaism and all the other great religions a concern
for the world of nature, which now many people are trying to resurrect and
resuscitate, but as the religion which was able to successfully create modern
science, modern technology, a science and a technology based on power over
nature, still plays an important role in much of the non-Western world. There
is, therefore, the great paradox that we observe in the United States and to
some extent in Europe, theologians at the edge or frontier of theological
discourse trying to rediscover the Christian view of the sanctity of nature,
while other Christians as missionaries in other continents are trying to destroy
what remains of the sacred view of nature among followers of other religions.
There are now many books coming out about Celtic spirituality and selling so
well in the United States. Why? Nobody was interested in Celtic spirituality
just a generation ago. When I wrote 'Man and Nature', because I did not know
Gaelic and other related languages, I had to search long and hard to find a few
medieval poems of Celtic monks in English. Now you can find books containing
such poems in any serious bookstore. All of this is due to the realization of
the importance of the revival of the older Christian view of the sanctity of
nature without which Christianity would lose many souls. How tragic that at the
same time at the other end of the spectrum, there are people with a great amount
of financial assets made from oil wells or from some form of modern technology
trying to propagate Christianity, not in the name of this older view, now being
revived, but in the name of an interpretation of religion that can live at ease
with consumerism, with the desecration of nature, and destruction of what
remains of the natural environment. This type of religious propagation naturally
poses a major problem for the creation of accord between religions so far as the
world of nature and the environment are concerned.

It is my duty and responsibility to mention this to a responsible audience.
What one can do about it, God knows. I understand perfectly well as a Muslim
that every Christian has a right to be a witness to Christ. Christ said, "Go and
preach unto the nations." But did he say to do it with money earned from a
technology and a secularized consumerist economy which are destroying God's
creation? This is an important moral issue, one about which every sincere
Christian will certainly have to think. Furthermore, on a practical level it has
a very important impact upon the possibilities of accord among the various
religions as far as the world of nature is concerned. All of the non-Western
religions of the world - I do not mean the small minorities living in the West,
like Muslims or Jews living in America, I mean mainstream and major religions
they are always on the receiving end. The innovations of technology in the world
today come primarily, with Japan being the one exception, from those parts of
the world in which the dominant religion is still Christianity. In most other
parts of the world religions are usually forced politically to side with
governments and other agencies which either want to or are forced to receive
this technology without question and the religions do not have the power to
resist. Therefore the role of Western Christianity in trying to make friends
with other religions in order to create a common discourse about the world of
nature so as to attract the followers of all religions not to destroy the
natural world becomes very important indeed. It is a unique role in the present
global situation.

From the other side, the other religions can offer something which
Christianity needs greatly. In the Christian West, the idea of a sacred science
has been destroyed. The very term is not used and seems to be a paradox
according to the still dominating paradigm. I have been using it, in fact, on
purpose for the last fifteen to twenty years, to seek to change the situation,
and have spoken and written often about it. (As, for example, in the title of my
book, 'The Need for a Sacred Science'.) That is also why my Gifford Lectures
were called 'Knowledge and the Sacred. I believe it is absolutely essential to
re-sacralize knowledge, not only on the highest level but also to resuscitate
the sciences of nature, sacred sciences of nature which have been forgotten,
relegated or thrown into the dustbin of occultism since John Dee and people like
him were walking the streets of this city a few centuries ago.

The other religions are in a very different situation. What I have called the
sacred sciences are alive in these other religions in a very different way as
part of the tradition and not simply as occultism in the Western sense. By
sacred science I mean not only the metaphysics which can be called the supreme
sacred science, but the various sciences of the cosmos. A person in my own
country, Persia, who knows these sciences is not an occultist because these
sciences are sacred and still belong to the predominant religious world-view.
The religions such as Islam in which these sacred sciences are alive can
compensate for Christianity's service to a world discourse on the views toward
nature mentioned above by providing these sciences in a context which is neither
demonic, related to devil worship, or socially marginal and which does not
require us to become Druids running in the streets of London, but which belongs
to the mainstream of religious life.

The challenges which I put before this audience today are, I believe, among
the most important that must be confronted in future relations between religions
because we cannot evade the following realities: First, there is a major
environmental crisis. Second, the religious element in the environmental crisis
is extremely important. Third, the vast majority of the peoples of the world are
still religious, and if a mullah tells somebody in a mosque not to pollute the
water, it will have a lot more effect than the government publishing an article
about it in a newspaper in Cairo, Damascus or Tehran. The fact is that we all
live on the globe within a web of life and an ecological system now being
threatened with destruction through the manner in which we live. Therefore the
question of interfaith dialogue and the relation between religions must also
encompass this very important dimension, that is, this attitude toward God's
creation. Without consideration of this reality, there will never be concrete
unity of life of human beings and other creatures or any kind of peaceful
existence and we will in fact only have the negative unity of joining forces to
destroy the earth together, leading to our own destruction.

Let us pray and hope that the positive unity of view and purpose to which we
have alluded will prevail before the very opportunity to save that precious
trust left by God in human hands, that is, His creation, is destroyed. But in
this, as in all matters, God knows best.

Wa'Llahu a'lam.