Special Issue on Ecology

The latest issue of our journal Second Spring, number 14, entitled 'In the Garden", is themed around Nature, Gardens, and Ecology. For us, this is a landmark issue. Not only does it mark a developing focus in our work on issues of development, sustainability, and man's relationship to nature, but this year is the tenth anniversary of the first appearance of Second Spring as an independent journal in 2001.

The Garden issue of Second Spring contains lead articles by Cardinal Angelo Scola (the new Archbishop of Milan, formerly Venice), Mary Taylor (Pax in Terra), and Christopher Blum (Thomas More College). There are also articles on gardening by Vigen Guroian, Jane Mossendew and others. Peter Milward SJ contributes a piece from Japan. Mark Elvins OFM Cap. writes from a Franciscan perspective, and Aidan Hart from the Orthodox Church on the way Icons "transfigure matter". Together with poetry, book reviews, reports, and lots of beautiful illustrations, this is in many ways our best issue yet.

(Several articles on the same theme can be found online in our main articles section at www.secondspring.co.uk, including Keith Lemna on Human Ecology, Environmental Ecology, and Ressourcement Theology. There is also a longer version of the important Second Spring article "Healing the Rift" by Mary Taylor available online. And readers might be interested to read a fascinating study of the universal symbolism of gardens by Mihnea Capruta, from Eye of the Heart issue 4. Some beautiful pictures of Japanese gardens and a discussion of that aesthetic may be found at David Clayton's Way of Beauty site.)

Our issue is quite timely, given the high-profile speech the Pope recently gave to the Bundestag in Berlin, where he emphasized the intrinsic relationship between respect for human life and respect for nature. Pope Benedict said that "the emergence of the ecological movement in German politics since the 1970s... was and continues to be a cry for fresh air which must not be ignored or pushed aside, just because too much of it is seen to be irrational. Young people had come to realize that something is wrong in our relationship with nature, that matter is not just raw material for us to shape at will, but that the earth has a dignity of its own and that we must follow its directives." "If something is wrong in our relationship with reality," he added, "then we must all reflect seriously on the whole situation and we are all prompted to question the very foundations of our culture." He went on:

The importance of ecology is no longer disputed. We must listen to the language of nature and we must answer accordingly. Yet I would like to underline a further point that is still largely disregarded, today as in the past: there is also an ecology of man. Man too has a nature that he must respect and that he cannot manipulate at will. Man is not merely self-creating freedom. Man does not create himself. He is intellect and will, but he is also nature, and his will is rightly ordered if he listens to his nature, respects it and accepts himself for who he is, as one who did not create himself. In this way, and in no other, is true human freedom fulfilled.

Sustainability in Crisis

A useful report from The Tablet on a conference about climate change in Cambridge.

Quote of the month

The philosopher Roger Scruton writes at the end of his article on the British Government's planning reforms:

When people refuse to pull down a cathedral for the sake of the coal beneath it, or insist on retaining a Georgian city when it could be rebuilt as a business park, they create obstacles to economic growth. Most forms of love are obstacles to economic growth. Thank God for obstacles to economic growth.

The British riots

"We have learnt that barbarism is not a picturesque myth or a half-forgotten memory of a long-surpassed stage of history, but an ugly underlying reality which may erupt with shattering force whenever the moral authority of a civilization loses its control." -- Christopher Dawson, Religion and the Rise of Western Culture, 1950

How do we understand the riots and looting that have engulfed parts of many British cities in the last few days? Britain's "broken society" has come in for a lot of comment, but there are reasons that lie deeper than family breakdown, poor education, unemployment and poverty, and the loss of trust in politicians. John Milbank's comments are interesting. I would add that we are seeing the results of an erosion of the sense of transcendence and respect that accompanies, not necessarily a religious faith, but a religious sense - the sense that somewhere there may be something worthy of belief, even if we aren't exactly sure what it is. It is not religious dogma that awakens this sense, but the experience of being loved. Mindless violence is the result of mindlessness: of living entirely at the level of feeling, impulse, and instinct, of never having been woken by love to the reality of an existence greater than ourselves, which is the awakening of the mind as much as it is the awakening of true human feeling.

The roots of all this lie deep. In the previous post I recommended a book by historian Glenn W. Olsen called The Turn to Transcendence. Winston Elliott III mentioned another seminal title in his comment: David L. Schindler's Heart of the World, Center of the Church. Others that would be worth mentioning in the same breath are Richard Weaver's Ideas Have Consequences, Romano Guardini's The End of the Modern World, Louis Dupre's Passage to Modernity, Jean Danielou's Prayer as a Political Problem, and G.K. Chesterton's What's Wrong with the World? Helpful too are several works by the historian Christopher Dawson, including The Judgement of the Nations (1943) which, though written in the face of totalitarianism, correctly saw that Western civilization itself had already broken down, and that victory against the Nazis would leave us vulnerable to moral anarchy and the temptation to control our own populations by the use of ever more powerful (and ineffective) machines - by means of cameras, plastic bullets, and ultimately tanks. Without a spiritual revival individuals will be incapable of controlling themselves. It's all in Plato, of course. If order is not in the soul, we will not find it elsewhere.

Left and Right

This column on other occasions has called into question the distinction between Right and Left (for example here). Further food for thought is provided by Charles Moore, a leading writer for the "right wing" Telegraph newspaper, in an article called "I'm starting to think that the Left might actually be right". But, as historian Glenn W. Olsen notes, these days "the great division is not between liberal (or progressive) and conservative, but between materialists and those who acknowledge a transcendental order."  The theme is explored with enormous depth and erudition in his book, The Turn to Transcendence. Materialists of Right and Left are playing the same game. But then there is a further division among those who do acknowledge a transcendent order, and that is the division between those who genuinely submit to it and those who don't: between those who are striving for truth, goodness, and beauty and those who are not; between those who are turned away from self by humility and love, and those who will try to use even the transcendent to advance their own aims. So everything comes back in the end to spiritual warfare, even politics. Glenn Olsen's book is a masterpiece on the role of religion in our society, and it ends with the Eucharist, where transcendence meets immanence - the "enactment within history of the new politics for which the human heart yearns."