Wendell Berry on Christian practice
I just posted a link to Wendell Berry’s unsurpassed essay, Christianity and The Survival of Creation, over at Insurgent American. Berry is a Christian, deep environmentalist, a writer, and a farmer in Kentucky. His message is strong; and his wise wordsmithing is the kind that makes other writers (like me) experience a stab of envy.
A few samples:
An essayist is privileged to speak without institutional authorization. A dissenter, of course, must speak without privilege.
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In biblical terms, the “landowner” is the guest and steward of God: “the land is mine; for ye are strangers and sojourners with me” (Lev. 25:23).
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We will discover that God made not only the parts of Creation that we humans understand and approve, but all of it: “all things were made by him; and without him was not anything made that was made” John 1:3). And so we must credit God with the making of biting and dangerous beasts, and disease-causing microorganisms. That we may disapprove of these things does not mean that God is in error, or that the creator ceded some of the work of Creation to Satan; it means that we are deficient in wholeness, harmony, and understanding–that is, we are “fallen.”
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We will discover that, for these reasons, our destruction of nature is not just bad stewardship, or stupid economics, or a betrayal of family responsibility; it is the most horrid blasphemy. It is flinging God’s gifts into his face, as of no worth beyond that assigned to them by our destruction of them.
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“The sense of the holiness of life” is not compatible with an exploitive economy. You cannot know that life is holy if you are content to live from economic practices that daily destroy life and diminish its possibility.
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if we are to maintain any sense or coherence or meaning in our lives, we cannot tolerate the present utter disconnection between religion and economy. By “economy” I do not mean “economics,” which is the study of money-making, but rather the ways of human housekeeping, the ways by which the human household is situated and maintained within the household of Nature. To be uninterested in economy is to be uninterested in the practice of religion; it is to be uninterested in culture and in character.
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It is understandably difficult for modern Americans to think of their dwellings and workplaces as holy, because most of these are, in fact, places of desecration, deeply involved in the ruin of Creation.
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The presence of his spirit in us is our wildness, our oneness with the wilderness of Creation. That is why subduing the things of nature to human purposes is so dangerous, and why it so often results in evil, in separation and desecration.
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outdoors we are confronted everywhere with wonders; we see that the miraculous is not extraordinary, but the common mode of existence. It is our daily bread. Whoever really has considered the lilies of the field or the birds of the air, and pondered the improbability of their existence in this warm world within the cold and empty stellar distances, will hardly balk at the fuming of water into wine–which was, after all, a very small miracle. We forget the greater and still continuing miracle by which water (with soil and sunlight) is fumed into grapes.
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By denying spirit and truth to the nonhuman Creation, latter-day proponents of religion have legitimized a form of blasphemy without which the nature- and culture-destroying machinery of the industrial economy could not have been built–that is, they have legitimized bad work. Good human work honors God’s work. Good work uses no thing without respect, both for what it is in itself and for its origin. It uses neither tool nor material that it does not respect and that it does not love. It honors Nature as a great mystery and power, as an indispensable teacher, and as the inescapable judge of all work of human hands. It does not dissociate life and work, or pleasure and work, or love and work, or usefulness and beauty. To work without pleasure or affection, to make a product that is not both useful and beautiful, is to dishonor God, nature, the thing that is made, and whomever it is made for. This is blasphemy: to make shoddy work of the work of God. And such blasphemy is not possible so long as the entire Creation is understood as holy, and so long as the works of God are understood as embodying and so revealing God’s spirit.
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I have been talking, of course, about a dualism that manifests itself in several ways; it is a cleavage, a radical discontinuity, between Creator and creature, spirit and matter, religion and nature, religion and economy, worship and work, etc. This dualism, I think is the most destructive disease that afflicts us. In its best known, its most dangerous, and perhaps its fundamental version, it is the dualism of body and soul.
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When we hate and abuse the body and its earthly life and joy for Heaven’s sake, what do we expect? That out of this life that we have presumed to despise and this world that we have presumed to destroy, we would somehow salvage a soul capable of eternal bliss? And what do we expect when, with equal and opposite ingratitude, we try to make of the finite body an infinite reservoir of dispirited and meaningless pleasures? It is the same spite and destruction, the same poor, preposterous assumption that Paradise can be recovered by violence, by assaulting and laying waste the gifts of Creation.
(Times come, of course, when the life of the body must be denied or sacrificed, times when the whole world must literally be lost for the sake of one’s life as a “living soul.” But such sacrifice, by people who truly respect and revere the life of the earth and its Creator, does not denounce or degrade the body, but rather exalts it and acknowledges its holiness. Such sacrifice is a refusal to allow the body to serve what is unworthy of it.)
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Despite its protests to the contrary, modern Christianity has become willy-nilly the religion of the state and the economic status quo. Because it has been so exclusively dedicated to incanting anemic souls into heaven, it has, by a kind of ignorance, been made the tool of much earthly villainy. It has, for the most part, stood silently by, while a predatory economy has ravaged the world, destroyed its natural beauty and health, divided and plundered its human communities and households. It has flown the flag and chanted the slogans of empire. It has assumed with the economists that “economic forces” automatically work for good, and has assumed with the industrialists and militarists that technology determines history. It has assumed with almost everybody that “progress” is good, that it is good to be modern and up with the times. It has admired Caesar and comforted him in his depredations and defaults. But in its de facto alliance with Caesar, Christianity connives directly in the murder of Creation. For, in these days, Caesar is no longer a mere destroyer of armies, cities, and nations. He is a contradictor of the fundamental miracle of life. A part of the normal practice of his power is his willingness to destroy the world. He prays, he says, and churches everywhere compliantly pray with him. But he is praying to a God whose works he is prepared at any moment to destroy. What could be more wicked than that, or more mad?
The religion of the Bible, on the contrary, is a religion of the state and the status quo only in brief moments. In practice, it is a religion for the correction equally of people and of kings. And Christ’s life, from the manger to the cross, was an affront to the established powers of his time, as it is to the established powers of our time.
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Surely no sane and thoughtful person can imagine any government of our time sitting comfortably at the feet of Jesus, who is telling them to “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them that despitefully use you and persecute you. . . ” (Matt. 5:44).
Steve B, UK:
Ironically, Berry’s poems are often quoted by pantheists and neopagans (and anyone else who sees deity as imminent in nature). His “The Peace of Wild Things” is stunning.
3 November 2007, 8:26 amLegume Sam:
I have two main thoughts here. Berry says:
The problem, of course, is that throughout capitalist history the true opponents of Caesar have found it necessary to erect counter-Caesars of their own to fend off Caesar’s armies, and thus you have the birth of “contender regimes.” This is why the opponents of the political economy of Caesar, with its domination and exploitation, have eventually been drawn into its orbit. It’s also why I think of Kees van der Pijl as an essential writer.
The amplification of the ecosystemic threat in the neoliberal era will perhaps persuade the human race to give up on the political economy of Caesar’s regimes. Everyone loses with a dead planet. It is in such a context that Berry’s writings become so meaningful.
Secondly, while Berry operates on the mythic plane, my thoughts repeatedly go back to the problem of “the Ring” in J.R.R. Tolkien’s polytheist/Catholic fantasy The Lord of the Rings.
To a certain extent, Tolkien’s “Ring” is a metaphor for the destructive powers of modern technology. In the story, the wizard Gandalf tells us that to keep Sauron’s ring to use it against Sauron would be to create a second great evil to match Sauron’s own. Thus to employ destructive technology to fight the lead technologists is to compound the problem presented by the technologies themselves.
3 November 2007, 10:34 amJames M:
Berry here is offering an alternative version of Christianity, one which would attempt to reform the distant, “de-immanentized” conception of Deity promulgated for centuries by the Church — and whether he is indeed in league with the pantheists (he perhaps hedges a bit on this by referring to nature as “God’s creation,” meaning God stands apart from it, but that mistreating it is to be a bad houseguest or something of the sort; which is not exactly pantheism) he is still saying that the schism between deity and nature is a false one, with the horrific implications we’re all witnessing. Which means he’s more or less on our side.
Problem is, to my mind, that he’s trying to reform and re-immanentize the God of a faith (Christianity) that came about in an effort to reform and re-immanentize the God of a previous faith, that of Judaism:
Moses’ pulverizing and melting down the Golden Calf [in decrying the worship of "idols"] … gives rise for the first time to the idea of something earthly that is ‘nothing but’ earthly, for it is deprived of its imaginal shine. As God becomes worldless by obtaining his absoluteness, so earthly reality becomes God-less.
– Wolfgang Giegerich, from this essay.
The problem was there in the Old Testament, had a failed attempt at rectification with the New Testament (remember that bit about “The Kingdom of Heaven is within you”? Didn’t catch on too well, for some reason) and continues to this day. The reason God must be regarded as distant, abstracted, apart from the earth, why nature must have been created ex nihilo and not from the substance of the divine, is because if the opposite were true, then communion with the divine could happen anywhere, at any time, without need of an intermediary. Without need of an intermediary between ourselves and the ultimate authority, earthly power structures fall apart. This is why Berry’s Christianity is so radical, why it is The Big Heresy.
But something about this “reform Christianity” has always bothered me, which is the way in which one gets to pick and choose the good bits from the holy texts, and selectively discard the other stuff (like that old bogeyman Leviticus.) This, of course leaves you open to certain charges from the other side, who of course practices a similar selectivity — “Love thine enemy” is all too conveniently forgotten when it’s time to get your war on, for example.
I dunno, I guess we have to work with what we’ve got. The religious impulse isn’t going away, including within myself, and starting over from scratch would be a most hazardous undertaking.
Personally, I admire Derrick Jensen’s bravery in admitting that he talks to trees, has conversations with the salmon and coyotes, etc., and not merely as metaphor … for if we’re not entering into conversation in SOME form with the natural world, it’s all too easy to regard it as dead matter, there to be commodified. Next thing you know, we extend that to our fellow human beings.
4 November 2007, 3:01 amCharles:
I only found one reference to God as “he” in the quoted passages: “It is flinging God’s gifts into his face..”
As far as God and Nature, the “Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away “, as in the various mass extinctions followed by new speciations down through the eons. So, God herself doesn’t act like all her creations are holy.
5 November 2007, 5:14 pmStan:
According to Berry, and the scriptures he quotes, the point is not whether all that is holy survives. It is that nature as a whole belongs to God, not to human beings. We are “sojourners.” We are supposed to take what we need as we pass through, and view our existence and creation with respect and humility.
In the film, The Thin Red Line, the protagonist has a kind of internal dialogue with God, in which the man’s voiceover meets its replies in images, many of them of nature.
He asks questions like, Who are you to live in all these forms? And, What if there is just one big soul and each of us a part of it, like a coal that’s thrown from the fire?
Berry makes an important if oblique point about how we do politics here. A lot of us who are on the left have little to no familiarity with the Bible. Yet it is the one book with which the majority of our culture has at least some passing familiarity. And before I leave that sounding purely instrumental, religion is sought after to fill a real need.
Liberation theologians talk about three poverties: material poverty (a sin to cause or allow), spiritual poverty (death in life, disconnection, disenchantment), and solidarity with the poor (faith-as-practice, obedience to God).
5 November 2007, 8:26 pmMichael Anderson:
Thanks, Stan….Was so moved by the essay, that I went out and bought the book that it is taken from: “Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community”. Berry says what I (and perhaps others reading this) have trouble putting into words. The wholeness and interconnectedness of “creation”, and how we are an integral part of it, not something separate from it, and how obvious it is that parts of this race of man are pathologically destroying it. The best thing he talks about is small actions, taken over time, adding up to a great good work, and how to enjoy the work. Sometimes the enormity of what we face is absolutely overwhelming. Think small, think local, and create and enjoy community. Onward!
5 November 2007, 8:38 pmDeAnander:
My favourite bound volume of Berry is The Art of the Commonplace in which he explores the implications of an agrarian ethic in various realms of life: acknowledgment of colonial violence and theft, resistance to corporate enclosure, the quality of interpersonal relationships, the care of land, the nature of food, the role of religion. I can definitely pick some bones with WB, particularly on gender where he seems — like Illich — to be struggling with dualism while still wedded (so to speak) to it. But on the whole his is a fine voice, sincere, reflective, and commonsensical — and very much to the point. It has been a bit unnerving for me to discover his work and find that he was persuasively arguing 30 years ago for conclusions that I have only just managed to reach myself, the hard way, in the last 10 years
oh well, sometimes we just have to reinvent the wheel.
5 November 2007, 10:32 pmCharles:
Main problem with the Bible,from the perspective here, might be that God is male. Hard to see how using the Bible for fundamental thinking would avoid masculinism. Surely, the current masculinism of Western Civilization is,in large part, rooted in Biblical thinking.
Would seem that Jesus was a revolutionary. Otherwise, why did the state execute him ?
I tend to think of the Bible as record of ancient Jewish history. Valuable in that regard. However, it is important to study other cultural traditions.
“Nature belongs to God.” have to think about that, and as to whether that is likely to make people act right.
6 November 2007, 4:42 pmDavid Parish:
Stan & DeAnander,
I’m glad to see that you’ve discovered Wendell Berry. Besides being an agrarian anarchist, Berry is also a fine novelist and poet. (Wendell Berry enjoyed reading Edward Abbey, whose books are also well worth reading. Both Berry and Ed were influenced by the poet Robinson Jeffers, whose poetry is timely and timeless).
My favorite Berry poem is the following:
MANIFESTO: THE MAD FARMER LIBERATION FRONT
by Wendell Berry
Love the quick profit, the annual raise, vacation with pay.
Want more of everything made.
Be afraid to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery any more.
Your mind will be punched in a card and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something they will call you.
When they want you to die for profit they will let you know.
So, friends, every day do something that won’t compute.
Love the Lord. Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
[...]
[Entire poem here, well worth a visit!]
7 November 2007, 8:52 pmStan:
…excellent, the essence of tactical agility
8 November 2007, 6:28 amDeAnander:
I am still mulling this over. the first stanza is pretty clear, but the second I am trying to parse. what is “a woman satisfied to bear a child”? is this about sexual courtesy and kindness, i.e. a man not pestering his wife for intercourse when she is pregnant? it sounds rather kindly and reponsible but then there is an undercurrent, a suggestion that pregnancy is a woman’s only excuse for refusing “conjugal rights”?
8 November 2007, 1:48 pm