In 1967 the American
historian Lynn White Jr described Christianity, especially in its
Western form, as 'the most anthropocentric religion the world has
seen'; and his brief article blaming the medieval Church for the
horrors of modern pollution became almost a sacred text for modern
ecologists.
White was not the
first to attribute the Western exploitation of nature to Europe's
distinctive religious inheritance. But, like his predecessors, he
almost certainly overrated the extent to which human actions have
been determined by official religion alone. In the 1680s Thomas
Tryon had also contrasted the moderate demands made on nature by
the North American Indians with the ruthlessly manipulative
approach of the European invaders. But he recognized that it was
new commercial incentives that had made the difference: it was less
the replacement of pagan animism by Christianity, than the pressure
of the international fur trade which led to overhunting and the
unprecedented onslaught on Canadian wild life. Commenting on this
aspect of European economic development, Karl Marx noted that it
was not their religion, but the coming of private property and a
money economy, which led Christians to exploit the natural world in
a way the Jews had never done; it was what he called the 'great
civilising influence of capital' which finally ended the
'deification of nature'.
Ecological problems
are not peculiar to the West, for soil erosion, deforestation and
the extinction of species have occurred in parts of the world where
the Judaeo-Christian tradition has had no influence. More recent
critics of White's thesis have observed that the ancient Romans
exploited natural resources in the pre-Christian world more
effectively than did their Christian medieval successors; and that
in modern times the Japanese worship of nature has not prevented
the industrial pollution of Japan.
The Maya, the
Chinese and the people of the Near East were all capable of
destroying their environment without the aid of Christianity.
Indeed, Christian teaching was less idiosyncratic than Professor
White suggested, for there were other, non-Christian religions
which also had their myths about man's God-given authority to
dominate the natural world. It was reported in 1632. of the
American Indians, for example, that 'they have it amongst them by
tradition that God made one man and one woman and bade them live
together, and get children, kill deer, beasts, birds, fish and fowl
and what they would at their pleasure.' Anthropocentrism was not
peculiar to Western Europe.
Besides, the
Judaeo-Christian inheritance was deeply ambivalent. Side by side
with the emphasis on man's right to exploit the inferior species
went a distinctive doctrine of human stewardship and responsibility
for God's creatures. The English theologians who have been quoted
so far tended to disregard those sections of the Old Testament
which suggest that man has a duty to act responsibly towards God's
creation. They passed quickly over the embarrassing passage in
Proverbs (xii. 10) which taught that a good man regarded the life
of his beast, and the section in Hosea (ii. 18) which implied that
animals were members of God's covenant. 'That this expression is
figurative,' said an Oxford professor in 1685 in his commentary on
Hosea, 'cannot be doubted, seeing the things here named are not fit
parties for making a covenant.' 'Many learned men of great
judgement', therefore, took the passage to be a mere renewal of the
league by which animals were subjected to Adam.
As for Proverbs, the
commentators gratefully quoted St Paul's question in his first
Epistle to the Corinthians (ix. 9.): 'Doth God take care for oxen?'
- which they took to mean, perhaps wrongly, that he
didn't.
It can indeed be
argued that Greek and Stoic influence distorted the Jewish legacy
so as to make the religion of the New Testament much more
man-centred than that of the Old; Christianity, it can be said,
teaches, in a way that Judaism has never done, that the whole world
is subordinate to man's purposes. At the dawn of the industrial
revolution exploitation, not stewardship, was the dominant theme. A
reader who came fresh to the moral and theological writings of the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries could be forgiven for inferring
that their main purpose was to define the special status of man and
to justify his rule over other creatures.
