There are references
in the New Testament to unmarried men and women who served the
local communities in special ways. Later, this celibate tradition
continued as some Christians went into the deserts of Egypt and
Syria to live their commitment in solitude. These men and women
were variously called "hermits," "anchorites" and "The Desert
Fathers." In the wilderness, they found a peace and tranquillity
that was conducive to prayer, contemplation and reflection. Saint
Anthony (d.350) said that, in creation, he could read the word of
God.
Demonic powers also
resided in the desert. The anchorites saw their presence in the
wilderness as a process of re-creating an earthly paradise, of
re-establishing the dominion over all life that existed before the
Fall. The stories of encounters with wild animals illustrated their
spiritual power. The monk Florentius had a bear as companion. The
animals taught the hermits what was poisonous.
Their spirituality
was to encounter a strange territory and move from conflict to
harmony, to merge the natural with the supernatural until the two
were indistinguishable. This spirituality influenced Celtic
spirituality where the theme of voyage or pilgrimage provided a
heightened awareness of the natural environment. Celtic
spirituality, in turn, influenced Saint Francis of
Assisi.
The Franciscan view
of nature flows out of the nature mysticism of their founder, Saint
Francis of Assisi. As Western civilization entered the Middle Ages,
a new prosperity created capitalism and a middle class. There was
also a universal call for reform within the Catholic Church. A
significant mode of that reform came in the person of Saint Francis
of Assisi (1182-1226) and his founding of the Franciscan Order. The
order was approved by edict of Pope Innocent III on April 16,
1209.
With the
Benedictines, very little is known about the personality of Saint
Benedict. It is his written rule that has shaped the order. With
Francis, his personality and charism dominate and it was hard to
capture in a written rule. The Franciscans became the first of a
different type of order. They are friars and mendicants, not monks.
Like the monks, they have a distinctive habit (robe) and chant the
psalms and canticles of the Bible in common. But unlike the monks,
they have a strong emphasis on apostolic work, on preaching and
serving people in a variety of ways. They move easily from place to
place and are not bound to a particular monastery.
Francis' father was
a wealthy cloth merchant who also bought up small farms and
expelled the tenants. Francis reacted dramatically to his father's
life style and attitude. He saw power, prestige and possessions as
leading to violence and so he embraced humility, poverty and the
cross. Much of his life was spent alone in nature like the Desert
Fathers and the Celtic hermits. In this liminal position, he had a
direct and mystical experience of God in creation.
There is a charming
fresco by Giotto in the Basilica at Assisi. Here, Francis is seen
preaching to birds. The famous incident illustrates the Saint's
sense of the interdependence he saw in creation, an interdependence
that called for respect and obedience. The birds praise God with
their song. They each have autonomous worth and beauty and yet are
brothers and sisters performing their divinely allotted function.
The birds respect Francis because he is also a servant of God.
Their response encouraged him to sustain his new perspective and
they encourage him to carry his preaching to people. By implicitly
humanizing creation through affective links, Francis made it easier
for others to share his bond with creation. It was Francis and the
early Franciscans who introduced the use of the crèche, the
manger scenes that dramatize the Christmas event.
The legend of the
wolf of Gubbio tells of a hungry wolf that was terrorizing a town.
Francis went out and preached to the wolf and then preached penance
and peace to the villagers. He was thus able to convince the people
that the wolf was simply hungry and needed food. He forged a
covenant wherein the people agreed to respect the wolf and provide
him with food.
Like the monks
before him, the psalms and canticles from the Bible shaped Francis'
expressions. But unique to Francis, is the influence of the songs
and lyrics of the troubadours. The troubadours were wandering
musicians who composed and sang love songs. Here, Francis
spiritualizes the mistral's interplay of natural setting and human
experience, an interplay that elicits love and joy. Francis
embraced and expressed the chivalric values of beneficent
magnanimity and deference to all.
Like the ascetics
before him, Francis also saw nature as allegorical. He had a
particular affection for worms because there is a passage in the
New Testament where Christ says, "I am a worm and no man." So
Francis would carefully pick worms up off the road and place them
in safer places. He saw Christ in the worms. The sun is like God
because it is beautiful in itself and it gives light.
The clearest
illustration of the Franciscan view of creation can be found in
Francis' Canticle to Creation. The hymn praises the four elements;
fire, air, water, and earth, which were seen as the components of
all life forms. In the Canticle, he expresses the intrinsic
goodness of the created world, the interdependence of all life, and
his passion for beauty and peace. Because we call God "Father,"
creation becomes our brothers and sisters. He calls for a fraternal
model, rather than a model of stewardship. We are to be detached
from creatures in order not to possess them. He goes so far, at
times, to say that we should even obey animals. The Franciscans
were a dynamic argument against the Cathars; a heretical group at
the time who held that "the spiritual" had been created by a
beneficent divine power and the natural world by an evil
one.
Francis forbade his
followers to cut down a whole tree. Part needed to be left intact
so that new sprouts could bud. Until recently, a Franciscan needed
permission from the provincial before cutting down a tree. Francis
spent the last years of his life in the wilderness.
The saint of Assisi
fulfills Arne Naess' definition of a deep ecologist because he
emphasized the diversity and intrinsic value of creation and
because he addresses the reform of behaviors that threaten to
destroy entire ecosystems. On Easter Sunday, 1980, Pope John Paul
II proclaimed Saint Francis of Assisi the patron saint of ecology,
following the suggestion 13 years earlier by Lynn White, Jr. in his
seminal article in Science.
Today, Franciscan
men and women continue their founder's work by focusing on the
changes of hearts and minds needed to live in balance. Franciscan
Keith Warner trained in geography and worked for a reforestation
cooperative in the Pacific Northwest that planted over 600,000
trees. He is on the steering committee of the California
Sustainable Agriculture Working Group and has lobbied with The
Religious Campaign for Forest Conservation. Warner also campaigns
against what he calls "Birdbath Franciscanism," a superficial and
romantic view of Francis depicted in flower garden statuary. He
sees his founder as much more ecologically radical.
Father Richard Rohr,
also a Franciscan, founded and is director of The Center for Action
and Contemplation in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The center's aim is
to seek a balanced life by bringing together the worlds of
spirituality, psychology, social action and environmental
concerns.
Former Franciscan
Leonardo Boff is a Brazilian and a major figure of liberation
theology. In Ecology and Liberation (1995) and Cry of the Earth,
Cry of the Poor (1997), he brings together poverty, ecological
degradation and liberation. For Boff, the fate of the rain forest
and the fate of Amazonian Indians are inseparably
linked.
Franciscan sisters
run Michaela Farm in Oldenburg, Indiana, where their aim is to seek
and teach skills in organic food production and foster a simple
lifestyle in harmony with the earth. Sister Rita Wienken has
similar objectives with her Franciscan Earth Literacy Action Center
on 500 acres in Tiffin, Ohio.
