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Out of the Greenhouse

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2024

John Milbank
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In the false Spring of our times, everything is painted green: it is the appointed liturgical colour for our post-historical sabbath. It’s to everyone’s taste, the guarantee of minimum respectability. There’s a Green party, but that doesn’t get very far, because it appears to appropriate for a particular cause the symbol that belongs to all. The colour has a utopian hint, or rather that of a puritan arcadia, but at the same time it soothes the passages of capitalist economic exchange. More than that: the guarantee of a ‘good’, ‘healthy’ relation to nature, as to one’s own body, increases surplus value. Capitalism has already incorporated, in the interests of profit, the new religiosity of our times, which takes the form of transcending one’s humanity in order to celebrate nature or animality as the ‘other’ with which one nonetheless seeks to become united.

I don’t want to be misunderstood. The planetary structures which support life have been dangerously interfered with; much natural beauty, along with the delicate and long-developed harmonies of people’s everyday environments has been ruined or destroyed. Technology is employed indiscriminately and for the mere sake of size and complexity. However, ‘Green consciousness’ is not the complete answer to all this: in too many ways it may collude with precisely what it purports to oppose.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 74 , Issue 867 , January 1993 , pp. 4 - 14
Copyright
Copyright © 1993 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

References

1 See Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air‐Pump (Princeton UP, Princeton NJ, 1989); Amos Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination (Princeton UP, Princeton NJ, 1986).

2 See Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age trans. Robert M. Wallace (MIT, Cambridge Mass. 1986) 229–457.

3 On the contrast of mediaeval ‘complex space’ and modem ‘simple space’ see my essay, ‘Against the Resignations of the Age’ given at the conference for the centenary of Rerum Novarum, St Edmund's House, Cambridge, July 1991, and to be published in a volume of the conference proceedings.

4 Shapin and Schaffer, 283–332. See also, Michael Buckley At the Origins of Modern Atheism (Yale UP, New Haven, 1987).

5 see Gillian Rose, The Broken Middle (Black well, Oxford, 1992).

6 See Liberating Life: Contemporary Approaches to Ecological Theology ed. Charles Birch et al (Orbis, Maryknoll NY, 1990).

7 J‐P Vernant, ‘Rémarques sur les formes et limites de la pensée technique chez les Grecs’, in Mythe et Pensée chez les Grecs Vol II (Maspero, Paris, 1978Google Scholar). And Bronislaw Szerszynski, ‘Religion, Nature and Ethics’ an unpublished essay which is the most comprehensive demolition of the Lynn White thesis (that Christianity is responsible for eco‐catastrophe) ever written, and to which the present essay is much indebted.

8 See Lois K. Daly, 'Eco‐Feminism, Reverence for Life, and Feminist Ecological Ethics in Liberating Life, 88–108 (on Schweitzer, 96–108).

9 See Liberating Life, and especially the essays by McFague, Birch, Berry, Daly.

10 Sallie Anne McFague, ‘Imaging a Theology of Nature: the World as God's Body’ in Liberating Life, 201–227; this quotation, 215.

11 See Funkenstein, 23–117.

12 Charles Birch, ‘Chance, Purpose, and the Order of Nature’ in Liberating Life, 182–200.

13 McFague, 218.

14 See Kantorowicz, Ernst H., The King's two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton UP, Princeton NJ, 1957) 32Google Scholar; Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan.

15 The researches of Robin Grove‐White, in particular, based on his long involvement in ecological campaigns, have demonstrated this point.