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Simmons
Augustine’s Ecologically Attractive Cosmology
Fred Simmons
This afternoon I would like to explore the implications of ecology for value theory. Such an undertaking may come as a surprise or seem to betray a mistake. Ecology is not often thought to have implications for value theory, and the suggestion that it could is sometimes believed to reflect either confusion of fact and value or commission of the naturalistic fallacy. Nevertheless I shall argue that at least for those who take Genesis to be scripture, ecology may have implications for value theory, and if so, for soteriology as well. However to make the case for the links I allege between ecology, ethics, and theology it is first necessary to consider the relationship between ecology and cosmology.
I. Ecology and Cosmology
Ecology and cosmology are both broad and malleable terms, so I’ll start by stating what I mean by each. For my purposes ecology may be understood in its common and basic sense as referring to that branch of natural science that investigates the relationships among organisms and between them and their environment. And as I shall use the term, cosmology denotes theological or philosophical views about the origin, dynamics, and destiny of life, and thereby encompasses life’s environment. Since cosmologies often offer comprehensive descriptions and histories of all reality, they commonly concern the matter, energy, expanse, and duration of the cosmos more directly than the life it has come to support. However, since I am exploring the import of ecology for value theory, that subset of cosmology that pertains to the domain of ecology—namely biological life and its environment—will usually be most relevant. Accordingly though cosmology in my sense may embrace the universe in its entirety since the cosmos as a whole is ultimately the context of biological life, practically I will be using cosmology here to refer to speculative conceptions of life on this planet and its relatively immediate environment.
Since ecology is a natural science and cosmology is a speculative branch of philosophy or theology, they have no necessary connection beyond the fact that any credible cosmology must acknowledge the sorts of dynamics ecologists document and predict. Still, though ecology and cosmology have only this limited necessary connection, they may relate in other ways as well. Specifically, ecology can affect a cosmology’s attractiveness. To appreciate how, let’s consider some of the principal dynamics that ecologists discern, starting with interdependence.
Every known form of biological life has proven interdependent. Indeed the interdependence of biological life is so pervasive and diverse that it is clarifying to distinguish two basic types—negative and positive. Negative interdependence refers to the fact that an organism can only survive so long as other organisms or the environment do not destroy it. Negative interdependence is thus a function of organisms’ fragility and is ultimately rooted in their mortality. Positive interdependence, by contrast, indicates the idea that organisms’ homeostatic requirements are only met through other organisms’ positive contributions to them as nutrients or hosts. It is not merely a consequence of fragility, whereby organisms can only survive if not overwhelmed by others, but also victimization wherein an organism can live at all only because it exploits another’s vulnerability to derive the energy and materials that it needs. Further, positive interdependence does not simply attest that organisms may be of use to other organisms when they die so that finite natural systems can renew themselves indefinitely. Beyond this, positive interdependence denotes the reality that organisms’ death is necessary for the viability of the whole. All of us live, according to ecologists, only because none of us live forever.
Evolutionary biology associates mortality with life’s earliest emergence and finds it integral to life’s development and diversification. Mortality is vital for evolution because without it nutrients would not be cycled and life would be static, confined to the forms exemplified by its immortal exemplars. Yet those who are living do not just rely upon others’ deaths but also hasten them. The trophic dynamics that ecologists attempt to quantify and predict menace and dismember the organisms they enable to thrive, for organisms do not only threaten one another but must thwart one another, too. As such the biological capacity, beauty, and complexity made possible by positive interdependence depends upon the vulnerability that renders all organisms negatively interdependent.
This pervasive interdependence, where positive senses of interdependence are predicated upon the mortality that make all organisms negatively interdependent, matters to more than species and the individuals that instance them. Ecological systems can adapt, and thus subsist and sustain organisms, because the organisms that these systems support succumb to them. Accordingly, the relationships between species, trophic levels, and the environment that organisms need to flourish also require these organisms’ demise. Such death is not always due to exogenous factors, and sometimes senescence may be its only cause. Nevertheless, even many aged organisms finally die because of infection and hence individuals do not generally live as long as they might. Instead young and old alike are overcome by others endeavoring to extend or increase their own imperiled and fleeting existence, whether visible predators capable of killing their prey in their prime or invisible interlopers who finish their victims in their weakness. Those that are not taken alive still nourish others by dying as they are decomposed and their nutrients and constituents are recycled through ecological systems. As a result the environment that makes life possible ultimately undoes every individual living thing despite its best efforts and the most propitious circumstances. Each organism—even a climax predator—is alternatively living from and feeding other organisms within the system. Consequently, though biological life is relentlessly prolific, fantastically resourceful, stunningly intricate, and wonderfully multifarious, according to ecologists it is also self-consumptive. I will henceforth refer to these multi-leveled relationships of negative and positive interdependence as ecological dynamics.
II. Ecological Dynamics and Cosmology
Equally important for cosmology to what ecologists find is when and where they find it, and it turns out that ecological dynamics occur whenever and wherever biological life does. As such, ecologists discern these dynamics before humans appeared and independently of human influence. Accordingly it is attractive to think that non-human nature is subject to ecological dynamics in virtue of its creation rather than as a result of human activity or Divine punishment for it. Hence cosmologies that ascribe ecological dynamics to non-human nature as created are more attractive given ecology than those that attribute these dynamics to non-human nature because of the fall.
Though acceptance of basic ecological commitments thus makes it attractive to think that non-human nature is not subject to ecological dynamics because of a human fall, it does not entail this position. Recall my initial insistence that the only necessary relationship between cosmology and ecology is that credible cosmologies acknowledge the dynamics that ecologists discern. The reason for this restriction is that ecology, as a form of inductive inquiry, cannot properly posit essences. Given this limitation inherent to its methodology, ecology cannot confirm nor contradict the proposition that non-human nature fell—or did not fall—into ecological dynamics, for the notion of a fall involves not only how something is now, nor even how it has long and seemingly everywhere been, but what it essentially is. The Christian doctrine of creation, however, as a cosmology, can properly make statements about essences—since it is speculative rather than inductive—and indeed does make such statements—since Christians believe that entities are defined by what God created them to be. Accordingly ecological commitments cannot imply or contradict cosmological claims about the way things were created.
Still, though no ecological conclusion can ever be logically incompatible with cosmological statements about essences that accommodate contemporary observations, this does not mean that cosmology and ecology are otherwise completely unrelated. Mere logical consistency is not the only consideration relevant to assessing how well different beliefs cohere, particularly when these beliefs emerge from different domains. Instead some beliefs combine more elegantly, and those worldviews with beliefs that do are more attractive in this sense than those with beliefs that do not. As we have seen, ecology and cosmologies that conceive non-human nature to be created subject to ecological dynamics instance such a comparatively elegant combination, and this is why I called these cosmologies attractive given ecology.
Let’s now turn from the relationship between ecology and cosmology with respect to non-human nature to their relationship in the case of human nature. Here the connection between ecology and cosmology is more complicated but no less relevant. The connection is less direct because, once human implication in ecological dynamics is at issue, humanity’s existence and influence are presupposed. Accordingly ecology’s implications for claims about humanity’s creation cannot follow directly from the presence of ecological dynamics independent of human influence. Instead ecology’s potential bearing on cosmological claims about human nature is mediated by the overwhelming natural continuity between human and non-human nature disclosed by the contemporary life sciences. Specifically, since these sciences show that non-human nature is subject to ecological dynamics before humans appeared and apart from direct human influence, and thereby make attractive those cosmologies that conceive ecological dynamics in non-human nature a function of its creation rather than its denaturing, the overwhelming natural continuity these sciences establish between non-human and human nature makes attractive those cosmologies that conceive human nature to be created subject to ecological dynamics.
III. Ecologically Attractive Cosmology and Christianity
Though it may be ecologically attractive to think that both human and non-human biological life were created subject to death, decay, and predation, as well as the struggle, stress, and suffering that these realities ineluctably impose on organisms capable of such responses, this sort of cosmology hardly seems compatible with a Christian worldview. After all, Christians commonly deem death a wage of sin and in his letter to the church in Rome Paul influentially contends that creation was subjected to futility and placed in bondage to decay. From a Christian perspective, then, death, decay, and other dimensions of ecological dynamics appear adventitious and aberrant rather than constitutive of biological life. However since it is attractive given ecology to think that ecological dynamics are a matter of creation rather than the fall, conventionally Christian cosmology turns out not to be ecologically attractive.
Upon confronting this conclusion some Christians may decide that ecological attractiveness is not itself very attractive. Many, however, will not. The ecological convictions I have considered are widely known, and they enjoy broad and seemingly irreversible scientific consensus. As such these ecological convictions function as a de facto point of departure for many contemporary people, and thus harbor profound implications for a worldview’s overall attractiveness. To be sure, attractiveness given ecology is not an arbiter of the truth of a cosmology. Still, since many modern people take ecology for granted, such attractiveness now meaningfully affects a cosmology’s credibility. Accordingly the unattractiveness of conventionally Christian cosmology given ecology may trouble many modern Christians. At least it will disappoint those who would rather consistently combine an ecologically attractive and Christian cosmology than have to choose between them or irreconcilably maintain both.
Happily I do not think that Christians are forced to face such a choice, for I believe that Augustine’s cosmology is not only Christian but ecologically attractive. However I maintain that Augustine’s cosmology has long been misinterpreted, so this dimension of his worldview has often gone unnoticed. My interpretation of Augustine’s cosmology is thus controversial, but it follows the now dominant scholarly view. Rather than defend that interpretation, though, I want instead to present it, show how it provides an ecologically attractive Christian cosmology, and investigate some of its implications.
The contention that Augustine’s cosmology is ecologically attractive may come as a surprise, for Augustine not only accords great theological significance to the fall but also clearly attributes decline, death, and decay to it. Yet the ecological attractiveness of a cosmology is not merely a matter of whether it propounds a fall or even whether ecological dynamics are its wage, but rather depends upon who is thought to fall and from what state. And it is on these scores that Augustine has often been misunderstood.
As many of you undoubtedly know, Augustine believes that human beings fell into ecological dynamics. What is less often appreciated is that Augustine also believes that human beings were created subject to ecological dynamics, including death. Augustine is able to combine these claims by arguing that, while Adam and Eve were yet in their state of original righteousness, God gave them an additional grace that suspended their participation in ecological dynamics. By disobeying God in Eden, however, Adam and Eve forfeited God’s supernatural gift and subjected themselves to ecological dynamics. According to Augustine, then, humans are congenitally mortal and created to participate in ecological dynamics, yet only actualize their mortality and become implicated in ecological relationships because of their fall. Augustine’s cosmology thus ingeniously reconciles the basic Christian conviction that human beings are subject to death and decay because of their fall with the ecologically attractive cosmological contention that biological life—including human beings—is constitutionally enmeshed in ecological dynamics. The result is a meaningfully Christian cosmology that is attractive given ecology.
IV. Augustine’s Evaluative Impasse
Since Augustine’s cosmology proves attractive in light of ecology, it turns out to be quite valuable for contemporary Christians. As I noted, attractiveness given ecology affects a worldview’s credibility for many people, and few Christian cosmologies are as attractive as Augustine’s given ecology. Nevertheless, though Augustine’s ecologically attractive cosmology thus resolves a problem for contemporary Christians, it also provokes one for them when combined with some of his other claims. Specifically, Augustine’s cosmology leads to an evaluative impasse for Christians given his judgment that human death is evil.
Initially Augustine’s evaluation of human death as evil hardly appears problematic and even seems to make sense. After all, human death is generally a disvalue; it is something we often properly try to avoid or postpone, and mourn when it befalls another. Moreover, we have seen that Augustine follows Christian convention and ascribes human death to sin, and sin is certainly evil. At the same time we have observed that Augustine believes humans to be congenitally mortal, indeed that this contention is precisely what makes his cosmology attractive given ecology. Yet if humans are created mortal and human death is evil, then creation intrinsically harbors evil, something that Christians, including Augustine, have been loathe to allow. Hence the impasse: Christians deny that creation is intrinsically evil yet Augustine considers human death evil and conceives humans to be created mortal.
V. How ought Contemporary Christians to Resolve Augustine’s evaluative impasse?
Since Augustine’s evaluative impasse emerges from the conjunction of three of his commitments—namely that human death is evil, humans are congenitally mortal, and creation is not intrinsically evil—one of these commitments must be surrendered in order to resolve it. Yet which commitment ought to go? It is hard to imagine Christians conceiving creation to harbor evil intrinsically. Denying that creation intrinsically harbors evil is one of the ways the faith distinguished itself from some of its principal rivals in the ancient near East and was a difference Augustine tirelessly exploited apologetically. Similarly, principal Christian theological convictions like creation ex nihilo, monotheism, Divine goodness, power, and wisdom, as well as commitment to God’s resounding affirmation of creation, all combine to prevent Christians from being able to ascribe evil to creation.
Denying that humans are created subject to ecological dynamics is likewise not an appealing option for many contemporary Christians since doing so forfeits those dimensions of Augustine’s cosmology that make it ecologically attractive. Admittedly a cosmology that is not attractive given ecology may yet be true, and so Christians could deny that humans were created subject to ecological dynamics without having to compromise any of their faith commitments. However since cosmologies that are less attractive given ecology are less credible for many contemporary people, I suspect that many contemporary Christians will be very reluctant to foreswear the claim that humanity was created subject to ecological dynamics.