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It Ain't Just Dirt, It's God

Religious Sisters Reject Evil Medieval Cosmos

BY CHRISTOPHER ZEHNDER

Eco-spirituality, eco-feminism, global spirituality, ecological theology, creation spirituality, the new cosmology -- I've seen it named a number of different ways, this new ideology embraced by Catholic religious sisters, in particular, but also by clergy and religious brothers. But whatever it is called, it is a curious development for Catholics, for it is essentially anti-Catholic. That is, it so reinterprets the corpus of Catholic belief as to make it something utterly foreign to what it has ever been. For something that calls for the "sustainable development" of the earth and even of ancient human traditions, this eco- global-feminist-creation-theology/spirituality is an ideology radically unsustainable of the traditions of at least one life form -- western, Christian man.

But then, the proponents of this new cosmological theology make it very clear that if they want to do away with anything, it is the Christian view of creation in favor of what they think is a more inclusive system of belief. I have run across bits and pieces of this ideology over the years, but it was only recently that I've seen it more or less systematically developed -- on a web page, "Women of the New Creation," a cyber-offering of the Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary (the congregation associated with Holy Names University in Oakland). This web page is linked to that of the Commission on the Status of Women in Church and Society, a department of the diocese of San Bernardino. Women of the New Creation offers essays and reflection of various religious sisters and Catholic lay women who, I learned, are some of the foremost proponents of the new cosmological theology in the Catholic Church today.

The lead offering on the Women of the New Creation site was an excerpt from a book, The Spiritual Exercises Reclaimed: Uncovering Liberating Possibilities for Women, by Katherine Dyckman, Mary Garvin, and Elizabeth Liebert (all sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary). In this offering, the sisters develop the theme of the new cosmology and how it radically changes traditional Catholic perceptions of the relation of human beings to the universe, to God, and of God's relation to the cosmos.

Sisters Dyckman, Garvin, and Liebert express the view that all aspects of human life, including theology, ecclesiology, and spirituality, "mirror one's perception of the universe." Western thought in the middle ages was geocentric and saw the cosmos as a great hierarchy. Outside the sphere of the moon were the spiritual and unchanging heavens that medievals thought of "as the dwelling place of God and the angels and saints." At the "pinnacle" of the universe was God, the Unmoved Mover; below God were intellectual beings, the angels. The farther beings were from God, the more inferior they became. Below the sphere of the moon, all was material and thus changeable and subject to corruption. Male man held the lordship of the earth, and below him was woman. "Women," write the sisters, ranked toward the bottom of the chain, but above animals and lifeless matter. The hierarchical dualism of mind over body was duplicated in the hierarchy of male over female, and human over animals and nature."

A geocentric cosmology, according to the sisters, gave rise to "patriarchy, a system of oppression of women that has existed in Western civilization for the past five thousand years." This patriarchy "affects social structures as well as cosmological, scriptural and theological formulations. In patriarchal cultures, domination of women provides a social symbolic link to the domination of the earth, which is seen as feminine."

With the coming of Copernicus, who placed the sun, not the earth, at the center of the universe, not much changed as far as patriarchy goes, say the sisters. "The sun, associated with man, became the center" and "any potential advantage women might have accrued from their association with earth as the center of the universe in a geocentric cosmology was obliterated." Indeed, with Copernicus, "the living cosmos of Greek and medieval times was now understood as a nonliving machine. The rational mind was seen as the essential self, while matter, nature and the universe now were matter, lifeless and dead, nature could be probed, subjugated and manipulated.... Women, still identified literally and symbolically with the natural world, could be probed, subjugated and manipulated as well. Both were identified as objects."

Modern science, however, the sisters say, has given us a new cosmological paradigm and opened up for us a new understanding of creation. All matter, everywhere, came to be from one source, a Big Bang, and we live in a universe that is not static but ever expanding. "The majority of atoms that make up the bodies of all living things were created by supernovas.... Humans are literally made of stardust and therefore, in one sense, no different from a stately rose or a sleek jaguar." This understanding gives western culture a new way to "relate to ourselves, to others, to the cosmos and to God." But, unfortunately, say the sisters, "Western cutlure ... has barely begun to move from a static, ordered, hierarchical, dualistic, anthropocentric view of the universe to a process, evolutionary, dynamic, organic, interdependent, relational, biocentric one."

But we must move beyond the old Western view, say the sisters. In theology and spirituality, because of the new cosmology, "classical dualisms are no longer tenable. The hierarchical, patriarchal dualisms of humans over earth, men over women and spirit over matter are obsolete." And if we do away with the "dualism" of spirit and matter, we presumably cannot set up a hierarchy even between man and the beasts, man and plants, man and minerals. Thus, "a human-centered norm of progress must give way to a biocentric focus. Humans are within the cosmos, not apart from it or above it." Humankind may be said to be the center of the universe, but not the center by means of which all is dominated, but "the center through which all enter into kinship and communion. Women and men are called to become partners in mutuality and respectful companions of all creation."

The new cosmology also has implications for how we think about God. God is not "out there;" rather, say the sisters, though God is not present in creation in a pantheistic way, He is present in a "panentheistic" manner; that is, God is "present and involved with the universe while still being independent of it." Thus, everything is sacred; salvation must be seen "as planetary and global as well as personal. A shift from other-worldly to this-worldly redemptive hope flows from this new paradigm. Persons no longer seek simply their own redemption but that of all creation, including the earth itself. The life and death of Jesus must be lived out salvifically for all Christians. The universe, the sacred body of God, also needs salvation."

The notion that the universe is God's body is a strange one, to say the least. That God interpenetrates all things, keeping them in being, has long been a Christian view. But that God is to the universe as a soul is to a body, which calling the universe His body suggests, places too close an identity between the two. But if everything is part of God's body, violating the material world is sacrilege, as Loretta Jancoski, in an interview posted on the web page, makes clear. "For humans," says Jancoski, "who are part of that creation to destroy other parts of it is sacrilegious."

But if all in the universe belongs to God's body, how do humans differ from anything else? Because "we are all made of the same stuff," says Jankowski, "if you and I have spirit and a spiritual nature, then everything else has spirit in some elementary form. Indeed we are not saying animals have a soul like a human soul. We are just saying that if we are spiritual, then everything else is spiritual in different degrees and in different ways." According to Dominican Miriam Therese MacGillis, in an essay "The New Exodus Event," since "our planet came to life and then became conscious of itself in the evolution of the human," humans are indeed unique in a pronounced way. In "Re-Visioning the Reign of God," Sister Miriam goes so far as to say that humans are "completely different from the rest of creation," and, "made in the image and likeness of God," every man "possesses an immortal soul which is directly created by God." Finally, all the writers mentioned seem to hold that the new awareness of the sacredness of nature leads man away from "having dominion" over the natural world, even when that dominion is one of a beneficent monarch.

Human beings, say the writers, have to reverence all the diverse creatures in the world. Yet, if all dualisms are destroyed by the new cosmology, if everything is sacred, if hierarchy is dismissed as an outmoded concept, what real differences in terms of nobility are there between man and creatures? And how does the worship of God, say in the Eucharist, differ from reverencing Him in creation? At least in the essays found on the website, the authors don't bother to say. It is unclear that they would agree with Religious of the Sacred Heart sister Paul Toner, who in an essay, "The Earth Charter: Incarnating a New Cosmology," found on another website, says, "in the new cosmology no creature is better than any other because all are loved by God."

Finally, what all these sisters are about is a new theology, different from the one allegedly based on the old cosmology found in scripture and Catholic tradition. As Sister of St. Joseph Elizabeth Johnson, in "Cosmos in Theology," says, "I am not suggesting that we just think through a new theology of creation, but that cosmology be a framework within which all theological topics be rethought."

Johnson reiterated this point in a lecture she gave at the Jesuit Santa Clara University in Santa Clara, California on October 4, 1998. Speaking of the communion of saints, Johnson noted how patriarchy has distorted the canonization process -- only 25 percent of all canonized saints are women, said Johnson, and the lives of these "as narrated" only "emphasize the patriarchal ideal of the 'good' woman; stereotypical feminine virtues such as obedience and submission, sexual purity, and acceptance of suffering overshadow the history of real women's raw struggle in the Spirit." Rectifying this "public history of neglect" is not "just a matter of adding women to what remains a patriarchal master narrative. The challenge," said Johnson, "is to reshape the church's memory so as to reclaim an equal share in the center for women and thereby transform the community."

Johnson attempts to "reshape the church's memory" not only by broadening the communion of saints to include those outside the Catholic Church but the entire creation as well. The Latin phrase, communio sanctorum, Johnson claimed, has "an intriguing ambiguity:" sanctorum may not be simply the genitive plural of sanctus (holy one) but of sanctum (holy thing.) Thus communio sanctorum, said Johnson, could refer to the communion of all holy persons and holy things -- and not just "the signs of bread, wine, water, oil, and sexual intercourse which, when taken into the narrative of Jesus' life, death, and resurrection, become avenues of God's healing grace." No, for "in the time of earth's agony, the sancta [holy things] can be pushed to its widest meaning to include the gifts of air, water, land, and the myriad creatures that share the planet with human beings in interwoven ecosystems -- the brothers and sisters of St. Francis of Assisi's vision, for the universe itself is the primordial sacrament through which we participate and communicate with divine mystery." Earth, "as a sacred creation," said Johnson, has "its own intrinsic rather than instrumental worth." This seems another way of saying that the material creation does not exist for man but merely alongside man in a relationship of equality.

Even man's hope of immortality becomes for Johnson merely a conscious expression of the entire universe for everlasting life and not anything unique to man himself. Man's "religious longing for future fulfillment" is nothing else than the blossoming of the innate impulse found in the material world.

Another well-known and very influential "ecofeminist" theologian, Rosemary Radford Ruether (who has taught courses at Holy Names University's Sophia Institute), echoes Johnson's call for an end to patriarchy and natural hierarchy. In an undated essay, ," Ruether says, "all racist, sexist, classist, and anthropocentric assumptions of the superiority of whites over blacks, males over females, managers over workers, humans over animals and plants must be culturally discarded." [Emphasis added.] But Ruether wants also to discard patriarchal and hierarch ical notions of God. "There are many elements that need to go into an eco-feminist ethic and culture for a just and sustainable planet," she said in her essay, "Ecofeminism." "One element is to reshape our dualistic concept of reality as split between soulless matter and transcendent male consciousness." Human consciousness, she wrote, must be reintegrated into the natural world, and "such a reintegration of human consciousness and nature must reshape the concept of God. Instead of modeling God after alienated male consciousness, outside of and ruling over nature, God in ecofeminist spirituality is the immanent source of life that sustains the whole planetary community. God is neither male nor anthropomorphic. God is the font, from which the variety of plants and animals well up in each new generation, the matrix that sustains their life-giving interdependency with each other."

So it is not surprising that for Ruether -- and really for the entire ecofeminist and global spirituality movement -- God can also be called "Gaia" -- the Roman mother earth goddess.

A future issue of the Faith will examine what the Church teaches about ecology and sustainability.

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