Thomas Berry, Dreamer of the Earth: The Spiritual Ecology of the Father of Environmentalism

1

The University of the Earth

An Introduction to Thomas Berry

Allan Combs

I first became aware of Thomas Berry in 1988, soon after he published The Dream of the Earth. I was then living in Asheville, North Carolina, a small town snuggled between the Blue Ridge and Smoky Mountains where I taught at a local liberal arts university. The first thing that impressed me about The Dream of the Earth was that Thomas had set out something equivalent to an entire university curriculum based on his spiritual vision of the human in relation to the earth and the cosmos.

Traditional liberal arts universities introduce students to broad areas of knowledge in fields such as literature, languages, philosophy, history, mathematics, and science. Back in medieval times an official liberal arts curriculum was divided into methods for understanding and the content to be understood. The methods included logic, rhetoric, and grammar, together known as the Trivium. The areas to be understood included geometry, arithmetic, music, and astronomy, or the Quadrivium. In contrast, the university in which I taught offered a broad range of liberal arts courses centered around a four-course sequence of cultural and political history courses that began with the earliest Paleolithic societies and led down to the modern world in all its complexities.

In The Dream of the Earth, however, Thomas Berry was laying out a different kind of curriculum, one based on an understanding of the cosmos itself and the human place within it. It seemed to me then, and it seems to me now, that nothing could be timelier or more appropriate for the confused age in which we live. I believe it is worth reviewing this curriculum briefly because in it we find a kind of outline of Thomas’s most urgent concerns for understanding the realities of our present historical moment and the pressing issues of our future.

Indeed, Thomas launches this project in a chapter titled The American College in the Ecological Age, where he sketches out a series for four courses as the backbone of the new curriculum. In order, these start with a first course that is about the birth and evolution of the cosmos as a whole, the beginnings of life, and the transformation of the earth as life evolved and interacted with the nonliving systems that support it. Here the student would begin to understand the place of the human in the larger picture and—within the living systems of the earth itself—the importance of human action on the complex ecologies of Mother Earth and our place as an integral part of this evolving panorama.

The second course would help the student to understand his or her place in the broad picture of human culture and civilization. From this it would also address the call to meaningful action in today’s age of challenges. It would follow the growth of human culture from its earliest origins through the development of the great religions and sketch out the beginnings of technology along its long course down to today’s complex technological civilization.

The third course would explore the great classical cultures in Eurasia, Africa, and the Americas. While these differ widely in geographical location and the expression of art, religion, and values, at the same time they seem to have developed languages, social structures, technologies, and values that express deeply common human characteristics. Here we also find what Berry terms the grand humanistic religious traditions of each great culture. Understanding these allows the student to appreciate the similarities between seemingly diverse cultural groups and to learn to honor them. He points out that these classical cultures came into existence when humankind’s experience of the world was predominantly spatial, while today we are given the mandate of transitioning to an understanding of the world in an ongoing evolutionary perspective. Such a course might help students understand and appreciate both the challenge and the positive potentials for this important transition.

The fourth course in this sequence would focus on the modern scientific-technological phase of cultural development, leading to an exploration of how the human is now interacting dynamically with the natural systems of the earth and what principles are involved in seeking a sustainable future. This exploration would lead effortlessly into the fifth course, which would be an examination of the present ecological age with its dense interdependence between the human and human technology on the one hand, and the natural systems of the earth on the other. Questions of how sustainability might best be achieved would be paramount here. If Thomas were writing The Dream of the Earth today, more than twenty-nine years on from its original publication, we can be sure that besides addressing concerns over biodiversity and the quality of life for all living beings, he would address the problem of global warming as well.

The sixth and final course of this sequence would explore emergent values for an ecological age. Here Thomas suggests three general realms of value. The first addresses the reality of the individual as a central feature of our experience. Thomas points out that the history of cosmic evolution, as well as geological and biological evolution, all involve stages in which previously undifferentiated wholes become articulated into separate parts that are still aspects of the greater whole. The amorphous plasma that filled space immediately after the primal big bang became differentiated into the first subatomic particles, which in time formed a range of more complex particles, ultimately leading toward innumerable varieties of molecules. The latter was the basis of biological evolution with its increasing diversity continuing right up to the beginning of the present ecological age, when activities of the human on a planetary scale have reversed this trend. Understanding this story, and our place in it, is vital to appreciating our proper place on twenty-first-century Earth and how we might act as positive agents of facilitation rather than as a destructive disease agent.

Thomas’s second value is subjectivity. Here he observes that it is through our interior subjectivity that we experience the more profound aspects of ourselves and the world around us. The poet, the thinker, the artist, the scientist all take their inspiration from an interior dimension that also brings us into communion with other human beings as well as the rich life that we first meet in the external world. It is this dimension, in fact, that grows into the third value realm, that of communion itself. Not only are we as human beings in communion with those persons we live with and love, but with all other life as well. In the forms of cooperation and symbiosis this is an essential aspect of evolution and life in general. Perhaps Thomas is most often quoted for his observation that the universe is not merely a collection of objects and organisms but a communion and a community. We ourselves are that communion become conscious of itself.¹

Now, having touched on the above core notions in Thomas’s thought as they are reflected in the six basic courses he recommends for his university curriculum, let us take a quick walk around the quad of a typical campus and reflect on some of the fields of learning that might be enriched by his influence.

We might first come across the art department. There, along with the traditional course offerings in drawing, painting, photography, sculpture, and silk screening, we would hope to see artists and students exploring the beauty of the natural world, not only through these traditional forms but perhaps also working more closely with nature as seen in Andy Goldsworthy’s creations, using objects such as wood, stone, and ice in the wild landscape.

We would also hope that the celebration of the natural world and the human as well as other living beings essential to it would be explored through music and dance. For example, the Greek composer Vangelis Papathanassiou, perhaps best known for scores to films such as Chariots of Fire and Blade Runner, considers much of his work to be Earth Music, reflecting the sounds and rhythms of nature. Likewise there exists a tradition in literature, and especially American literature, that celebrates nature in poetry, essays, and novels. From Henry David Thoreau’s Walden and Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, to John Muir’s many essays on nature, to Peter Matthiessen’s Snow Leopard and David Abram’s The Spell of the Sensuous, we find a great living tradition of the literature of wild nature. A cultural history of the human’s relation to nature in poetry and art is also found in Robert Bly’s News of the Universe.

We might also hope to find the Department of Economics as well as the Business School exploring the emerging field of Green Economics, with its stress on quality rather than quantity, on the importance of sustainability and regeneration, on the value of individuals and communities of all kinds, and on ecosystems, rather than on the accumulation of money or material wealth. Indeed, with prophetic insight, in The Dream of the Earth Thomas introduces the notion of an earth deficit that overarches such purely financial indices as the GNP.

Seldom does anyone speak of the deficit involved in the closing down of the basic life system of the planet through abuse of the air, the soil, the water, and the vegetation. As we have indicated, the earth deficit is the real deficit, the ultimate deficit, the deficit in some of its major consequences so absolute as to be beyond adjustment from any source in heaven or on earth. Since the earth system is the ultimate guarantee of all deficits, a failure here is a failure of the last resort. Neither economic viability nor improvement in life conditions for the poor can be realized in such circumstances. These can only worsen, especially when we consider the rising population levels throughout the developing world.²

Fortunately, much of the world is beginning to wake up to these problems today, but it is the eleventh hour and much is to be done. It is especially important for universities to teach this message of this urgency to young people, but not in terms of pessimistic scenarios of lost resources and lost hope, but rather in terms of optimistic challenges that can be met by their own generation.

We would hope that the School of Law would value the importance of the environment and the quality of life of all beings that live on our planet. The historical Enlightenment was a dramatic step forward toward modern civilization, creating in the United States the first great liberal democracy of the world, one that still lasts today. But the stress on the individual and personal rights, when combined with the American Dream, the idea that everyone can achieve unlimited wealth and success for themselves, has led to a disastrous growth of greed along with a widespread unwillingness to work toward common cooperative goals.

Moving along around the quad, the department of psychology might offer courses that address the inner depth dimension of human experience. No one has written more eloquently and profoundly on this topic than William James, in his Principles of Psychology and The Varieties of Religious Experience, both classics as relevant today as when they were written more than a hundred years ago. Students might also investigate the mythic and archetypal dimensions of the human soul. In this regard, Thomas notes of the great works of art and literature that "all of these derive from the visionary power that is experienced most profoundly when we are immersed in the depths of our own being and of the cosmic order itself in the dreamworld that unfolds within us in our sleep, or in those visionary moments that seize upon us in our waking hours. There we discover the Platonic forms, the dreams of Brahman, the Hermetic mysteries, the divine ideas of Thomas Aquinas, the infinite worlds of Giordano Bruno, the world soul of the Cambridge Platonists, the self-organizing universe of Ilya Prigogine, the archetypal world of C. G.