Religious Campaign for Forest Conservation

ONE THING WE no longer need to be told is that we are in the throes of a crisis of the most appalling dimensions. We tend to call this crisis the ecological crisis, and this is a fair description insofar as its effects are manifest above all in the ecological sphere. For here the message is quite clear: our entire way of life is humanly and environmentally suicidal, and unless we change it radically there is no way in which we can avoid catastrophe. Without such change the whole adventure of civilization will come to an end during the lifetime of many now living.

Unhappily we do not yet appear to have realized the urgency of the need for such change. In spite of everything, we continue to blunder along our present path of devastation in a kind of blindfold nightmare enacted with all the inevitability of a Greek tragedy, planning to extend our empire of sterilized artificiality and specialist methodology even further, advancing even further into the computerized or electronic wilderness, devising bigger and better banking systems, manipulating the natural reproductive processes of plants, animals and human beings, saturating our soils and crops with high-powered chemicals and a variety of poisons which no sane community would allow out of a closely-guarded laboratory, and behaving generally in a manner which, even if we had deliberately programmed it, could not be more propitious to our own annihilation and to that of the world about us. It is as if we are in the grip of some monstrous collective psychosis, as if a huge death-wish hangs over the whole so-called civilized world.

In the ecological sphere the message is unambiguously clear, however much we may continue to ignore it. Yet although the effects of our contemporary crisis are most evident in this sphere, the crisis itself is not first of all an ecological crisis. It is first of all a crisis concerning the way we think.

This is the first thing about which we have to be absolutely clear if we are even to begin to find a way out of the hells of self-mutilation to which we have condemned ourselves. How we see the world depends above all upon how we see ourselves.

Our model of the universe — our world-picture or world-image — is based upon the model we have of ourselves, upon our own self-image. When we look at the world, what we see is a reflection of our own mind, or our mode of consciousness. Our perception of a tree, a mountain, a face, an animal or a bird is a reflection of our idea of who we think we are.

This means that before we can effectively deal with the ecological problem, we have to change our world image. This in turn means that we have to change our self-image. Unless our evaluation of ourselves, and what constitutes the true nature of our being, changes, the way we treat the world about us will not change either. And unless this happens, conservation theory and practice, however well-intentioned, will not touch the heart of the problem. They will at best represent an effort to deal with what in the end are symptoms, not causes.

I do not want in the least to belittle such efforts, which often are heroic, lonely and against all odds. One of the terrible temptations we face is that of thinking that the problem is so big that nothing we can do on an individual scale can possibly have any effect: we must leave it to the authorities, to the experts.

That is a fatal attitude. Every single gesture made, however pathetic it may seem, counts, and may have incalculable consequences. Thought not accompanied by corresponding practice soon becomes sterile. Yet at the same time practice springing from incorrectly based thought easily becomes counter-productive, because practice deals with symptoms. Causes are rooted in the way we think, and it is because of this that our crisis is first a question of our self-image and our world-view.

This is the crux of our situation. The industrial and technological inferno we have produced, and by means of which we are devastating the world, is not something that has come about accidentally. On the contrary, it is the consequence of allowing ourselves to be dominated by a certain paradigm of thought — embracing a certain human image and a world image — to such a degree that it now determines virtually all our mental attitudes and actions, public and private.

It is a paradigm of thought that impels us to look upon ourselves as little more than two-legged animals whose destiny and needs can best be fulfilled through the pursuit of social, political and economic self-interest. To correspond with this self-image we have invented a world-view in which nature is seen as an impersonal commodity, a soulless source of food, raw materials, wealth, power and so on, which we think we are quite entitled to experiment with, exploit, remodel and generally abuse by means of any scientific and mechanical technique we can devise and produce, in order to satisfy and deploy this self-interest. Having in our own minds desanctified ourselves, we have desanctified nature too, in our own minds: we have removed it from the suzerainty of the divine and have assumed that we are its overlords. In short, under the aegis of this self-image and world-view, we have succeeded in converting ourselves into the most depraved and depraving of all creatures upon the earth.

This self-image and world-view have their origin in a loss of memory, in a forgetfulness of who we are, and in our fall to a level of ignorance and stupidity that threatens the survival of our race. By an inescapable logic inherent in this origin we are impelled to proceed along a course each step of which is marked by our fall into ever deeper ignorance of our own nature and consequently into ever deeper ignorance of the nature of everything else as well.

So long as we persist in this course, we are doomed to advance blindly and at an ever-increasing pace toward total loss of identity, total loss of control and eventually to total self-destruction. And nothing can stop this process except a complete reversal of direction, a complete change in the way we look at ourselves and so in the way we look at the world about us. Without this change, we will simply continue to add fuel to our own funeral pyre.

Can we make this reversal, this complete change_ I think the answer to that is that no one can stop us except ourselves. The question — the only real question — is what self-image and world-view are we to put in the place of the bankrupt stereotypes, the unensouled fictions, which have taken us over_

In the great cultures of the world, human beings do not regard themselves as two-legged animals, descended from the apes, whose needs and satisfactions can be achieved through pursuing social, political and economic self-interest. On the contrary, they think of themselves first and foremost as descended from God, or from the gods, and as heirs to eternity, with a destiny that goes far beyond politics, society and economics, or anything that can be fulfilled in terms of the material world. They think of themselves as sacred beings, not in their own right, but because they are created in the divine image, in the image of God. They come from a divine source, and the divine world is their birthright, their true home.

In the same way, they do not look upon what we call the outer world, the world of nature, as a chance association of atoms or whatever, or as something impersonal, soulless, inanimate, which they are entitled to manipulate, master, exploit and generally to tamper and mess around with in order to gratify their greeds and their power-lusts. They look upon nature, too, as a divine creation, as full of a hidden wisdom as they themselves are. They sense that every part of the earth — of the whole cosmos — is sacred. Every leaf, every grain of sand or soil, every bird, animal and star, the air and every insect is holy. The sap which courses through the trees is as sacred as their own life-blood — and is one with their own life-blood. They may trade in the gifts they offer — in precious stones and spices, in corn and cattle. They may in ignorance be excessive in their demands on them, in grazing their flocks or in felling too many trees. But they do not deliberately "trade in nature itself."

If nature is the creation of God, or the manifestation of Supreme Wisdom and Harmony, it follows not only that it is the expression of a divine order and disposition, but also that this order and disposition are the best that are possible, given the conditions under which nature is created. Consequently, for us to imagine that we can improve it, or remove the imperfections inherent in it, by interfering with it, re-modelling it, transforming it and so on, through ways that involve disrupting or perverting its God-given order and disposition as well as the organic processes that are part and parcel of them, is sheer folly and impertinence: it is to imagine that we can outstrip and improve on the wisdom of Wisdom Absolute. Inevitably, therefore, any attempt on our part to interfere or to re-model it can only debase, canker, corrupt and vitiate the conditions in which we have to live our life on earth. Over the last few centuries we have so effectively demonstrated the truth of this that we should not need any further convincing as to the rightness of the understanding in which it is rooted.

Yet in spite of this, such an understanding, and the sense of the sacredness of both man and nature, as well as the awe and reverence that they inspire, are often characterized nowadays as primitive, or as based on superstition, and regarded as belonging to the pre-scientific age and as something promoted only by those who have failed, for whatever reason, to move into the twentieth century (or the twenty-first century, as it will soon be).

And this in spite of the fact that — to limit ourselves to the European tradition alone — there is no major philosopher, from Plato to Berdyaev, and no major poet, from Homer to Yeats, who has not explicitly or implicitly affirmed the kind of cosmology that we now tend to ridicule, repudiate or ignore. One of the great unresolved psychological enigmas of the modern western world is the question of what or who has persuaded us to accept as virtually axiomatic a self-view and a world-view that demand that we reject the wisdom and vision of our major philosophers and poets in order to imprison our thought and our very selves in the materialist, mechanical and dogmatic torture-chamber devised by purely quantitative scientific minds.

In this connection there is one particular fallacy from which we must free ourselves, and this is the idea that contemporary scientific theories, and the descriptions that go with them, are somehow neutral, or value-free, and do not presuppose the submission of the human mind to a set of assumptions or dogmas in the way that is said to be demanded by adherence to a religious faith. This idea is, indeed, still propagated and even believed by many modern scientists themselves. On it is based the claim that scientific descriptions of things are objective descriptions. It is not that these scientists deny that there are values. It is that insofar as they are scientists they claim to operate independently of value-judgements, and to be engaged in what they like to call disinterested scientific research.

This is one of the most insidious fallacies of which we tend to be the victims. Even people who maintain that they are fighting for a new philosophy of ecological values repeat it as though it were beyond dispute. In fact, far from being beyond dispute, it represents a total lie. Every thought, every observation, every judgement, every description, whether of the modern scientist or of anyone else, is soaked in "a priori" preconceived built-in value judgements, assumptions and dogmas at least as rigid, if not more rigid (because they are often unconsciously embraced), than those of any explicitly religious system. The very nature of human thought is such that it cannot operate independently of value-judgements, assumptions and dogmas.

Alongside this fallacy is another of which we still tend to be the victims. This is the notion that modern science is valid in relation to that limited htmlect of things <197> namely, that htmlect of them which is material or phenominal, and extended in time and space — that it sets out to study. This notion involves the claim that there are two levels of reality; that each level can be studied apart from, and without reference to, the other; and that the knowledge gained as a result of studying the one level is just as valid in its own terms as the knowledge gained as a result of studying the other level.

There are not two sciences, one concerned with the material and the other with their spiritual dimension. There is only one science. But there are two dominant modes of consciousness in man: his ego-consciousness, which is his lowest mode of consciousness, and his spiritual consciousness, which is his higher mode of consciousness. Of course, there are endless permutations between these two modes, depending upon whether the consciousness gravitates more to the one or the other.

If we could perceive and experience with the full clarity of our higher or spiritual consciousness, we would be able to see and understand that no visible thing — nothing belonging to the world of phenomena — possesses existence or being in its own right. We would see and understand that, apart from its inner and spiritual dimension and identity, it possesses no reality whatsoever, whether physical, material or substantial, and that the notion that it does so is merely an illusion or distortion inherent in the viewpoint of the ego-consciousness. In no way is it possible to separate physics from metaphysics, and in so far as we think it is possible we simply confirm the inanity of our thought.

Thus insofar as modern science presupposes the notion that we can obtain a knowledge of phenomena apart from a prior knowledge of their inner and spiritual dimension, it is still based totally upon the ego-consciousness, or <197> which comes to the same thing <197> it is still in servitude to a dualism that opposes mind and matter, subject and object, the knower and what is to be known <197> a dualism which represents a total distortion of reality. This means it is tainted with the inhuman and satanic characteristics in man of which this consciousness is the vehicle. That is why its application is liable to be fraught with consequences that are equally inhuman and satanic, whether with regard to our own being or with regard to the natural physical world.

That, too, is why every extension of the empire and influence of our contemporary secular scientific mentality has gone and continues to go hand in hand with a corresponding and increased erosion in us of the sense of the sacred. In fact, we do not have any respect, let alone reverence, for the world of nature because we do not fundamentally have any respect, let alone reverence, for ourselves. It is because we cripple and mutilate ourselves that we cripple and mutilate everything else as well. Our contemporary crisis is really our own depravity writ large.

The only real answer to this crisis is to stop depraving ourselves. It is to recover a sense of our true identity and dignity, of our self-image as sacred beings, as immortal beings. A false self-view breeds a false world-view, and together they breed our nemesis and the nemesis of the world.

Once we repossess a sense of our own holiness, we will recover the sense of the holiness of the world about us as well, and we will then act toward the world about us with awe and humility that we should possess when we enter a sacred shrine, a temple of love and beauty in which we worship and adore.

Only in this way will we again become aware that our destiny and the destiny of nature are one and the same. Only in this way can we restore a cosmic harmony. If we do not take this way out, then that is that, for there is no other way out. To fail here is to fail irrevocably: there can be no escaping our inhuman genocide. Without a sense of the holy — that everything that lives is holy — and without humility toward the whole — towards man, nature and towards that which is beyond both man and nature, their transcendent source and origin — we will simply proceed headlong along the course to self-destruction to which we are now committed, to that nemesis which is our choosing and for which we are entirely responsible.

First we have to get absolutely clear in our minds — to identify coherently and unquestionably — the paradigm of thought that underlies and determines our persent self-image and world-view. Unless we first do this, we are liable to become victims of a kind of double-think, attacking the symptoms while remaining subject to the causes that produce the symptoms. And it is all the more important for us to do it because we have tended to forget what the assumptions and presuppositions that characterize this paradigm are: they are so deeply imbedded beneath the ramparts of our ordinary thought-processes that we are unaware that they underlie and determine these processes.

Second, we have to try to recover, or rediscover, the vision of man and nature — or, rather, the theoanthropocosmic vision — that will make it possible for us to perceive and experience both ourselves and the world we live in as the sacred realities that they are. Unless we recover a sense of their sacredness that is based upon a coherent understanding of why they are sacred, our attempts to re-affirm this quality in them may be debilitated by what in the end is little more than sentimental prejudice.

Our enquiry, therefore, is simultaneously anthropological — concerned with the question of who man is — and cosmological — concerned with the question of the nature of the universe. It is ultimately an attempt to reaffirm sacred images of both man and nature: to affirm a sacred human image and a sacred world image.

His new book, Human Image: World Image: The Death and Resurrection of Sacred Cosmology , published by Golgonooza Press, marshalls in a powerful and convincing manner the Christian vision of a sacred cosmology, a lost vision which contemporary humanity desperately needs to recover for its own sake and for the sake of all the earth.

According to Sherrard, the missing dimension in Christian ecology is a genuine cosmology — an image of the universe — founded on its native metaphysical and theological "first principles." Only an integral and sacred cosmology, rooted in Revelation, illumined through Intellection (infused knowledge of the Sacred), grounded in the experience of Divine Immanence, may intuit a true and adequate image of the universe.

In an image of the world which is dynamic rather than static — in other words, which is correlative with the Scriptural image we have of ourselves as created in the image and likeness of God and which is activated in imagination, inspiration and intuition — may be found the fundamental principles of a truly Christian "deep ecology." Sherrard develops this thesis with exceptional clarity and rigor. Just listing the titles of the seven chapters in the book will give the reader the barest hint of the intellectual feast that lies therein: 1) "Forms of Sacred Cosmology in the Pre-Renaissance World"; 2) "The Fetish of Mathematics and the Iconoclasm of Modern Science"; 3) "The Apotheosis of Time and the Bogey of Evolution"; 4) "Knowledge and the Predicament of Modern Science"; 5) "Christian Vision and Modern Science: I. Teilhard de Chardin"; 6) "Christian Vision and Modern Science: II. Oskar Milosz"; 7) "Notes toward the Restitution of Sacred Cosmology."

Sherrard's basic argument is that the ecological crisis is first of all a crisis, not of the environment, but of our own consciousness. It is a crisis rooted in the way we think. The way we see ourselves determines the way we see the world and the image we have of the world affects how we see ourselves. Hence the title: Human Image: World Image. Because our collective image of our human nature is no longer seen as the "image of God," but as little more than two-legged animals whose horizons are limited to the pursuit of social, political and economic self-interest, we have developed a corresponding image of the cosmos as impersonal, soulless, exploitable. The sense of the sacred has been banished from the cosmos because we have banished the Creator and Lord of the cosmos from our minds, souls and hearts.

Ecological thinkers have been expressing similar ideas for years. What makes Sherrard's analysis uniquely powerful is the way he supports his thesis with a rigorous and uncompromising critique of the "paradigm of modern science" and its doctrinal corrolary, the notion of evolution, coupled with a penetrating analysis of the two epistomologies that follow from the two worldviews: knowledge through sense data supported by mathematics versus participatory knowledge in body, soul and spirit. His critique of the paradigm of modern science is not to be equated with the criticism of "anthropocentrism" we are used to hearing from ecologists of the "biocentric" persuasion. For Sherrard, if you accept the modern scientific paradigm as unquestionably valid, it matters not whether you are "anthropocentric," "biocentric" or even "theocentric," because the underlying assumptions of the scientific paradigm render such differences as ultimately superficial.

Sherrard sees two fallacious assumptions at the heart of the scientific paradigm. The first is that modern science is value-neutral. It is not. Implied in the widespread acceptance of that paradigm are a host of assumptions, the end result of which is to make contemporary humanity conscious or unconscious idolaters of phenomena, because any awareness of the "inside" of things, in which the divine Presence may be experienced, is suppressed or denied. Hence, the injunction of the Parable of the Talents applies, implacably, to the human awareness of the Sacred in the cosmos: "For to every one who has will more be given, and he will have abundance; but from him who has not, even what he has will be taken away" (Matt. 25:29).

The second fallacy is the idea that there are two types of reality, the material and the spiritual, each of which has its own science valid in its respective sphere. This is a kind of dualistic heresy that has infected human thought in modern times as a result of the scientific "revolution" in thought, involving the falling apart, in human consciousness, of the phenomenal and noumenal dimensions, to such an extent that knowledge of the one was felt to be independent, if not irrelevant, to the knowledge of the other.

Not so, says Sherrard. There is only one reality and only one science. But there are two or more levels of consciousness. What Sherrard calls the "paradigm of modern science" is actually a level of consciousness linked to the lower self-aggrandizing, egocentric nature of fallen humanity, what St. Paul calls the "mind of the flesh." From this level of consciousness, a naturalistic worldview emerges and a materialistic theory of knowledge develops which support each other in suppressing humanity's capacity for perceiving the metaphysical transparency of phenomena, or, to say the same thing in theological terms, the risen Christ in a transfigured cosmos.

Human Image: World Image is not all metaphysical critique and ecological jeremiad. The essence of Sherrard's message lies in the vision of the resurrection of sacred cosmology in the Christian tradition. A genuine Christian ecology, at once deep and wide and effective, must be based on the recovery of the "theanthropocosmic vision" at the heart of the Church, a vision exemplified by but not exhausted in the writings of the greatest Christian cosmological thinkers, saints such as Dionysius the Areopagite, Maximus the Confessor, Symeon the New Theologian and Gregory of Sinai.

Perhaps the most insightful writing in the book is in the final three chapters, where Philip Sherrard attempts to lay the foundation for the restoration of sacred cosmology in which it would again be "possible for us to perceive and hence to experience both ourselves and the world we live in as the sacred realities that they are."

The crucial issue, and Sherrard returns again and again to this point, is not simply a matter of demonstrating the falsity and perversity of the modern scientific worldview; it is above all a matter of affirming a concept of the physical universe and the place of human beings in it that is adequate to (in harmony with) reality in such a way that it corresponds with our deepest and truest being and, equally, with the being of all created beings with whom we share existence itself.

Only such a world image — in which there is a three-fold correspondence between the way God actually creates and sustains the world, the way in which we ourselves conceive it, and the way all created beings subsist and participate in the world — will produce the kind of sharp and poignant ecological awareness capable of changing humanity's exploitive, destructive and sacriligious attitude toward the natural world.

In the last two chapters, Sherrard examines two attempts to unite the Christian vision with modern science: the deeply flawed approach of Teilhard de Chardin and the imaginative and brilliant attempt of the poet and visionary, Oskar Milosz. Sherrard's treatment of the thought of the famous French Jesuit scientist-theologian is, quite simply, the most insightful critique of de Chardin that I have read. Not only does he outline the many flaws and contradictions in his thought, he also does not discount the importance, despite Teilhard's wrong-headed scientific mysticism, of his central intuition — that there is a "withinness" to all things — and the equally significant metaphysical hunger for continuity which motivated his research, and which, indeed, corresponds with the deepest needs and innermost reality of human nature.

Oskar Milosz (1877-1939), whom Sherrard presents as a thinker who points to the right way to restore sacred cosmology and so heal the schizophrenia of modern man, is not exactly a household name. Yet Milosz' vision is important, says Sherrard, because he attempts a renewal of Christian metaphysics and a restoration of Christian cosmology squarely on the basis of the traditional Christian doctrine of the Incarnation.

If you really take the Incarnation seriously — and that means cosmically as well as theologically — then, in Milosz' own words, you must face the recognition that "the matter which clothes us and surrounds us is absolutely identical with that in which all-powerful Love humbled Himself during the years of the Incarnation," and which He continues to hallow, Sherrard adds, at every celebration of the Eucharist. Therefore the universe cannot be the "universe of death" envisioned by the paradigm of modern science, the blind, inexorable concatenation of space-time-energy-matter utterly alien to the human spirit. No, everything that exists must be stamped in a mysterious way with the image of the Logos, who is "the Way, the Truth and the Life." Through the presence of the Logos in creation (Col. 1:17), the universe becomes a revelation, acquires its sacred charcter, a universe woven of Love, the "love that moves the sun and the other stars," in Dante's words.

By positing the Divine Logos as the true Paradigm of cosmology and all other branches of human knowledge, including science, Oskar Milosz joins a select company of thinkers who have seen the Logos as the key to all science, knowledge and art, from St. Maximus the Confessor to Owen Barfield. May their tribe increase.

In the final chapter, Sherrard outlines some steps necessary for the recovery of sacred cosmology in Christianity. This cannot be confined to repeated assertions in an arbitrary manner that the cosmos is sacred, but must be the acquisition of an intellectual-experiential knowledge of God that is not merely limited to subjective inwardness, but that "can be translated into a knowledge of the world and of the cosmos that illumines every object and every form of being."

Since we cannot reclaim the sacred cosmology at the heart of the Christian tradition until we rectify the condition which led to its loss, Sherrard offers a sharp, but fair critique of Christian theology, past and present. While Christianity as a whole certainly cannot be held responsible for the ecological crisis, as some rather anti-Christian environmentalists have attempted to claim, nevertheless, Christian theology, primarily in the West, but also to some extent in the East, must take responsibility for the loss of the positive cosmological vision that existed in the early Church and the corresponding eclipse of the cosmic significance of the Incarnation.

Because the Incarnation has become almost exclusively identified with the historical manifestation of Jesus at Bethlehem, and also because the Trinitarian doctrine of the eternal generation of the Son as the true Image of the Father has been divorced from the doctrine of creation, Christians are forced into an either/or position. They must choose either God or the world, because theology, having lost the theanthropocosmic vision, presents only a view in which God and creation are totally separate, with an unbridgeable gulf between them. A kind of inescapable dualism, God versus the world, the order of grace versus the order of nature, has become the order of the day.

From this dualism emerge three false attitudes toward the cosmos among Christians: an a-cosmism in which the cosmos has no relevance whatever to Christian life; a cosmolatry or secularization of life in which the physical world is accepted at face value as the only reality that counts; and the anti-cosmism of pseudo-asceticism, which is closed to the sacredness of the beauty of sensible things, and, out of hostility or cowardice, denies to the creation its God-given role of revealing, representing and glorifying God.

To counter these false attitudes toward creation, Sherrard calls for a return to the patristic theological synthesis of the early Church and its positive doctrine of creation. The central Christian doctrines <197> the Trinity, Creation, Incarnation <197> must once again be seen as interrelated and inseparable, each one illumining and supporting the others. The encounter between God and man, Sherrard says, must no longer be envisioned in terms of a meeting with a divine wholly Other in a cosmic environment equally inhuman, but in the biblical terms of image and Archetype.

This is not the "spiritual imperialism" of an abstract, totalitarian, unilateral monotheism, which is the result of the "disastrous dualism" in modern theology that opposes God and creation, but is a relationship of synergy and reciprocity, of the interpenetration in love of the Supreme Self of Christ with the human being and with all other created beings in which the real self of the human being and the true natures of all created beings are realized and perfected in and through Christ.

This creative theological synthesis must in turn be placed in support of a true science of phenomena — of visible nature — which is "rooted in a science of the spiritual realities of which visible phenomena are the spacio-temporal manifestations or 'signatures'; and that consequently a knowledge of these metaphysical realities is a prerequisite of a knowledge of their physical analogues in the natural world."

We must abandon the false notion that it does not matter what kind of idea we may possess of the physical world because it does not affect our capacity to live a full spiritual life; for it is precisely the materialistic, mechanistic, scientistic paradigm of the modern world that is so out of harmony with humanity's true nature and deepest needs that it works to cripple mankind's spiritual life at the roots. We must reshape our concepts of space, time and matter and abandon the materialization of thought that has given rise to the false cosmogonies that "presume the universe to be the outcome of some kind of organization of chaos within a pre-existing void."

There is no space here to give the kind of detailed and nuanced presentation that is necessary for a balanced appreciation of Sherrard's proposals for the resurrection of sacred cosmology. Briefly, he calls for a doctrine of creation that does not require an irreduceable dualism between God and creation, that is, in short, neither pantheism nor dualism, but panentheism. Secondly, we must transform from within the quasi-absolute concept of the physical universe of space-time in order to reestablish a genuine sacramental relationship between ourselves and the world in which we live. Above all, he calls for a recovery of the cosmic significance of the Incarnation. This is the real key to the restoration of sacred cosmology and the heart and soul of a genuinely Christian ecological vision. Without a recovery of the sense of the Sacred in nature, there is no environmental ethic that will be powerful enough to change the catastrophic course upon which the world is now hurtling.

These ideas are not easy to grhtml. We must not underestimate the inner dislocation and blindness of which we are all the victims due in large part to the false and sacrilegious concept of the world we have inherited from post-Cartesian physics. A conversion of mind is required, an intellectual repentence as radical as the moral metanoia Jesus demands of all his disciples.

We may be tempted to reject this demand as too idealistic or too much to ask of people. But this is only to avoid facing the real issue. Ask any environmentalist who is truly aware of the enormity of the crisis we face, and he or she will honestly admit to being haunted by a fear that nothing done so far, whether by government, business or volunteer organizations, has done more than scratch the surface. We must get to the root of the problem before time runs out. Thus we have no choice but to consider seriously the radical change of mind and vision which Philip Sherrard insists is the only way to escape the bankrupt and corrupt self-image and worldview which degrades and destroys at one and the same time our world and our souls.

Every pastor, preacher or theologian responsible for shaping or teaching a Christian worldview should read this book. Beyond this, it deserves the widest possible distribution, since its message is too universally important to be restricted to specialists.