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Ecosystems and Systematics
By Hugh T. Kerr

"The ecological emergency of our day has reopened the cosmological argument…. To imply that ecology is the matrix of a new systematics, as the Gothic image and the Elizabethan chain were in their time, may seem an extravagant conceit. But if ecological predictions of the immediate future are justified . . . we may have no choice about the contextual situation in which future deliberations in any area are to be pursued."

THE reason for the writing of this essay may well be more important than the essay itself. The invitation to contribute to a Festschrift, honoring the name and work of a long-time friend and former colleague, is of course reason enough. But there is another reason. As the biblical people say, the "provenance" of the document is an important clue to its contents and tells us something about the author and how his mind works. Instead of leaving all this subjective rationale properly hidden from public view, as modesty might prescribe, I propose to display it at the outset and make something out of it.

Several years ago during a misspent sabbatical, I drew up an outline, and actually wrote out several chapters, of a book that never got published because it never got finished. I was then immersed in comparative symbolism, and I was eager to see whether the current multivalent approach to archetypal symbols could be constructively applied to the interpretation of doctrinal theology. I dreamed of "The Many Levels of Faith" as a descriptive, if not catchy, title, and I half-completed a chapter on "The Harmony

Hugh T. Kerr is Professor of Theology at Princeton Theological Seminary and Editor of THEOLOGY TODAY. A graduate of Princeton University and Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, he holds the M.A. degree in philosophy from the University of Pittsburgh and the Ph.D. from Edinburgh. He is the author of Positive Protestantism (1963) and Readings in Christian Thought (1966).

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of the Spheres" which involved some research into the chain-of-being motif.

As I say, the project never saw the light of day, and so I am dusting off that unfinished symphony as a pretext for this present assignment. But it is not just dredged up from the bottom of a barrel (otherwise, I would not tell anyone about it). The reason I'm making something out of this is to allege that the conclusion which I drew from my research a few years ago no longer satisfies me, and in fact I now think the same data can support a quite opposite point of view.

Whether this switch is earth-shaking for anyone besides myself, I can't tell without trying it out. It would be simpler to settle the matter immediately by revealing the first and second conclusions and let the reader decide. But that would spoil all the fun, and I'm inclined to think that some quirky perversity of approach might just appeal to the one whom we want to honor with this issue.¹ So some of the background on "The Harmony of the Spheres" will act as preface to the first conclusion, and this will be followed by the occasion for the switch to the second conclusion and its implications for the task of theologizing.

I

Traditional apologetic theology has usually presented the truth claims of Christian faith within a context of meaning structures. Whatever the mysteries of revelation, the paradoxes of thought, or the limitations of language, the primary presupposition of theology is that the gospel provides a clue to the riddle of the universe. Bible, creed, and liturgy have always been taken as embodying the divine purpose in various kinds of meaningful patterns.

In addition to the implied unity of purpose disclosed in the divine revelation itself, theology has also gratefully exploited the presumed grandeur and uniformity of the cosmos. In this sense, "the cosmological argument" pertains not only to a proof for the existence of God but functions as supporting evidence for the meaningfulness of Christian faith.

¹ I venture to observe that unconventional approaches to ordinary things is one of Paul Lehmann's trademarks. I first heard him address a public audience in a chapel service following a seminary "day of prayer." He read from the Gospels about Jesus praying for his disciples and the subsequent betrayal by Judas, and then he began: "Imagine Judas Iscariot as the answer to prayer!"

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The meaning of the revelation and the harmony of the cosmos, when taken together, has always provided convincing presumption of design and purpose, the interpretation of which has been theology's major responsibility. In this way, both Bible and cosmology could be invoked to authenticate Christian truth claims.

Cosmologies, of course, ante-date the Bible and are found among all peoples everywhere. Hastings' Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics (1914), which still endures as an exhaustive resource on such matters, devotes more than 50 double-columned pages to an extensive article on "Cosmogony and Cosmology." It includes discussions of American Indian, Babylonian, Buddhist, Celtic, Chinese, Egyptian, Greek, Indian, Iranian, Japanese, Jewish, Mexican and South American, Mohammedan, Polynesian, Roman, Teutonic, Vedic, as well as Hebrew and Christian views. Certain common features underlie these otherwise diffuse views, such as the implication of time and seasons, arrangement and sequence of the created order, relation of the world to man, and the design of the world as teaching religious or moral lessons.²

But it is more instructive, for our purposes, to examine in some detail the cosmological contours of two specific world views, and we will single out the Gothic image of thirteenth-century France and the Elizabethan chain-of-being of sixteenth-century England.

II

In his classic volume on Gothic art, Emile Mâle has convincingly demonstrated from contemporary original sources the unifying harmony of medieval culture.³ Concentrating his examination on the High Middle Ages, when Gothic architecture was at its most advanced form in thirteenth century France, Mâle has amassed abundant evidence of the interlocking spheres of faith, truth, and life which constituted the basic assumptions behind the medieval world view.

If we may speak of "the Gothic image" as a whole, we note that it is composed of a prior sense of order, symmetry, proportion, and

² The Hastings' article, Vol. IV, pp. 125-179, is written by several authors; a more recent discussion of cosmologies is Mircea Eliade's Patterns in Comparative Religion (New York: Sheed & Ward), 1958.
³ Emile Mâle, The Gothic Image (New York: Harper Torchbook), 1958; translated from the third French edition of 1913, L'art religieux du XIII siécle en France. Bernard Berenson said this work was "the most illuminating, the most informing, and the most penetrating book on the subject." The Gothic critical corpus is enormous, but that is not our focus here.

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arrangement. All things work together to form the whole, and the cathedral itself teaches like an encyclopedia. The realms of nature, of learning, of ethics, of history, as well as of the Bible, are all neatly and completely interwoven. Nothing is omitted or excluded from sacred consideration. Every level of truth and reality corresponds to every other level. What is true of the animal kingdom finds its parallel in the kingdom of Heaven.

Divisions and sub-divisions in the scale of virtues and vices are paradigmatically related to the hierarchy of angels and demons. The biblical revelation is endlessly adumbrated as associations are made with extra-biblical sources. Bits and pieces are put in their proper place, for even the most minor scrap of created matter, of isolated wisdom, of the lesser beasts, makes its appointed contribution toward the total harmony. As the cathedral building itself suggests, all God's universe is harmonious, and everything joins together in aspiration to sing doxologies to the Creator.

The history of the world from the time of creation, the dogmas of the creed, the lives of the saints, the structure of the virtues, the range of the natural sciences, the organization of the liturgy, the canons of artistic craftsmanship, the dispensations of the divine revelation-all were incorporated into the Gothic image and were continuously reproduced according to fixed standards of interpretation.

For example, and here we simply single out and rearrange for our purposes a few of Male's innumerable illustrations, a vertical nimbus behind a human head is everywhere understood as an expression of sanctity. But a nimbus including a cross is the sign of divinity reserved for the persons of the Trinity. The aureole or radiant nimbus, suggesting eternal bliss, belongs to the Trinity, the Virgin, and the souls of the blessed. The three persons of the Trinity, the angels, and the apostles are always depicted with bare feet. A tree or plant in sculpture, painting, glass, or tapestry implies that the scene is on earth; concentric lines mean the sky or heaven; wavy lines mean the sea or water. Peter always wears curly hair and a short beard; Paul is always bald with a long beard.

Such conventions were everywhere observed so that departure from them or attempts on the artist's part at freedom of expression would have been the equivalent of heresy. The rules of design were almost mathematical in their precision. The cathedral itself is

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positioned with its head toward the east where the sun rises in the sky at the equinox; the north region of the building points to the Old Testament, the south to the New, and the west is the scene of the last judgment.

Peter stands to the right of his Master, and in crucifixion scenes Mary is to the right and John to the left. The twelve patriarchs are related to the twelve prophets, twelve tribes, and twelve disciples. The four major prophets correspond to the four evangelists, and the twenty-four elders of the Apocalypse bring to mind the twelve prophets and twelve disciples.

Twelve is, of course, a mysteriously wonderful number, for it is the product of three by four, the respective numbers for the divine Trinity and the basic material elements (earth, fire, air, water). So we have a combination of heaven and earth, spiritual and material, God and man, divine and human. So, too, seven is the addition of three and four, and thus earth (the body, matter) is made to give glory to things spiritual (heavenly, divine). Therefore human life runs through seven stages; there are seven virtues and seven sins, seven petitions in the Lord's Prayer, seven sacraments, seven planets, seven ages of history, seven days of creation, seven hours of worship, seven tones in the Gregorian mode, and so on and on. Eight, which is one beyond seven, gives the baptismal font its octagonal shape, for eight is the number of the new life which begins after the traditional stages are transcended, as in music the octave begins another series all over again.

Contrived as this network may appear to us today, the whole world of heaven and earth was put together into a book to be read for Christian and moral lessons as well as for information on life and nature. Every creature, every part of creation, everything, contains a divine thought available to the ignorant as to the wise. The sun and the moon, the changes of the seasons, the grain of the field, the grape and the vine, the birds and beasts, the metals and stones, the infant and the elder-all have many levels of meaning, and all are easily and readily interrelated within the harmony of creation. ⁴

⁴ "The thirteenth century was the century of encyclopaedias. At no other period have so many works appeared bearing the titles of Summa, Speculum or Imago Mundi," Male, op. cit., p, 23. CL "Like the High Scholastic Summa, The High Gothic cathedral aimed, first of all, at 'totality.'" Erwin Panofsky, Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism (Cleveland: World Pub. Co.), 1963, p. 44.

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III

The Elizabethan chain-of-being provides us with still another harmony structure of intricate and elaborate design.⁵ Sixteenth century England echoed the successive levels of the medieval Gothic image but with a distinctive accent and with a native instinct for orderly arrangement.

The connecting links in the chain of creation, from top to bottom, owed their importance to their place within the whole pattern of meaning. Endlessly reticulated in Elizabethan literature, with prompting from the wings in the drama of the period, the chain-of being constituted an accepted world web of hierarchial relations.

Two brief samples of the chain may be cited. First, from Sir John Fortescue (1531-1607), Chancellor of the Exchequer, statesman and jurist, who wrote of the chain in a Latin work on law:

"In this order, hot things are in harmony with cold, dry with moist, heavy with light, great with little, high with low. In this order, angel is set over angel, rank upon rank in the kingdom of heaven; man is set over man, beast over beast, bird over bird, and fish over fish, on the earth in the air and in the sea: so that there is no worm that crawls upon the ground, no bird that flies on high, no fish that swims in the depths, which the chain of this order does not bind in most harmonious concord . . . God created as many different kinds of things as he did creatures, so that there is no creature which does not differ in some respect from all other creatures and by which it is in some respect superior or inferior to all the rest. So that from the highest angel down to the lowest of his kind there is absolutely not found an angel that has not a superior and inferior; nor from man down to the meanest worm is there any creature which is not in some respect superior to one creature and inferior to another. So there is nothing which the bond of order does not embrace. " ⁶

The second description is from the Natural Theology of Raymond de Sebonde (Sabunde; d. 1437), the Spanish-born theologian whose work was in wide circulation in sixteenth-century England. The gist of the argument is given by Tillyard:

⁵ The definitive study is Arthur 0. Lovejoy's The Great Chain of Being (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press), 1936; a later and more compact discussion is E. M. W. Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture (New York: Macmillan), 1944.
⁶ Tillyard, op. cit., pp. 26f.

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"First there is mere existence, the inanimate class: the elements, liquids, and metals. But . . . water is nobler than earth, the ruby than the topaz, gold than brass . . . Next there is existence and life, the vegetative class, where again the oak is nobler than the bramble. Next there is existence, life, and feeling, the sensitive class . . . the creatures having touch but not hearing, memory, or movement. Such are shellfish and parasites on the base of trees. Then there are animals having touch, memory, and movement but not hearing, for instance, ants. And finally there are the higher animals, horses and dogs, etc., that have all these faculties. The three classes lead up to man, who has not only existence, life, and feeling, but understanding; he sums up in himself the total faculties of earthly phenomena . . . There are vast numbers of angels and they are as precisely ordered along the chain-of-being as the elements or the metals . The chain is also a ladder. The elements are alimental. There is a progression in the way the elements nourish plants, the fruits of plants beasts, and the flesh of beasts men. And this is all one with the tendency of man upwards towards God."⁷

One of the interesting aspects of this chain is the way the top of one level is linked with the bottom of the next higher, and this connection can be either vertical or horizontal, natural, moral, or within the context of divine revelation. In each class there stands a primate: the lion among beasts, the whale among fishes, the eagle among birds, the king among men, the sun among the planets, fire among the elements, the oak among the trees, the rose among flowers, the apple among fruits, the diamond among gems, gold among metals, justice among virtues, the head among the limbs, reason among the faculties, man among the creatures, and God above all.⁸

The organization of all creation into a symphony of sight and sound, proportion and reciprocity, was regarded in the Gothic image or the Elizabethan chain-of-being as a necessary corollary to the existence of God and faith in the divine providence and purpose. All such harmonies include at least four common characteristics. (1) They are theocentric in a normative and cumulative sense; (2) they are didactic as devices for instruction in science and wisdom; (3) they are implicative in so far as one can move from one

⁷ Ibid., Pp. 27f.
⁸ The Elizabethan chain assumes that order in the state parallels order in the natural world; cf. the Church of England Homily of Obedience (1547), and Richard Hooker (15541600), Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity.

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level of reality to another; and (4) they are reconciliatory in bringing together apparent opposites, such as, faith and reason, sacred and profane, heaven and earth, spirit and matter, soul and body, God and man.

IV

The cosmological structures which I examined in some detail some years ago, such as the Gothic image and the Elizabethan chainof-being, struck me at the time to represent a net of interconnections that was no longer viable. Fascinating and intriguing, certainly; but hardly relevant or germane for today.

The harmony of the spheres, which once we hymned in praise, has turned cacophonous and dissonant. The grand alliance between earth and heaven, the majestic architecture of the Gothic image, the homogeneity of a multifaceted perspective, all have fallen on days in which such presuppositions are both meaningless and inconceivable. It is not that there is no meaning anymore anywhere, or that cynicism has taken the place of faith, or that finis has usurped the possibility of telos. The plain fact is that contemporary man has no confidence in the traditional views of cosmic harmony as evidence for faith or as apologetic support for Christian truth claims.

The gospel for today can scarcely be good news about the revelation of a mysterious world order in which, among other possibilities, an ox (who has seen one lately?) can stand for a huge beast, a sacrificial animal, the Jewish nation, an Evangelist, a Christian virtue' and Jesus Christ himself. The gospel, so Bultmann has instructed us after demythologizing the biblical cosmology, is good news about new creation. However that is proclaimed or structured, it does not depend upon any particular view of the world, even the traditional biblical view.⁹

The evangelistic and apologetic problem for today is not how to revive older harmony patterns to induce modern man to believe in an overarching Gothic wholeness. That option, like the Gothic cathedral itself, is stone dead. The issue rather is twofold: first, how to disengage ourselves from the obsolete systems as gracefully

⁹ "The cosmology of the New Testament is essentially mythical in character. The world is viewed as a three-storied structure, with the earth in the centre, the heaven above, and the underworld beneath." Rudolf Bultmann, "New Testament and Mythology," in Kerygma and Myth, ed. by Hans Werner Bartsch (E. T. London: S.P.C.K.), 1953, p. 1. A more recent discussion of some particulars of this cosmology is Robert M. Grant's "Chains of Being in Early Christianity," in Myths and Symbols, ed. by Joseph M. Kitagawa and Charles H. Long (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press), 1969, pp. 279ff.

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as possible; and second, how to present the uncomplicated nucleus of the gospel to a fractured contemporary humanity without worrying too much about getting everything all together neatly and completely.

This was the drift of my thinking and the way my mind was changing ten years ago. As a professor of systematic theology, I was perhaps vocationally uptight about abandoning structures of all kinds in favor of free forms and pluralism everywhere. Yet it seemed clear that the eager search for tidy meaning-structures that inspired so many sermons, biblical studies, and theological discussions in years past could not be commended today. Modern man has learned in the name of science, psychology, and the arts to claim less and to relax his grip on the whole universe.

This means that everything is up for grabs, that any view is permissible, that truth, reality, gospel, theology, church are all laid out in bits and pieces, that authentic meaning can be found in any one or more of the integers but not necessarily, or only, in all together in unison. Any particular link, therefore, can be as significant as the chain itself. Tennyson's sentimental reflection about the "flower in the crannied wall" still makes sense today not because it holds the secret of "all in all" (including God and man), but because it has its own validity and ought to be gratefully appreciated as such without being artificially immortalized within some grandiose divine-human schema.

Many different lines of investigation appeared to converge toward this point of view. Books like Barrett's Irrational Man seemed to me to point in this direction. So did the theater of the absurd, abstract expressionist painting, and the new wave of films. I even tried my hand at a little book which sought to retain the deeper significance of symbolism while casting loose from the larger cosmological meaning structures. I felt somewhat vindicated when Harvey Cox advised, some years later, that "we should oppose the romantic restoration of the sprites of the forest." ¹⁰

That, then was the first conclusion, and while I still hold to some aspects of that point of view, the reasons have changed. The first conclusion, I thought, emerged out of research data for various

¹⁰ William Barrett, Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy (New York: Doubleday), 1958; Martin Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd (New York: Doubleday), 1961; Hugh T. Kerr, Mystery and Meaning in the Christian Faith (Toronto; Ryerson Press), 1958; Harvey Cox, The Secular City (New York: Macmillan), 1965, p. 36.

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chains-of-being, and since the very idea of a chain has become obsolete, I imagined the inferences once drawn were now untenable.

It never occurred to me that a new chain-of-being was about to be discovered and that it would almost immediately capture everyone's attention. It is, of course, ecology.

V

Ecology is not a new word. Biologists and botanists have used it for a long time as indicating the interrelation of organisms and plants with their environments. And of course conservationists and nature lovers have been telling us for decades that man is recklessly expending the world's natural resources. What is new is the melodramatic realization, just recently come over us, that ecology represents an implicative system in which man, nature, and the world are mutually interdependent for survival.

Water and air pollution, the pillage of mineral resources, the increasing list of extinct or endangered species of birds and animals, the far-reaching effect of pesticides, the wanton dumping of industrial chemicals on land and sea, the overwhelming accumulation of waste, garbage, and junk, and especially the spiraling of the population explosion-all add up to instant awareness of apocalyptic crisis.

What started me rethinking the first conclusion based on the Gothic image and the Elizabethan chain-of-being was an article in Natural History magazine, with the intriguing title, "Ecology: The New Great Chain of Being." ¹¹ The editorial preface to the article quoted the passage from Fortescue which was already familiar to me and which has been cited above under the Elizabethan chain. And the first paragraph of the article noted a contemporary chain effect of simple but frightening implications.

It seems that the World Health Organization some years ago in Borneo used DDT to eliminate the mosquito. In the process, certain predatory wasps were also killed, and since the wasps kept the caterpillar population in control, the roofs of the houses began to collapse because they were eaten by the caterpillars. DDT was also used indoors to kill flies, which in turn were eaten by the gecko lizard, and they in turn by the cats. So the cats died from ingesting too much DDT, and then the rats began to multiply, and with them

¹¹ Natural History, Vol. LXXVII, No. 10 (Dec. 1968), pp. 8ff. The literature on ecology has grown enormously, especially since "Earth Day," April 22,1970.

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came the threat of plague. In order to restore some balance in this disrupted ecosystem, new cats were parachuted into the region.

In the biosphere, where man and a million other species live, the energy cycle is regular and stable. Plants are nourished from the soil and transform the sun's rays into food. Herbivores eat the plants. Carnivores feed on herbivores and are eaten by scavengers. With decomposition, the nutrients return to the soil, and the process is renewed. That is, unless an intruder such as a chemical or manmade pollutant disturbs the cycle. As in the case with DDT, it is the scavenger birds, the eagles, ospreys, and hawks, which die out first because the concentration of the chemical builds up as it moves from stomach to stomach, and from level to level. DDT incidentally has been detected in the penguins of the Antarctic, thousands of miles from any possible contaminating source.

One of the baffling aspects of the ecological chain is the possible damage already done but as yet unrecognized. It is only recently that industrial discharging of mercury into rivers and lakes has been spotted in fish. Mercury poisoning can cause brain damage, and it is especially toxic in the unborn fetus of pregnant women. Massive mercury pollution has been found in Lake Erie' San Francisco Bay, the Delaware River, Lake Champlain, the Tennessee River, and in many other areas. Surprisingly, it has now been found in the livers of the Alaskan fur seals. These wonderful creatures roam miles from land in the open Pacific Ocean.

Mercury, used in pulp mills and paper processing, is absorbed from the water by plankton which is eaten by fish and in turn eaten by the seals. Ironically, the livers of the seals are being used to make an iron supplement "blood booster" for humans. "You can just figure from this," said a biologist, "that there isn't any place in the whole world that isn't contaminated." ¹²

The ailing environment has become a current crisis, as everyone now knows, because of man's exploitation, destruction, and pollution of the very resources on which his survival and well-being depend. He can hardly be excused for pleading ignorance of the law of ecosystems, and his only salvation requires that he learn to live within the limits of the biospheric chain-of-being. This represents a new worldview as comprehensive and inescapable as the

¹² The New York Times, Nov. 1, 1970. (The Sunday edition now runs a regular featureon "Environment").

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Gothic image or the Elizabethan chain-of-being, and it is not a matter of contrived imagination and inflated metaphor but an empirical matter-of-fact. It imposes on us, whether we like it or not, a new systematic ordering and harmonious structuring which we can resist only by willing our own and the world's extinction.

The first conclusion, to which reference has been made, must therefore give way to a second conclusion. Chains-of-being are not so obsolete after all. The harmony of the spheres is not only a romantic reminder of a simpler and more credulous age, it is the only option before us. If previously everything appeared to be fragmented in bits and pieces with authentic existence found, if at all, here and there but not everywhere, now we must reconsider our pluralistic, discrete, and individuated inferences in the light of new evidence.

Ecology speaks of the interdependency of organisms and things within the whole system. Entities in isolation do not exist. What seems to solve one problem may create another worse problem in another area. What affects one segment affects the whole system. Ecologists cannot afford the luxury of specialization; they must be generalists. So a new commitment and compulsion to systematics is upon us.

VI

The ecological emergency of our day has reopened the cosmological argument. This may appear to claim too much for an environmental situation of great ambiguity. To imply that ecology is the matrix of a new systematics, as the Gothic image and the Elizabethan chain were in their time, may seem an extravagant conceit. But if ecological predictions of the immediate future are justified, and here numerology reappears with statistical vengeance, we may have no choice about the contextual situation in which future deliberations in any area are to be pursued. If everything is related to everything, then the "choir of heaven and the furniture of earth," to use Bishop Berkeley's quaint phrase, re-emerges as an imperative to "get it all together."

Ecology suggests that systematics must become ecumenics. The Gothic image and the Elizabethan chain put people and things in their proper places, but the ecological network is more concerned

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with mutuality and interdependency. Etymologically, "ecology" and "ecumenics" are rooted in the same familial or domestic notion of togetherness. This among other things is what Marshall McLuhan means by the "global village" which has been precipitated on our day by the electronic revolution.¹³

VII

Two major implications for theology seem to me to issue from this ecological consideration, one having to do with order (and its opposite disorder and chaos), and the other with nature (and its studied avoidance in most modern theology).

Chaos and order accompany each other as night follows day, but the basic question here has to do not with the temporary ambiguities and transitions of the day, which may go one way or the other, but with the ultimate convictions of faith. If this way of speaking seems hopelessly irrelevant for many today, it is instructive to be reminded of the ultimate ordering of ecology. This certainly does not mean to regard existing structures as inviolate, but it does mean that it is not enough to "cry havoc" without some ultimate, perhaps transcendent, re-ordering in mind.

Peter Berger has incorporated this "argument for ordering" as it a signal of transcendence" which comes to us apart from the religious or theological spheres. He regards this "signal" as supporting religious faith, in a time when transcendence appears to have evaporated, but it may not necessarily be related to religion at all.

"Man's propensity for order is grounded in a faith or trust that, ultimately, reality is 'in order,' 'all right,' 'as it should be.' Needless to say, there is no empirical method by which this faith can be tested. To assert it is itself an act of faith. But it is possible to proceed from the faith that is rooted in experience to the act of faith that transcends the empirical sphere, a procedure that could be called the argument from ordering." ¹⁴

As an illustration, Berger uses the commonplace experience of a mother comforting her frightened child.

¹³ For the extensive use of oikos and derivatives in the New Testament, see the article by to Michel in Kittel's Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, Vol. V. "The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village." Marshall McLuhan, with Quentin Fiore, The Medium Is the Massage (New York: Bantam Books), 1967) 67
¹⁴ Peter L. Berger, A Rumor of Angels: Modern Society and the Rediscovery of the Supernatural (New York: Doubleday), 1969, p. 67.

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"A child wakes up in the night, perhaps from a bad dream, and finds himself surrounded by darkness, alone, beset by nameless threats. At such a moment the contours of trusted reality are blurred or invisible, and in the terror of incipient chaos the child cries out for his mother. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that, at this moment, the mother is being invoked as a high priestess of protective order. It is she (and, in many cases, she alone) who has the power to banish the chaos and to restore the benign shape of the world. And, of course, any good mother will do just that. She will take the child and cradle him in the timeless gesture of the Magna Mater who became our Madonna. She will turn on a lamp, perhaps, which will encircle the scene with a warm glow of reassuring light. She will speak or sing to the child, and the content of this communication will invariably be the same-'Don't be afraid, everything is in order, everything is all right.' " ¹⁵

It would be too simplistic to argue that the mother-child experience or similar signals of transcendence are persuasive reasons for believing in order as against disorder. But "inductive faith," as Berger calls it, tries to look beyond immediate disruption to ultimate patterns of reality. In our own time of dislocation, when traditional orders seem so dysfunctional, it may be necessary to be reminded of man's propensity for order and his vested ecological interest in redressing what imbalances there are.

A second ecological implication for theology, beyond affirming order in some fashion, is the necessity for coming to terms with nature itself. What is needed is a new natural theology. For the most part, modern theology has avoided taking seriously what amounts to a whole empirical dimension. The influence of the Barthian and neo-orthodox biblical emphasis on special as opposed to natural revelation now clearly seems a one-sided and misguided attempt to magnify the uniqueness of faith.

Some are now proposing that western man's decimation of nature has been an outgrowth of biblical thought, particularly the account of creation with the divine command that man, the consummation of creation, "be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of

¹⁵ Ibid., pp. 67f. Unless we are to say that the mother is lying to the child, says Berger, we must assume that "there is some truth in the religious interpretation of human existence." Another dimension of order-chaos tension is the psychological. See, e.g., William R. Rogers, "Order and Chaos in Psychotherapy and Ontology," in The Dialogue Between Theology and Psychology (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press), 1968, pp. 249ff.

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the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth" (Genesis 1: 28).

In a now classic discussion of this point of view, Lynn White nominates Francis of Assisi as a semi-heretical patron saint for ecologists.

"I am not suggesting that many contemporary Americans who are concerned about our ecologic crisis will be either able or willing to counsel with wolves or exhort birds [as Francis did]. However, the present increasing disruption of the global environment is the product of a dynamic technology and science which were originating in the western medieval world against which St. Francis was rebelling in so original a way. Their growth cannot be understood historically apart from distinctive attitudes toward nature which are deeply grounded in Christian dogma. The fact that most people do not think of these attitudes as Christian is irrelevant. No new set of basic values has been accepted in our society to displace those of Christianity. Hence we shall continue to have a worsening ecologic crisis until we reject the Christian axiom that nature has no reason for existence save to serve man." ¹⁶

VIII

A crucial difference between the Gothic image and the Elizabethan chain-of-being, on the one hand, and contemporary ecosystems, on the other, has to do with the matter of stability and permanence. In former times, no doubt, the implicative systems were regarded as inviolable, enduring, tamper-proof. But today the problem of ecology is the disruption of the balances necessary for the maintenance of the system in some sort of workable equilibrium. If previous generations could invoke the harmony of the spheres as a signal of transcendence and supporting evidence for faith in the divine purpose, we today are compelled to observe that the ecological imbalance not only indicts man for his rapacity but presents us with an almost irreversible apocalyptic prospect.

The cynics and the stoics among us, perhaps calling themselves realists, will take what consolation they can from observing that man, being what he is, can hardly be expected to reverse a tide that has been running for centuries. ¹⁷ As James Reston once put it, the

¹⁶ Lynn White, Jr., "Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis," Science, Vol. 155 (March 10, 1967), p. 127.
¹⁷ Among those who question whether the ecological imbalance can be reversed are Paul R. and Anne H. Ehrlich (Population, Resources, Environment: Issues in Human Ecology, 1970). On the other side, John R. Sheaffer thinks that wastes, for example, can be

119 - Ecosystems and Systematics

holocaust may come not because of atomic power but because of sex power. There are just too many reproducing humans, and the ecological disaster may have progressed beyond the point of no return.

Unless there is another alternative, a way to redress ecological imbalance and reorder the disorder of our times, hardly anything else seems worth talking about. And unless theology can participate constructively in such an alternative, who needs it?

recycled as valuable land nutrients and that even the Great Lakes have a future (cf. "Re-viving the Great Lakes," Saturday Review, No.. 7, 1970, pp. 62ff.).