Madame Pickwick Art Blog Art and media blog of the unexpected

OIL SPILLS & MORAL SHILLS

The time and expense spent on rescuing and rehabilitating animals amid the Gulf oil spill has given rise once more to the issue of animal rights, and the question of whether animals have souls; A return to the  faith leaders who exemplified kindness and feeling for animals, such as St. Francis of Assisi. Currently, it appears that religious institutions have lost sight of this sensibility and tend instead to teach a “traditional” religious view that man has a right to harm animals.What would Saint Francis think about BP’s oxymoronic proposals for ”failsafe” methods to cap the leak? Disconcerting as well is the ambiguous theological issue as to whether we have a moral duty to save wildlife affected by the spill, beyond the obvious economic considerations. That is, something beyond the foot-dragging phrase of ”deserving of moral consideration”. Ultimately, this would open the door on other areas such as the treatment of animals for slaughter.

BP Parody www.bite.ca

What we do about ecology depends on our ideas of the people-nature relationship. More science and more technology are not going to get us out of the present ecological crisis until we find a new religion or rethink our old one. Possibly we should ponder the greatest radical in Christian history since Christ; Saint Francis of Assisi. The prime miracle of Saint Francis is the fact he did not end at the stake, as many of his equally passionate and humanistic followers did.

Saint Francis was so clearly heretical that a general of the Franciscan order, Saint Bonaventure, a great and perceptive Christian, tried to suppress the early accounts of Franciscanism. The key to an understanding of Francis is his belief  in the virtue of humility, not merely for the individual but for man as a species. Francis tried to depose man from his rule over creation and to set up a democracy of all God’s creatures. For him, the ant is no longer simply a homily for the lazy, nor are flames a sign of the thrust of the soul toward union with God; now they are Brother Ant and Sister Fire, praising the Creator in their own ways , as Brother man does in his.

Later commentators have said that Francis preached to the birds as a rebuke to men who would not listen. The records do not read so; he urged the little birds to praise God, and in spiritual ecstasy they flapped their wings and chirped rejoicing. Legends of saints, especially the Irish saints, have long told of their dealings with animals but always, it appears, to show their human dominance over creatures. With Francis it is different. The land around Gubbio in the Apenines was being ravaged by a fierce wolf. Saint Francis, says the legend, talked to the wolf and persuaded him of the errors of his ways. The wolf repented , died in the odor of sanctity, and was buried in consecrated ground.

What Sir Steven Runciman calls ” the Franciscan doctrine of the animal soul” was quickly stamped out. Quite possibly it was in part inspired, consciously or unconsciously, by the belief in reincarnation held by the Cathar heretics who at that time abounded in Italy and southern France, and who presumably had got it originally from India. It is significant that at just the same moment, about 1200, traces of metempsychosis are found also in western Judaism, in the Provencal Cabbala. But francis held neither to transmigration of souls nor to pantheism. His view of nature and of man rested on a unique sort of pan-psychism of all things animate and inanimate, designed for the glorification of their transcendent Creator, who, in the ultimate gesture of cosmic humility, assumed flesh, lay helpless in a manger, and died on a scaffold.

The present increasing disruption of the global environment, and long-time problem, is the product of a dynamic technology and science that were originating in the same Western medieval world against which Saint Francis was rebelling in so original a way. Their growth cannot be understood historically, apart from distinctive attitudes toward nature that are deeply grounded in Christian dogma. The fact that most people do not think of these attitudes as Christian, or Judeo-Christian is irrelevant . No new set of basic values has been accepted in our society to displace those of Christianity. Hence, we will continue to have a worsening ecologic crisis until we reject the Christian axiom that nature has no reason for existence save to serve man; the implied meaning is that nature is a pagan conception, the antithesis of which means its subservience is ideologically imperative.

The greatest spiritual revolutionary in Western history, Saint Francis, proposed what he thought was an alternative Christian view of nature and man’s relation to it; he tried to substitute the idea of the equality of all creatures, including man, for the idea of man’s limitless rule over creation. And he failed. Both our present science and our present technology are so tinctured with orthodox Christian ( and Jewish ) arrogance toward nature that no solution for our ecologic crisis can be expected from them alone. Since the roots of our trouble are so largely religious, the remedy must also be essentially religious, whether we call it that or not.

There has to be some effort to rethink and to re-feel our nature and destiny. The profoundly religious, but heretical, sense of the primitive Franciscans for the spiritual autonomy of all parts of nature has clearly pointed a direction that has yet to be embarked upon to any meaningful degree. There have been many calls to action, but the specific proposals have over the past forty years seemed too partial, palliative and negative. The simplest solutions have been to revert of a romanticized past; a ”wilderness area” mentality that advocates deep freezing an ecology as it was before the first cigarette butt got rubbed out.

Science was traditionally aristocratic, speculative, and intellectual in intent; technology was lower class , empirical and action oriented. The quite sudden fusion of these two toward the middle of the nineteenth-century , seems related to the slightly prior and contemporary democratic revolutions which by reducing social barriers, tended to assert a functional unity of brain and hand. Our ecologic crisis is the product of an emerging, entirely novel, democratic culture. The issue is whether a democratized world can survive its own implications. Presumably it cannot unless we rethink our axioms.

”It’s not remarkable that St. Francis would move small worms to the side of the path, even though Thomas of Solano, historian and companion, mentions it in his writings. What is remarkable is how much we make reference to that today as something extraordinary. I think St. Francis would find it remarkable that we do, as well. It’s an indicator of how far removed.. .how much we’ve become separated from our brothers and sisters of creation. To care for the worm lest it becomes trampled is a neighborly act, and not necessarily uncommon to caring people today. St. Francis cared for even the tiniest of creatures, not only because he came to know them as neighbors, but he recognized each one as “an imprint of the Most High.” If we came to know, love, and care for God’s creatures as St. Francis did, the birds would flock to us as well. Stake your life on nature, and she’ll stake her life on you. We do live in the Kingdom, if only we could see beyond the shallow facade of materialism to find value as St. Francis found value.( Charles Spencer )

”Francis forbade his followers to cut down a whole tree. Part needed to be left intact so that new sprouts could bud. Until recently, a Franciscan needed permission from the provincial before cutting down a tree. Francis spent the last years of his life in the wilderness.
Saint Francis represents a watershed in the development of Christian views of nature. Some spiritualities after him flow from him. Others, such as the Rheinland mystics, continue a Neoplatonic tradition. …What is unique to Francis is that he is the first known person within the Christian tradition to exhibit a nature mysticism. Previous ascetics were ambivalent. They saw the natural world too much as the realm of demonic powers. For Francis, his union with nature became a mode of God’s communication of himself to humanity and humanity’s union with God through a perceived presence in the physical world.” Start by doing what’s necessary; then do what’s possible; and suddenly you are doing the impossible.
-St. Francis de Assisi