A Theology for the Earth: The Contributions of Thomas Berry and Bernard Lonergan

SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS

SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS JLhis work originated in a desire to discover the relationship between two urgencies of our times. The first was the ecological crisis and the second, the reform of Christian theology. The preliminary, largely untested insights that moved the project into actuality were that (1) as Thomas Berry had loudly and clearly proclaimed, the ecological crisis was also religious; it had religious roots and it required a religious solution, and (2)a theology that did not serve to increase hope in the possibility of authentically negotiating the major crises of our time had already died. Bernard Lonergan seemed to corroborate this latter premonition, and also to meet the challenge with the assertion that theology can still be an effective mediator of hope in the contemporary world. Hence, we began with an investigation into the formation of Berry's convictions that the ecological crisis was first and foremost a cultural crisis requiring a cultural solution. Religion, for Berry, operated most prominently at the level of culture. Chapters one to four traced the genetic development of his thought from his early study of Vico to his consuming interest in the ecological crisis. We found that Berry inherited from Vico (or found resonant with him) a methodology of cultural history and a counter-Enlightenment stance. Like Vico, he displayed a penchant for large synthetic views and 196 A THEOLOGY FOR THEEARTH organizing principles. He saw history as a succession of identifiable ages, which in their states of decline required some kind of return to the primal stages of humankind for the renewal and rejuvenation of history itself. The emergence of new ages were not merely adaptations of human ingenuity, but were characterized by a radical change in human consciousness. Thus, Berry would later postulate the emergence in our times of the Ecological Age (Ecozoic Era),accompanied by a psychic transformation that would be expressed in human culture as a new contextual story. This transformation would require some kind of recovery of primal sensibilities. If Vico was the precursor of a counter-Enlightenment tradition, as scholars maintain, then Berry was its inheritor. Throughout his career he found support for his developing ideas in a smorgasbordof groups and individuals (neo-Platonists, Renaissance Platonists, alchemists , romantics, transcendentalists, natural historians, humanists and existentialists) in the Western tradition, whose common trait was sometimes not much more than their insistence on an alternative to developing mainstream Enlightenment notions. They were anti-materialist, anti-empiricist and anti-mechanist (many were organicist and idealist) in their conceptions of the natural world. Because of their high valuation of nature, Berry saw in them forerunners of the contemporary ecological movements. That he would find support (andperhaps solace) in the alternative visions of the past was not surprising in the light of his own conviction that Western society was not working. Berry's interest in world religions grew, he admitted, from his desire to find out why Western society and Christianity were not working. His writings in that area attest to his concern that religious scholarship be effective in society. He interpreted the role of religions within cultures as existential meaning-making. He consistently challenged Christianity and theological scholarship, in particular, to examine the religions of the world with a view to self-criticism and fruitful collaboration for the sake of renewing contemporary culture. Notions of plenitude and organicism were organizing principles for his own conception of the interrelationship among religions. His particular fondness for the religion of the North American natives attested to his Vichian conviction that primal consciousness held a wisdom that was lost, but urgently needed, in the present world. He concluded from his investigations into religion that the contemporary world needed a myth that would guide it and motivate it as the religious myth of the past had done for former times. Aware from the beginning of the hegemonic role modern science commanded in Western society, Berry found in Teilhard de Chardin a SUMMARY ANDCONCLUSIONS 197 religious interpretation of science. Furthermore, Teilhard, like Berry, was concerned with the growing irrelevance of religion, in particular Christianity, to the contemporary world. Even further, he had composed a modern story, a grand narrative, that reinterpreted both mainstream science and Christian beliefs. This story, Berry felt, was in the tradition not only of the great myths of all the religions, but also of Augustine's City of God and Dante's Divine Comedy. These, in his view, had been epochal...