Toward an Ecology of Transfiguration: Orthodox Christian Perspectives on Environment, Nature, and Creation

Through Creation to the Creator

86 Hurt not the earth, neither the sea, nor the trees. —Revelation 7:3 The saints embrace the whole world with their love. —St. Silouan the Athonite (1938) I “Love the Trees” On the Holy Mountain of Athos, the monks sometimes put up beside the forest paths special signposts offering encouragement or warning to the pilgrim as he passes. One such notice used to give me particular pleasure . Its message was brief and clear: “Love the trees.” Fr. Amphilochios (d. 1970), the geronta or “elder” on the island of Patmos when I first stayed there, would have been in full agreement. “Do you know,” he said, “that God gave us one more commandment, which is not recorded in Scripture? It is the commandment ‘love the trees.’” Whoever does not love trees, so he believed, does not love God. “When you plant a tree,” he insisted , “you plant hope, you plant peace, you plant love, and you will receive God’s blessing.” An ecologist long before ecology had become fashionable, when hearing confessions of the local farmers he used to assign to them as penance the task of planting a tree. During the long summer drought, he himself went round the island watering the young trees. His example and Through Creation to the Creator Metropolitan Kallistos (Ware) of Diokleia T H RO U G H C R E AT I O N TO T H E C R E ATO R 87 influence have transformed Patmos: photographs of the hillside near the Cave of the Apocalypse, taken at the start of the twentieth century, show bare and barren slopes; today there is a thick and flourishing wood. Fr. Amphilochios was by no means the first spiritual teacher in the modern Greek tradition to recognize the importance of trees. Two centuries earlier , the Athonite monk St. Kosmas the Aetolian, martyred in 1779, used to plant trees as he traveled around Greece on his missionary journeys, and in one of his “prophecies” he stated, “People will remain poor, because they have no love for trees.” We can see that prophecy fulfilled today in all too many parts of the world. Another saying attributed to him—not in this instance about trees—is equally applicable to the present age: “The time will come when the devil puts himself inside a box and starts shouting; and his horns will stick out from the roof-tiles.” That often comes to my mind as I survey the skyline in London, with its serried ranks of television masts. “Love the trees.” Why should we do so? Is there indeed a connection between love of trees and love of God? How far is it true that a failure to reverence and honor our natural environment—animals, trees, earth, fire, air, and water—is also, in an immediate and soul-destroying way, a failure to reverence and honor the living God? Let us begin with two visions of a tree. The World as Sacrament; or, A Tale of Two Trees Have we not known, each of us, certain moments when we have started with sudden amazement at the lines before us on the printed page, words of poetry or prose that, once read, have forever remained luminous in our memory ? One such moment happened to me at the age of eighteen as I was reading that magical anthology by Walter de la Mare, Behold, This Dreamer, and came across a passage from the book of Edward Carpenter (1844–1929), Pagan and Christian Creeds. “Has any one of us ever seen a tree?” asks Carpenter , and he answers, “I certainly do not think that I have—except most superficially.” He continues: That very penetrating observer and naturalist, Henry David Thoreau, tells us that he would often make an appointment to visit a certain tree, miles away—but what he saw when he got there, he does not say. Walt Whitman, also a keen observer . . . mentions that, in a dream trance he actually once saw “his favorite trees step out and promenade up, down and around, very curiously.” Once the present writer seemed to have a 88 M E T RO P O L I TA N K A L L I S TO S  W A R E  O F D I O K L E I A partial vision of a tree. It was a beech, standing somewhat isolated, and still leafless in...