Laudato Si’ and the Rise of Green Thomism

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Laudato Si’ (2015) IS an extraordinary encyclical.¹ Through it, the Holy Father teaches, in a manner not previously specified, a central thesis of the Christian faith: because everything is created by our loving Father, we inhabit an earth that we share with his creatures. Thus, the gift of this beautiful earth is not to be ignored or regretted; this world is, rather, the central setting in which the Christian life is to be attentively lived and joyfully pursued.

The putative subject matter of Laudato Si’ is the ecological concerns that have emerged at the conclusion of the twentieth century as a result of the practical abuses consonant with industrialization and modern development. But Lauadato Si’ is much more than a meditation taking aim at environmental practices and policies. It is a magisterial call to recover creation itself and, in recovering creation, to discover the moral fabric that binds us to ourselves, each other, each creature, and the Creator. Indeed, there is scarcely an aspect of contemporary life that is not addressed in some fashion in the encyclical. Its breadth, however, does not suggest anything trivial. Instead, it affirms the foundational character of the discussion the Holy Father seeks to undertake.

Taken as a set of practical observations in isolation from the broader theological implications, Laudato Si’ does not constitute an extraordinary moment. It merely re-iterates some of the conclusions and findings of both the scientific and ethical communities. And yet, when read against the broader claims of theological reasoning, Laudato Si’ marks the occasion of historic doctrinal development.

Simply stated, the Pope’s call for a comprehensive “integral ecology” is essentially a call to confirm a comprehensive vision of the cosmos and our vocation within it. It is a mandate for the natural law tradition in the twenty-first century and beyond—not the rarified, conceptualist accounts one sometimes encounters in the scholarship of the post-modern milieu,² but the fully enfleshed, perennial articulation that sees the spontaneous inclinatio of human aspirations within the movement of a universal trahi ad deo expressed in the drama of every creature’s living, where God is both inspiration and end of the entire cosmos. In other words, Laudato Si’ is the manifesto for “Green Thomism.”³

The Holy Father’s repeated claims that “everything is connected” and that no creature is, therefore, superfluous are not mere sentimental, nostalgic, or poetic fancy; his intention is to declare a fundamental doctrinal claim: “Nature is nothing other than a certain kind of art, namely God’s art, impressed upon things, whereby those things are moved to a determinate end” (§80).⁴ For, God is the Creator of all things, and thus, “each creature has its own purpose” (§84). Moreover, “the entire material universe speaks of God’s love; … the universe as a whole, in all its manifold relationships, shows forth the inexhaustible riches of God” (§86).

Laudato Si’ consistently affirms a theology of “nature” as a divinely arranged, ordered complex of organic wholes, each with its own note of intelligence, together forming a symphony of meaning in motion—a theology that has been honed over the centuries through the Church’s repeated engagement with its central questions. Whether in its encounter with the Manichaeism of the fourth century, the Albigensians of the thirteenth, or the reductive materialists of the twenty-first, the Church’s consistent witness has been on behalf of the order, beauty, and goodness of creation.⁵ Francis’s encyclopedic appeal to witnesses from the ancient tradition (as well as more recent bishops’ statements from around the globe) demonstrates that Laudato Si’ is the magisterial expression of that core conviction in the twenty-first century. Its central significance lies in the clear affirmation that the native habitat of the human person as a spiritual creature is precisely this material cosmos of organic beings. The human person, whose dignity lies within a spiritual destiny, is nevertheless a creature of this ordered earth—a living, organic being among other organic beings whose immortal soul by nature transcends the cosmos and yet, by grace...