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186 The Apocalypse of St. John has been regarded as the supreme symbol of the decisive cultural shift that occurred with the advent of Christianity : a shift from nature to history. The problem of the environment—the violation of nature, its unrestrained exploitation by the human race—is judged to be a necessary consequence of the priority that Christianity gave to history , subordinating nature to an eschatological perspective that entailed its final disappearance for the sake of an eagerly awaited spiritual “Kingdom.” We are speaking of a cultural shift because Christianity was preceded by ancient Greece. To the Greeks, the idea of the historicity of nature was unknown . The problem of a beginning in time and a predetermined end did not arise. Nature constituted the fullness of being: a beautiful structure of harmony and order that rendered it a cosmo-cosmema, an ordered ornament. A perfect universe, harmoniously arranged, with a given absolute rationality, it even encompassed the reality of God, who constituted a part of its general seemliness. Given that the world was eternal, it could not have any goal other than itself. It could only be. And the greatest thing that human beings could attain was to contemplate and to imitate the perfection of the cosmos. Knowledge of the cosmos, episteme, was identified with virtue, the serene prudence that came from participating in the universal “common mind” or logos. The collective imitation of the harmony of the cosmos formed “the microcosm of the city,” the common effort of political life, which did not differ from the art of the composer or the painter, since it aimed at the same imitation of the laws of the rationality that beautified the universe. What was of the first importance to the Greeks was not becoming or the necessary, was not potentiality and will, but being and its rational plenitude. Existential versus Regulative Approaches: The Environmental Issue as an Existential and Not a Canonical Problem Christos Yannaras E X I S T E N T I A L V E R S U S R E G U L AT I V E A P P ROAC H E S 187 Modern Europe saw the appearance of Christianity—chiefly through the eyes of Hegel, Fichte, and Schelling—as a radical break in the Greek view of nature. The God of the Judeo-Christian tradition is outside the cosmos. He himself creates the cosmos, giving it a specific temporal beginning and directing it toward a preordained end. Now it is history that has priority, not nature; the becoming of nature, not the being of nature. This historicity of nature is at the outset devalued because it is dominated by the consequence of the Fall and sin of humanity. Human beings are called upon to participate in history—in God’s plan for the salvation of humanity—and they succeed in the measure in which they are liberated from nature and the necessity of the laws of the Fall, which held sway over nature. In this perspective, the book of the Apocalypse of St. John was interpreted as a radical and final condemnation of nature, since the expected eschatological “Kingdom” is announced as a nightmare of physical destruction and the collapse of the entire universe. Thus the world is presented as a simple episode in a history that essentially undermines and finally destroys it. The expression “this world” becomes synonymous with the expression “this age” and signifies a particular historical period, an age that is inimical and contrary to the “age that is to come” of the Kingdom of God. Was the Christian view of nature in reality so radically contrary to the Greek view? Let us put this question to one side for the moment, for I should like to address the second vital shift in our encounter within nature, which has been accomplished within the framework of our modern attitudes, our contemporary culture. This culture was founded by the philosophy of the Enlightenment on a polemical opposition to metaphysics. The opposition expressed a historical need, after the painful medieval experience of centuries, over the course of which metaphysics was transformed into a dominant ideology of an integral character. The opposition of our modern culture to metaphysics—the shedding of religious integralism—appeared as an enthusiastic affirmation of nature and the potentialities of nature. It was concerned above all with the knowledge of physical reality, not with its metaphysical supports. It was concerned with humanity...

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