by · July 14, 2024
The deep grief that many people experience due to environmental devastation—grief not just for “the planet” in the abstract but for ourselves and the people and places we love—is an object of wide discussion these days, at least among people not inclined to deny or minimize the problem. (That isn’t to say that everyone who doesn’t personally experience this grief is inclined to deny or minimize the problem. Not everybody reacts the same emotionally to this because not everybody reacts the same emotionally to anything.) In the middle decades of the twentieth century, Christian writers in English-speaking countries produced a large body of writing that wrote about this grief; much of this writing seems to prefigure Pope Francis’s ecological vision. These writers lamented the rupture between human beings and other forms of life. Rather than discursive academic theology, much of this writing was fiction, devotional or meditative prose, or academic writing in other fields. Examples might be C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, as well as a speculative description of the Fall in The Problem of Pain; J.R.R. Tolkien’s remark in “On Fairy-Stories” that the appeal of stories about talking animals “derives from one of the primal ‘desires’ that lie near the heart of Faërie: the desire of men to hold communion with other living things;”[1] and William Stringfellow’s assertion that circus acts involving animals are “among the few coherent images of the eschatological realm to which people still have ready access.”[2] These ideas were motivated not by environmentalist or animal-rights concerns as we think of them today—in particular, most environmentalists would be, and are, horrified by Stringfellow’s enthusiasm for the circus—but by the intuition that something about a correct understanding of humanity’s relationship to the rest of the created universe had been lost in technological civilizations.
North American and Western European societies have more recently regained a sense of morally relevant connection between humanity and nature not only through shifts within Christianity but also through influence from other religions and even popular science fiction and fantasy stories. Some of these stories have been by Christian writers such as Tolkien and Lewis, but many have not. When the actor William Shatner, best known as Star Trek’s Captain Kirk, went to space in 2021, he felt overpowering grief for the natural world. His later writing about this feeling made international news; some news outlets reported the story in august, numinous terms.[3] Tolkien’s “primal desire” became a front-page news story through the experiences of a Jewish actor best known for a role in a series that famously advances broadly secular, leftist values. This is not to be deprecated. Shatner and Captain Kirk are key figures in our imaginative culture, as for that matter are Tolkien, Lewis, and their creations. Theology should take notice when important cultural figures weigh in on issues of moral or religious concern. In this case, Shatner’s description of his experience in space gives us an opportunity to reopen the issue of humanity’s moral divorce from nature. His account of “the lifeforce that I saw coming from the planet—the blue, the beige and the white”[4] imparts a poetic, artistic, and mass-cultural cachet to this work in theology, which is, unfortunately, currently a niche field that is widely seen as uninterested in real problems.
And so I think that these feelings can be an important touchstone for us as we set about situating this environmental consciousness within Catholic ethics,[5] as can a strong sense of what ways of thinking we need to avoid. There is only so far that one can take this “desire….to hold communion with other living things” within traditional Christian theology. The strong distinction that Christian belief makes between human beings and animals is often misunderstood; the theological problem with John Ames from Marilynne Robinson’s novel Gilead baptizing a litter of kittens as a young boy, or with worrying overmuch about whether or not one will see one’s childhood dog in heaven, is not that cats and dogs “don’t have souls” but that they don’t have the same relationship that humans do with the Fall and thus with the Incarnation. Nevertheless, the strong distinction is there, and traditionally has led to a reluctance among Christians to think of other forms of life seriously as subjects for moral theology. (C.S. Lewis’s fondness for animals, once again, does yeoman’s work in inspiring an interesting analysis of this in his fiction; his pre-Narnia trilogy of science fiction novels has whole species of unfallen, nonhuman beings that have the same kind of relationship to God that humans do.)
Even when we do think of other forms of life seriously in a moral way, we are presented with a body of thought in secular ecological study that at times is so focused on “systems” that it manifests a chilly indifference to individuals’ lives. Three key texts that have this problem in a big way are Garrett Hardin’s essays “The Tragedy of the Commons” and “Lifeboat Ethics” and Paul and Anne Ehrlich’s book The Population Bomb. Hardin and the Ehrlichs were part of a tradition of gloomy disbelief that the environmental crises of the industrial and post-industrial age can ever be solved except through coercive limits on human activities, especially human reproduction. In Hardin’s case, this extended to explicit support for eugenics, hardline anti-immigration views, and flirtations with white supremacism. Multiple commentators, mostly on the political left, have concluded that Hardin was a fascist.[6]
In the Hardin-Ehrlich account of environmental ethics and protection of the natural world, the sheer amount of human activity on the planet, especially in terms of total population size, is a problem to be solved. The most commonly suggested means of addressing this problem, to avoid doing violence to an abstract system “nature,” involve doing violence to one’s fellow human beings instead—coercive control, abortion (up to and including forced abortion), disproportionate impacts on the developing world in order to maintain developed-world standards of living. Alternatives exist; alternatives must exist.
As Pope Francis has said, “[a]s stewards of God’s creation, we are called to make the earth a beautiful garden for the human family. When we destroy our forests, ravage our soil and pollute our seas, we betray that noble calling.”[7] God gave us Eden to till and keep; we were given dominion-as-stewardship, so one metaphor for our abuse of this stewardship might be that of the poacher. Poaching fundamentally is an abuse of just this stewardship, of the king’s, the state’s, right to concede and regulate the taking of animal life. Similarly, there is much that God allows us if, and only if, we keep up our ends of the covenant relationships into which He enters with us.[8]
Yet poaching, unpopular as it is among many, is often undertaken for what are themselves good reasons—like, in our metaphor, the desire to keep up a decent standard of living for oneself and one’s loved ones without resorting to a cold-blooded Hardinian denial of this to others. Medieval and Early Modern England spent hundreds of years with a huge swath of its landmass designated as “royal forests,” which were the exclusive hunting preserve of the monarch and, by invitation, other aristocrats. These forests had special legal régimes, the forest law and the game laws, which were separate from and often much harsher than England’s common law. This was in spite of the widespread view that hunting was, or should be, “the most universal of all sports, one of the most common varieties of social intercourse,”[9] which made its restriction to the élite rulers of English society enormously unpopular. Indeed, outside the royal forests the general direction of medieval English hunting law was towards a more libertarian approach; the thirteenth-century legal scholar Henry de Bracton was particularly influential in insisting that wild animals, ferae naturae, were ownerless in any part of the country where the owner was not expressly the monarch. Even so, “to some medieval writers the royal forests seemed to bedeck the whole country, as they did the whole county of Essex,” and even Bracton defended the practice of granting noblemen local hunting monopolies in franchise form.[10] The chorus of the English folk song “The Lincolnshire Poacher” surely expresses a common sentiment during the periods of the forest and game laws’ harshest enforcement:
Bad luck to every magistrate that lives in Lincoln-sheer (sic);
Success to every poacher that wants to sell a hare;
Bad luck to every gamekeeper that will not sell his deer:—
Oh! ‘tis my delight of a shiny night, in the season of the year.[11]
Opposition to real or perceived restrictions on hunting remains a more salient political issue in both the United Kingdom (the Kingdom of England’s successor state) and the United States than polite opinion often realizes. The United States has a large and powerful lobby in favor of minimally-conditioned individual rights to own and use firearms, one that has roots in the country’s hunting culture even though it is now primarily known for interventions on other issues.[12] The United Kingdom’s Hunting Act 2004, which banned most hunting with dogs in England and Wales, sparked large public protests and is one of only seven pieces of legislation ever to have been forced through by the House of Commons over the veto of the House of Lords.
This isn’t limited to cultural angst in countries like America and Britain, either. The currently well-known case of Delia and Mark Owens illustrates the Hardinian problems with trying to crack down on our literal-and-metaphorical poacher even more clearly. The Owenses are American zoologists who for many years lived in the African nation of Zambia; latterly Delia became famous for writing the popular historical novel Where the Crawdads Sing. In an atmosphere of increased media interest around the release of a Where the Crawdads Sing movie adaptation in July 2022, several news outlets ran stories on the Owenses’ troubles with the Zambian government; both are still wanted for questioning in connection with the murder of a poacher in the country in 1996.[13] A justification for this might be that conservation of endangered species is imperative enough that a “by any means necessary” approach is merited. This argument can be sustained, but only on premises that are willing to accept or brush off violence against human beings. These are not premises acceptable to the Zambian government, which, its ability or willingness to enforce its own poaching laws aside, must be at least basically capable of preventing harm from coming to human Zambians in order to justify its own existence.[14] Nor is it obvious why countries like Zambia should have to continue with a lower standard of living now, merely because the developed world burned unconscionable amounts of coal earlier.
So laws regulating hunting were received as onerous and tyrannical for many centuries in England, are sometimes grumbled about but generally accepted as a normal part of the state’s legislative power in the contemporary US and UK, and strike a certain kind of developed-world do-gooder as if anything insufficient in curbing poaching in postcolonial countries like Zambia. Moreover this true of environmental laws more broadly as well, for most of the same reasons.
The middle category, contemporary developed democracies in which “the environment” is one regulatory issue among others, is remarkable for representing an almost complete abandonment of a once-widespread idea in the cultures concerned. I think if we recover some of this older sensibility we might be able to go in a direction on these issues closer to where Pope Francis, and the Church as a whole, tell us we ought. This is the intense and at times almost Stringfellovian concern that Medieval and Early Modern English legal scholars from Bracton onwards had with the forest and game laws as unique exercises of sovereign power. The same concern appears in Ancient Near Eastern texts, even the Bible (the wicked king Nimrod is “a mighty hunter before the Lord” according to Genesis 10:9), and in a curious anecdote in the medieval Japanese epic Heike monogatari:
During a visit to the Shinzen’en Garden, Emperor Daigo told a Chamberlain of Sixth Rank to fetch a heron he had seen standing by the lakeside. Although the Chamberlain had no notion of how to capture the bird, he walked toward it as commanded. The heron poised its wings for flight. “By imperial command!” the Chamberlain said. The heron crouched low without attempting to escape, and the Chamberlain picked it up and took it to the Emperor. “You are greatly to be commended for coming here as directed,” the Emperor said to it. “I decree that you be given Fifth Rank forthwith.” He wrote out a notice, “This bird is to be King of the Herons from now on.” Then he attached it to the creature’s neck and released it. He did not have any use for a heron; he had simply wanted to test the extent of an Emperor’s power.[15]
I would tentatively suggest that these incorporations of wild animals into the polity, in the sense of treating them as subject to (or even as expressions of) the sovereign’s authority, derive from the idea that there is more of a sacral element to political leadership than most people believe in today. If this is the case, then the concern does become religious; the ultimate sacral sovereign over the natural world is God Himself, as the creation narratives make clear, as God’s speech to Job out of the whirlwind makes even clearer.
The King of the Herons in the passage above is a unique individual with a unique quasi-sacral relationship to the human monarch. This personalized understanding of animals as components of both the state and the cosmos, just as human persons are, comes up again and again in many kinds of traditional religious sensibilities. Animals themselves can, in (some versions of) a Shinto understanding of the cosmos, reflect divine as well as natural personalities. The Ainu, an indigenous group in Northern Japan whose religious practices are of a more shamanistic-adjacent nature than is the Japanese religious mainstream, have a custom of sacrificing bears in which the bear is not sacrificed to the gods but is a god, with its soul freed by the sacrifice to join the other gods.[16] In the more mainstream Shinto religiosity of the rest of Japan, animals were still long conceived of in a sacral way. At some point in the Heian period (794-1185), a person was punished with exile for killing a fox near the important Ise Shrine;[17] the perception must have existed by that point that specific animals could be shinshi, divine messengers of particular Shinto kami (gods).[18] Well into the twentieth century an ethnographic dictionary claimed confidently that there was “still a lot of faith in sharks as shinshi as an object of popular piety to [the fisherman god] Ebisu.”[19] Also in the first half of the twentieth century the Irish writer William George Aston claimed, without citation of Japanese sources, that:
Animals may be worshiped for their own sakes, as wonderful, terrible, or uncanny beings. The tiger, the serpent, and the wolf are for this reason called Kami. But there are no shrines in their honour, and they have no regular cult. A more common reason for honouring animals is their association with some deity as his servants and messengers.[20]
Aston may have been thinking, in part, of a common etymological gloss or pun in Japanese, in which the similar words o-kami (kami with a “beautifying prefix”) and ōkami (wolf) are interpreted to impart to wolves a certain numinous quality.
More recent Shinto texts express a theological approach to this topic that has begun to hew ever more closely to the “holistic” or “systems-based.” Yamakage Motohisa, whose book The Essence of Shinto is widely read in English translation in the West, describes the relationship between the gods and the rest of the cosmos in a way that reads like a formalized pantheistic or panentheistic religious philosophy. “The spiritual dimension, the world of Kami, permeates all life forms, including humans, animals, and plants.”[21] Mauro Arrighi tells us that the Shinto priest Tanahashi Nobuyuki “ultimately sees Shinto closer to pantheism than to shamanism.”[22] The 2007 apologetical work Shintō no jōshiki ga wakaru kojiten (A Small Encyclopedia of General Knowledge of Shinto) by the Japanese nationalist scholar Mitsuhashi Takeshi gives the following explanation of the relationship between humans, animals, and the gods:
Human beings sustain our lives by eating birds, beasts, fish, et cetera. Moreover, birds, beasts, fish, et cetera themselves live by eating various other lives. Despite this, religions the world over teach “thou shalt not kill.” Humans can see the paradox here, but birds, beasts, fish, et cetera cannot. Humans are unlike birds, beasts, fish, et cetera in that we can see the reason of things; consequently we can tell good from evil. The gods show an absolute confidence in human beings. Therefore, if you violate their trust, the gods will exact a severe judgment upon you.[23]
These formulations show clear influence from global academic philosophical categories; the third also shows Jewish and/or Christian influence in its assessment of the “divine image” in which human beings are created (this is the title of the section in which the passage I translate and quote above appears).[24] Pope Benedict XVI could have made parts of the argument that Mitsuhashi makes in his encyclopedia.[25]
The notion of kami has more in common with numina in the early stages of ancient Roman paganism than it does with many more recent Western notions of godhood. Postwar books from Western academic publishers by authors such as Janet Goodwin, Carmen Blacker, and Barbara Thornberry (expressly following Blacker) have drawn the connection and indeed used numina to explain kami to Western academic readerships.[26] The example par excellence of an individuated, numinous animal in the early strata of Roman mythology is the she-wolf who nurses Romulus and Remus, but there is also the stag that Ascanius shoots and badly wounds in Book VII of the Aeneid. Virgil, writing at the beginning of the imperial period, reaches deep back into Rome’s legendary prehistory for his material, and gives us a passage about a tame deer known for by his closeness to a girl called Silvia. Ascanius, in shooting this stag, precipitates the war between the locals and the Trojan refugees led by Aeneas.[27]
The stag is not a god, but it is an individuated being within the scaffolding of the story, intimately connected with the human character Silvia. Even Classically-influenced works usually do not take this tack today. Ursula K. Le Guin’s Lavinia does a good job of reconstructing the religious world of early Rome (so far as that is known), but other novels dealing with Roman religion, especially mass-market fiction, treat the Roman gods more like the Greek ones. The Greek gods are more personal in themselves yet also less liable to occur in immanent aspects of the environment. One even sees popular fiction poking fun at the idea of individuated sacred animals, treating it as a low-stakes distraction from the higher-stakes and more serious holistic vision of the environment. Catholic authors get in on it sometimes; Tamsyn Muir is one recent example.[28] Evidently the stag of Silvia is not what he used to be. This is reasonable; “nature” is a system, a whole, not a bunch of individual animals some of which are “important” and “sacred” and some of which are not.
Modern environmental theology, in which the sacral character of specific animals such as the shinshi and the stag of Silvia is displaced in favor of a concern with whole systems and biomes, owes much to the Franciscan tradition.[29] While Francis of Assisi himself held a version of the ancient individuated concern with natural entities, as early as Bonaventure a few decades after Francis’s death the Franciscan theological tradition had started to think of a complete, unified nature that was, in itself, in a morally significant relationship with God.[30]
Crucially, the human and the natural have still not been entirely divorced in this line of thinking; they are both “creation,” Bonaventure’s writing on which could be mistaken for a paraphrase of Augustine’s work on the same subject.[31] Bonaventure believed, as had Augustine, that many of the truths of Christianity could be derived from examining the created world, but that in order to do this successfully one had to start by looking at the created world itself with love. In addition to the Patristic sources and Psalm 148 this also brings us once more to Job. God’s legitimacy as the “king” in our poacher metaphor rests, in part, on the awe-inspiring—and, yes, stupefying—characteristics of the universe He created. “Can you bind the chains of the Pleiades, or loose the cords of Orion?” makes a great argument for God’s majesty and kingship, but only if one sees having created the stars as an impressive and worthy feat to begin with. Bonaventure’s contribution is to take this love for nature/creation, a love that Francis had expressed more exuberantly than perhaps anyone else in history, and use it to animate the structured frameworks of scholastic philosophy.
Since the dawn of widespread awareness that humans can and often do precipitate environmental crises,[32] it has become clearer and clearer that the individuated shinshi or stag-of-Silvia model of sacral nature is simply not helpful in practically solving the problem. The now-familiar word “biodiversity” appeared at some point in the 1980s. The biologist E.O. Wilson published the book Biodiversity in 1988.[33] Over the succeeding decades the term and concept became more and more prevalent in the scientific and public consciousness due to the efforts of advocates like David B. Wake and the late Stephen Jay Gould (whose own work was concerned with the decidedly non-sacred-seeming snail). Today it is one of the cores of conservation theory and advocacy.
Yet a problem emerges: humans are part of the overall ecosystem—creation—and as biological entities are subject to the same biological pressures as any other life form, but applying the concept of biodiversity to humans leads in all sorts of sinister directions, denying both human individuality and universal human fraternity. Hardin’s treatment of humans as a sort of weed to be ruthlessly pruned back (all at the direction of Stanford PhDs and people similar to them, of course) was based on somewhat earlier understandings, which is part of why its racism is so crass and difficult to dispute or ignore. Wilson’s leanings in the same direction were subtler and went largely unnoticed during his lifetime. After his death in 2021 it emerged that he had written extensively (but secretly, due to his “fear of being called racist”)[34] in support of J. Philippe Rushton, a deceased Canadian psychologist best remembered for his obsession with race, intelligence, penis size, and (as he believed) correlations between the three.[35] Nor is this a peccadillo of one especially eminent and especially underhanded scientist. A pronounced racist undercurrent exists within the scientific community, especially around the issue of intelligence, which (perhaps because most scientists are intelligent themselves) is often given outsized salience as a morally relevant attribute, both by those advocating and by those opposing racist ideas concerning it. In 1994 two men named Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray published a book called The Bell Curve that has produced its own sub-tradition of preoccupation with this topic for the past three decades.[36] Seminal texts and organizations in this tradition include an editorial in support of Herrnstein and Murray called “Mainstream Science on Race and Intelligence;”[37] the Pioneer Fund, a foundation, later led by Rushton, that funded Herrnstein and Murray’s work; and the Murray-associated Human Biodiversity Institute, which in addition to its advocacy for far-right racial politics has also produced research purporting to support less generous policymaking towards LGBT people. One member, J. Michael Bailey, has gone so far as to argue that it would be morally acceptable for prospective parents to perform prenatal genetic selection (i.e. selective abortion) against (or, he concedes, for) potentially gay children, were such technologically possible.[38]
Why is a useful, helpful, and empirically correct idea as applied to nature so easy, or tempting, to exploit for violent purposes as applied to human beings? It is, simply put, because environmental morals needs to be “morals” first and “environmental” second. Something has been lost with the jettisoning of Silvia and her stag. We still need to be able to think about ourselves as, in the weightiest sense, imago Dei. We matter and our relationship with God matters, both individually and as a collective human family; otherwise, why would our abuse of that relationship, and of the stewardship that He gives to us as part of it, make as much of a difference as it does?
This essay represents the beginning, rather than the end, of a course of study and research that I have been doing into issues of stewardship, the environment, the person, and the conscience. It thus ends here somewhat abruptly. I continue to study this point and pray for God to illuminate me on the path to a right understanding of it.
❦
[1] J.R.R. Tolkien, Tree and Leaf (London: Allen & Unwin, 1964), 20.
[2] Quoted in Nathan Schneider, “The Biblical Circus of William Stringfellow,” Religion Dispatches, October 14, 2009, https://religiondispatches.org/the-biblical-circus-of-william-stringfellow/. Accessed July 14, 2024.
[3] Enrique Rivera, “William Shatner experienced profound grief in space. It was the ‘overview effect,’” NPR, October 23, 2022, https://www.npr.org/2022/10/23/1130482740/william-shatner-jeff-bezos-space-travel-overview-effect. Accessed July 14, 2024.
[4] Ibid., quoting William Shatner. Lack of serial comma sic.
[5] Or morals. Ethics is sometimes a synonym for morality, sometimes a word for the discipline of philosophy that attempts to study morality in a systematic way, sometimes a word for the specific series of moral questions raised by a particular topic (such as “business ethics,” “sexual ethics,” “scientific ethics,” and so forth), and sometimes a word for the moral approach adopted by a particular subculture, occupation, or other discrete group of people. Consistently using the word “ethics” in preference to “morals” can imply a somewhat less imperious and encompassing demand laid on the human person; it was in reference to this last usage that a friend of mine once pungently quipped that “ethics are morals for people too gutless to have them.”
[6] Alan Carter, A Radical Green Political Theory (London/New York: Routledge, 1999), 25; Murray Bookchin, “What is Social Ecology?,” in Environmental Ethics: Third Edition, ed. Michael Boylan (New York: Wiley, 2022), 74; Matto Mildenberger, “The Tragedy of the Tragedy of the Commons,” Scientific American 23 (2019); Michael Loadenthal, “Feral Fascists and Deep Green Guerillas: Infrastructural Attack and Accelerationist Terror,” Critical Studies on Terrorism Vol. 15, No. 1 (2022): 169-208.
[7] Francis, “Meeting with the young people in the sports field of Santo Tomás University,” January 18, 2015, https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/speeches/2015/january/documents/papa-francesco_20150118_srilanka-filippine-incontro-giovani.html. Accessed July 10, 2024.
[8] Ronald Hutton, following Gideon Bohak, makes the point that in the Hebrew Bible the only clear distinction between licit ritual practice and illicit sorcery or magic is whether or not the action in question has the approval of God and His temple priesthood. The Witch: A History of Fear, from Ancient Times to the Present (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2017), 52. There are many subjects on which this remains a key point for Christian, Jewish, and/or Islamic moral analysis, including and especially subjects of life and death.
[9] Roger B. Manning, Hunters and Poachers: A Social and Cultural History of Unlawful Hunting in England 1485-1640 (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1993), 59.
[10] William Perry Marvin, Hunting Law and Ritual in Medieval English Literature (Cambridge, England: D.S. Brewer, 2006), 107, citing Orderic Vitalis and Henry de Bracton. Bracton’s overall approach to legitimacy relies on a ruler gaining the right to kingly titles and prerogatives, including whatever relationship he was or was not supposed to have with a monopoly on hunting, by gaining and wielding power in a lawful manner. This has some affinities with the Confucian zhèngmíng concept, about which I wrote online, with full citations, in my essay “Polemic on the Rectification of Names,” Silicate Siesta, December 2, 2022, https://www.silicatesiesta.com/nonfiction/polemic-on-the-rectification-of-names. Accessed July 14, 2024.
[11] Robert Bell, Ancient Poems, Ballads, and Songs of the Peasantry of England, Taken Down from Oral Recitation and Transcribed from Private Documents, Rare Broadsides, and Scarce Publications (London: John W. Parker and Son, 1857), 217.
[12] Simon J. Bronner, Killing Tradition: Inside Hunting and Animal Rights Controversies (Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky, 2008), 55 and 235.
[13] Jeffrey Goldberg, “‘Where the Crawdads Sing’ Author Wanted for Questioning in Zambia,” The Atlantic, July 11, 2022, https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2022/07/where-the-crawdads-sing-delia-mark-owens-zambia-murder/670479/. Accessed July 10, 2024.
[14] The famous Weberian definition of the state, as an entity that forms and preserves a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence against people in its territory, is obviously at issue here; Zambia’s own statehood depends in part on its ability to enforce this monopoly by stopping or punishing people like the Owenses (or whoever actually murdered the poacher).
[15] Helen Craig McCullough, trans., The Tale of the Heike (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988), 175.
[16] The practice bears a clear similarity to one among the Nivkh of the nearby Russian-governed island Sakhalin. Bear worship, “arctolatry,” is a common feature in North Eurasian religions. See Chisato O. Dubreuil, “The Ainu and Their Culture: A Critical Twenty-First Century Assessment,” The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, Vol. 5, Issue 11 (November 2007); Valerie Chaussonnet, Native Cultures of Alaska and Siberia (Washington, DC: Arctic Studies Center, 1995), 35.
[17] Seki Yūji, Jisha ga kataru Hatashi no shōtai (The Character of the Hata Clan as Revealed by Temples and Shrines) (Tokyo: Shodensha Shinsho, 2018), 38. In Japanese.
[18] The exact nuances of kami are controversial in translation, but it is usually given as “gods.”
[19] Nakayama Tarō, Nihon minzokugaku jiten (Dictionary of Japanese Folkloristics) (Tokyo: Godo Shoin, 1941, reprinted 1998), 5. In Japanese; my translation.
[20] William George Aston, Shinto: The Way of the Gods (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1905), 63.
[21] Yamakage Motohisa, The Essence of Shinto: Japan’s Spiritual Heart, trans. Mineko S. Gillespie, Gerald L. Gillespie, and Yoshitsugu Komuro, ed. Paul de Leeuw and Aidan Rankin (Tokyo/New York/London: Kodansha International, 2006), 210. Yamakage is a controversial figure in Shinto studies due to his treatment of several peculiar ideas of his own tradition as if they are commonly held and to his authorship of several antisemitic books; the latter have not been translated into English and their existence is not widely known in the West.
[22] Mauro Arrighi, “Techno-Animism: Japanese Media Arts and Their Buddhist and Shinto Legacy,” in Spirits and Animism in Contemporary Japan: The Invisible Empire, ed. Fabio Rambelli (London/New York/Oxford/New Delhi/Sydney: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), 151.
[23] Mitsuhashi Takeshi, Shintō no jōshiki ga wakaru kojiten (A Small Encyclopedia of General Knowledge of Shinto) (Tokyo: PHP Research Institute, 2007), section “Kami no gazō.” In Japanese; my translation.
[24] I use the expression “Judeo-Christian,” which is currently out of favor for some good reasons, consciously, for the same reasons given in footnote 20. The “divine image” concept of humanity comes from the very first chapter of Genesis.
[25] See e.g. the then-cardinal’s analysis of factory farming in Joseph Ratzinger and Peter Seewald, God and the World: A Conversation with Peter Seewald, trans. Henry Taylor (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2002), 789.
[26] Janet R. Goodwin, Alms and Vagabonds: Buddhist Temples and Popular Patronage in Medieval Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1994), 50; Carmen Blacker, The Catalpa Bow: A Study of Shamanistic Practices in Japan (Abingdon-on-Thames, England: Taylor & Francis, 1975), 362; Barbara E. Thornbury, The Folk Performing Arts: Traditional Culture in Contemporary Japan (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1997), 170.
[27] Virgil, The Aeneid, trans. Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Everyman’s Library, 1992), 213-214. Note that the translation of uterus in this passage as “womb” in Robert Fagles’s more recent translation is incorrect; in this context it means “belly,” since the stag is definitionally male.
[28] See e.g. Tamsyn Muir, Nona the Ninth (New York: Tor, 2022), 222.
[29] Lynn White Jr., “The Historic Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis,” Science Vol. 155, No. 3767 (March 10, 1967), 1207. I believe that White is correct to observe the debt environmental thought owes to Franciscanism but incorrect about the nature of the distinction between Francis and his scholastic interpreters such as Bonaventure. For a more generous view of Bonaventure’s contributions see Jame Schaefer, Theological Foundations for Environmental Ethics: Reconstructing Patristic and Medieval Concepts (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2009), 77-78.
[30] Christopher M. Cullen, Bonaventure (Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2006), 128-133.
[31] Op. cit., Schaefer, 69-71 and 77.
[32] This is an awareness that goes back a bit further than most people realize; Americans in the early twentieth century, for example, were cognizant of the problem through the work of figures like John Muir, George Bucknam Dorr, and Charles W. Eliot.
[33] E.O. Wilson, Biodiversity (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 1988).
[34] Stacy Farina and Matthew Gibbons, “‘The Last Refuge of Scoundrels’: New Evidence of E. O. Wilson’s Intimacy with Scientific Racism,” Science for the People, February 1, 2022, https://magazine.scienceforthepeople.org/online/the-last-refuge-of-scoundrels/. Accessed July 14, 2024. The article quotes personal correspondence between E.O. Wilson and the Appeals Committee at the University of Western Ontario, April 4, 1990.
[35] Ibid.
[36] Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (New York: Free Press, 1994).
[37] Linda Gottfredson, “Mainstream Science on Intelligence,” The Wall Street Journal, December 13, 1994.
[38] Alice Dreger, “The Controversy Surrounding The Man Who Would Be Queen: A Case History of the Politics of Science, Identity, and Sex in the Internet Age,” Archives of Sexual Behavior Vol. 33, No. 3 (June 2008), 366-421. Note that Dreger is sympathetic to Bailey yet still concedes that this is his position.
Image from “Landscape with Ascanius Shooting the Stag of Silvia” by Claude Lorrain. From Wikimedia Commons.
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Nathan Turowsky is a native New Englander and now lives in Upstate New York. A lifelong fascination with religious ritual led him into first the Episcopal Church and then the Catholic Church. An alumnus of Boston University School of Theology and one of the relatively few Catholic alumni of that primarily Wesleyan institution, he is unmarried and works in the nonprofit sector. He writes at Silicate Siesta.
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