Dossier, Volume 14 #2: A Spiritual Sampler

New Respect for Women and the Earth

As defined by Toronto-based ecofeminist Heather Eaton, ecofeminism is "the study of, and resistance to, the associated exploitation and subjugation of women and the natural world." Christian ecofeminists are part of this global interdisciplinary movement; their work is based on sound research and can be credible to thoughtful Christians.

A basic insight of ecofeminism is its identification of the long and tortured connection between dominance over women and dominance over nature by powerful males. In the 1970s, a number of texts opened the question of this connection: Sherry Ortner's article "Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?" and books by Carolyn Merchant (The Death of Nature, 1980) and Susan Griffin (Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her, 1978).

Our English language betrays the link. Thus we have "virgin territory", "animal husbandry", "rape of the land." Conception was long viewed in terms of the woman being receptacle to the man's "seed." Anna Primavesi quotes a Greek wedding agreement: "The father says, `I give you this girl in the hope of a ploughing that will produce legitimate children.'" Language is not merely neutral description: it gives evidence of the power structures that prevail in any society. For example, we have "ministries of natural resources"; how different would their mandates be if they were called "ministries for listening to all beings"?

Christian ecofeminists have paid particular attention to analysing patriarchal structures and anti-earth elements in the Hebrew and Christian canonical texts as well as in the Greek thought that was woven in with the early Christian tradition. In the main, they accept Lynn White's famous charge that western Christianity has a lot to do with the present ecological crisis. Control of women and nature--both regarded as lower in a hierarchy than white males, who alone are the "image of God"--is a major strand in the tradition.

Thus, the natural world has no "soul"; in the ninth century, as Anna Primavesi reports, "a Church Council decided, by a majority of one, that women had souls"[FN 1]; the question of souls was again raised in reference to the indigenous peoples of the Americas during the Council of Trent in the sixteenth century. This strand led logically to the view that nature was something for human beings to use, and science and its partner technology were set free. But it was not only in science that all others than human beings were denigrated. The famous "Principle and Foundation" of St. Ignatius's Spiritual Exercises exhibits the same instrumentality: "Everything else on earth has been created for man's sake."

Important Christian ecofeminists such as Anna Primavesi, Rosemary Radford Ruether and Catharina J.M. Halkes are searching the Christian tradition not only for the roots of alienation from women and all the earth but also for strands in the tradition that suggest new interpretive readings.[FN 2]

Thus, Primavesi's reading of Genesis 1-3 insists on separating the original text from its later interpretations. She points out that "sin" is connected only to the story of Cain and Abel, not to Eve and Adam. Adam shares with Eve and with other creatures a common origin in the clay of the earth. There is no suggestion of women's inferiority. Eve takes the initiative with the serpent, and although there have been different interpretations, Primavesi emphasizes the role of the serpent in terms of insight and wisdom, even in the Hebrew Scriptures. In her view, the text describes the human "leap" into maturity through human beings learning in relationship with the life community.

Primavesi's insight into the complexity of the human "knowing of good and evil" is compelling, and it leads her into a rich study of the relationship of earthly creatures with one another and with the Divine. She also has insights into Christology and the role of the Spirit, stemming from her close reading of Genesis. Abel, she suggests, is the first victim of eco-wars, as Cain rejects his brother and the fruits of the earth, his fellow creatures.

Ruether takes up two major themes: covenant and sacrament. She stresses that the covenantal tradition between God and Israel always knit the covenant to the gift of the "land." This tenure was dependent on Israel's "righteousness." The sabbath rest, the seven-year rest and the jubilee year all point to the need for ecosocial justice, as disorder creeps in and Israel needs to be renewed. While Ruether sees evidence of this tradition in the New Testament, with the gradual spiritualizing of the work of Jesus "the concrete eco-justice perspective of Hebrew law vanished." She calls for a renewal of the covenant tradition with all creation, in its ecojustice implications.

Following Irenaeus, Ruether also affirms that the incarnation is "the renewal of the divine power underlying creation. In the incarnation divine power permeates bodily nature in a yet deeper way, so that the bodily becomes the sacramental bearer of the divine and divine deifies the bodily." Thus the sacramental is linked to the cosmological in a way that we can revitalize by recognizing that we are embedded in the great, mysterious, evolving process of cosmogenesis. Enlarging our sense of sacrament is key to a deeper spirituality.

While exploring many of the same themes, Halkes also emphasizes the importance of the breakthrough from the clockwork universe that dominated the scientific worldview for several centuries to the new cosmogenesis. "God's living presence in creation," she writes, "implies that God, as cosmic Spirit, enters creation, and does so as a creating, reconciling and sanctifying Spirit."

For these Christian ecofeminists, the ancient, hierarchical ordering of God, men, and then women and all creatures is undone by new sensitivities in experience, in historical studies, in twentieth-century science and in fresh readings of the Bible and neglected strands of tradition. Their writings all repay close meditation and thought.

Anne Lonergan RC is on the staff of Holy Cross Centre for Ecology and Spirituality, a retreat centre focusing on creation spirituality in Port Burwell, Ont.