Willis Jenkins, University of Virginia, Department of Religious Studies
[E-mail: wjj2c@virginia.edu]

Biodiversity and Salvation: Notes for an Eco-Thomism

Abstract

The anthropocentric and hierarchical system of Thomas Aquinas can prove surprisingly helpful to environmentalist difficulties in grounding intrinsic value and adequately describing the roots of ecological problems.  For Thomas, humans live to know God, and we know God from the world which God created. In order to see God, therefore, not only must we know his creation, we must see it as God sees it.  In order for humans to become truly human, they must then receive creatures (all createds) as divine gifts – both to themselves and to humans.  (Extinction and commodification are then for us modes of deicide.)  The proper vocation of humanity to prayer, praise, and knowledge needs then the preservation of many kinds of creatures, and requires an attentive, loving regard for them.  So anthropocentrism warrants preserves of biodiversity and a divinely-valued nature.  This further implies that it is in our own soteriological interest that the sort of dominion we are to have over the earthly creation is one that brings forth its perfection.  The model of Thomistic stewardship then is Christ, Dominus, who lords over humanity as servant among them, in order to preserve humans and lead them to their proper perfection, which he does as the proper act of Sonship.  For Thomas, the ecological disturbances we are facing are not then the result of too much human action, but in fact are the sinful consequences of not enough truly human action. 

Introduction

The writings of Thomas Aquinas have been troublesome to those who would recuperate the seemingly problematic Christian tradition for ecological purposes.  It does not take long in the pages of his Summa to discover a picture of the cosmos that is hierarchical and anthropocentric – a presentation of Christian “dominion” that looks much like human domination.  Worse, it is rationality that individuates and moves Thomas’ order of things; and since purpose and value are the possession of reason, all the irrational world looks to be without its own value, just stuff for the projects of rational actors.  So it is that Thomas displays both of the cardinal sins decried by ecological thinkers: an anthropocentric assumption and an instrumentalist regard for material/earthy/bodily things - the twin hallmarks of a logic of domination underwrites our growing ecological crisis.  It has seemed, then, that the place to begin a Christian apology for the possibility of a greener faith is not with Thomas and his ilk, but rather in new models of the world and God that disallow domination and instrumentalism by displacing humans from the center of life. 

If, however, upon closer reading we can find in Thomas a certain regard for the natural world necessary to Christian faith, then we will have done something more helpful than scanned the tradition for environmentally-correct phraseology.  That is, if Thomas’ language of dominion and dichotomy can prove itself at once salvific and verdant then we will have made a start towards doing something more than greenwashing churches; we will have made some headway into understanding a distinctively Christian environmentalism – one rooted in soteriology, and so in the very heart of its faith.  Furthermore, if we can understand Thomas to have something to say of the deep root of our environmental problems, then we will show this distinctively Christian environmentalism to be importantly helpful to formulating human answers to ecological problems.

In what follows I argue that the path of human salvation Thomas presents implies a robust environmental ethics requiring ecodiversity, an attentive regard of the natural world, and natural entities endowed with what we try to express with intrinsic value.  It is an argument of implication and fittingness (ex convenientia), an offering of some notes of ecological apology for Thomas that seeks to show how the physics of his soteriology entails a divinely-gifted nature and a truly responsible stewardship, concepts fecund both for ecological theologians and secular environmentalists.  

I.  Desire’s Movement to Participate Perfection

            For Thomas, we are made holy through active desire for the object proper to our nature, and our desire is always materially mediated.  Our appreciation of creatures, and our knowledge of their particular values, is not in tension with pursuing our own final good, but is in fact comprehensible only within the movement to our own perfection.  We begin to see creatures moving toward their actuality, or in light of their final form, only within our distinctively human movement into God; that is, regard of creation rightly occurs from within the context of our own sanctification.  The argument is as follows:

A.            For Thomas, God is the satisfaction of human desire.  Of course God is more than an answer shaped after our need, but nonetheless we humans know God primarily, if “in a general and confused way”, by our natural desire for happiness, knowing God “inasmuch as God is man’s beatitude”. [1]   An object is known according to the mode of the knower, “hence the knowledge of every knower is ruled according to its own nature.” [2]   Thus, God is known first and primarily to us as the end of our nature, and this end as the attainment of rationality, because human nature is rational and our desire is to know God, who by character of being pure act (the most actual) is the most knowable, and thus the satisfaction of our rational nature’s desire for its own perfection. [3]  

B.            Yet it is not just humans who have their end in God, and whose desire for perfection is concomitantly known finally in God; “…every creature intends to acquire its own perfection, which is the likeness of the divine perfections and goodness.” [4]   Every entity has been created by God, and it is therefore natural for every creature to love God. [5]   Noting the ravens who call upon God in Psalm 146:9, Thomas says, they “are said to call upon God on account of the natural desire whereby all things, each in its own way, desire to attain the divine goodness.” [6]   The various ways to God of non-rational creatures are the distinctive movements of their natural appetites toward what is proximately good for each of them, [7] which is a sign of their inclination toward their Creator, itself a sign of the providence of God moving things to their proper end. [8]

C.            The perfection that every created thing desires is ultimately one, [9] though each particular nature participates this perfection in an inadequate, and therefore distinct, way: “since all things flow from the Divine will, all things in their own way are inclined by appetite towards good, but in different ways.” [10]   Creatures are, therefore, by seeking ends proper to their natures, different from one another because of their diverse participations of one ultimate perfection.  However, this final end is also the source of their unity: “things which are in themselves different, may be considered as one, according as they are ordained to one common thing.” [11]   And, “the divine goodness is the end of all things.” [12]  

So we find that for Thomas the good of humanity, the divine perfection by light of which we may be truly known, is also the final good of every being, and so the totipotent source of the very many kinds of being.  The transcendence of God, God’s difference from the world, founds the differences among creatures, and as foundation unites them together in their longing for the divine difference. [13]

II.  The Science in/of God

            From this soteriological participation of perfection we find the beginning of an environmental regard: 1) we really can know nature, and 2) it is full of meaning and value, but 3) only insofar as we truly know God, thus only from within the context of human participation of the divine life.  We cannot, however, find real, valuable nature by peering out over into the natural world and discovering its secrets (and so our own).

What Thomas is saying is that a true science of nature can only be that which knows things in God.  Because everything has its first cause and final perfection in God, a thing cannot be known truly until it is known as in the One who created it. [14]   For Thomas, an environmentalist turn to nature, the desire to look into the natural world for how we ought to structure our lives, is not wrong – it is just incomplete.  If we look to nature and our gaze stops there, if we are not pushed on toward the knowledge of God, then our understanding stops short of completion. [15]   An intensification of this natural gaze will only issue in endless adumbration: the more a thing is known the more it is revealed as unknown, and understanding of an entity (let alone all of nature) is always deferred.  If, however, our desire to know the natural world is provoked onward in and by the knowledge of God, and we then view the world through participation in the intellectual sight of God, we will find the meaning in/of nature we have been looking for. [16]   “All perfections are in God”, because God is the formal cause of every perfection in effects, and so Himself is the perfection of being.  Nature by itself is elusive, a slippery concept and an empty category.  (Whose concept of nature?  Whence this category? – and like critical questions.)  Nature under the aspect of God (read: creation) is populated by many and different species, all related, and all differently, by their participations in God (in the virtues of their creation).  This participation amounts to and is evidenced by the activity of an entity seeking its perfection, its moving from potentiality to act, a movement into the fullness of being.  But this movement cannot be finally discerned unless one knows to where it is directed, and this is to know God.  “Comprehension is not a distinct operation from vision”, says Thomas; both the vision itself and the entity sought are our objects of comprehension. [17]   For the knowledge of God that we seek is also also a participation in God’s vision, and so is the grace that strengthens the natural light of our reason. [18]   If then we cast our pursuit of nature in the context of our own pursuit for God, we will find the nature(s) we have been seeking as we understand God by God’s relations to creation, and ourselves by God’s pursuit of us.  

Exploring this phenomenological movement of knowing an entity, we find that not only can creation be known, but is to be known as gift.  We have seen the sense in which through our desire for God we are provoked by sensory knowledge of the natural world to realize something of the character of God, and then in this knowledge to apprehend the true nature of the entity which mediated our vision.  It is not that nature gives itself to our intuition if only we refine our attention to accommodate its efforts (Husserl), nor that we discover ourselves to be inextricable from nature, and so in the act of knowing ourselves discover ourselves to have already been given by nature all along (already enfolded in nature – Merleau-Ponty); rather, creation is there (es gibt?), given to us, in order to give us over to God.  Creation hands us over to God (makes us “handy” to God) by putting on display God’s perfections.  Creation performs a participated analog to the incarnation as God’s giving God’s self; that is, in Christ creation appears to us as God’s availability.  We receive this giving of God in and from creation by the (rational) act of seeing natures as the givenness of God.  This gift of God’s self given for us (yes, for us – to this bald anthropocentrism we will return) is received through a certain regard for creation.  It is by receiving creation in reference to God that we have something to say about its beings: creation is known as gift to us, and this we can only recognize in and by the sight of God (which is to say, by grace).

III.  Given For Us

            Here, in the context of God’s giving to us, we discover the ethical thickness of nature; it is in receiving nature as God’s gift for us that we find something special to say about it – something like but better than “intrinsic value”.  Creation is gift to us not because of its use-value for our projects, but because it reveals God.  The availability of God in creation is the display for our cognition (more properly: as adumbration of the praecognitio of revelation, for our re-cognition) of many and different kinds of perfections.  The stunning diversity of creation is not for our eco-touristic entertainment, nor to give us building blocks enough to keep us happily constructing our own artifacts; rather, “because His goodness could not be adequately represented by one creature alone, He produced many and diverse creatures, that what was wanting to one in the representation of the divine goodness could be supplied by another.” [19]   All of these beings we find around us are present in creation firstly because their natures represent God, who “prepossesses in Himself all the perfections of creatures, being Himself simply and universally perfect.  Hence every creature represents Him, and is like Him so far as it possesses some perfection”. [20]   While we live on earth we know God through His likeness reflected in creatures. [21]   The value of every creature is that it is a visable participation of God, an icon into the divine life.  Clearly there is in Thomas a theological mandate to preserve biodiversity, for it is to preserve the multifarious character of the availability of God for us.  To those who would let the gift of creation mean only what immediate good it can provide for humans, and disregard those entities that are difficult or dangerous for them, Thomas replies that everything created is good (however partially), because every created thing can lead us to God, and in this way is good for humans. [22]

            So far a directive for preserving ecodiversity is clear, but it might seem Thomas is in danger of substituting a technological instrumentalization of nature for a soteriological one: creation may seem the stuff of a certain spiritual technology.  We can point to beyond this objectification of creation, however, by noting that when we say creation is revelation for us, the “for us” is relative proper to our nature, not the nature of the created entities.  Because it is our nature as rational creatures to desire to know, and because we know by our embodied experience in the world, [23] the rest of creation, understood under the aspect of a biblical faith, is for us material signs of God.  Nature is not in essential substance a spiritual tool, but is so for me, because of the function it performs relative to my desire for God.  Therefore, to say that creation is revelation for us, is not to say that the essence of nature is to be something for humans.  To say that the world is for us the availability of God is a statement about the intrinsic nature of humans, not of other creatures.  It is an affirmation of what we are for, not a comprehension of what creation is for.  The natures of creation are constituted as gift for us by our being recipients through them of the grace of God; creation is not gift by essential nature, but by proximate function, relative to human nature and God’s love for us.  So creation is not finally known by humans, even enframed as gift, but is constituted as gift by our being creatures loved by God.  The question of the being of non-human creatures remains questionable, and so the possibility of our difference from them (and theirs from each other) is maintained.

            There is a second thing to say about this giftedness of creation:  Realizing the different and sundry perfections of creation we are awed, through the array of being in God, by the many creatures around us that are also given-to.  “[E]very being in any way existing is from God, ” [24] receives its determinate form from the divine wisdom, [25] and is preserved by God “continually pouring out existence into [it]”. [26]   In so far as an entity participates being, and therefore reflects the likeness of God, it is the recipient of the love of God, [27] and to receive creation as revelatory gift is then also to receive all creatures as gifted beings.  So the divine availability we sense in creation is itself included in this pouring out of God, and so in discovering God through creation we discover also others that God has been giving to.  To truly receive the gift God offers us in creation is to recognize that all the entities around us participate in being and so are directed to their own perfection.  Understanding creatures in their mode of givenness for us, we see their intrinsic givenness to themselves: God has given every creature the gift of participation, which we see in their manifest striving for an end. [28]   (Jean-Luc Marion says that by grace we realize we are always already being given more; here it is by grace that we realize others have all along already been being given more – that we are not the only subjects to grace-full phenomena.)  To say, therefore, that creation is an instrument of grace is to refute the very idea of nature’s instrumentality.  The grace that creation is an instrument of is the grace that allows us to see God, and by seeing God to appreciate better the diversity of beings who receive God’s grace. 

            Giftedness gives us the language to say something consequential about the non-human world.  Better than trying to say that nature is instrinsically valuable, and so catching us up into the market commerce of values, we can affirm the specialness of nature best by saying that creation is for us the grace of God.  If we pay attention to what the “for us” says about who we are and what it is we truly desire, and if we really are taken into the grace of God, we will then find natures that are much more than instrinsically valuable; they are intrinsically given-to and so caught up along with us into the divine commerce of grace.  We find by taking nature seriously as gift for us that God reveals himself to be courting the desire of many kinds of consorts.  If all perfections are made perfect in God, so too then all desires, and the desire of God, we find, is to be desired by many kinds of beings.  And, one would surmise, if our goal is to be made deiform, we too will want to be desired by many kinds of beings as we are redeemed into God.

IV.  Eucharistic Biodiversity and Crisis as Deicide

            We have seen that for Thomas we are able to speak of God with the attributes we know through the created things that participate in God.  We are therefore able to name God “as far as creatures represent Him,” [29] and as far as we have been attentive to those creatures.  We have seen that whatever good we see in creatures “preexists in God, and in a more excellent and higher way.” [30]   We are therefore ascribing to God the various goods we have seen in creatures when we name God as their end and sustenance – as the perfect Good they participate. [31]   “In this way therefore He can be named by us from creatures, yet not so that the name which signifies Him expresses the divine essence itself”, [32] but so that we can signify God with what we have known Him by, indicating God by the “community of idea” [33] the name shares. [34]   Thus the eco-Thomist can argue for extensive preservation by saying that, if we can bless God insofar as we are able to name God, and this we do drawing from creation, insofar as creatures represent God, and the perfections of creatures represent God inadequately and diversely; then it follows that the more creatures we encounter the more representations of God we have, and so the greater capacity to offer our praise.  There is an availability to God (and in this sense, an embodiment) in God’s significability by human names for the natural world. [35]   The everyday Christian should want vast reserves for species protection simply in order to know how better to call upon God in worship and in prayer.  The more kinds of created things we see, the more modes of God’s availability for us.  Ecological diversity is a sort of adumbration of God (God’s own phenomenological self-description, given for us), and its preservation promises the continual issue of surprising new descriptions.  So it is important that we have not only zoos and gardens for preserving creatures, but whole ecosystems which continually produce new creatures.  Ecodiversity is the fertile ground of a multi-chorused praise of God. 

With the extinction of species and despoiling of places we lose the ability to name and praise God, and find ourselves left with only the names derived from things made in our own image, the artifices of our own technology.  The terrible paucity we are threatened by in ecological degradation is the loss of that by which to bless God, and so the increased likelihood of idolatry: naming God after things made in our own image.  When we are left with nothing but our own projects to gaze upon, the traces of God become even more vestigial, while the face of humanity, reflected off the chrome surfaces, dazzles and fixates our gaze.  Indeed, technological ecocide appears to us as a mode of deicide.  The extinction of species is the extinction of God for us. [36]    The intelligibility of God is not reduced by the imperfection of the context in which we seek God’s knowledge.  The goodness of God is not made less by our inability to speak of it.  The act of God is unchanged by our frustration of its effects.  Yet the degradation of creation can be construed as the loss of God because it impoverishes the fullness of God’s availability to us through the world.  We have a responsibility to preserve species and wild lands if for no other reason than preserving the possibility of human worship, wherein is the fullness of God for us. 

            Worship now appears as the eucharistic return of creation to God: in our liturgical naming of God from creation we also denominate created things according to their mode of existence in the Divine wisdom; that is, as essentially belonging to their own particularity in God. [37]   This is seen best in Thomas when he says that even in the state of innocence, where humans would have had no need of animals for clothing or food, “man needed animals in order to have experimental knowledge of their natures.  This is signified by the fact that God led the animals to man, that he might give them names expressive of their respective natures.” [38]   As the creatures were brought before Adam to name, he was to pay attention to each one, discern its peculiar relation to the rest of the world and to God, and give it a name significant of those relations.  Naming appears as a kind of blessing whereby Adam refers creatures to their Creator, and by so doing understands the creatures, as “spiritual things set before us under the guise of things sensible,” [39] and so then also their Maker.  In Eden Thomas places the perfecting work of God in humans in the context of humans working in creation.  Humanity is found first in a garden so that just as God “might Himself work in man and keep him by sanctifying him”, humans could work to “dress and keep paradise, which dressing would not have involved labor, as it did after sin: but would have been pleasant on account of man’s practical knowledge of the powers of nature.” [40]   Known from its soteriological center, the human re-cognition of divine knowledge, all of human labor is to be liturgy (properly, latreia), a naming of creation, a blessing of this world through the act of blessing God. [41]  

            Here we find foreshadowed the eucharistic character of stewardship: not only is it our responsibility to be take care of the earth, but it is also our vocation to the gather up the various loves of the earth and return them to their Lover.  If it is our responsibility as masters to demonstrate the love of God for every creature, so too is it our liturgical work to hold up and bless the natural love every creature has for God.  Noting that every thing loves God in its own way, Thomas remembers that Dionysius said, “God leads everything to love of Himself”, and comments in response, “Hence, in the state of perfect nature man referred the love of himself and of all other things to the love of God as to its end.” [42]   Stewardship then is at once the preservation of the possibility of praising God, and itself a liturgical work, eucharistic at its center.

V.  Stewardship as Justice

For Thomas, stewardship is rooted in justice, which is itself an act of God’s providential love, bringing creation to its perfection in God – and, as we have just seen, insofar as humans participate that movement it is also a eucharistic performance.  There are two questions Thomas might ask of the stewards of creation, one ecological and one soteriological.  First, are the natures God created moving to their proper perfection? (Or are they trapped in potentia, enframed by our technology and edificial environments as no more than resource?)  Second, how praise-worthy of God are our uses and constructs of nature?  (Do they make visible the harmony of created differences that can point us toward God, or do they stop the gaze in homogeneity, making opaque God’s availability in the world?)

The ecological task of stewardship is the dispensation of justice, giving each its due according to proper proportion, [43] and so bringing each creature to its perfection in God through its place in the created order.  The work of stewardship is to be a minister of God’s justice, which is the act of God completing what God’s mercy has begun.  For insofar as every entity participates being, it participates the goodness of creation, which justice follows as its servant: “the work of divine justice always presupposes the work of mercy, and is founded thereupon.” [44]   Justice honors the giftedness which we have seen to be the heart of every creature, whose goodness is given it in its participation of being, which is always participation of God. [45]   Here is what may be called the right of every created thing: seen under the aspect of creation, we have a prima facie duty to every entity to honor the divine goodness to which its participated existence refers.   The first question the eco-Thomist may ask of our labor is, are we respecting the goodness already bestowed on every thing?

Justice must respect the particular character of each creature’s participation in God.  Some are to be respected more than others because of their greater perfection; not all share the same degree of goodness. [46]   There are many participations of the divine goodness, some more perfect than others, and this for the perfection of the universe as a whole, the beauty of which consists in its diversity, and therefore in the harmony of the many imperfect participations of its members: [47] “For the universe would not be perfect if only one grade of goodness were found in things.” [48]   Therefore, the justice that is accorded in respect of the goodness to which existence is referred must also be diverse in its operation.  This justice follows the love of God, Who loves some creatures more than others because of their nearer likeness to God; thus, the greater good a creature participates, the more it is loved by God, and so willed into better goodness yet. [49]   It is then proper that the lower creatures exist for the higher; indeed, the lower are perfected by participating in the higher. [50] So it is fitting that “the plants make use of the earth for their nourishment, and animals make use of plants…[and] that man should be master over animals.” [51]   That the lives of lions require those of donkeys is a lesser evil, permitted by the relative defect of donkeys to lions, so that the greater perfection in the diversity of the universe might be displayed. [52]   Predation, that every entity eats and is eaten, is an operation of diversification, part the material process by which the glory of the universe is made newly manifest.  Since the goodness which is simple in God is manifold and divided in creatures, “the whole universe participates the divine goodness more perfectly and represents it better than any creature whatever.” [53]   Every entity is to the universe as a part to the whole, and exists for the greater perfection of the universe, which itself exists for God: “Now the universe of creatures, to which man is compared as part to whole, is not the last end, but is ordained to God, as to its last end.” [54]  

Here we find the ethical purchase of the Thomistic hierarchy of being: since it is true that while God loves all creatures some are loved more than others, on the basis of their likeness to God, [55] and that the whole order of creation represents the divine goodness better than any single creature, [56] then it follows that more is owed the whole of creation by justice.  Here we find the principle of ecocentrism: let us be concerned with whole earth systems, with keystone habitats, biomes and ecosystems, for these are more representative of God than single species or particular entities. [57]   Just stewardship requires savvy ecology.

Ecological justice to a creature therefore includes several levels of respect: 1) the goodness which every creature participates, 2) its relative nobility, 3)its subordination to the good of the universe, and 4) its ultimate ordination to God.  These are summed by Thomas:

“So, therefore, in the parts of the universe also every creature exists for its own proper act and perfection [(1) the fundamental dignity of every creature],

and the less noble for the nobler, as those creatures that are less noble than man exist for the sake of man [(2) the propriety of the higher to use the lower for their good]

 whilst each and every creature exists for the sake of the entire universe [(3) a reminder that every particular good, including those of humans, is subject to the higher good of the universe]. 

Furthermore, the entire universe, with all its parts, is ordained towards God as its end, inasmuch as it imitates, as it were, and shows forth the Divine goodness, to the glory of God. [(4) an affirmation that every good participates the divine goodness, and every being has its true end in God],

Reasonable creatures, however, have in some special and higher manner God as their end, since they can attain to Him by their own operations, by knowing and loving Him [the place of humanity is unique, and so their participation of goodness proper to rationality].  Thus it is plain that Divine goodness is the end of all corporeal beings.” [58]

Therefore, where the fundamental dignity of creatures is not respected, where creation is impoverished by improper use by its inhabitants, where the good of creatures is not seen as ordained finally to God, this is injustice. [59]   Notice that near to the end of the quote Thomas makes special mention of the place of reasonable creatures in the order of the universe and in ordination to God.  The peculiar responsibility of these rational creatures for injustice can be seen in Thomas’ view of providence. 

Providence as Human Ministry

For Thomas, the providence of God is principal to every creature’s existence, each of whom “would fall into nothingness were it not kept in being by the operation of the Divine power.” [60]   This preservation is mediated, however; “in the creation itself He established an order among things so that some depend on others, by which they are preserved in being, though He remains the principal cause of their preservation.” [61]   Furthermore, God governs the order of being by means of the higher creatures.  This subsidiarity of authority allows the lower to be perfected by participating in the proximate higher [62] (as the human body is perfected by participating in the salvation of the whole nature), and gives sanctifying responsibility to certain delegated governors. [63]   The stewardship role of humans is thus given them by the order of the creation, in which they have their existence and for which they are to care, as the responsibility accorded them by the hierarchy of being and concomitant mediation of providence.  Thomas uses the example of the preservative quality of salt functioning as a secondary cause of God’s preservative providence. [64]   Extending this, the ecoThomist can say that we humans are to be the salt of the earth, to be a “middle cause” of the preservation of being.  (Unless the salt has lost its flavor...)

 The power humanity is to mediate is of course rightly modeled after its primary source: the governing action by which God brings creation to its fulfillment.  “[I]t is not fitting that the supreme goodness of God should produce things without giving them their perfection…[which] consists in the attainment of its end.  Therefore it belongs to the Divine goodness, as it brought things into existence, so to lead them to their end: and this is to govern.” [65]   The government by humanity over creation, insofar as it rightly administers the providence of God, is thus to be about bringing things to their perfect end. [66]   Government seeks the participation of all creatures in good, and so has two effects: “the preservation of things in their goodness, and the moving of things to good.” [67]   Stewardship, therefore, as the mediation of divine providence, is defined by Thomas as being both about conservation and careful tending; [68] we are to protect the participations of goodness and to move things to their ordained end, which proximately is their natural perfection and ultimately is God.

The dominion of humanity does not therefore, as it has seemed, issue from a capricious election by God of one creature to lord over the rest; it is the responsibility humanity undertakes proper to the mode of God’s providence, the order of creation, and its own nature.  So it is that, after noting the imperfect are for the use of the perfect, and the inferior are governed by the superior, Thomas marks the distinctive rationality of human nature as that by which God governs creation: “Wherefore, as man, being made in the image of God is above other animals, these are rightly subject to his government.” [69]  

The root of our ecological crisis is then a matter of improper government and its consequent disorder of natural harmony. [70]   The cause of disruption in creation was human sin, after which other creatures began to disregard the mastery of humanity: “before man had disobeyed, nothing disobeyed him that was naturally subject to him.” [71]   When humanity rebelled from God it abdicated its proper lordship, and so lost the respect proper to its natural role.  In trying to be something more than human, humans were repayed with being regarded by the rest of creation as less than human.  The disorder of creation is evidence that as human actuality decayed in corruption, the performance of proper humanity was made more difficult.  The injustice known by ecological crisis is the effect of the disorder wrought by humans unable to subject creation to the providence of God of which they were to be ministers.  Our ecological problem is not too much humanity, but not enough of it.  

            It is then a soteriological question that Thomas can ask of our stewardship in inquiring whether our projects refer fittingly to the divine good by which its material has its being.  Or do they reflect the likeness of humans to such a degree that this referentiality is largely lost?  Remembering is a divinely-reflective order of perfection to entities, and some are better than others, insofar as some reflect more adequately the divine goodness, [72]   when the question is put to us, “Why not plastic trees?”, [73] we know the answer must have to do with whether plastic trees or organic trees better reflect the goodness and wisdom of God.  It is for us a soteriological question because seeking the good of every creature under our power, and in manner appropriate to the divine wisdom, is integral to the vocation of human rationality.  Some uses of the world, it turns out, are irrational – both in the sense that they offend divine beauty and contradict ecological order, and in the sense that they are degenerative of humanity.

            Note that this is not simply a matter of preferring the “natural” over the “artificial”, but of actively desiring what is good for creation.  For Thomas there is no ground for an essential difference between artificial and natural.  Both nature and humanity “concreate”, making composites out of form and matter, and both presuppose in their making the creation of God. [74]   This means that every creature, whether made by nature or constructed by technology, bears the trace of the Trinity. [75]   Whether it is more preferable to have a steel tower or a pine tree is not a matter of category or of essence, but of the degree to which the availability of God is visible.  The question is, how evident is the love of this thing for its Creator?  This cannot be answered except by careful attentiveness to the creatures around us, and only insofar as we see them with/in the sight of God, for it is under the aspect of God, and by the grace of divine vision, that we truly apprehend an entity’s nature and perfection.  That is, the question cannot be answered except through love: Thomas says the movement of the will toward comprehension of any intelligible thing is a movement of love (and so a participation in our attaining to happiness). [76]   Furthermore, Thomas tells us that to love a thing is to will it its own proper good. [77]   So we see that in order to make decisions in favor of one creature or another, or to plan to bring about a certain kind of new entity, involves loving that created and willing it its proper good.  Now in willing an entity the good proper to it we must know and comprehend its good, which, if done justly in respect of the ordination of goods, will be evidently a greater or lesser good, and so a higher or lower participated perfection.  Insofar as we want to associate with more luminous representations of God [78] (or, more divinely sensuous bodies) we will choose the higher participated perfection.  In choosing,  then, between plastic trees and conifer trees I suspect that in the respective love we might have for both, the perfection of growing trees will be more compelling, more iconic.  Furthermore, insofar as we are proper ministers of God’s goodness we would have it that all our development which uses, replaces, or replicates trees would be part of a work that preserves and realizes the perfections trees participate.  “Sustainable development” is now really an inferior ambition, for Thomas calls us to a salvific development: a mode of working on earth that renders the world as liturgy – as a place that performs the presence of God for us.

VI.  Conclusion

            There is the possibility from Thomas, read in the anguish of ecological crisis, to hear a clarion call to a distinctively Christian environmentalism, one which happily avoids the determination of anthropocentric, ecocentric, or even theocentric, by showing the harmony of several centrisms: It is in our own best interests to be able to perfect our nature (anthropocentric) by seeking the knowledge of God through worship (theocentric), which we are able best to do by understanding the many different perfections of the cosmos and our particular place amongst them (ecocentric).  That is to say, for Thomas, part of the way God works for the perfection of humans is to invite them into wisdom, beauty, and goodness, made available on earth through active participation in God’s love for creation.