Medieval Ecocriticisms
When I first encountered medievalist ecocriticism, I admit I scoffed. “Under the grene wode tre: Sherwood Forest as Preservationist Green Space”? “Ecofeminist Subjectivities: Chaucer's Talking Birds”? Surely “ecocriticism” was the most egregious example yet of scholars shoehorning texts into anachronistic theoretical frameworks in a misguided attempt to unite academic research and political activism.
Of course, I was a callow grad student with no real understanding of the academic world I was trying to enter, and amid my ocean of ignorance it was a fleeting consolation to feel superior to anyone, for any reason. I shelved my insight (ecocriticism = scholarly fad) and focused on Middle English religious writing.
It took me many years to return to the subject from a different angle, asking not what medieval poetry has to say about twenty-first century environmental issues, but whether the Christian tradition offers resources for resolving them. To my surprise, I found Pope Francis a medievalist, St. Francis an eco-theologian, and a papal encyclical a work of literary ecocriticism.
Pope Francis’s 2015 encyclical Laudato Si’ takes its title from the first line of a thirteenth-century poem, St. Francis’s “Canticle of the Creatures” or “Canticle of the Sun.” This lovely hymn imagines God’s creatures, from the sun and moon to water and earth, as brothers and sisters joined in praise, epitomizing St. Francis’s humble, tender affection for all life. Beyond the title, homage to the medieval saint is woven throughout the encyclical, as his love for fellow-creatures, his embrace of poverty, and his popular appeal to Christians and non-Christians alike are invoked as inspiration for Catholics today.
The focus on St. Francis also, however, carries on a subterranean argument about the relationships between Christianity, modernity, and environmental destruction. To understand what’s happening here, we must turn to a seminal article that has engendered large bibliographies in medieval studies, ecocriticism, and ecotheology: Lynn White Jr.’s “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis” (1967). This genealogical argument traces modern destruction of species and ecosystems to the idea that God commanded Adam and Eve, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth” (Genesis 1:28). In White’s reading, Genesis teaches that the nonhuman world exists solely to serve humankind. It is this sense of absolute ownership and divine right, he suggests, that drove European Christians to dominate the earth through scientific revolution, industrialization, and colonialism, while other cultures were content to live in harmony with natural systems.
White does single out one exception to this rule within the Christian tradition: St. Francis. For White, Francis is “clearly heretical,” espousing a “sort of panpsychism of all things animate and inanimate.” As such, he offers hope for a reimagined spirituality that escapes orthodox Christianity’s sense of human separateness from the earth. The last paragraph of White’s essay proposes “Francis as a patron saint for ecologists.”
Twelve years later, in 1979, the Catholic church picked up White’s gauntlet, as John Paul II proclaimed Francis “patron before God of those who promote ecology.” Considered as a response to White, this move can be understood in part as a concession, acknowledging White’s insight. But it is also an emphatic assertion of St. Francis’s orthodoxy. From the perspective of the church, the medieval saint is not sui generis, a historical aberration without precedent or inheritance, nor is the work of modern Catholics to preserve natural environments wholly modern, a novel response to novel conditions; both are instead continuous with long tradition.
Pope Francis surely had this ongoing quarrel in mind as he wrote Laudato Si’. Early in the encyclical, he responds explicitly to “the charge that Judaeo-Christian thinking, on the basis of the Genesis account which grants man ‘dominion’ over the earth (cf. Gen 1:28), has encouraged the unbridled exploitation of nature by painting him as domineering and destructive by nature.” Though White is not cited, the reference is unmistakable. Pope Francis replies, simply, “This is not a correct interpretation of the Bible as understood by the Church.” “The biblical texts are to be read in their context, with an appropriate hermeneutic”—that is to say, they are to be read within a theology that recognizes God as the Lord of creation, existence as sheer gift, and authority as inseparable from responsibility.
If White’s genealogy of ecological crisis is wrong, where does it come from? Laudato Si’ provides two alternative accounts: one conceptual, the other historical. Where White claims that human assertion of unlimited rights over nature comes from worship of an absolute, authoritative God, Pope Francis says they spring rather from the rejection of God’s authority over creation in favor of self-will and idolatry. In contrast, he proposes, “the best way to restore men and women to their rightful place, putting an end to their claim to absolute dominion over the earth, is to speak once more of the figure of a Father who creates and who alone owns the world.” True respect for nature springs not from pantheism, animism, or vague spirituality, but from an orthodox Christian understanding of the Creator’s love for his creatures.
On the cosmic level, the conflict between human beings and the rest of creation is a result not of God’s delegation of authority to humankind, but of sinners’ abuse of the power with which they were entrusted. On the historical level, Laudato Si’ implies that the ecological crisis of the twenty-first century has its roots not in ancient Jewish and Christian religion, but in distinctively modern technological and economic developments. Again and again, Pope Francis localizes the problems he is addressing to “the past two centuries” and “the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.” It is this period that has seen unprecedented economic growth, the rapid development of new technologies from the steam engine and the telegraph to robotics and the digital revolution, and accompanying “real social decline, the silent rupture of the bonds of integration and social cohesion.” Not coincidentally, this period has also seen the secularization of rich developed regions, especially the formerly Christian countries of Europe. Christian cultural dominance and ecological damage, it seems, are not directly but inversely correlated. In this telling, the Christian Middle Ages is prior to and undefiled by the demand for infinite growth that characterizes industrial modernity. It thus offers a vision and a resource for living differently.
The difference between White and Pope Francis’s accounts points to a more general question of historiography: should we trace a line of influence back to its first, remotest stirrings and call that the cause of all that follows, or should we pay more attention to decisive turning points along the way? The technological and industrial revolutions that shaped the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were surely made possible, in part, by scientific revolutions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The birth of modern empirical sciences in Europe was surely influenced, in part, by Christian theology, which has faith that the cosmos is ordered by intelligible laws because it was designed by a divine intelligence. Are these developments ineluctable, slowly unrolling what was already contained in the first fatal idea of a transcendent God? Or do people at each point in history have the freedom to study a phenomenon without exerting mastery over it, to discover a resource without exploiting it, to see an opportunity for power and profit but show restraint?
Pope Francis’s specific periodization—the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—implies that we could, as a culture, have turned back from a headlong plunge into industrialization after seeing the first factories and railroads. Unlikely? Perhaps. But any call for environmental action, save those that put their hope in future technologies offering unlimited abundance, implies that we can, even now, turn back from powers and pleasures we have already learned to take for granted. We can only hope to change if we believe that people of the past were able to choose, and thus that premodern philosophies did not compel, though they may have made possible, later technological abuses.
So much for the historical account. What of the conceptual? Is the crucial choice between seeing humanity as one with or separate from nature, as White would suggest? Or is what matters whether we see humanity’s authority over nature as delegated by God or usurped from him? While the writer of Genesis may have faced White’s choice of imagined worlds, I’m afraid that in the Anthropocene—the age in which humankind is reshaping climates and ecosystems—human dominion over the earth is not an article of faith, but simple fact. The question now is how to use the power we unquestionably have: as obedient stewards, or as free agents with no responsibility to a higher authority.
St. Francis of Assisi Preaching to the Birds, Giotto di Bondone
As we make and remake this choice, I agree with the ecocritics, with White, and with Pope Francis that the stories we read and songs we sing will shape how we think, what we value, and how we act. Still, even with newfound respect for the strategy of seeking premodern resources for modernity’s ills, tactics in literary studies leave something wanting. I believe in the transformative power of literature, but is anyone at all likely to change their way of life on Chaucer’s say-so? Religious texts have a far stronger grip on reality: tens of thousands of people today obey vows of poverty as Franciscan friars, sisters, and tertiaries. While Robin Hood’s relevance to environmental preservation efforts must be divined by skillful interpretation, St. Francis speaks in a clear voice about the essential principles of ecological responsibility, recognizing both the kinship of creatures and the kingship of their Lord. If you want to get on a conference panel, you can do an ecocritical reading of many medieval texts. If you want to effect political change and be deeply faithful to the medieval past, there’s no better place to start than a 2015 encyclical.
Kathryn Mogk Wagner is a PhD candidate in English at Harvard University. She studies late medieval religious writing and liturgical theology.