The Cambridge Companion to Christianity and the Environment. Edited by Alexander J. B.Hampton and DouglasHedley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. Pp. xii, 346. £26.99.

Recent decades have witnessed a growing interest in religious approaches to nature. Prompted by the mounting crises of climate change, biodiversity loss, and ecological destruction, numerous scholars have had cause to investigate Christianity's conception of the natural world, and to ask whether the views espoused by Christians serve to help or hinder contemporary ecological concerns. Like much of the literature in Christian ecotheology, The Cambridge Companion to Christianity and the Environment takes Lynn White's famous essay, ‘The Historical Roots of our Ecologic Crisis’, as its starting point. Published in Science in 1967, this essay places the blame for the ecological crisis squarely at the feet of the Judaeo-Christian tradition. White is highly critical of Christianity's human focus, its dominion theology, and its linear teleology—and blames this intellectual milieu for tacitly enabling science and technology to be employed for exploitative ends. As White writes, memorably, ‘Christianity is the most anthropocentric religion the world has ever seen’ (p. 4). In broad terms, this volume agrees with White's analysis, highlighting anthropocentrism as the core of the ecological problem, whilst also wanting to complicate White's account and foreground aspects of the Christian tradition that offer alternative conceptions of nature. The editors justify their focus on western Christianity precisely because, as they put it, ‘this legacy stands at the centre of our present environmental challenge’ (p. xi). The volume is divided into three parts—‘Concepts’, ‘Histories’, and ‘Engagements’—though there are plenty of connections to be made between chapters from different sections. At the heart of the book, though, is a series of historical vignettes, which chart various movements and philosophies that have played an important role in shaping attitudes towards nature in the Christian west. Crystal Addey begins this survey in ancient Greece. She acknowledges that the Platonic distinction between the spatiotemporal world and the Forms produces a dualism that is often construed as anti-ecological, anti-material, and anthropocentric. But Addey seeks to defend Plato from the charge of anthropocentrism and emphasises Platonism's parallel themes of interconnection, participation, emanation, and relationality. Kellie Robertson then picks up the baton, focusing on medieval personifications of nature. For medieval writers, such personifications were not merely poetic devices, but modes of analysis to explain the workings of the material world. Yet this attention to nature's voice was subsequently silenced by the mechanical models of nature that came to dominate the Early Modern period. As Nathan Lyons recounts, this mechanisation went hand in glove with both shifts in biblical interpretation and the rise of experimental science. Just as biblical hermeneutics increasingly focused on the literal sense of the text, so too with nature, which was increasingly understood to be mathematically ordered rather than symbolically charged. Mark Stoll's contribution highlights a couple of important Protestant interventions. In particular, William Stanley Jevons's The Coal Question (1865) was one of the first texts to argue for natural limits to growth. And the so-called Jevons paradox—in which greater energy efficiency leads to increased, not decreased, energy consumption—is a psychological insight that is all too often ignored today. Laura Dassow Walls traces ecological thought through Romanticism and Transcendentalism. And this whistlestop history concludes with Sean McGrath's portraits of three contemporary religious ecologies—pantheism, neo-paganism, and ecological monotheism. Most of these accounts are descriptive rather than normative, though some authors offer brief judgements. Robertson, for example, clearly mourns the ‘death of nature’ brought about by the scientific revolution (p. 147), while McGrath implicitly approves of traditional Christianity's ‘corrective to pantheism and eco-ideology’ (p. 210). This overarching history is supplemented in other chapters by potted genealogies of specific concepts. For example, Jacob Sherman provides an account of the ‘book of nature’ motif. He traces the idea of creation as a readable text from the logos in the prologue to John's Gospel, via patristic exegesis and medieval bestiaries, to the ‘prose and poetry’ of the natural world in the writing of environmentalists such as John Muir and Aldo Leopold (p. 109). Likewise, Emily Brady offers a brief history of ‘the sublime’, specifically noting its potential for positive moral effects. By focusing attention away from humanity, she argues, the sublime helps to prompt humility and foster non-anthropocentric attitudes. Towards the end of the collection, Douglas Hedley offers an overview of the interrelated concepts of divine Sophia (wisdom) and the anima mundi (world soul)—and suggests that these aspects of the western tradition, which focus on a living and interconnected cosmos, provide something of a rebuttal to Lynn White's charge of anthropocentrism. Many of the remaining chapters are consciously philosophical in approach. Fiona Ellis problematises the oft-assumed distinction between nature and supernature; Jörg Lauster examines the apparent tension between materialism and enchantment; and Charles Taliaferro launches an argument about the consciousness of nonhuman animals. Meanwhile, Robin Attfield highlights an important difference between metaphysical anthropocentrism—in which everything is understood to have been brought into existence for the sake of humanity—and ethical anthropocentrism, in which it is just that the criterion of right action is the promotion of human wellbeing. This allows Attfield to offer a nuanced response to Lynn White. For example, Attfield proposes that a non-anthropocentric Christian stewardship is possible by coupling an admittedly anthropocentric ethics to a wider metaphysical theocentrism. Meanwhile, Alexander Hampton provides a parallel response to White, arguing that an aesthetic appreciation of nature not only critiques the anthropocentrism driving the ecological crisis, but can also be a means of overcoming human alienation from the natural world. In a couple of more theological chapters, Andrew Davison notes how the theme of participation can apply to human relationships with nature, just as much as to human relationships with God, and Jame Schaefer charts three ways to consider the sacramentality of creation. One recurring theme throughout The Cambridge Companion to Christianity and the Environment is the potential significance of a distinction between ‘nature’ and ‘creation’. On the one hand, ‘nature’ is a false construct, a product of modernity that serves to separate and subsequently objectify the nonhuman world. On this view, ‘creation’ might be preferable terminology because it refuses the artificial nature/culture binary. And there is a sense from several of the contributors that a return to a theological account of creation in a manner akin to radical orthodoxy would help to solve many of our contemporary problems. As Sean McGrath expresses this position: ‘what is needed is not a new sense for sacred nature but a renewal of the old sense for created nature’ (p. 210). Yet, on the other hand, ‘creation’ is also a contested term. It specifically indicates that ‘nature is a divine formation’ and, as Alexander Hampton notes in the introduction, it is somewhat tainted by its association with creationism (p. 6). But the strongest warning against any simplistic return to ‘creation’ comes in Willimien Otten's concluding chapter on creation and gender. Otten notes how the traditional creatio ex nihilo enshrines such a sharp divide between God and created reality that there is a real risk of ‘materiaphobia’, where matter is ultimately subordinated to soul and spirit. What is more, this division is invariably gendered and Christianity, she says, can be held responsible for promulgating the idea that gender hierarchy is embedded in creation. This misogyny invariably persists in secularised form and has rightly been the focus of ecofeminist critique by the likes of Val Plumwood and Carolyn Merchant. Hence, Otten's key insight is that a rejection of ‘nature’ in favour of a return to ‘creation’ will be insufficient to address the gendered dimensions of the present ecological crisis. Another theme that persists throughout the volume concerns the animacy of the natural world. Kellie Robertson's focus on medieval personifications of nature serves as a reminder about nature's voice and agency. Charles Taliaferro speaks about the ‘soulful standing’ of nonhuman life (p. 48). And Douglas Hedley's chapter does important work to foreground the notion of a world soul. But the most sustained argument comes in Michael Northcott's contribution. Northcott focuses on the idea of a shared realm of creaturely agency, and traces this notion from Vedic texts, via Greek philosophy, into early Christianity. Whilst many indigenous traditions continue to preserve such ideas, the concept has largely been lost from contemporary Christianity. Yet Northcott is adamant that this animist sensibility is ‘what Christians call the logos, or divine spirit’ (p. 231). The decline of religious accounts of more than human agency is not because of anything intrinsic to Christianity, he argues, but because of Christianity's capitulation to a Baconian worldview of human dominance. The Cambridge Companion to Christianity and the Environment assembles scholars from classics, english, environmental ethics, literary studies, history, history and philosophy of science, philosophy, religious studies, and theology. What unites many of these thinkers is an interest in the relationship between Christianity and Platonism in the west. For example, the editors of the volume—Alexander Hampton and Douglas Hedley—currently chair the ‘Platonism and Neoplatonism Unit’ at the American Academy of Religion. But the editors are also very conscious that ‘a great diversity of traditions and voices’ are required to address the contemporary ecological crisis (p. xi). And Hampton reiterates the ‘necessity of hearing multiple voices on such a broad topic of existential importance to us all’ (p. 7). In effect, the editors acknowledge that the contributors they have assembled—the vast majority of whom are from the US, the UK, or Canada—only represent a small slice of this wider conversation. As such, The Cambridge Companion to Christianity and the Environment differs from other edited collections within the field of Christian ecotheology—such as Dieter Hessel and Rosemary Radford Ruether's Christianity and Ecology: Seeking the Well-being of Earth and Humans (2000), or Ernst Conradie and Hilda Koster's T&T Clark Handbook of Christian Theology and Climate Change (2019). Moreover, in the present volume, comparatively little is said about the Christian scriptures. And the environmental implications of specific Christian doctrines—such as Christology, Pneumatology, ecclesiology, or eschatology—is never fully teased out. There is no mention of liberation theology, or the interconnected character of ecological and social concerns, as demonstrated in Pope Francis's encyclical letter Laudato si’. Nor are there any voices from the global south, or any engagement with Christianity's take on climate justice. None of this is necessarily a problem; a narrower focus is perfectly legitimate. But it means that this book does not give an overview of the range of work that is currently taking place within Christian ecotheology. As Hampton himself notes in the introduction, a more precise title—such as Christianity, Nature, Creation, and the Environment in the West—might well have been preferable (p. 5). Yet this should not detract from the achievements of this volume. It is indeed a compelling account of the history and philosophy of human relationships with nature in the Christian west. And, as such, it is an important contribution to the larger discussion.

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