Augustine and Ecology (I): Dualism

[First in a short series related to discussions among members of the Doctrine Commission of the Anglican Church of Australia on the Church and Ecology]

Dualism refers to any philosophical or religious system where two fundamental realities (such as matter and spirit, or good and evil) are understood to co-exist, either eternally or at least in general experience, and often in some tension.

In the strictest sense dualism is incompatible with orthodox Christian theology, which claims the transcendent God is the only ultimate and self-existent reality. ‘Dualism’ can also be used more loosely, however, of systems where strong but less absolute distinctions are made between aspects of being. The most common, and most relevant, dualisms of this sort involve a distinction between material and spiritual principles or realities, especially where the spiritual is valued more highly than the material.

The most radical forms of dualism tend even to correlate spirit and matter with good and evil, respectively. The ancient religious tradition known as Manichaeism, for instance, suggested that matter was inherently bad, and that the believer’s hope was effectively to escape the material world. Augustine of Hippo (354-430), bishop of a relatively obscure North African town, but one of the most influential of all Christian theologians was for some time an adherent of this movement, admiring its ascetic seriousness and the account it gave of the obvious evils present in the world. His awareness of this position later helped inform his very different cosmology, whose articulation is one of his great contributions to Christian thought.

Although the Christian account of creation is fundamentally different from Manichaean dualism, readers of the Bible will recall echoes of such radical distinctions. Most obviously, the Pauline language of ‘flesh’ and the Johannine terminology of ‘world’ use these particular ideas as metonyms – words related to the thing they are concerned to speak of, but used as though they were the thing itself.

This is rhetorically powerful but easy to misunderstand. Although John’s Gospel at times speaks of the ‘world’ as shorthand for human and cosmic evil (John 7:7, 8:23, 14:17) at other points it is clear that the ‘world’ is precisely what Jesus has come to save (above all, of course, 3:16; cf 6:33, 8:12 etc.).

Similarly, Paul’s use of ‘flesh’ to speak about forms of human life that are self-serving and egocentric does not actually entail a rejection of human embodiment (see Rom 7-8; cf. 1:3, 9:5); Paul can also speak of the body as a temple (1 Cor 6:19; cf. 3:16-17) and he looks for the renewal of embodied existence in the resurrection (1 Cor 15).

Yet this language does reflect a widespread ancient view that matter itself was not only a lesser sort of reality than spirit, but inherently problematic. Greek and Roman philosophers tended to see matter as eternal, not created; it had existed along with spiritual things for ever, but was formed or animated into the cosmic order we know by the infusion or imprint of spiritual or heavenly reality. This logic does not make matter evil, but certainly draws a stark distinction between its value and that of spiritual and intellectual things.

Some forms of Christian belief have even seen the very fact of material existence, and human embodiment in particular, as reflecting the biblical view of the human and cosmic condition as sinful or fallen. Yet of course the Judeo-Christian account of creation depicts the material world, including human bodies, as an intended part of the divine order. The fact of material existence says nothing in itself about what ails us as human race, or as fallen universe.

A more authentic Christian understanding rejects a strict dualism of matter and spirit, granted that it may make other important distinctions between them. It would be better, at least initially, to think of Christianity as a distinctive sort of ‘monism’, a system affirming one sole ultimate reality. All spiritual and material realities alike then come into being through God’s gratuitous creative work, and all are contingent, having their original source and their ultimate meaning from and in God. God is the sole self-existent reality, utterly transcendent of creation, but bringing it into existence as a free act.

In that case, the differences between one element of creation and another may be significant for many purposes, but not relative to the shared dependence all things have on God. Recognition of God’s uniqueness and transcendence has a levelling effect on assumptions that would devalue one set of created things relative to another. Theologies which assume that the spiritual is in itself superior to the embodied or material, and which derive ethical norms from such observation, are dubious. Yet this recognition does depend on making a very strong (even 'dualistic') distinction between God and creation itself.

'Dualism' is therefore not necessarily the easy target some eco-theological discourse makes it; it is just as important to consider what sort of dualities are being proposed, and why.

Eucharist and Sacrifice (IV): Some Preliminary Conclusions

[The last extract from my SBL presentation. I have omitted a section discussing Ignatius of Antioch, in hope I can hold something back for a published version!]

Eucharistic meal practice not merely an object of a process whereby a fixed essential idea of sacrifice was gradually used more and more to interpret it. Meals, here as elsewhere in the ancient Mediterranean world, are settings where meaning is made and re-made.

Amid the rather unsystematic evidence for belief and practice concerning Eucharistic meals in these texts, at least two tendencies crucial in the subsequent development of sacrificial theories and practices in Christian contexts appear, which have been neglected because of assumptions of sacrifice as an essentialized and stable object.

The first is conflation: a tendency by these authors and communities to recast the theory and practice of sacrifice through reinterpretation, combination and other changes to inherited understandings. The prior Septuagintal conflation and adaptation of cultic language and understandings particularly of the key term θυσία (thusia), is itself an assumption in the Didache. But these texts make their own contributions to further forms of re-imagining cultic language and practice, both by applying this biblical imagery directly and literally to new forms of meal and offering and also, in Paul’s case, by drawing new correspondences between the Christian meal and those of Greco-Roman religion.

The second is extension: a tendency to extend the reach and force of sacrificial understandings and interpretations to a wider range of practices. There is no need to identify this process with the “spiritualization” of sacrifice which Philo and the Letter to the Hebrews engage in; it may also be worth noting that these transformations are not dependent on the violent death of Jesus or the tradition of the Last Supper, although for Paul one or both contribute profoundly to his specific proposals. This is an organic, material process of extension from one cultic meal and tradition to another.

These two tendencies are instances, rather than the whole extent of, the transformation of sacrificial theory and practice in the crucible of early Christian meal practice. This crucible was to contribute further to the development of the more familiar ideas of sacrifice so important and yet so contestable for practitioners and theorists of religion alike, both in Eucharistic settings and otherwise.

These earliest texts certainly do not show all the features ultimately assumed as the meaning of “sacrifice” in contexts such as Medieval Eucharistic theology—strikingly, none of them is particularly interested in the Eucharist as an expiatory or substitutionary sacrifice at all. Other early Christian texts will manifest more profound unease about the logic and practice of both Jewish and pagan offerings.

These discussed above however are witness to the fact that what is typically called “sacrifice” can neither simply be identified or denied at the earliest identifiable level of Eucharistic origins, partly because it does not (yet) exist. Or to put it another way, “sacrifice” in this sense is both present, and absent, and in formation.

Untying the Knot: Church, State and Same-sex Unions

[a version of this piece was run by the Fairfax media in Australia as an op-ed on their combined National Times site on November 27]

Is it time to change the way Australian law deals with marriage? As the Prime Minister and the ACT government wrangle over civil unions for same-sex couples, it seems the peculiarity of Australian marriage law has led to a situation unhelpful and unproductive for governments, celebrants and couples alike.

Although most Australians now marry in civil ceremonies, these are secularized versions of a religious model, not a genuinely civil construction. Kahlil Gibran, balloons or doves and tapes of Michael Bublé have simply (if unaccountably) replaced St Paul, candles and Mendelssohn on the organ, but the knot is still tied by ritual.

Despite a general understanding that Church and State are separate, Australia has inherited a feature of the established religion that still prevails in the UK, in the form of religious ceremonies with actual legal force. Unlike European countries and the USA, where the contracting of a marriage is a purely civil matter and ceremonies optional according to personal belief, England’s and Scotland’s established Churches can and do marry all comers, as agents of the state.

Australia inherited and continued this connection, despite the fundamental constitutional difference. Since there is no single established Church, instead the Marriage Act of 1961 allows for any Church to nominate ministers “to meet the needs of the denomination”, who are then authorized to solemnize marriages. Civil “celebrancy” (has anyone pointed this one out to Don Watson?) emerged as a secular counterpart to this oddity.

It is the continued centrality of ceremonial—traditional or tasteless as it may be in a given case—that now provokes the difficulty over civil unions in the ACT and elsewhere. The inclusion of a ritual for civil unions as part of the ACT legislation does, as conservative objectors point out, mimic marriage as Australians know it. What is less well-understood is how peculiarly Australian this situation is.

We still find ritual significant, whether or not we find religion so. And the provision for ritual that meets changed and changing needs for marriages, as well as other life transitions, remains a reasonable hope. Yet this need lies far outside the proper realm of government; and the unwarranted confusion, having thus far lain dormant in our history, is now causing some difficulty and even injustice.

Although there are many Australians who seem uneasy about civil ceremonies for same-sex couples—the Prime Minister is savvy enough to feel there are votes to lose on this front—I suspect many of the same Australians feel it is iniquitous for same-sex couples not to have equivalent legal protections and security to those of conventionally-married couples. Yet where people of different faiths and none might, given the chance, agree over such legal protections for couples of the same sex, regardless of whether they all think such unions constitute marriage as traditionally understood, the ACT legislation and that in Tasmania (where the Federal government has no power to complain) repeats the problem enshrined in the Federal Marriage Act—it makes the ritual the point.

The Federal government would do better to withdraw from the realm of offering credentials to religious and civil celebrants alike, but to ensure that appropriate legal safeguards exist for traditional marriages, and for civil unions between persons of the same sex (as well as for de facto couples, as appropriate).

Couples should contract marriages, and other unions legally provided for, in a purely civil setting, and then be able to seek appropriate forms of celebration (if any) for their needs. Religious groups should similarly be free to express in their own rituals, and in the choice of those whom they welcome to them, the beliefs and values fundamental to their traditions.

There is still room for argument about the character and desirability of different forms of relationship, as there is about Churches, good taste and sexuality itself—yet government exists to ensure the inclusion and security of all, not the continued marginalization of any group for the sake of a knot between legal marriage and public ritual than would best be untied.