Thomas Berry: A Great Work

The image of the mythical creature of the three-legged crow appears in the ancient mythologies of East Asia: in China, Japan and Korea. According to Chinese ideas, it is a bird-sun, inhabiting and symbolizing the sun. In Japan, this mythical creature is known as Yatagarasu, the forest crow, and is understood as a divine messenger, as the intervention of the will and guidance of heaven; it is a sign of rebirth and rejuvenation. In Japanese history, Yatagarasu cleaned up after great battles, was a sign of renaissance after such tragedies.

The essay "The Great Work" is the first chapter in Thomas Berry's book The Great Work - Our Way into Future (1999 /Great Work – Our Journey into the Future), the Czech edition of which is being prepared by Malvern Publishing House. Translated by Jiří Zemánek and David Sanetrník.

“The great task today, as we enter the new millennium, is to make the transition from a period of human devastation of the Earth to a period of our mutually beneficial presence on the planet. … We find no historical parallel for such a transition since the geobiological transition that occurred 67 million years ago, when the age of the dinosaurs ended and a new biological age began. Therefore, we now find ourselves in a period of far-reaching chaos in the biological structure and functioning of the planet.”

Thomas Berry

History is ruled by those unifying movements that give shape and meaning to life by relating our human adventures to the larger destinies of the universe. The emergence of such a movement may be called the “Great Work” of men. There have been many such great works in the past: the great work of the world of classical Greece, with its understanding of the human mind and the creation of the Western humanist tradition; the great work of Israel, which articulated a new experience of the divine within human affairs; the great work of Rome, which consisted in gathering the peoples of the Mediterranean world and Western Europe into orderly relationships with one another. Likewise, the task of the Middle Ages was to give the Western world its original shape in its Christian form; the symbols of this great work were the medieval cathedrals, rising so gracefully to the heavens in the territory of the old Frankish empire. In them the divine and the human could meet in a certain grand way.

In India, the great work was to lead human thought into the spiritual experiences of time and eternity, into their mutual presence, with a unique delicacy of expression. China has created as its great work one of the most refined and humane civilizations we have ever known. In America, the great work of the first people to populate this continent was to establish an intimate relationship with the forces that brought it into existence in all its grandeur; the natives did this through their ceremonies such as the Great Thanksgiving ritual of the Iroquois, the sweat lodges and the vision quests of the prairie Indians, such as the song journeys of the Navajo and the Kachin rituals of the Hopi. Through these and many other aspects of the native cultures of this continent, certain models were created for how people can unite with the larger context of their existence here on planet Earth.

While all these efforts to accomplish the great work have contributed significantly to our human adventure, they have all been limited in their accomplishment and have borne the marks of deeply human flaws and imperfections. Here in North America, we are beginning to realize today, with painful feelings and forebodings about the future, that the European occupation of this continent, admirable as it was in its intentions, was flawed from the beginning in its assault on the native people and in its plunder of the land.

Among its most impressive achievements are the establishment of a sense of personal rights for settlers, participatory governance, and religious freedom.

Although advances in scientific knowledge and technological skills led European settlers in the Americas to alleviate many diseases and poverty, they were accompanied by the devastation of the continent in its natural flourishing due to the suppression of the way of life of the indigenous people, who were transmitted many diseases previously unknown to them, such as smallpox, tuberculosis, diphtheria, and measles. While Europeans developed some immunity to these diseases, they became absolutely fatal to the Indians, who had never known such diseases and had no resistance to them.

Meanwhile, the newly arrived Europeans embarked on the development of a new industrial age that began to dominate human consciousness. New achievements in science, technology, industry, commerce, and finance had indeed ushered in a new age for human society. However, those who had brought about this new historical period saw only the bright side of these achievements. They had no idea of the devastation they were causing on this continent and across the planet, devastation that had ultimately led to a dead end in our relationship with the natural world. Our commercial-industrial obsessions had disrupted the biosystems of this continent to a depth unprecedented in human history.

The great task today, as we enter a new millennium, is to make the transition from a period of human devastation of the Earth to a period of our mutually beneficial presence on the planet. This historical change is more significant than the transition from the classical Roman period to the Middle Ages, or from the Middle Ages to the modern era. There is no historical parallel for such a transition since the geobiological transition that occurred 67 million years ago, when the age of the dinosaurs ended and a new biological age began. Therefore, we now find ourselves in a period of far-reaching chaos in the biological structure and functioning of the planet.

Since we began to live in settled villages with agriculture and the domestication of animals some ten thousand years ago, we have placed increased demands on the planet's biosystems. These demands have been manageable to some extent thanks to the enormous bounty of nature and the limited number of people living at the time, as well as the limited capacity of humanity to disrupt natural systems. In recent centuries, under the leadership of the Western world - and largely thanks to the resources, psychic energy and ingenuity of the people of North America - an industrial civilization has emerged with the capacity to devastate the Earth at its deepest foundations, with dire consequences for its geological structure, chemical composition and life forms over vast expanses of land and in distant seas.

We are currently losing some 25 billion tons of topsoil each year, which will have a huge impact on the food supply for future generations. Some of the most widespread marine species have been commercially wiped out by the over-grabbing of the seas by factory fishing boats using gillnets thirty to fifty kilometers long and reaching depths of more than six meters. When we consider the extinctions that have occurred in the rainforests of the southern regions of the planet and elsewhere, we find that we are losing a large number of species every year. Much more could be said about the impact of humans on the planet, the disruption caused by the use of river systems for waste disposal, the pollution of the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels and the radioactive waste resulting from our use of nuclear energy. All these disruptions to the planet are now bringing us to the final stages of the Cenozoic Era. Natural selection can no longer function as it did in the past. Cultural selection is now becoming the decisive force in determining the future of Earth's biosystems.

The deepest cause of the current devastation lies in the mode of consciousness that has established a radical discontinuity between humans and other modes of being and that has granted all rights to humans. Non-human modes of being are considered to have no rights of their own. They have reality and value only because they are used by humans. In this context, the non-human becomes completely vulnerable to exploitation by humans, an attitude shared by all four fundamental institutions that control the human realm: governments, corporations, universities, and religion, that is, political, economic, intellectual, and religious institutions. All of them, consciously or unconsciously, are committing a radical discontinuity between the human and the non-human.

In reality, there is one integral community of the Earth, which includes all its individual members, human and non-human. In this community, each being has to fulfill its role, its own dignity, its own inner spontaneity. Each being has its own voice. Each being claims to the whole universe. Each being enters into union with other beings. This capacity to relate and present itself to other beings, the capacity for spontaneous action, is inherent in every mode of being in the whole universe.

Every being also has the right to be recognized and respected. Trees have tree rights, insects have insect rights, rivers have river rights, mountains have mountain rights. So it is with all beings in the vast universe. All rights are limited and relative. And so it is with humans. We have human rights. We have the right to the food and shelter we need. We have the right to a home, to our natural environment. But we do not have the right to deprive other species of their own homes. We do not have the right to interfere with their migration routes. We do not have the right to disrupt the basic functioning of the planet's biosystems. We cannot absolutely own the Earth or any part of it. We own property so that what we own can be well managed and benefit the greater community as well as ourselves.

The sense that the continent is there primarily for our needs has developed over the past few centuries. Our deforestation reached its final stages in the late 20th century, when we find that we have cut down more than 95 percent of the original forests of the North American continent. With the new technologies that emerged in the latter half of the 19th century and with the automobile industry that developed in the early 20th century, industrialization took on new momentum. Roads, superhighways, parking lots, shopping malls, and housing estates are now everywhere. Living in the suburbs has become the norm for a quality of life. At the same time, the number of free-flowing rivers has also begun to decline. Large dams were built on the Colorado and Snake rivers, and especially on the Columbia River.

However, it was also a time when resistance to this trend began. The growing threat to the continent's living natural systems awakened a sense of the need to perceive the grandeur in the natural world if any real human development was to continue in our cultural traditions. This new awareness was born in the 19th century with figures such as Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, John Burroughs, and Georgie Perkin Marsh, as well as John Wesley Powell and Frederich Law Olmstead, and artists, notably Thomas Cole, Frederick Erwin Church, and Albert Bierstadt of the Hudsonian School.

The work of naturalists and artists was joined in the political sphere by the work of conservationists. These leaders in 1872 established Yellowstone National Park, the first wilderness area on Earth to be officially set aside as a permanent protected area. A little later, in 1885, New York State established the Adirondack Forest Preserve, an area to be preserved as wilderness forever. And in 1890, Yosemite National Park was established in California. During this same period, the first voluntary associations were formed to develop a deeper understanding of the natural world. The Audubon Society, founded in 1886, was primarily concerned with understanding different species of birds. The Sierra Club was founded in 1892 and the Wilderness Society in 1924. Both of these organizations sought to create a more intimate relationship between human society and the wild world around us.

These various groups were just the beginning. The larger dimensions of what was happening then could not have been recognized by people living in the 19th century. These people could not have foreseen the oil industry, the age of the automobile, the building of river dams, the depletion of marine life in the oceans, or radioactive waste; yet they knew that something was wrong at a deep level. Some of them, like John Muir, were deeply disturbed. When the decision was made to build a dam to seal off the Hetch-Hetchy Valley as a reservoir for the city of San Francisco, Muir saw it as the unnecessary destruction of one of the most sacred sanctuaries of the natural world, one that satisfied some of the deepest emotional, imaginative, and intellectual needs of the human soul. “Hetch-Hetchy Valley! As much as it is a dam, it is a cathedral, for no more sacred temple was ever consecrated by the heart of man.”¹John Muir, "The Hetch Hetchy Valley." Sierra Club Bulletin, Vol. VI, No. 4, January 1908..

Throughout the 20th century, the situation has worsened decade after decade, with man's relentless pursuit of profit by destroying the planet for uncertain and dubious gain. Large corporations have merged together, so that today a few organizations control vast areas of the Earth. The assets of several multinational corporations are beginning to reach trillions of dollars. Today, in these final years of the 20th century, we are witnessing growing concerns about our responsibility to the generations who will live in the 21st century.

Perhaps the most valuable legacy we can pass on to future generations is some awareness of the great work that lies before them in moving the human project from its present devastating exploitation to a beneficial human presence on Earth. We must somehow indicate how they can effectively carry out this work. For the success or failure of any historical period is determined by the degree to which those who lived in that period fulfilled the special role that history has assigned to them. No period lives entirely by itself. Each period has only what it has inherited from the previous generation. Right now we have abundant evidence that the various kinds of life, the mountains and rivers, and even the vast ocean itself, which we once thought could not be seriously threatened by our actions, survive only in their compromised integrity.

The great work before us—the task of moving modern industrial civilization from its current devastating impact on the Earth to a more benign mode of our earthly presence—is not a mission we have chosen. It is a mission given to us without anyone asking us. We did not choose it. We were chosen for this historical task by some power outside of us. We do not choose the moment of our birth, who our parents will be, the particular culture, or the historical moment in which we are born. We do not choose the status of our spiritual knowledge, or the political or economic conditions that will be the context of our lives. We are, so to speak, thrown into existence with a challenge and a role that transcends any of our personal choices. However, the sublimity of our lives depends on the way in which we begin to understand and fulfill the role assigned to us.

Yet we must believe that the forces that assign us our role must in the same act grant us the ability to fulfill that role. We must believe that we are cared for and guided by the same forces that bring us to life.

Our own specific role, which we will bequeath to our children, is how to navigate the challenging transition from the final phase of the Cenozoic to the emerging era of the Ecozoic, when humans will relate to the planet as participating members of a vast earthly community. This is our great work and the great work of our children, just as the role given to Europeans in the 12th and 13th centuries to establish a new cultural age after the difficulties and strife of that long dark period from the 6th to the late 11th centuries was to establish a new cultural age. By this time the grandeur of the classical age had faded, European cities were in decline, and life in all its physical and cultural aspects continued only in the great castles and monasteries. In this way was born what we know in European history as the feudal period. In the 9th and 10th centuries the Normans invaded the nascent culture of Europe from the north, the Hungarians from the east, and the Muslims advanced into Spain; Western civilization was situated in a very limited space under siege. In response to this threatening situation, medieval Europe launched the Crusades at the end of the 11th century, which united the European nations and engaged them for two centuries in an eastern campaign against Jerusalem and the conquest of the Holy Land.

This period can be seen as the beginning of a historical journey that led European nations to their religious, political, and economic conquest of the world. This trend has continued through the period of discovery and domination of the planet until our own time, when the presence of Western civilization on Earth culminates politically in the United Nations and economically in such organizations as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization, and the World Trade Council for Sustainable Development. This Western drive for unlimited domination in all its forms can even be interpreted as what ultimately led to human dominion over the natural world.

However, the immediate achievement of the 13th century was the creation of the first political and cultural integration from which Western civilization was born. This century saw new and dazzling achievements in the visual arts, in architecture, and in speculative thought and literature. With the erection of medieval cathedrals, a new and original architecture was created. These fantastic buildings manifested an artistic boldness and refinement rarely equaled in the vast history of civilization. It was also the time of Francis, the poor man of Assisi, who established in Western civilization both the spiritual ideal of renunciation of earthly goods and an intimate relationship with the natural world. It was also the time of Thomas Aquinas, who developed Aristotelian studies, especially in the field of cosmology, in medieval Christian civilization. Within this Aristotelian context, Thomas reinterpreted the entire range of Western theological thought. And as philosopher Alfred Norton Whitehead noted, it was a time when the Western mind acquired the critical edge and the process of logical reasoning, which allowed us to develop the processes of our modern scientific thought. In literature, in the early 14th century, the incomparable Dante Alighieri created his The Divine Comedy, at a time when Giotto and Cimabue began a great era of Italian painting.

The reason it is important to recall these formative forces in the narrative of Western civilization is that they arose in response to the Dark Ages in Europe, which lasted from the sixth to the eleventh centuries. We need to remember that in these and so many other cases, the dark ages of history are creative periods; they are times when new ideas, new art, and new institutions can emerge at the most basic level. Just as in Europe the great era of medieval civilization emerged from those difficult conditions, so in China we can recall the third century when the invasion of tribes from the northwest ended the rule of the Han dynasty and caused the empire to fall apart for centuries. Yet this period of disintegration was also a time of Buddhist monks, Confucian scholars, and artists who gave expression to new visions and new ideas at the deepest levels of human consciousness. Scholars developing Taoist and Confucian traditions inspired later literati, such as the poets Li Po, Tu Fu, and Po Tzu during the Tang period in the 8th century. The Song period, which followed the Tang period, gave birth to masterful interpretations of traditional Chinese thought in the 10th to 14th centuries, such as those presented by Zhou Tun-yi.²Zhou Tun-i (Zhou Lian-si / 1017-1073) was a Chinese philosopher who was influenced by Taoism. He is famous for the Diagram of the Highest Pole, a diagram clarifying the ontological interpretation of the world. According to him, the primordial beginning of all existence is “thachj-t´i”. This all-encompassing principle (analogous to “tao”) became the basis of the philosophy of Neo-Confucianism.. and Zhu Xi ³Zhu Xi (1130-1200), Chinese philosopher, representative of the Neo-Confucian Song dynasty. He is considered the consummate Neo-Confucian scholasticism. He incorporated Buddhist and Taoist ideas into Confucianism. He recorded his teachings in a number of writings, the most important of which are the Four Books.. Visual artists like Ma Yuan⁴Ma Yuan (1160-1225), a Chinese painter, living in the Song Dynasty. His work, along with that of Xia Kuei, forms the basis of the Ma-Xia school of painting and is considered among the best of his time. and Xia Kuei from the 12th century and poets like Su Shi⁵Su Shi (1037-1101), also known as Su Tung-po, was a politician, poet, essayist, and calligrapher of the Song Dynasty of China. He was one of the leading statesmen of Song China in the second half of the 11th century. He was famous as an essayist; his works influenced subsequent generations of poets in China, Japan, and throughout Southeast Asia. then completed this creative period in China's cultural history. These are some of the figures who enabled the Chinese as a nation and culture to survive and, after a long period when their survival was threatened, to discover new ways of expressing themselves.

We ourselves, in these early years of the 21st century, are experiencing a terrifying historical situation that cannot ultimately be compared to any previous era in Europe or Asia. Because the people of those past eras were concerned only with how to correct the disruptions in their own human life patterns. They did not have to face, as we do today, the disruption and even the termination of a geobiological period that has governed the functioning of the planet for 67 million years. They did not have to deal with anything comparable to today's toxic substances in the air, water and soil, or with the enormous volume of chemicals that are currently scattered throughout the planet. They did not have to deal with species extinctions or climate change on the scale that now worries us.

Yet we can be inspired by their example, their courage, and even their teachings. For we are the heirs of a vast intellectual legacy, of traditions of wisdom, with the help of which these men were able to accomplish the great work of their times. These traditions are not the passing thoughts or the immediate observations of journalists who are concerned with the daily course of human affairs; they are human expressions of the principles by which human life is governed within the structure and functioning of the universe itself. We can observe here that the great work of men is the work of all men. No one is exempt from it. Each of us has his own personal life pattern and his own personal responsibility. And yet each man—apart from his own worries and interests—helps, within and through his own personal work, to accomplish the great work. The personal work must be united with the great work. This can be well observed in the Middle Ages, when the basic patterns of personal life and artistic skills were united within the larger work of civilizing endeavor. Although such a connection is more difficult to achieve in our time, it must remain an ideal to which we strive.

Without a doubt, we too have been given the intellectual vision, the spiritual insight, and even the physical resources we need to make the transition that is required in these times: from a time when humans were a disruptive force on planet Earth to a time when they live on it in a way that is mutually enriching for both them and the Earth.