The New Story & The Great Work

Mary Evelyn Tucker, John Grim, Andrew Angyal: Thomas Berry: A Biography. NY: Columbia University Press, 2019

review by Robert McDermott

Readers of being human who are at all interested in comparative religious traditions, or an approach to ecology rooted in a compelling cosmology and evolution of consciousness, or in an in-depth critique of Christianity by a deeply spiritual Catholic priest, will want to know about the life and ideas of Thomas Berry (1914-2009)— scholar, professor, author, lecturer, prophet, saint. From my attendance at Thomas’s informal seminar on Dante in 1954, when I was 15 and he was 40, until approximately 1980, I was one of Thomas’s unofficial students, a close friend, and academic collaborator. In 1964 Thomas officiated at my wedding to Ellen Dineen who for the next twenty years baked dozens of brownies for him. In 1975 he arranged for me to replace him as Fulbright faculty at the Open University, UK.

In the late 1970s it seemed to me that Thomas was not interested in Steiner and anthroposophy. Several decades later I came to realize that I had made a strategic mistake: Instead of telling him about Steiner’s Philosophy of Freedom and his esoteric research on karma and rebirth, I should have told him about Steiner’s lectures on biodynamic farming and agriculture. While president of the Rudolf Steiner Institute in the 1980s I knew Marjorie Spock, Will Brinton, and Herbert Koepf, all internationally known experts on bio-dynamic farming, but I was not interested in their farms or in agriculture, including biodynamic. Forty years later I learned of Thomas’s interest in biodynamic agriculture from a letter that Thomas sent to his friend Sr. Adrian Hoefstetter, OP. In 2007, Sr. Adrian sent to Richard Tarnas (whose Passion of the Western Mind had influenced her own research on Aristotle and Aquinas) this paragraph that Thomas had sent to her.

It became clear to Steiner that a more comprehensive understanding of Earth economy, as well as a more effective style of cultivating the land, was needed. This insight led to his remarkable series of eight agricultural lectures, given in Silesia, Germany, in 1924, and their rapid dissemination throughout the world as a guide to biodynamic gardening, a new agricultural development. While this teaching of Steiner already inspires many American projects, it needs to be more widely appreciated. (1)

As Thomas Berry is one of the truly prophetic voices sounding an alarm concerning the causes of ecological devastation as well as possible solutions, his recommendation of biodynamic agriculture is significant. Thomas’s writings, especially The Dream of the Earth (1988), The Great Work (1999), and with Brian Thomas Swimme, The Universe Story (1992), have exercised a deep influence on ecologists with a spiritual interest, including Leonardo Boff (author of Cry of the Earth, Cry of the Poor), who in turn influenced Pope Francis’s encyclical, Laudato Si: On Care for our Common Home. (2) A person reading this review who might wonder how to learn more about Thomas Berry need look no further than the recently published biography under review. With photos, quoted passages, and plentiful tributes, this book offers a valuable account of Thomas’s evolution from a professor of comparative religion to a self-described “geologian” known throughout the world. This biography tells the story of how Thomas evolved and why his thought is so important in the face of ecological devastation—and why in 1993 CIIS awarded Thomas Berry an honorary doctorate.

Born to a large, prosperous Catholic family on the edge of Greensboro, North Carolina, Thomas entered the Passionist seminary at age 14. The Passionist order of priests are called to a reverence for the passion of Christ. Ironically, Thomas’s primary theological contribution would be a refocus from the crucifixion of Christ to His creativity, or from salvation/redemption theology to creation theology. A brilliant student, Thomas read voraciously, learned a half dozen languages, studied all of the major religious traditions, and in service of ecology expressed the need for mutually enhancing human-Earth relations. As this rich and insightful biography shows, Thomas was wonderfully supported by many colleagues who recognized his prophetic genius. Perhaps foremost was Wm. Theodore (Ted) de Bary, professor of Asian Studies and for some years provost of Columbia University who was the primary force behind the publication of books for the study of Asian civilizations as well as the director of the monthly Columbia Seminar on Oriental Thought and Religion which Thomas (and I) attended.

Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim, husband and wife professors at Yale University and creators of the Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology (FORE), are the primary guarantors of Thomas’s legacy. Brian Thomas Swimme, my colleague at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) since 1990, and the co-author with Thomas of The Universe Story, is the second name in the increasingly influential Berry-Swimme worldview. Journey of the Universe, an influential film and book by Swimme, Tucker, and Grim, recounts the evolution of consciousness based on Thomas’s vision from the Big Bang to the ongoing Sixth Mass Extinction. In 2005 CIIS awarded John Grim and Mary Evelyn Tucker an honorary degree. Matthew Fox, exponent of Creation Spirituality in more than twenty volumes, and Drew Dellinger, celebrated cosmic poet, also advance the vision of Thomas Berry.

Beginning in 1978 with his influential essay, “The New Story,” (3) Thomas has been known primarily as an ecological thinker, a Cassandra warning against the destruction of Earth. The first half of his career as a scholar of comparative religion is crucial for his ecological vision. Following his dissertation on Giambattista Vico’s philosophy of history, Thomas studied the sacred texts and cultural history of Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, and China. The research that led to his first two books, Buddhism (1967) and Religions of India: Hinduism, Yoga, and Buddhism (1971), enabled Thomas to develop a truly global perspective free of Christian exclusivism and modern western exceptionalism. If one knows Augustine’s City of God and Thomas Aquinas’s Summa it is possible to detect their influence on Thomas’s thought but his writings are almost entirely free of Christian claims and limitations. This biography shows the many creative ways that Thomas’s ecological analysis and proposed solutions include Confucian ideals and the profound relation to nature celebrated in shamanic/indigenous traditions.

Beginning in the 1960s and continuing through his lengthy, productive career, Thomas was one of the foremost exponents of the thought of Teilhard de Chardin, SJ (1881-1955). With an eye on the need both to deepen humanism and to show the presence of divinity in nature, Thomas celebrated Teilhard’s evolutionary vision which he complemented (and to some extent corrected) by Confucian and indigenous spirituality. His one publication on Teilhard is critical of Teilhard’s optimistic faith in industrial and technological progress and his failure to see the harm to Earth already in evidence during Teilhard’s lifetime. As Thomas wrote:

Neither Teilhard nor his opponents seem to have realized that the greatest challenge to his work would derive from the planetary disturbance consequent on the ideas of progress that were then being proposed throughout Western society. They could not see that the glory of the human was becoming the desolation of the Earth or that the desolation of the Earth was becoming the destiny of the human. (4)

Thomas steers a middle course between a scientific humanism that regards the cosmos as dead and a Christian theism that fosters a separation of God and creation. Thomas suffered opposition to his religious views but less severe than Teilhard who was forbidden to publish his theological writings during his lifetime. Teilhard famously lost a series of appeals to the Vatican and his Jesuit superiors; in his response to the attempted restrictions on him by his Passionist superiors Thomas repeatedly prevailed. Neither Teilhard nor Thomas was as opposed as Galileo, but the comparison comes to mind.

Students of Thomas’s writings are fond of quoting two phrases, one sentence, and a biographical reference, each of which invites an explanation: First, “The New Story” refers to Thomas’s conviction, based on deep personal experience, that the Universe is revealing itself through every species. Because humans are the only self-reflective species, they have a special role in the self-revelation of the Universe from the “primordial flaring forth” to the present and into the future. Second, “The Great Work” refers to that same ideal collaboration of human and Earth and the four institutions that in Thomas’s view are thwarting its advance: corporations (especially due to unregulated capitalism), governments, religious institutions (especially dimensions of Abrahamic religions that focus on the divine at the expense of Earth), and universities. The Great Work (1998) concludes with Thomas’s recommendation of four wisdoms: indigenous, women, “urban classical literate traditions,” and “scientific knowledge [which] has advanced with amazing success ever since the sixteenth century.” (5)

Third, Thomas’s often-quoted sentence, “the universe is a communion of subjects,” (6) refers to his compelling case for interiority and subjectivity of all components and all relationships. The plundering of Earth has followed the objectification and emptying of meaning that accompanied modern western science since Bacon, Descartes, and Newton. As Thomas argues, a viable future will need to replace both flatland science and religious transcendence in favor of numinous dimensions of Cosmos, Earth, humanity, and nature. Fourth, followers of Thomas often refer to his experience at age nine of a meadow across a creek to which he attributed a lasting importance in his life. As he recounted years later, “I seem to come back to this moment and the impact it has had on my feeling for what is real and worthwhile in life.” Thomas wrote:

This early experience, it seems, has become normative for me throughout the entire range of my thinking. Whatever preserves and enhances this meadow in the natural cycles of its transformation is good; whatever opposes this meadow or negates it is not good. My life orientation is that simple. It is also that pervasive. It applies in economics and political orientation as well as in education and religion. (7)

Returning to my unsuccessful conversation with Thomas in the late 1970s and my gradual (and always grateful) shift from Thomas as my primary mentor to anthroposophical teachers and friends, this passage also suggests, at least retrospectively, an explanation for why, in the 1980s and 1990s, I saw less of Thomas as I committed to the study of anthroposophy and administration of anthroposophical institutions. While single terms for profound mentors can be misleading, if not taken as a limit they can also be helpful. Hence, I tend to think of Thomas as a multi-religious humanist, Teilhard as a Roman Catholic scientist and mystic, and Steiner as a Christian esotericist. Thomas brought to his task a detailed appreciation of the complementarity of many religions and wisdom traditions, all of which in diverse ways supported and extended his reverence for a meadow across a creek. Steiner researched and reported on many esoteric ways to know the influence of high spiritual beings on individuals and cultures, on past, present, and future. As Steiner would not want to build an ethics on a meadow across a creek, Thomas would not seriously consider the idea of Buddha spiritually attending the Nativity of Jesus. Yet, as I have known for approximately five decades, the prophetic ecological vision of Thomas Berry and the esoteric teachings of Rudolf Steiner are wonderfully complementary. It is a pleasure to recommend Thomas Berry and this book that describes him and his important ideas with insight and grace.

Robert McDermott is president emeritus of the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) and CIIS professor of Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness. He is the editor of The New Essential Steiner (2009). His Steiner and Kindred Spirits (2015) includes approximately thirty pages on Teilhard de Chardin and Thomas Berry. His The Essential Steiner appeared in 1984; he served as President, New York Center for Anthroposophy; President, Rudolf Steiner [summer] Institute; board member, Steinerbooks; and member of Eastern Regional and General Councils of the Anthroposophical Society in America.

Endnotes:

1 Correspondence from Thomas Berry to Adrian M. Hofstetter, OP, to Richard Tarnas, 2007.

2 This chain of influences has been confirmed by Sean Kelly, CIIS professor and integral ecologist.

3 “The New Story,” in Thomas Berry, The Dream of the Earth (San Francisco, Sierra Club, 1988).

4 Thomas Berry, “Teilhard in the Ecological Age,” in Arthur Fabel and Donald St. John, eds., Teilhard in the 21st Century (NY: Orbis Books, 2003), 73.

6 The Great Work (NY: Crown/Bell Tower, 1999), 177. Thomas Berry, “Teilhard in the Ecological Age,” in Arthur Fabel and Donald St. John, eds., Teilhard in the 21st Century (NY: Orbis Books, 2003), 73. “The Meadow Across the Creek,” in The Great Work, 16.

7 Ibid., 13.