Gaia and God: An Ecofeminist Theology of Earth Healing. - book reviews

Christian Century, June 2, 1993 by Cristina Traina

The field of ecological ethics is fast becoming a morass of positions among which only specialists can distinguish: creation spirituality, deep ecology, ecofeminism and the animal rights movement. Thus the title of Rosemary Radford Ruether's latest volume is apt to put off both insiders, who may assume that they know the contents without reading the book, and untutored readers. The book is neither a rehearsal of obscure definitions nor a stump speech nor an ethic. Despite her commitment to "earth healing" (a healed relationship between men and women, between classes, between nations and between humans and the earth) and her suggestions of means to that end, the most important word of the title - and the project at the front of Ruether's mind - is theology. She takes a hard, theologically inspired look at ecofeminist assumptions (that male domination of women and male domination of nature are interconnected), and offers an equally stringent ecofeminist critique of the Christian theological tradition.

Ruether's many interests - liberation in general, ecumenical relations, liturgy, racism, language, ethics, history, Christology, sexism - have been evident in such earlier works as New Woman/New Earth (1975), but in Gaia and God the connections are worked out systematically. Sin, defined as wrong relationship among human beings and between them and the rest of nature, fosters not just economic and political injustice, not just racism and sexism, but the destinction of the entire created order. Therefore attempts to reconcile and transform human relationships cannot succeed unless human attitudes of domination over nonhuman creation are uprooted as well.

Ruether holds her theology accountable to an impressive number of disciplines. She begins with an analysis of three Western creation stories - Genesis, the Enuma Elish and Plato's Timeaus - and argues that the early Christian effort to synthesize these accounts has bequeathed to us two unmanageable assumptions: that nature was originally paradisiacal and benign for human beings, and that human mortality is the product of human sin. She follows this account with scientific versions of the creation story, drawing from them a sense of the profound interdependence of atmospheric, aquatic and organic systems. This juxtaposition of religious and scientific accounts is repeated in a discussion of narratives of world destruction. Western apocalypticism, she argues, projects all evil onto one group, and hails death and destruction as the harbinger of the kingdom of God. This analysis is paired with highly quantitative accounts of the various links between population growth; hunger and poverty; pollution and atmospheric change; the extinction of species; and the effects of militarism. Ruether warns that the ecosystem can no longer absorb and recover from relentless human abuse; its destruction is not the prelude to its salvation.

Next comes an insightful critique of Christian theology in which Ruether argues that sin - the misuse of freedom in the distortion of relationships - must be distinguished from finitude, the good and created condition of human life. This sets up what is probably her most controversial chapter. Unlike man ecological ethicists and post-Christian feminists, she insists that humans did not originally live lightly on the earth in harmonious, paradisiacal groups. Further, the matricentric structure usually attributed to these mythic societies is inherently unstable and, in fact, contains the seeds of patriarchy; it would thus be dangerous to reinstitute that structure uncritically. After exploring the development of structures of domination in Western societies, she concludes that undoing these structures requires re-establishing more manageable units of local control, ensuring just relations and the just distribution of life's necessities, and converting a culture of competition and domination into one of compassionate solidarity. In her final section she examines two strands of Christian spirituality - covenant and sacrament - which can support these changes.

Ruether concludes with some general suggestions, ranging from the spiritual to the pedestrian, for beginning the process of earth healing. Her vagueness, although frustrating, is consistent with her emphasis upon conversion as the prerequisite for concrete, local solutions: "Only by understanding how the web of life works can we also learn to sustain it rather than destroy it. This is not simply a task of intellectual understanding, but of metanoia, in the fullest sense of the word: of conversion of our spirit and culture, of our technology and social relations, so that the human species exists within nature in a life-sustaining way."

This compressed version of the book shortchanges its bold theological elements. To begin with, Ruether makes connections between ecofeminism and other ecological spiritualities and ethics. She concurs with the ecofeminists in correlating the mental and mythical misadventures of Western thought with misogynism and destruction of the global ecosystem. Patriarchal patterns are responsible for ecological destruction, and any approach which presumes to correct one without acknowledging its profound connection to the other is doomed to fail.