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

Christian Century, June 2, 1993 by Cristina Traina

Ruether attends to both ecofeminist and deep ecologist solutions. ("Deep ecology" goes beyond ecology to explore the symbolic, psychological and ethical patterns of humans' destructive relations with nature.) Deep ecologists want to counter Western culture's anthropocentrism - its tendency to place humanity at the center of the universe and to reduce the nonhuman world to an instrument for human ends - with a theory of an expanded self which calls for identification with the nonhuman world. As Lois Daly has noted, some ecofeminists, while suspicious that such self-expansion perpetuates the patriarchal tendency to reduce others to tools of self-realization, still accept the patriarchal identification of man with controlling reason and transcendent deity, and of woman with physical nature and the immanent earth goddess. They simply reverse the hierarchy.

Ruether takes both ecofeminist and deep ecologist criticism of Christian thought with utmost seriousness, acknowledging and describing Christianity's historic culpability for many unjust, world-destroying practices and attitudes. In the process she discovers contradictions - like the tendency to regard finitude as sin and death as evil - which have both hobbled Christian theological reflection and encouraged Christians to pursue ultimately sinful and destinctive relationships with one another and their surroundings. But here the resemblance between Ruether and the others ends. For many ecofeminists and deep ecologists, such a critique of Christianity is a prelude to its rejection; it is a signal to create new religious systems, opt for non-Western ones, or return to the beliefs and practices of an era preceding the fall of Western civilization into a world- and woman-denying dualism.

Ruther refuses to allow post-Christian visions the last word. In particular, she rejects the argument that women's experiences and relationships infallibly refute the patriarchal tradition. No alternative to patriarchy lies dormant in women, waiting to be unleashed. Both women and men require transformation. Gaia and God continues Ruether's pattern of critical reverence for the Christian tradition: she bets that Christianity, while not inherently superior to other religious traditions, contains fragments that can, in concert with new insights, subvert and transform Christianity's patriarchal theologies and practices.

Ingrained in Ruether's argument are solutions to two problems which have long plagued not only ecological ethics but feminist thought and Roman Catholic natural law ethics. First, there is the tension between Western notions of human reason-nature-controlling, deductive and scientific - and a more embodied, feeling, experiential approach which draws on biological and psychological processes. If the rationalist approach is the cause of the environmental crisis, should it be discarded in favor of the second? If not, how can the two coexist? Second, environmental ethicists have trouble balancing the needs of an interdependent system against the rights of its individual elements. This difficulty also dogs feminist and natural law thinkers. Ruether's solutions to these problems evoke natural law understandings of nature and reason, and of the common good. The connections are implicit, not explicit - she neither employs standard natural law terms nor accepts the tradition uncritically - but they are profound reminders of the Catholic roots of her thought.