The Original Eco-Warriors: Desert Monks Who Lived With The Land
(ANALYSIS) To state that our culture suffers from a general alienation from its natural environment is to state a cliché.
The ecological and environmental crisis is undeniable. Discussions around political action, however, quickly fragment into a rivalry of socio-economic interests that result in seemingly inescapable deadlocks.
Religious traditions still play rather marginal roles in ecological thought, which often reflects progressive narratives that seek liberation from religion.
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In fact, the field of ecological studies has developed an increasingly strong conviction that religion, especially the Judeo-Christian tradition, is among the culprits for the climate crisis. In his seminal paper, “The Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis,” published in 1967, Lynn White Jr., stated: “Christianity is the most anthropocentric religion the world has seen.”
Among the general features of Judeo-Christian ecological thought, he names an inherent dualism between man and nature and the legitimation of the dominion of man over the rest of creation.
While White certainly noted a strong tendency in certain forms of Christian thought, recent scholarship has become increasingly skeptical of the universal applicability of this thesis to the entire Christian tradition. Developments in the geopolitical landscape of the 21st century have seen the resurgence of religions as major political actors, which makes engagement with their ecological models a practical necessity.
Within the Christian tradition, one current that represents a radically different outlook on ecology is early Desert Monasticism. Although turning towards a way of life located in desert landscapes might seem counterintuitive for contemporary discussions, Christian Desert Monasticism has a particularly rich ecological tradition to offer.
The phenomenon of Desert Monasticism emerged in the late third century as a reaction to what can be seen as a crisis in human-nature relations similar to our own. At this time, Roman religious life centered around urban temple worship and a strong distaste for uncultivated spaces that represented the mere “outside” to the all-encompassing, protective power of civilization. In this context, significant numbers of Christians fled into the deserts of Egypt and Syria, consciously locating themselves in the wilderness and establishing small monastic communities, inverting Roman conceptions of culture and nature.
Their way of life was characterized by ascetic simplicity: agriculture, vegetarianism, craftwork, and small huts to shield them from the heat of the sun. In their thought, the desert emerged as a “counter-world” opposed to Roman civilization and religiosity, radically challenging its human-centered outlook. It was the land itself that came to be seen as a primary identity marker, representing Divine presence outside the borders of Roman civilization.
In reflecting on their environment, the Desert Fathers and Mothers — who by the beginning of the fourth century had become influential figures within Christian communities — developed a tradition of ecological practice centered around a deep appreciation for the landscape of the desert.
It was Origen, one of the central Christian thinkers of the third century, who developed the theological foundations of Desert Monasticism. He turned to the experiential qualities of the desert, among which he praised the clean air, the silence and the withdrawal from the crowds, invoking earlier Jewish and Christian traditions that associate the desert with liberation and the encounter with the divine.
In his understanding, Desert Monasticism simply cannot be abstracted from a deep receptivity towards the concrete desert landscape. This is illustrated by countless anecdotes of Desert monks and nuns “falling in love” with the desert, befriending wild animals such as lions or snakes and even sharing their huts with them.
Later theologians of Desert Monasticism developed these foundations towards the vision of transforming the desert into paradise by invoking a deep sense of kinship among all life forms. The Desert Fathers and Mothers understood salvation to be inseparable from the restoration of the whole creation. In their thought, the desert appears as a web of relations in which all agents are both shaped by the landscape and shape the landscape simultaneously.
The human being here was not seen as lord of creation but rather as a “nexus-point” that unites all life forms. In the ecological thought of Desert Monasticism, responsibility and receptivity are always held together: One cannot transform the desert if one does not let oneself be transformed by the desert first.
When considering the tradition of Desert Monasticism, it is this openness to the agency of the landscape that should be most unsettling for contemporary ecological politics. All too many of our approaches to the environmental crisis suffer from an internalized management mindset that reproduces exactly what caused it: a homogenous, abstract view of “nature,” the assumption of its passivity and an impoverished, uni-directional vision of our relationship to it.
Perhaps a contemporary Christian ecology should not start from the question of what measures should be taken to “save nature.” Such approaches will inevitably fall into the kind of anthropocentric way of thinking Lynn White Jr. criticized so poignantly.
In the spirituality of the Desert Fathers and Mothers, ecological practice always begins with listening, relating, and deliberately exposing oneself to the concreteness of the land, entangling identities and bodies. That is not a call for passivity, but rather an acknowledgment of the necessary embeddedness of all ecological action. It is this attitude of humility from which they conceptualized their responsibility, and it is this attitude that seems to be mostly absent in contemporary ecological thought.
Or to put it in the words of the theologian Douglas Burton-Christie: “To orient oneself toward the non-human, to give one’s conscious attention fully and deeply to a place, an animal, a tree, or a river is already to open oneself to relationship and intimacy with another. We have lost our capacity to see and feel the world, to experience it as a gift …”
Jonathan Bühne is currently studying religious studies in Leipzig. He was born in Menden in 2005, grew up in Tenerife and Germany and spent a year in Kyrgyzstan after graduating from high school. In addition to his studies, he works as a journalist, editor and author.