Tending God’s Garden: Adam’s Vocation and Ours

Over the past few months, much of my time and energy has been devoted to a side project exploring God’s two books through the lens of Pope Benedict’s dialogue with atheism. Now, however, I’d like to shift back to reflecting on the fundamental principles that ground the Catholic Church’s approach to the environment. As I’ve written before at Catholic World Report, this vision is rooted in the idea that all creatures are united with the Triune God and with one another in a cosmic covenant.

Even as we share a familial connection with God’s other creatures, it is also true that man alone bears the unique privilege of embodying the divine image and likeness. Because of this gift, our species has been uniquely charged with the responsibility of fostering this cosmic communion through acts of loving stewardship.

This task is detailed vividly in the Bible’s opening creation accounts. The fundamental duties of man are first outlined in the directive to “subdue” the earth and “have dominion” over it (Gen 1:28). They are then reinforced when Genesis declares that man has been put on earth to “till and keep” God’s garden (Gen 2:15). In what follows, I’ll delve into the meaning of these revealed imperatives, confront some objections commonly levied against them, and unpack their authentic implications with the help of a great mind who thought about them a lot: Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI).

Man’s priestly vocation of tilling the earth

Taken at face value, the divine ordinances issued in Genesis were issued to an individual named Adam who walked the earth at the dawn of our species. The story appears simple enough: the first human was placed in a lush garden in Mesopotamia, tasked only with caring for it. If we left the story there, it would be difficult to see its relevance for us today, let alone for our efforts in environmental stewardship so many millennia later. However, a closer examination of the original language and context of the Bible’s creation account reveals that the message of this ancient text is as timely today as ever.

For starters, it is easy for the modern reader to miss out on the fact that the person to whom they were directed is not a personal name like “Bob” or “Susie.” Rather, it’s a reference to humanity as a whole—not “Adam” but “the adam.”

From the perspective of Genesis, human beings are represented by the figure of the adam–literally the “dirtling”–and as such we united with all other creatures because we all take our origin from the adamah—the “dust of the earth.” This applied to the first man hundreds of thousands of years ago, and it applies to us still today. To borrow the words of Joseph Ratzinger: “The picture that describes the origin of Adam is valid for each human being in the same way. Each human is Adam; Adam is each human being.”

Here’s why that’s significant for our purposes: because we are Adam, the commands God gives to Adam are also directed toward us.

For an ancient Israelite, the message of Genesis would have come across quite clearly, for in its original context Adam represented not only mankind generally but the nation of Israel in particular. Knowing this is crucial if we are to interpret correctly the duties God enjoins upon man in Genesis, for these responsibilities are reflections not just of any laws whatsoever but specifically God’s laws for ancient Israel. Adam’s story told in the first few chapters of the Bible is a figurative dramatization of Israel’s story—its reception of God’s law, its violation of that law, and its journey toward redemption. The story unfolded early on in Genesis mirrors the Chosen People’s drama from the nation’s “creation” at the Exodus to its immediate “fall” with the Golden Calf to its “death” in the Babylonian Exile.

Much ink has been spilled explaining what I only have time to summarize briefly here, but I would like to highlight a few ways this is conveyed through the sacred author’s thoughtful use of wordplay. For one thing, it is worth reflecting on the simple reality that God commands man to fill and subdue the earth in Genesis 1:28. It is no accident that the word rendered here in Genesis as “earth” (eretz) is the same term translated “land” in Numbers 32:22—when God’s people conquer or subdue the promised eretz. A similar parallel lies in Scripture’s depiction of God taking both the Hebrews and Adam from their native lands and placing them in new, holy territories: Israel comes to Canaan from Mesopotamia (Gen 11:31), just as Adam is taken from the land of his creation and placed in Eden (Gen 2:8,15; 3:23). As God does for Adam in primordial time, so he does for Israel in salvation history.

While there are additional parallels worth mentioning, in this context perhaps most the noteworthy connection between Adam and Israel comes in Genesis 2:15. This is where Adam is instructed to “till” (RSV) or “cultivate” (NAB) and “keep” (RSV) or “care for” (NAB) the Lord’s garden sanctuary. These terms (avad and shamar, respectively) are the precise words deployed later in the Pentateuch to describe the liturgical functions of Israelite priests who “minister at” (avad) and “have charge of” (shamar) the tabernacle (Num 3:7–8; 8:26; 18:5–6). Both of these carry critical ramifications for how we as descendants of the first adam ought to approach our relationship with creation.

The first of these, avad, refers both to working the soil and to working for someone as a servant. This includes “serving” or “ministering to” a deity as a worshiper (an ancient pairing reflected still to this day in our modern notions of a “minister” and participation in a liturgical “service”). With this in mind, we can say that Adam is the priest of creation who has been placed on earth to minister to God through his work in the garden of creation. Just as Israel is the Lord’s servant called to cultivate obedience to his law and keep his commandments, man understood in this way is God’s servant called to cultivate and protect creation. This, in fact, is precisely how Ratzinger saw things. In his own words, the call to “serve the earth” as a covenantal partner is an integral, if often neglected, component of man’s quest to “fulfill both ourselves and the world.”

As for the other verb in Gn 2:15, shamar is commonly used not only in reference to taking care of gardens and priestly service but also with regard to care for people (looking after a household) and sheep (the practice of “keeping” a flock). It can also be translated “to observe”—as in observing the commandments, nature, and the Sabbath. The idea is that observing nature with due diligence equips us to serve it in the right way.

This is just a brief sketch of what Genesis’s creation account has to teach us about caring for creation today. There is a wealth of literature out there on this theme, but it comes down to this: both in the Bible as well as in the Jewish and Christian tradition that followed, Adam is the priest of creation, and we are Adam. Originally intended for the Jews, this message now holds the same significance for Christians who partake in the new and everlasting covenant.

How Ratzinger handles the claim that Christianity has ruined the planet

If Genesis portrays man as the priest and shepherd of creation, the tragic fact is that Christians have not always lived according to the ethos of service that characterizes this vocation. All too often, our service is primarily directed toward ourselves, and our dominion over creation becomes domination.

Environmentalists the world over have long called attention to this posture among believers and the negative impact that it has had on the degradation of the earth. As Wendell Berry observes, “[T]he culpability of Christianity in the destruction of the natural world, and the uselessness of Christianity to any effort to correct that destruction, are now established clichés of the conservation movement.” Rather than outright dismissing this accusation, it is revealing that Berry responds, “[T]he indictment of Christianity by the anti-Christian conservationists is, in many respects, just.” As a sign of this, he correctly points out, “It is hardly too much to say that most Christian organizations are as happily indifferent as most industrial organizations to the ecological, cultural, and religious implications of industrial economics.”

How should the Catholic respond to such assertions?

Joseph Ratzinger’s many and often tangible contributions to the Church’s vision of environmental stewardship offer a valuable repository of wisdom as we work toward a thoughtful engagement with this challenge.

To take just one simple but representative example, Ratzinger never hesitated to express his sorrow over situations such as the industrial exploitation of creatures. For instance, he laments that geese are often inhumanely overfed to maximize the size of their livers and hens are kept packed so tightly together that they become “caricatures of birds.” Writing as cardinal, Ratzinger noted that these practices degrade living beings to the status of commodities, and he saw the trend as symptomatic of a wider pattern that violates the “relationship of mutuality” that Scripture envisions for man with respect to his fellow creatures.

Ratzinger candidly broached the issue of Christianity’s allegedly “merciless consequences” more systematically in his 1981 Lenten pastoral letter. In this text disseminated throughout his diocese, then-Bishop Ratzinger confronted the accusation that the Judeo-Christian tradition “bears the guilt for the entire tragedy of our age and is directly responsible for the bitter state of ecological devastation that we are currently experiencing.” In response to this charge, Ratzinger humbly acknowledged that Christians are indeed part of the problem, just like everyone else. Wrongdoings, in other words, are not solely the product of the secular world but have also been carried out by people of faith. In admitting this, he unequivocally denounced the view that man’s dominion over nature justifies treating it as a machine to be manipulated at will.

Crucially, however, Ratzinger goes on to delineate how Christian environmentalism differs from its secular counterparts (e.g., the work of a sprawling governmental agency like the EPA, large NGOs, and smaller movements that do not draw from the treasury of wisdom that comes only through faith). An endeavor that he elsewhere refers to as “Christian ecology,” the approach Ratzinger has in mind is made possible thanks to “belief in creation, which sets limits to man’s caprice, which places normative criteria before freedom.”

Ratzinger goes on the offensive: devaluing man degrades creation

With this foundation in place, Ratzinger turns the tables on those who pin the source of our present ecological crises squarely on the shoulders of Christianity. While recognizing that believers have not always lived by the authentic teachings of the Book of Genesis, he nonetheless decried “a new and no less ruinous view—an attitude that looks upon the human being as a disturber of the peace, as the one who wrecks everything, as the real parasite and disease of nature.” These words exemplify Ratzinger’s support for a bona fide con-servation, in which humans work with creation rather than embracing the prevailing environmentalist tenet that humans must “put themselves out of the way so that nature might be well again.”

Cardinal Ratzinger also articulated this effectively in Salt of the Earth, one of his incisive and revealing book-length interviews. While agreeing that “we can’t treat the earth as we do,” he noted that our culture’s increasing ecological awareness has unfortunately “spawned a kind of embarrassment about humanity, about man who, as it were, sucks creation dry.” As Ratzinger observed, it seems as though some people today would prefer to undo eons of human evolution, preferring that man should “take his place once more among the other animals.”

Ratzinger characterizes this perspective as “calumny against the human species.” Ironically, he says, such a philosophy ultimately ends up accomplishing the opposite of its stated intention. Instead of fostering renewal, in the end it “destroys the earth and creation and keeps it from its goal.” Meanwhile, those who propagate this error “destroy ourselves and creation by removing from it the hope that lies in it and the greatness to which it is called.” Given all of this, Ratzinger concludes that a robustly Christian approach to the environment is the only one that is “truly salvific.”

To connect this analysis to a famous observation that Benedict would make later as pope, the anti-human mentality at work here is symptomatic of “a peculiar Western self-hatred that is nothing short of pathological,” our current tragic state of affairs in which contemporary society “has lost all capacity for self-love.” As a consequence of this mindset, Benedict explained, “All that [our culture] sees in its own history is the despicable and the destructive; it is no longer able to perceive what is great and pure.”

The loss of God and divinization of creation

Ratzinger further denounced the secular viewpoint that I have just sketched not only for being pathological and reductive, but moreover idolatrous. Challenging another current trend in the field, he emphasized that authentic environmentalism must avoid wedding itself to a “sectarian cult of animals” or a “new pantheism tinged with neo-paganism.”

With these words, he sought to differentiate a Christian theology of creation from today’s prevailing approach, which prioritizes the needs of other creatures while failing to defend the most vulnerable humans among us. Notably, this consistent emphasis in Ratzinger’s oeuvre has found an echo in Pope Francis’s pointed critique of a misguided “divinization of the cosmos” in which “more zeal is shown in protecting other species than in defending the dignity which all human beings share in equal measure.” In contrast with this flawed approach, the Catholic tradition offers a vision of a world that, while not divine, is nevertheless sacred and deserving of our care.

According to Benedict, a key reason this new paganism has been able to gain such traction is because our society has lost sight of the doctrines of creation and redemption, which he described as the “two dimensions” that must be held together in Catholic environmentalism. Neo-paganism, however, can’t sustain care for the earth in the present while fixing our gaze on eternity. As a result, much of life in modern society has taken on a de facto atheistic character, and it is this more than anything else that the Magisterium sees as the leading cause of creation’s denigration. In other words, as the Second Vatican Council taught, the ultimate source of our environmental troubles is not faith but rather its loss, emphasizing that “the creature without the Creator disappears” (Gaudium et Spes, §36).

Benedict would later refine this insight with greater concreteness, elaborating that “the wasting of creation begins when we no longer recognize any need superior to our own, but see only ourselves. It begins when there is no longer any concept of life beyond death.” Without eternity on our horizon, he says that life devolves into a frenetic race in which we “must grab hold of everything and possess life as intensely as possible, where we must possess all that is possible to possess.” Benedict’s proposal for remedying this existential crisis is blunt: the only enduring remedy for the destructive excesses engendered by a secularized worldview is a complete and total return to God. Put simply, “[T]rue and effective initiatives to prevent the waste and destruction of Creation can be implemented and developed, understood and lived only where creation is considered as beginning with God.”

Conclusion: “One of the most pressing tasks of theology today”

What we’ve surveyed of Benedict’s wisdom here is merely a continuation of the ancient Christian tradition, where care for creation was motivated above all by love of its divine Source. And, thanks be to God, living this out requires no special training for the average person still today. Without dismissing the importance of high-level systematic ecological initiatives, if the Church’s perspective holds true, then the most impactful thing we can do for the environment is quite simple. It is to be good Christians—an integral part of which involves adopting a lifestyle that differs noticeably from the bourgeois status quo in our relationship with creation.

This manner of inhabiting the earth embraces all facets of life, both great and small. To name just a couple of examples, our appreciation for God’s creation calls us to avoid wasting food and littering. It also leads us to refrain from supporting commercial firms like those that haul in sharks by the thousands only to sever off their fins and discard the animals back in the ocean to die slow and painful deaths. Whether we’re talking about seemingly trivial matters or ones that have an obvious impact on the entire globe, I find that Wendell Berry ties this all together about as well as anybody: “[O]ur destruction of nature is not just bad stewardship, or stupid economics, or a betrayal of family responsibility; it is the most horrid blasphemy. It is flinging God’s gifts into his face.”

Berry may have elucidated this point more comprehensively, but the emeritus Pope Benedict expressed it most pithily. And it is noteworthy that he deemed this so important a subject that he made it a central point in one of his final essays penned before his death: “This disparagement of creation is really a disparagement of God.” According to Ratzinger, then, the dynamic operates in both directions: losing God leads to losing creation, and losing creation leads to losing God. But the good news is that this interplay has a positive corollary: discovering God shows us how to restore creation, and caring for creation can draw us nearer to God.

And, with that, I’ll let Ratzinger have the final word: “[The renewal of our world can be accomplished…only if the teaching on creation is developed anew. Such an undertaking, then, ought to be regarded as one of the most pressing tasks of theology today.”