The Storm Cloud of the Twenty-First Century | Commonweal Magazine

Source: The Storm Cloud of the Twenty-First Century | Commonweal Magazine

Despite the obvious religious differences between the Victorian prophet and the pope—Ruskin was a heterodox Christian who had experienced an “unconversion” from Evangelicalism—a sacramental consciousness lies at the heart of their ecological imaginations. As one of the premiere Romantic intellectuals of the nineteenth century, Ruskin epitomized the Romantic inheritance of the medieval sacramental worldview, its modern restatement, in Wordsworth’s lines, of

…a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man.

Throughout his work—from the art criticism of his early career to his later climatological oracles—Ruskin discerned the trademarks of divinity “deeply interfused” in nature. He argued in Modern Painters (1843–60) that artists portrayed the “faultless, ceaseless, inconceivable, inexhaustible loveliness, which God has stamped upon all things.” The beauty of flowers, rocks, or human beings displayed, he wrote, “the Divine attributes.” When we gaze upon “the material nearness of these heavens,” he marveled, we “acknowledge His own immediate presence.” In “The Work of Iron” (1858), Ruskin importuned readers to consider that a pebble possessed “a kind of soul,” and that it would say to us, if we were inclined to listen, that “‘I am not earth—I am earth and air in one; part of that blue heaven which you love, and long for, is already in me.’” When Ruskin reported on his ominous storm cloud, he was deciphering signs of sacrilege as well as recording ecological devastation.

Throughout his work—from the art criticism of his early career to his later climatological oracles—Ruskin discerned the trademarks of divinity “deeply interfused” in nature.

Francis echoes Ruskin’s Romantic apprehension of God’s countenance in the material realm. Invoking the cultures of Indigenous peoples whose habitats are being stolen and contaminated, the pope lauds their belief that “land is not a commodity but rather a gift from God…a sacred space with which they need to interact.” All of nature is “imbued with the radiant presence” of God; “to contemplate creation,” he asserts elsewhere, “is to hear a message”; divinity conveys its power and love, he reminds us, even in “the last speck of dust of our planet.” What Gerard Manley Hopkins called “the dearest freshness deep down things” envelops the entire universe, beckoning us into what Francis calls “universal communion” with all created things. Calling on us to relinquish the authoritarian desire for technological hegemony, he issues an invitation into an “openness to awe and wonder” that will reestablish “fraternity and beauty in our relationship with nature.” Francis’s ecological vision rests not on a moral and political claim about the primacy of the common good, but on an ontological claim about the nature of the universe: that its architecture is thoroughly leavened by what Dante called “the Love that moves the sun and the other stars.”