Narrating a Sacred Universe. A Study of The Universe Story through the Hermeneutics of Paul Ricoeur

This essay examines the use of language in narrating a sacred universe, focusing specifically on the text of The Universe Story by Thomas Berry and Brian Swimme. It applies the narrative hermeneutics of Paul Ricoeur, who argued for the role of narrative in influencing a life through its creation of a world, to the text. It focuses specifically on Ricoeur’s five traits of a phenomenology of the sacred. This step in Ricoeur’s hermeneutics is a reminder that religious language has been shaped by demythologisation, and this in turn impacts any attempt to articulate in language what is interpreted as an experience of the sacred. In designating the universe as sacred, The Universe Story is confronted with the task of narrating such an experience. In examining the language of the text, this essay analyses how this is preformed and the effectiveness of such an approach.

Introduction

This chapter argues that Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four could well be seen as an example of the science-fictional sub-genre of the enclosed universe story. In these the reader is simultaneously aware of the wrongness of the narrator’s or hero’s views, and the fact that these views arise naturally out of the narrator or hero’s limited knowledge. Can they be disproved without input from outside the enclosed world, such as the captain’s log of a generation Starship, or in Orwell’s case, the hidden history revealed by Goldstein? It is argued that doublethink and Newspeak are Orwell’s vital concepts as agents of mind control. Two works by Ursula Le Guin are seen as further instances of mind control by language, with interestingly different results.

The Recurrence of the Evolutionary Epic

In his 1978 On Human Nature, Edward Wilson defined the evolutionary epic as the scientific story of all life, a linear narrative beginning with the big bang and ending with the story of human history. Since that time several popular science writers have attempted to write that story of life producing such titles as The Universe Story (1992)and The Epic of Evolution (2006). Historians have also gotten into the act under the guise of “Big History,” which has resulted in a series of monographs and is taught at several universities and high schools throughout the world. While the evolutionary epic is often presented as a novel way of bringing the historical insights of modern science into a narrative form that transcends the humanities–natural science divide, the genre itself originates in the nineteenth century, just as new geological and cosmic timescales were being established and new sciences such as biology and anthropology were being formalized. Several German Naturphilosophen and Victorian naturalists imagined the history of life as one, as a “Cosmos,” and produced evolutionary epics that bare significant similarities with their more modern counterparts. By considering the various recurrences of the evolutionary epic, from its origins in early German Romanticism and Victorian naturalism to the degeneration narratives of the fin de siècle and on to the Wilsonian and Big History versions of the late twentieth century and beyond, this essay seeks to map out a shared intellectual genealogy while examining the genre’s conceptual commonalities. What is perhaps most compelling about the history of the genre is the striking persistence of non-Darwinian forms of evolution that are utilized to situate the emergence of humanity in these epic narratives of life.

Ecology and Pneuma: Needing and Finding Each Other?

A discussion of early contributions on ecological spirituality, such as “rediscovering the Gospel of the Earth” (Tom Hayden), “telling a New Universe Story” (Thomas Berry) and “religion as roots and wings” (Jay McDaniel), serves as sounding board for the much earlier pneumatological reflections on humanity and nature by the Dutch scholar, A.A. van Ruler. In his Trinitarian theology, Van Ruler explored ways of overcoming dualism in Christianity and countering spiritless definitions of reality in science. Christology and ‘incarnation’ need supplementation by Pneumatology and indwelling’ of God’s Spirit in humanity and nature to eschatologically properly integrate ‘all things’ in God’s ecology.

Introduction: The Design of Culture and the Culture of Design

Environmentalists are often regarded as people wanting to stop one thing or another, and there are surely lots of things that ought to be stopped. The essays in this book, however, have to do with beginnings. How, for example, do we advance a long-delayed solar revolution? Or begin one in forest management? Or materials use? How do we reimagine and remake the human presence on earth in ways that work over the long haul? Such questions are the heart of what theologian Thomas Berry (1999) calls “the Great Work” of our age. This endeavor is nothing less than the effort to harmonize the human enterprise with how the world works as a physical system and how it ought to work as a moral system. In the past two centuries the human footprint on earth has multiplied many times over. Our science and technology are powerful beyond anything imagined by the confident founders of the modern world. But our sense of proportion and depth of purpose have not kept pace with our merely technical abilities. Our institutions and organizations still reflect their origins in another time and in very different conditions. Incoherence, disorder, and violence are the hallmarks of the modern world. If we are to build a better world—one that can be sustained ecologically and one that sustains us spiritually—we must transcend the disorder and fragmentation of the industrial age. We need a perspective that joins the hardwon victories of civilization, such as human rights and democracy, with a larger view of our place in the cosmos—what Berry calls “the universe story.” By whatever name, that philosophy must connect us to life, to each other, and to generations to come. It must help us to rise above sectarianism of all kinds and the puffery that puts human interests at a particular time at the center of all value and meaning. When we get it right, that larger, ecologically informed enlightenment will upset comfortable philosophies that underlie the modern world in the same way that the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century upset medieval hierarchies of church and monarchy.

FOR THE LOVE OF LIFE

This article affirms Thomas Berry's description of our cultural predicament and the responses he offers in terms of the Universe Story and the 'great work'. After articulating aspects of this new story, the article proceeds to discuss the implications for a new politics and a new economy. The three elements of the 'great work' that of telling the story, the creation of a new politics and the creation of a new economy are essential to the transformation of society. Yet the political and economic transformation are dependent on real democracy, and all are in need of profound reform.