Meditations on Creation in an Era of Extinction

Kate Rigby introduces her book by pointing to a peculiarity of human beings: we tend to puzzle over our very existence. Why are we here? What are we good for? What is our purpose? How should we answer these fundamental questions about the human place in the scheme of things in the Anthropocene, a time of threatening ecological collapse and widespread human injustice. How do we hear the deeply interconnected ‘cry of the Earth’ and the ‘cry of the poor’?

In this book, Rigby, Alexander von Humboldt Professor of Environmental Humanities at the University of Cologne, turns to what she sees as one of the most influential creation narratives, the Hebrew sacred Scripture Bereshit, ‘In the beginning’, adopted into the Christian Bible as Genesis I. She argues that this creation story is significant because ‘it remains part of the religious inheritance of almost one-third of the world’s human population’; and can resonate strongly with ‘secular assumptions that privilege human knowledge, agency, and interests over those of other beings.’

Rigby draws on the long Christian tradition of the hexameron, ‘meditation of the six (hexa) days (hemera) of creation’ when ‘God’ created the world – although Rigby uses the word Elohim throughout, an ambiguous, ‘queer plurisingular’ term that shows that ‘the unnameable and ungraspable divine only becomes creator in and through the activity of creation’, which implies a ‘panentheistic co-becoming’. The hexameron tradition started in the fourth century CE with writers such as Basil of Caesarea, Philo of Alexandria, Theophilus of Antioch, and continued into the Middle Ages and Renaissance: Milton ‘smuggled a hexameron into Book VII of Paradise Lost’. Rigby shows how this tradition was often less anthropocentric than we might imagine, often celebrating the ‘astonishing abundance and variety of living beings.’ While the tradition as faded in modern times, I see parallels in teachings from Indigenous scholars around the world, for example, in Robin Wall Kimmerer’s re-telling of the story of Sky Woman in Braiding Sweetgrass.

Following the Introduction, seven chapters reflect on the Genesis account of each day of creation from first light, the division of Heaven from Earth, the separation of dry land from the sea, the creation of Sun and Moon, and so on. Each starts with the relevant verse from Genesis followed by Rigby’s personal reflection on that day and a scholarly review of the writers in the hexameron tradition, which show the very wide range of interpretations of the Scripture – very far from the literal and fundamentalist view we so often hear today. There is then a review of contemporary responses to the issues raised, from contemplative and community practices to practical action, mainly from within Christian communities across the world – Rigby told me in a personal communication that the book is ‘pitched primarily at left-green Christians’ although hopefully of interest to those inclined to a secular eco-spirituality. At the end of each chapter, Rigby draws the themes together with her own final meditation on the day.

The big challenge to this meditation comes on Day 6 of Creation: Elohim creates living creatures on the land, and humans ‘in our image’, charging them to ‘be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and conquer it,’ to ‘hold sway over’ all other living beings. This is for me where the book truly gets interesting, as many ecological commentators have identified this text as at the heart of human exceptionalism within Christendom and so at the root of the ecological catastrophe. It has been described as an ‘inconvenient text’ by ecologically-minded Christians; Rigby herself approaches it ‘with dread’ and makes a valiant but not always successful attempt to give it a meaning appropriate to modern critiques of human exceptionalism. She shows that early hexameral writers placed more emphasis on the glory and diversity of the whole of creation; that reading the text in its historical context can be taken to mean ‘humans were to be neither entirely separate from otherkind nor unbounded in their rule.’ Other ecologically-minded Christians have resolved the challenge by rewriting the whole Genesis verse.

I find her resolution of this ‘inconvenient text’ more convincing in the final chapter. The tradition of hexameron stops at the sixth day, since ‘God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it’ and ‘Elohim fell silent’. But Rigby argues that the seventh day is not so much an ending as a new beginning: ‘the culmination of it all is not the making of human beings, but the hallowing of the whole… creation is an ongoing adventure rather than a finished artefact’; elsewhere she writes of a ‘paradoxical time out-of-time… in which all things are perpetually being summoned into existence by a divine creative agency.’

Rigby concludes that for too long, the people of the Book attended only to the human version of creation as told by a privileged few. In her revised view we face a new summons, ‘one that calls us all into a wider community of creatures and toward a marvellously multispecies kingdom yet to come.’ She tells us to ‘quiet down and listen up’, to attend to the voices of the trillions not of our kind, so we together can ‘augment rather than cut short’ the tale of creation in ‘newfound harmonious strains to the ancient, endangered, yet enduring chorus of creation.’

The secular commentator might ask, Why bother? Does one need a close study of Genesis to come to this conclusion? Why struggle, sometimes tortuously, to justify these ancient texts, so full of patriarchy and human exceptionalism? But even an old skeptic like me can enjoy the wisdom in this Christian tradition, just as there is wisdom in other world religions and in the Indigenous worldviews we are only now learning to appreciate. This wisdom has been deeply buried in the accumulated assumptions of those ‘privileged few’ through history, increasingly seen through a dualist and materialist lens. Engaging with serious theological thought and language, as its best, draws the reader away from this narrow vision into a wider, more inclusive perspective.