The decline of the consciousness of nature in Christianity and its economic consequences

'Die Grenze von bewusst und unbewusst ist in hohem Masse durch unsere Weltanschauung bestimmt'
Carl Gustav Jung

The wake up call of the desert

The importance of a personal contact with nature was felt in early Christianity by the so called Desert Fathers. They represented an Eastern form of Christianity which was less formal and more spiritual than the form of Christianity of the West. The Desert Fathers are separated from us by a large historical gulf. Their communities sprang up across the wildernesses of Egypt and Syria in reaction to materialism in the fourth century church and world. The Desert Fathers were monks who decided to live in solitude in order to rediscover the connection with their own inner world as well as with the world of nature and the world of the Creator. They were looking for the kingdom within, for the sources of spirit, wisdom and sense needed to guide people in making the sustainable decisions in the complexity of the outer world.

The desert experience was an experience of restoring to life in people the good connections with their own nature and with nature. The monks saw this new life exemplified in the life of Christ, who lived in the desert and touched the animals with new glory. The Desert Fathers were concerned at the one sided mental attitude which crept into the organisation of the Church and which dominated the economy of the Roman world. In Christianity took place a process of compliance with a mental and rational Roman worldview which left no space for the natural world in individuals and the natural world in nature itself. This process of adaption was building up an unprecedented central religious authority parallel to the centralised civil government which it succeeded. As an administrative body it flourished, but as a spiritual force it counted for less and less, sinking into the torpor of materialism which was the fashion of the times.

The main stream of early Christianity stood at the bifurcation of becoming an institution with political power. This form of Christianity was not focussed on engaging people as part of nature with economic life. Trade never entirely dried up. But the main stream of Christianity had turned politics and wasn't able to set free inspirational forces that should revitalize enterprise.

A wake up call should come from another place, the place of the gradually exploited nature itself, the place of the wilderness and the desert.

Economy and the exploitation of nature in the Roman world

The omens of decay in economic life of the Roman world grew as the huge administration of the empire became more formalised. Most of the leaders were focussed on material growth only. Upcoming problems were addressed by looking for solutions which were bounded within the existing framework of thinking.

The economic structure depended on the class of peasants. Their profits on foodstuffs were increasingly subjected to taxes and to exorbitant rents demanded by the patrician landlords (the business leaders of the Roman times), who needed money for the support of the growing army and civil administration, and life in the cities. The poor townsmen for example were guaranteed provisions, provided free by the state.

As a result peasants sought to scale up their productivity. They resorted to quick yields and soon exhausted large stretches of land through erosion and over-production. The trading results became more and more devoid of a solid base. The pressure on realising more growth in only material wealth resulted in a circle of exploitation and corruption and increasing threats at the borders and increasing costs.

Much of the land lost its value for production and in time had to be deserted. But the borders remained. The protection of the unpeopled provinces by the army raised the costs which had to be borne by the remaining peasantry.

Consciousness of nature, a transformational power

'Wilderness, it is here I came to know myself, but it was only just the beginning, because I found the more you know your true self, the more you know about those around you' Janet Shaw

The Desert Fathers had an innate feeling that people cannot function well in the routine of their lives when they are tearing of the very fabric of their being and their relationships. The preference for the security of a rationally mastered world went hand in hand with the estrangement of one's own natural being. This estrangement endangered at the same time the rational securities. The connections between people became shallow and the establishment of good relationships was difficult. The challenge was to overcome the objections of fear and scepticism by experiencing that an attitude of letting go in reality meant a gain in all respects: spiritual, relational as well as material and rational. How did they work this out in practice?

In nature people were brought along the way of full self acceptance. A person's self acceptance started by the acceptance of the body by adapting the domestic situation (eat, sleep, drink) to the rhythm of nature. With the pledging of the body to certain wilderness place people made a first step to become reconnected with the forgotten and repressed parts of their own human nature.

The Desert Fathers knew that the consciousness of nature made people aware of their deeper selves. The desert experience would open them up to their innate inspirational sources. The concern with the body proved to be a gateway to this inner natural world. People learned to listen to themselves in an other way than they were used to. The interaction with nature released a listening attitude by which people were guided in a natural way out of their mental boxes and were reconnected with the hidden parts of their own nature. The result of the interaction with nature was an in-depth experience by which people turned upside down in their approach of the world they lived in. The challenge was to look for ways in which a one-sided mindset, which was accompanied with the fear to run out of control, could be opened up to a mindset in which people were able to function as whole vital persons. Persons would function only well in daily life and work when they would be engaged in this life as whole persons with body, spirit, heart and mind.

To the desert for leadership development

'The Shadow cannot be denied, but must be dealt with in the light of higher authority' John Sanford

Some of the Desert Fathers grew out as coaches of leaders and decision makers in the cities who visited them to experience a resourcing process as a whole person in relation to their responsibilities as leaders. The resourcing process was described by biblical metaphors. Finding the world of the heart and the spirit was compared with finding a lost treasure which was hidden in the field, or with a woman who had lost a precious coin and who was sweeping her house till she had found the piece of silver.

Instructive in this context is the story of King Saul. It is a story concerning leadership development.

King Saul couldn't overcome the giant Goliath with the mindset by which he tried to control his empire. This mindset was not a sufficient condition to perform a lasting and sustainable change. King Saul was driven by the fear to lose his power. He became gradually enclosed in a framework of thinking which intensified a split in his personality. He repressed his inner world which grew out to a destructive shadow side of his personality. He wasn't free as a leader in finding vital and meaningful solutions. Only a restored good contact with his inspirational source could have helped him. This freedom could be gained by undertaking an inner journey into the repressed dark world of his soul. It was the way to re-establish the good relationship with himself and other people. The connection with his innate source should release an inspirational activity by which gigantic transformations could be performed. The young shepherd David represented such a transformation. He did not live in Saul's framework of thinking. He was able to defeat the giant Goliath because of his inner freedom and creativity.

Whirlwinds of brutality, insecurity, unchained libido were roaring through the streets of Imperial Rome. The role of the Eastern Desert Fathers and of Western institutionalised Christianity to address these problems tended at the beginning to complement each other.

According to C.G. Jung developed official Christianity in the way it did to serve the function to promote the development of human consciousness by helping them not to live out their untamed and unrecognised instincts, and to give them their mitigated natural place in life. This latter role was played by the Desert Fathers. Formal Christianity was building up organisational channels by which the released energy could flow. At the same time there was a tension between both roles. The Western system needed the Eastern desert experience to remain open and flexible. Western Christianity was doomed to dry up in her own system when it should no longer be refreshed by the originality of Eastern thought.

The desert of nature

'The study of European history indicates that gradually there has arisen a great cataclysmic divide within human nature. As we have become rational we have lost touch with our primitive nature, and as a result have lost touch with the sense of being known and of belonging. This divide has meant a loss of meaning in our hearts and minds' Sir Laurens van der Post

As an administrative and legislative body Christianity flourished under new regimes of the Western world. It turned politics and became entangled in a long struggle for power. The wake up calls came from outside this body. But monasteries weren't able to plant their seeds of refreshment into the administrative and legislative system of the organisation itself. Two worlds were separated from each other. In European history medieval scholastic theology, for example, placed the rational intellect at the top of the relative powers and degraded intuition to a far lesser position. The spirit of nature and the nature of human being wasn't anymore appreciated in the way the Desert Fathers and their successors did. People weren't stimulated to listen to and to learn from nature in an unbiased way. The theological tenets of medieval scholasticism professed an hierarchical attitude of the subjugation of nature to human rational power. For Thomas Aquinas animals couldn't inherit a place in heaven because they had only a mortal sensitive soul and no eternal rational soul. By a sensitive soul Thomas meant that animals could suffer pain, feel a situation of threat etc. However they were deprived of deeper consciousness. Similar things were said many years earlier by the famous church father Saint Augustin.

Hereby Thomas glorified the power of abstract rational knowledge above the innate wisdom and the spirit of nature. The ratio became the ultimate standard which couldn't listen anymore to nature. Nature and innate wisdom should listen to the rational soul of human being.

René Descartes took one step further and combined this rational knowledge with an exclusive egocentric attitude. He took the ultimate consequence of the collective thinking of institutional Christianity. Descartes banished the spirit of nature and of innate wisdom definitely to the shadow lands of personal life. Animals and nature had in this paradigm no soul at all. They were considered as automata. People could plunder nature for their own progression without being tempered even by the awareness of the sensitive soul of nature.

Hereby the way was paved to scale up the exploitation of nature to realise more economic and political power.

The Protestant Calvinistic ideas didn't correct the alienation process from nature. The split between the soul of nature and economic life was consolidated by Calvinistic Protestantism. In Calvinistic Protestantism, the entrepreneur and the minister worked together, but not in a similar way the desert fathers and leaders did in earlier times. Nature could only give a faint glow of a remote and unreachable God. The return to nature as a teacher, which helps people to connect with their souls, was in this mindset a blind spot. The facts of the blessings of this remote God were sought in organizational and material successes only. The rational and material solutions were seen as the fruits of their election as children of God. But people were not able to become engaged as whole persons with entrepreneurial and organizational life.

The way to the desert and back is still open.

In the beginning of this century we are confronted with many serious problems concerning the future of life on earth. The technocratic system of economic and organizational thinking shows serious signs of exhaustion.

Economic and sustainable solutions concerning the question how to live on earth in our century cannot be found within the box of thinking which led to the exploitation of nature.

Nature itself should become again the teacher of people to bring them outside their boxes and to show them how many simple and effective solutions can be discovered outside their frameworks of thinking. To find these solutions they should connect again with nature outside and inside themselves. Nature, people and economy can co-operate again.

How such a co-operation can happen in business life is in the last years experienced by leaders and employees of Unilever. They had the courage to make a joint journey in an holistic approach in realising an enormous business transformation.

Jan Willem Kirpestein

Acknowledgements

• Antony Burgmans, chairman of the board of Unilever, who stimulated me to write an essay on this theme.
  
  He made the useful observation that the flaw between the one sided organizational mindset of Western Christianity and the spiritual desert experience of the Desert Fathers in modern times led to the ecological devastation in the South, the wilderness of Africa and other continents. The missionary activities in modern times after the Middle Ages didn't connect with innate spirituality of the aborigines in many cases. They uprooted this spirituality, which paved the way to the exploitation of nature.
  
  While in Europe, the Irish missionaries of the fifth and sixth centuries in Ireland and Scotland, the attorneys of Celtic Christianity, sought to understand the universal connection with the godly sparks of the natives and their heathen spiritual sources. These Celtic monks were deeply inspired by the Desert Fathers. But the things which happened in the fourth century repeated themselves several centuries afterwards in England, Ireland and Scotland.

• Ian Player, a desert father of modern times, founder of the Wilderness Leadership School in South Africa, who initiated me into the world of C.G. Jung, Christianity and Nature and invited me to a wilderness trail in the Umfolozi game reserve.

• The Umfolozi friends, Robert Jan van Ogtrop, Marcello Palazzi, Mark Tigchelaar and Syb Roell. We had together an unparalleled wilderness experience in Umfolozi Game Reserve in the month of October 2003.

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