If you want vivid images for this, turn to the pages in\u00a0The Lord of the Rings<\/em>\u00a0dealing with the battle between Saruman and the Ents or to the section of\u00a0The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe<\/em>\u00a0detailing the permanent winter into which Narnia had fallen.<\/p>\n It is only against this Guardinian background that we can properly read the Pope\u2019s latest encyclical. Whatever his views on global warming, they are situated within the far greater context of a theology of nature that stands athwart the typically modern point of view. That the earth has become \u201cpiled with filth,\u201d that pollution adversely affects the health of millions of the poor, that we live in a \u201cthrowaway\u201d culture, that the unborn are treated with indifference, that huge populations have little access to clean drinking water, that thousands of animal species are permitted to fall into extinction, and yes even that we live in housing that bears no organic relation to the natural environment \u2013 all of it flows from the alienated Cartesian subject going about his work of mastering nature. In the spirit of the author of the book of Genesis, the Biblical prophets, Irenaeus, Thomas Aquinas, Francis of Assisi \u2013 indeed of any great pre-modern figure \u2013 Pope Francis wants to recover a properly cosmological sensibility, whereby the human being and her projects are in vibrant, integrated relation with the world that surrounds her.<\/p>\n What strikes the Pope as self-evident is that the nature we have attempted to dominate, for the past several centuries, has now turned on us, like Frankenstein\u2019s monster. As he put it in a recent press conference, \u201cGod always forgives; human beings sometimes forgive; but when nature is mistreated, she never forgives.\u201d These lessons, which he learned many years ago from Romano Guardini, are still worthy of careful attention today.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" If you want vivid images for this, turn to the pages in\u00a0The Lord of the Rings\u00a0dealing with the battle between Saruman and the Ents or to the section of\u00a0The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe\u00a0detailing the permanent winter into which Narnia had fallen. It is only against this Guardinian background that we can properly read […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":557,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-19346","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"yoast_head":"\n