Humanitarian Environmental Magazine. Vol. 2. Is. 2. 2000. P. 79-81.

THE ECOLOGICAL THEME IN THE ORTHODOX CHURCH

Archpriest V. Potapov

The extreme adherents of the ecological movement openly declare that the Christian religion is the source of destruction of the environmental harmony in the world. These people try to prove that as Christianity puts that the man is the master of nature, and he is the supreme creation, then it was the reason for the man to study nature (science), and then – to subdue nature (technology). The adherents of eco-religion believe that this is why Christianity is guilty of the current ecological crisis. No doubt – our environment is polluted, and the modern industrial technological society aggravates the pollution each day. But it is a gross slander to say that it is the Christianity who makes people do so.

The Bible teaches that the man was created in the image and likeness of God. St. Apostle Paul defines that the man is a collaborator of God in the World. Acting like God, man should love nature and take care of it, its harmony and wealth. That means that man's supremacy over nature allows and even assumes knowledge of nature (science), and proposes some control over it (technology), but it does not mean that man has the right to abuse his power or to destroy nature. The man must love nature as a sacred gift of God, he must defend it responsibly. He should remember that this love is one of the main God's commandments, given to the man on the first pages of the Bible. God blesses the first people and tells them: "Fill the earth and own it, and be masters of the fish in the sea, and of the birds in the sky, and of all the animals on the ground". So, own and be masters. Did these words give birth to the ideology of "conquering nature"? Is this the religious permission of such an attitude to the creation? People forget that these words were addressed to the man before the Fall. The slogan of the radical humanism is: "The man for himself". It calls for the man to self-realize without God. But it turns out that the man's "I myself" without God, out of God, is absolute insignificancy, mathematical point in space. We can't help remembering here the words of the Saint Augustine: "When man lives as man wants and not as God wants, that man becomes like devil". The paradox and the greatest truth of the Christianity lies in the fact that for the man to self-realize he should forget about himself in the name of love to God and to his neighbor.