When God breathes into the dead clay of Adam, he (Adam) becomes a nephesh khay, a “living creature” (Gen. 2.7). God places Adam, this living creature, into a world that is teeming with life —he’s a living creature in a living world. This same phrase is used later (in 2.19) when Adam names “every living creature” —every nephesh khay. While distinct from all creation because he is the image of God, Adam is not the only living creature in God’s world. Rather he is the chief of a world composed and filled by living things. This is not just connotatively true (i.e. Fr. Mark is making a good observation about how these things are analogically related), but true by the very verbiage of the text. God uses the same word to describe what Adam is and what the creatures of the world are.
For Christians this should not be anything new. Of course we live in a world teeming with living things! We might say. We’ve read the Psalms where trees and rivers and cattle and birds and sea beasts and even inanimate cymbals and stones and stars sing praises to YHWH (Ps. 98.8, 148.9-10, 150.5, 19.2; Lk. 19.37-40). Good, I don’t doubt it. Our treatment of the world suggests otherwise however.
I’ve been reading a lot of Jeffery Bishop lately. He’s a professor at St. Louis University who works in the overlapping area of medicine/bioethics/theology. Central to his work is a term he calls “the anticipatory corpse” by which he means the way in which modern medicine regards the human person as already essentially dead for all intents and purposes. Modernity tends to relate to the world as mere matter to be manipulated as we see fit. Bishop cites Hans Jonas to the effect that “we moderns conceive the universe as dead, where the ancients thought it teeming with life” (689).
In his studies on contemporary western medicine Bishop identifies the way in which modernity regards the human body as an “anticipatory corpse” –a merely material body with “its simple three-pound lump of conscious clay” that both consumes resources and potentially offers them (think organ transplants, cellular tissue, experimental cadavers, etc.) (690). This, suggests Bishop, is how modernity conceives of the world for “the corpse is dead just like the rest of the universe is dead materiality awaiting a higher-order power” (689).
In our daily living we respond to the non-human world (and sometimes even to humans) as if to dead materiality that exists in mere anticipation of our arrival to subsume it to our will. Like a fruit plucked from the branches of a tree we were once asked not to eat from. As it follows the internal utilitarian logic of our soul, we regard the world as inert, like a corpse. Tuna populations, the Black Hills, the lives low-income voters, the marriages of political rivals, the bodies of people we find attractive, the time of people who are a rung on the ladder of our success –to these all we functionally regard as cadaverous materiality who find their ultimate narrative expression by being a part of “my story, not theirs”. The patient with a bad prognosis who lies on the table with harvestable organs is, to the medical eye, “dead already”.
But then we experience events that forcibly remind us how alive the world is, how populated with living creatures is this creation. A virus transferred from animals to humans, like the SARS family of viruses, is threatening both on the level of health (it can infect us), and on the level of control (our ability to treat the world like inert matter). Wait! We think, this can’t happen! We thought the world was just full of dead stuff and dead stuff shouldn’t be able to do this! We feel under attack by a world of living creatures we had forgotten were alive.
In response to this failure of modernity to relate rightly to God’s world, interspecies scholars (a la Donna Harraway) believe that the key to moral integrity and justice for our living world is to conceive of it as a unitary whole of which we are a small and non-significant part. They want to do away with human-centric construals of the universe. Humans, for such scholars, are just another non-integral piece of the tumult of material existence. They also want to do away with God. For to have a Creator is to already privilege the rational capacity of humans above other animals.
But that won’t do. For the world is not an inter-related unitary whole by itself. The world is only a inter-related living world because it is the creation of the inter-related Living God. Without reference to the relationships of the Trinity, all of the inter-relations of the world devolve as a matter of course into mimetic violence. And without reference to the Living God who breathes the Living Word, the world becomes a dead one, unanimated by the Spirit. In a world divorced from the Living God, all our ideas of “living” become mere euphemisms for the various forms of dying which animate nihilism in which “power is ordered to control entropic collapse” (689). I wonder what kind of “multi-species cosmopolitanism” we are capable of achieving without the human body of Christ, the Second Adam, who became a “living creature” and a “life-giving spirit” (1 Cor. 15.45). He is the Lord of the cosmos, and the builder and cornerstone of the true polis (cf. Eph 2.20, Heb. 11.10; “polis” is the Greek word for “city”). There, we are told, “the lion lays down with the lamb” (Is. 11.16). Here, in this City of God, and nowhere else. For in him all of the living creatures of God’s living world are unified and ordered towards glory (Eph. 1.10). And yet, this ordering is not like modern medicine’s sheer extension of biological life. The life of the true cosmopolis is a resurrected one, where death is not regnant but subservient to the purpose of God; where all multi-species life is at once reconciled and yet where we also “eat the fatty meat and drink the aged wine” (Is. 25.6).
Ironically, it seems that even the big proponents of ecological conservation and environmentalism are motivated by the same notions of the world-as-mere-matter, awaiting biopolitical orchestration for ultimately utilitarian purposes (e.g. “saving the planet”). For both the person who sees the world as an “item” to be exploited and the person who sees the world as an “item” to be conserved, fundamentally do not see it as a living world among which we are living creatures made in the image of God. Both ways of seeing are the products of the imagination of secular modernity which is “grounded in a utilitarian moral framework, bounded only by a respect for autonomy” (688).
As Christians we can live in our world justly by relating to it as neither inert matter nor as a speciated viscosity in which we are just more matter for exchange. These past 18 months have taught us nothing if not how very much God’s world is full of “living creatures”. Our aim must be to respond as living creatures to a living situation. Our response to a living world cannot be to act as if we are already counted among those who go down to the grave—not to act like the walking dead in a lifeless wasteland in which we do not ultimately matter. (Yes, that was a pun).