Thomas Berry (1914-2009) was a historian of world religions and an early voice awakening moral sensibilities to the environmental crisis. He is known for articulating a “new story” of the universe that explores the implications of the evolutionary sciences and cultural traditions for creating a flourishing future. This course investigates Berry’s life and thought in relation to the Journey of the Universe project. It draws on his books, articles, and recorded lectures to examine such ideas as: the New Story, the Great Work, and the emerging Ecozoic era. The course explores Berry’s insights into cosmology as a context for locating the human in a dynamic unfolding universe and thus participating in the creative work of our times. In particular, we will examine Berry’s reflections on renewal and reform in the areas of ecology, economics, education, spirituality, and the arts. Course Rationale: Thomas Berry was an original, creative, and comprehensive thinker, especially regarding the critical nature of our global environmental crisis. His intellectual importance resides in his response to the ecological crisis by bringing together the humanities and science in an evolutionary narrative. In addition, he articulated the need for the moral participation of the world religions in addressing environmental issues. He came to this realization largely through his study of cosmologies embedded within religious traditions. Sensing the significance of these stories as “functional cosmologies” he explored the widespread influence that these stories transmitted through a tradition, for example, in rituals, ethics, and subsistence practices.
Dialogue: Tucker and Grim, “The Worldview of Thomas Berry”
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The Worldview of Thomas Berry: The Flourishing of the Earth Community
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Yale University
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Cours 3 sur 4 dans Specialization Journey of the Universe: A Story for Our Times
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Introduction - Thomas Berry as Cultural Historian
Mary Evelyn and John talk about their first encounters with Thomas Berry.
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Mary Evelyn TuckerSenior Lecturer and Senior Research Scholar
Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies
John GrimSenior Lecturer and Senior Research Scholar
Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies
Welcome to this course on Thomas Berry and his life and thought.
We're going to begin with a discussion of Howard meeting with Thomas Berry,
encountering him, but also his encounter of the world's religions,
which he was into in the 60s and 70s,
way before most people were talking about other religions.
I remember meeting him when I came back from Japan.
I had been in Japan 73, 74 and the year after that, 75.
Just after I arrived home, I went to meet him.
It was February, it was cold, crisp day along the Hudson.
He was in the Riverdale Center there, which we'll show a picture of soon, and
he was filled with zest for life and joy knowing the problems of the world.
But he had this sense already of understanding other religions, and
as I had just gotten back from Japan and had been dealing with what is Buddhism?
What is Hinduism?
Even as I traveled through Asia, I was beginning to try and
grapple with this notion.
The world is filled with many, many ways of looking at the religious,
of looking at how we are human, and so on.
So, there's just one encounter I wanted to share that kind of exemplifies
what Thomas did for me as I was finding my way forward.
And that was, I was in the parking lot, I'd come back after class with him, and
the classes were terrific, and I'd go out and have a cheese sandwich afterwards in
the Howard Johnson's nearby, and I realized the car wasn't starting.
Something was the matter with the motor or the battery.
And I got a hold of him and explained the situation,
because no one of the security guards at Fordham seemed to be able to help.
Well, he got an old rope.
>> Mm-hm.
>> [LAUGH] He tied it to my car and
to his car, and he pulled me along the Bronx River Parkway.
>> Yes. >> In the Hutchinson Parkway to Pelham,
where my parents live and I was living.
And that was somehow exemplary of his help to me,
but to many, many other people on our journeys.
So, that's part of my encounter with Thomas.
>> Yes.
There's an image of Thomas too.
Let's look at that.
I remember meeting Thomas in 1968 when I came to New York, and he was
much younger than this picture, probably when he was in his late 70s or 80s.
Thomas was very vigorous in the 60s, and I had occasion,
then, to undertake studies with Thomas in the history of religions, so
I'd come with a history underdegree major, and a theology major.
And in the course of time, I moved from studies in Buddhism to
Native American traditions because of an interest in healing practitioners.
And eventually, I would visit out west to Anishinaabe people.
And I returned, and then lived at Riverdale Center with Thomas Barry and
other colleagues who were studying.
And it was a time of dissertation writing.
And those can be very onerous and burdensome times,
we're trying to gather ideas and present them in a coherent manner.
And one occasion especially memorable for
me, in that region of Riverdale, there were some overgrown areas,
and I found a group of pheasants that I would go and visit.
Coming from North Dakota, that was very meaningful to me.
And when I came back to the Riverdale Center after a session of visiting with
pheasants, I was ruminating through the ideas of this dissertation, and
sitting, working on the sofa that was in the sunroom at the time, sewing it a bit.
And Thomas came in, and this image on the screen now is so
indicative of that perceptive physiognomy.
It's the face of a penetrating mind, and
someone whose compassion reaches out, and he saw me at that moment,
and could see the burden of the dissertation that I was writing.
And he sat down and he said John, what you need is
what Virgil gave to Dante at that moment in The Divine Comedy,
where Dante was going on to Paradise in Heaven, and Virgil could not go
from leading Dante through the Inferno and the Purgatorio.
And Dante was distraught at the thought of losing his guide,
and Virgil looked at him and said [FOREIGN], lift up your beard.
And Thomas is now laughing, and I'm rapt on his words.
And Thomas looked at me and he said, crown and miter yourself over yourself,
which says so much about him, that capacity to transmit confidence.
And not a confidence that's borrowed, or lent.
He's not a closed fist teacher, he's one of these open palm teachers.
He's giving something that's self realization.
And that stays with me to this day.
>> Yes, and he never wanted us as graduate students or
others to imitate himself either in style, or method, or content.
I mean, you studied Native American traditions.
I studied East Asian traditions.
And he had a breadth and a range that was remarkable.
>> Yes, his initial studies in Giambattista Vico and
writing a dissertation on that philosopher's thought.
>> Yes.
Just an amazing library at Riverdale.
And we want to share then this personal encounter with his encounter with other
religions and cultures.
Here he was at this Riverdale Center, this huge tree, this great red oak.
And in that center along the Hudson River, he had a library of possibly 10,000 books.
Eventually, we would take it apart, when he was 80 years old and
he moved down to North Carolina.
But at this center, so much happened.
>> Yes. >> This oak was 400 years old, and
it was a place of gathering for people from all over the world.
We had monthly meetings there, Tayard Association meetings.
He would give talks, and we'd have potlucks, and so on.
So, at that Riverdale Center, this role of culture and religion became more and
more clear that he was encountering the global interaction of world religions,
way before it was fashionable in any particular way.
And we wanted to share this first
quote of his to just illustrate something of this encounter.
>> Yes, it's very helpful for entering into Thomas's early thought before he
had turned especially to environmental thinking.
In this quote, he says all human traditions are dimensions of each other.
If, as Christians, we assert the Christian dimension of the entire world,
we must not refuse to be a dimension of the Hindu world,
of the Buddhist world, of the Islamic world.
Upon this intercommunion on a planetary scale depends the future
development of the human community.
This is the creative task of our times.
To foster the global meeting of the nations and
of the world's spiritual traditions.
What do you see in that, Mary Ellen?
>> Well, what's so fascinating to me, as I mentioned, coming back from Japan, seeing
these various traditions right in Japan, Buddhism, and Confucianism, and Shinto.
And they were all interacting with each other in ways that we don't see in
the west, where these traditions are very separate,
and where each claims exclusives a truth.
But in other part of the world, especially east Asia, these are interacting
traditions, and in that sense they are very fully a dimension of each other.
You would have a Buddhist funeral, but
you would have an early childhood coming of age as a Shinto.
And you would have all your ethics for your family and society from Confucianism.
So these were continually interacting syncretic traditions.
Now what he's saying here is something I think very special.
And that is to foster this meeting, to appreciate
the particularity of these traditions, the cultural context and so on.
But also to understand their global meeting.
>> Yes. >> As never before.
>> Yes, especially in this period of the emergence of the United Nations and
Thomas' travels then as a chaplain into Germany with the army.
His own encounter, growing encounter, in the late 40s he had gone to China, 1948.
So Thomas was aware of the interaction of traditions.
And I find this quote very interesting in terms of the emphasis upon particularity,
world religions, or specific religions.
And universality, that sense of completing one another.
There's something about the inward character of the traditions and
their outward meeting.
Something about the intimacy of these traditions to themselves, and
the distance that they have,
that he would see they need to travel in order to encounter the other.
So Thomas was situating this encounter of the world religions on a planetary scale.
I think this is what is calling him forward into his later understandings.
>> Right, and as we know, this is so critical for our own times, but
when you think that he was doing this 50 years ago.
And it's important to remember that in the Second Vatican Council in the early 60s
said that for the first time the Catholic church more than a billion people,
said there's actually truth in other religions.
And Thomas has this great phrase, not only truth in the other religions.
>> Yes, he would quote from one of the Encyclicals from the Vatican
of the statement of raise of truth and other traditions.
The recognition by the Catholic church of raise of truth.
And Thomas would look at us for a moment and he'd laugh, and he's say my goodness,
raise of truth, there's floods of truth in these traditions.
That was well springing out of his sense that the encounter of Christianity,
of Roman Catholicism, a form of Christianity, with other traditions,
opened up these floods of inner spiritualities within these traditions.
And that they had something to say to each other, not simply as a dialogue
in separate spaces, but in a communion,
a meeting together, and a participatory exchange.
>> Right, at the same time what's so
striking and the fact that we were trained as historians of religion,
as he is a historian as well of the world's cultures and religions.
And he actually went into great depth in each of these traditions.
He knew languages, he had studied Sanskrit, he taught us Sanskrit.
He wrote a book on the religions of India that's still in print from Colombia.
He did a book on Buddhism that's- >> Yes.
>> Still in print.
He's written many, many essays on the Chinese tradition which are powerful, and
Confucianism in particular affected me.
So he did the history, the culture,
the text, often the languages of these traditions.
And that Riverdale Library- >> Yes.
>> Had the church fathers as well.
>> Well that's an important point to make that the library was not simply
an assembly of secondary text or commentary.
Certainly there were significant commentaries on the tradition, but
at the heart of it were the scriptures or the recognized texts of these traditions.
The trapidica of Buddhism,
the sense of the heart of the tradition in the Chinese, in the original language.
And so the the library held a resource for those of us who were studying in world
religions to encounter these traditions in their literate forms, especially.
>> Right, and that included the western religions as well, and so on.
>> Wasn't there another quote we were going to
look at- >> Yes.
>> Too?
>> So here we have, continuing this discussion of the meeting of traditions,
but also the study of them.
Within this larger world of humankind the multiple, spiritual,
and humanist traditions implicate each other, complete each other, and
evoke from each other higher developments, which each is capable.
These traditions implicate each other, for each has a universal mission to humankind.
Each is panhuman in its significance.
None can be fully itself without the others.
Each has a distinctive contribution to make to human development that can
only be made by itself.
So once again, distinctive- >> Yes.
>> But universal, particular but planetary.
>> Mm-hm, and drawing out the nature of the human.
What is the character of the human?
So central to each one of these traditions, and
generally we collapse these traditions into separate realities but
Thomas is seeing, in our contemporary challenge, the reaching out.
Not simply in dialog, but
to understand how these traditions are implicated in each other.
To understand the relationship of this universal mission and
particular expression.
>> And one reason we like this quote is because he chose to [COUGH] talk about not
only the spiritual traditions, but the humanist traditions.
>> Yes. >> He had a tremendous feeling for
humanism, for culture, for the arts, and so on.
Even the so called secular world, and for him he is really fluid.
And how traditions, namely philosophies, worldviews,
implicate each other, was a continual source of fascination for him.
>> Yes, then the second part of this quote too, it goes on.
Each tradition, each must therefore be kept distinctive,
even as it reaches a universal diffusion among humans.
For any tradition to withhold itself from the other societies of humankind or
for any to exclude the other traditions is to vitiate and
stultify its own tradition and development, to condemn itself to
sterile isolation from the only forces that can give it life and creativity.
All human traditions are dimensions of each other.
The last line is almost a mantra, or
a phrase that has deeper meanings in Thomas' thought,
this sense of all human traditions are dimensions of each other.
>> Yeah, and it's been such a joy, I think, for us to teach world religions for
nearly 40 years and to realize that they are feeding the human community still.
These are wisdom traditions.
They're constantly changing their processes, in fact.
And that's what Thomas helped us to understand.
They're not static, they're changing, they're responding.
And eventually, this is where he would bring us all to
understand they need to respond to the ecological and social crises of our time.
>> Exactly, and Thomas would use the image of the rose window,
those beautiful windows in Gothic cathedrals.
And reflecting upon them and
talking about this central window in relation to the outer windows.
Say for example, the window also at St.
Peter's Basilica in Rome, the sense of this spirit image in the middle, the bird.
And then these beautiful outer windows.
And he would talk about the inner window as the core spiritual religion.
Often a religious tradition that one is given,
and sometimes not a religious tradition.
But a deep spiritual value or an ethical value.
And outside it then the world's religions, and
that a person can become fixated on the middle.
And that's, I think, what he's after in this quote also.
The sense of what is lost by binding oneself
simply to what one has been given in youth.
And not to understand that the beauty and the delight of these other traditions.
And of course, we're also aware that some people play in
a field of these beautiful traditions and lose their central core.
So Thomas is interested in exploring these very subtle psychological
realities also of how traditions speak to one another.
And yet we have to be very aware and nurture that central window of ourselves
to the outer window and central windows and their relationship to one another.
>> Well, I think that brings us to this final section here,
where he says there are presently four main religious
issues facing the human community in its spiritual aspect.
The first is the grounding of the various spiritual traditions,
just as John was saying.
There's a sense they are grounded in their own particular belief systems,
world views, scriptures, traditions, history, dogma, even.
And so that there's a grounding of these particular traditions,
and that's what we need to study.
At the same time as so many of them are interacting, they are syncretic.
The spread of Buddhism across Asia from India through Afghanistan and
the Silk Road all the way to China and Korea and Japan, and how it changed.
But there's this sense of a shared understanding of Buddhist beliefs and
values and practices.
>> Yes, it's a very good point.
This first one of grounding and
the place-based character of traditions that are still able to move beyond.
So Thomas was himself grappling with some of these deep methodological issues,
or approaches in the study of religions, about how they form particularity but
they're also interacting with one another.
And the second point then is the activation of the macrophase of each
tradition.
And again you can sense in these earlier quotes when they encounter one another,
how they begin to realize and
reflect upon dimensions of themselves that are reaching out.
So this sense of inner creativity towards a larger calling.
>> Right, and even at that macrophase, sometimes we see this complementarity.
A sense of a cosmic Christ of the universe that's in St Paul, and
the sense of the Buddha nature in all things.
And this becomes interesting for
this comparative study of world religions as well.
>> Yes.
>> His third point was this intercommunion of traditions,
which we've spoken a great deal about in this talk right now.
But I think we still have to emphasize that this is not easy,
that these traditions are committed, often to their own path, and
therefore there's obstacles to this intercommunion.
>> Yes, and
we've emphasized the particularity in relationship to the universality.
And that particularity we might also describe as a subjectivity,
that Thomas was very aware of unique voices within the tradition.
That the tradition as a whole,
Buddhism as a whole, might be described as having a subjectivity.
But within that are these many different voices.
The great scholars of Buddhism, the great missionaries who carried
Buddhism both across Asia and then from Asia, from China especially,
the rediscovery of traditions by Chinese monks returning to India.
That this intercommunion, then, is situating Thomas to understand
subjectivity as embedded in the grounding of these traditions and
how this subjectivity is speaking across traditions.
>> And the final point here- >> Is the entry of the traditions
into alliance with the newly developed cosmological myth of modern science.
This is a major step that Thomas would take in the late 60s and early 70s.
>> Right, and it brings us as well to our next talk on Teilhard.
Because Thomas realized the religions were insufficient for our times,
that they needed to be in dialogue with science.
>> Yes.
>> And that's exactly what Teilhard was doing.
>> That's it, that's the increasing attention that Thomas saw not
simply again in the dialogue or
speaking across from separated positions and trying to find a realm of tolerance.
But rather this exchange which led to an intercommunion and a deeper meeting
of the subjectivities, the voices of this tradition leading towards
a new expression of these traditions, a macrophase of these traditions.
>> Thank you very much.
>> It's good.
[MUSIC]
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