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For nearly a century, humanity has been grappling with a new understanding of the impact which our behaviour has on the natural world. New data regarding the changing climate, the decimation of non-human species and the destruction of natural habitats has alerted governments and populations to the fact that humans must radically change their understanding of their relationship with the natural world or else perish. This realisation has altered the way in which politicians, philosophers, sociologists, scientists and geographers have approached their fields. The same is true for theologians. In recent decades theologians have begun the process of retrieval, returning to the storehouses of Christian theology to find old wisdom to address these new crises. In the course of this five week programme we will look back at the work of great Christian theologians - from Irenaeus to Augustine and from Aquinas to Lubac - to discover what these thinkers wrote about creation and what those writings can teach us today.
Week 1: Is Creation Good?
This may seem an odd question given that the goodness of creation is precisely the subject of the very first verses of the Christian Holy Book. In the very early church, however, some followers of Christ were drawn towards an interpretation of his teachings which implied that the material world was irredeemably fallen and that only the spiritual world could truly be called good. These gnostic and dualist thinkers fell foul of some of the great theologians of late antiquity. Figures like Basil and Irenaues of Lyons sought in their work to reaffirm the goodness of creation and their influential writings provided a framework for the Christian theology of creation which stands to the present day.
Week 2: Sin and Creation
How could a good God create a world which is so filled with suffering? The problem of evil is one of the oldest theological dilemmas and it is one with renewed significance in our own period of environmental crisis. St Augustine provided a solution to this problem by rooting the human experience of suffering with the conditions of the Fall. This week we ask whether the Augustinian account of evil as privation, and sin as disordered love can be used as a diagnostic tool for ecological crisis.
Week 3: What is Creation For?
In the scholastic period, thinkers like Aquinas and Bonaventure developed the conceptual machinery for a robust doctrine of creation: God gives being, creatures participate, and divine causality does not compete with creaturely integrity. This yields a natural bridge to ecological reasoning, because creatures have real goods, ends, and forms of flourishing that are not reducible to human preference. This account of order and the common good supports an ethics of limits, responsibility, and attentiveness to systems rather than isolated acts. In this session we will translate metaphysics into practical judgments about stewardship, exploitation, and the moral significance of nonhuman life.
Week 4: Creation vs. Nature
Modernity brought with it new ways of looking at creation. Reformulated as wilderness, creation was seen as an adversary over which enlightened humanity could assert its mastery and tame. Reformulated as 'nature,' creation was described as a closed system, pristine and perfect but for human exploitation. How did these different attitudes play out in the emergence of our current economic, technological and political cultures. With reference to Lubac and Romano Guardini, this week we bring secular and theological attitudes towards non-human life into dialogue and ask whether the former can benefit from moral wisdom imparted by the latter.
Week 5: Laudato Si'
The course culminates in explicit Catholic eco-theology through Laudato Si', which frames "integral ecology" as the inseparability of environmental, social, economic, and cultural goods. We integrate earlier doctrine—creation as gift, sin as disorder, creaturely integrity, and the common good—into a coherent account of ecological conversion and institutional responsibility.
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Aidan is a tutor in Social and Environmental Justice stream. He completed his PhD at the Divinity Faculty of the University of Cambridge in 2018. During his doctoral studies he ran as a Parliamentary candidate for the Green Party. He is the author of two academic books: Jewish Christians in Puritan England (2020) and Israelism in Modern Britain (2021). Between 2020 and 2022 he worked as a Post-doctoral Research Fellow at St Mary's University in London.
