We shall continue to have a worsening ecologic crisis until we reject the Christian axiom that nature has no reason for existence save to serve man.
—Lynn White Jr., The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis
The victory of Christianity over paganism was the greatest psychic revolution in the history of our culture. By destroying pagan animism, Christianity made it possible to exploit nature in a mood of indifference to the feelings of natural objects.
—Lynn White Jr., Science
Author of Medieval Technology and Social Change and Medieval Religion and Technology, the historian Lynn White traces the demise of earth-based, pagan spirituality in the wake of Christianity’s triumph during the Middle Ages. This victory on the part of Christianity became a watershed in human history and in our species’ relationship with the earth. With the near death of paganism came the objectification of the earth and “the greatest psychic revolution in the history of our culture.”
What happened to humans as a result of this psychic revolution? We were commanded by the Christian church to put away our reverence for nature, our instinctive sense that the divine abides within nature and that, by extension—because we come from earth—the divine abides within us. Indoctrinated in the notion that the sacred is far from them and must be obeyed and appeased by their piety and good works, medieval men and women, over the centuries, forsook intimacy with nature in favor of ecclesiastical authority. Not all inhabitants of the medieval world abandoned pagan religions, but most did. Persecution—in the form of witch burning and the hunt for heretics—made the endurance of earth-based spirituality nearly impossible. Moreover, the church’s myriad forms of humanitarianism made life easier for some former pagans who no longer wished to struggle against the hierarchy.
The psychic revolution—or, perhaps more accurately, this open psychic wound—remains with us, and our destruction of nature is a major symptom of its painful presence in the soul of our species. It is never too late to attend to this psychic wound and discover abundant healing in your reconnection with the earth.