Introducing the Blog of Balaam’s Ass: Orthodoxy and Eco-Justice.

As some of you know, I am currently writing a book on Orthodoxy and Eco-Justice, and I thought it might be helpful to get some of what I've written on out there so that others could provide the project with thoughtful comments, criticism and advice. I also thought that posting this material might provide some of you who have never thought much about it with an opportunity to learn and reflect upon the relationship between Orthodoxy, Ecology, and Social Justice. I've avoided doing so thus far, out of a serious concern about our civilization's current cultural relationship with the kind of technology that this medium represents - a concern the causes for which I hope to begin to make clear in this and future posts. I must ask you, therefore, not to consider the existence of this blog to be, in any way, an endorsement of the technological edifice in which it is ensconced. Rather, consider these posts, if you will, as the lone missionary outreach effort of an Orthodox Christian Neo-Luddite to any of you out there lost in the machine. By all means, feel free at anytime to get up, close your laptop and go - to pray, putter in the garden, play fetch with the dog, make cookies for your children, or take a long walks in God's creation. Encouraging my readers to make such a choice is, after all, one of the primary purposes of this blog.

This blog, like the book I am writing, takes its title from the peculiar, if superficially familiar, biblical story of Balaam’s Ass, in which the prophet Balaam is presented as a man at war with himself. As a man of power, indeed, as a magician of sorts, Balaam is frequently sought out by those who wish him to wield this power on their own behalf, paying him handsomely to bless their intentions or curse their adversaries. Balaam’s power, however, as he himself is fully aware, has its source in the antecedent creative will and power of the God whom he serves, even if, thus far, that service has been principally to his own benefit. As the tale begins, however, God has stepped in and interfered in the case of a particularly lucrative business opportunity, sternly warning Balaam not to accept the commission of King Balak of Moab, who wants Balaam to curse the Israelites that are amassed so menacingly on the Moabite border. This curse (and its implied blessing of the Moabites) is not in accordance with God’s will, so Balaam reluctantly refuses King Balak’s commission.

King Balak, however, is not a man to accept “no” for an answer, and pretty soon his representatives are back, sweetening the previous offer with a thinly veiled assurance that whatever the cost of Balaam’s assistance may be, there will be no objections from King Balak and the Moabite nation. Balaam once again rejects King Balak’s offer, but this time he does so with considerably less conviction. He neither verbally nor physically rejects King Balak’s minions, and instead suggests that they wait the night while he seeks the Lord’s will, more or less explicitly in the hopes that God might change His mind.

On the following day, after a rather vivid dream, and still torn between his greed and avarice and his calling to serve God, Balaam arises, saddles his donkey, and sets off behind the King’s men to visit King Balak, in order to see how things will turn out. No longer motivated solely by his calling, Balaam is starting to wander. The biblical story is parsimonious in its telling, and rather thin in psychological analysis, but the clear implication of the narrative is that Balaam has decided to keep an open mind, heedlessly offering himself up to the possibility of being won over by King Balak’s ever more lucrative offers. Equally clearly, and far more explicitly, God is not pleased. The angel of death is sent forth to bar his way.

Wholly obsessed with his own moral dilemma, and eager to arrive at a resolution less objectionable to his avarice, Balaam begins to have some trouble with his otherwise generally reliable donkey, who first runs off the road and into a field, and then presses himself against a stone wall, crushing Balaam’s foot. In each case, Balaam exercises his mastery over the animal by force, beating the donkey to get her moving again. Finally, when, in a narrow pass, the donkey proceeds to collapse underneath him, Balaam’s anger knows no bounds; he proceeds to beat his donkey savagely with a stick. At this point, both God and the donkey have had enough, and God in his compassion provides the donkey with the gift of speech, a gift with which she querulously reproves Balaam: “What have I done to thee that thou hast smitten me these three times?”

Balaam’s response says much about the manner of human existence expressed solely in terms of dominion, and about the pride that so assiduously accompanies human avarice: “Because thou hast mocked me: I would that there was a sword in mine hand, for now would I kill thee!”

Thus bluntly expressed, the donkey is no longer a fellow creature—however subservient—but has become techné, a “being-at-hand” solely instrumental to the fulfillment of Balaam’s narrowly human project, and to the propping up of his fragile self-esteem. As such, Balaam believes that his donkey no longer has any independent right to its own existence. If it serves, well and good. It is a resource. If it does not, then it must be destroyed as an obstacle to progress. It is an attitude that the Russian poet Joseph Brodsky succinctly expresses in his delightful poem “A Halt in the Desert”, observing that “in the universe of dead and soulless things/ resistance is regarded as bad form.”[1] The recalcitrance of natural things, once they are misconceived solely as an affront to our own meaningful existence, is transformed into nothing more than a problem to be overcome, whether by brute force or clever stratagem.

Admittedly, this is not a promising start to an interspecies dialogue, but to her credit, the donkey seeks to reason with Balaam: “Am I not thine ass, upon which though hast ridden ever since I was thine until this day? Was I ever wont to do so unto thee?” The contrast thus highlighted between the beast’s normally helpful, reliable and inarticulate assistance, and the strange and contrary way in which she is currently behaving, finally begins to puncture Balaam’s self-preoccupation. When it finally does so, Balaam can at last see what the donkey has seen all along – death, destruction, and the terrible judgment of God standing before him in the road ahead. Belatedly aware of his foolish heedlessness, Balaam, like his donkey before him, “bowed down his head, and fell flat on his face.”

The words of the angel of the Lord to Balaam are stern, expressing a moral judgment which is coterminous with that of nature, but transcending it in authority. Picking up where the donkey left off, the Angel demands to know: “Wherefore hast though smitten thine ass these three times? Behold, I went out to withstand thee, because thy way is perverse before me: And the ass saw me and turned from me these three times: unless she had turned from me, surely now also I had slain thee, and saved her alive.” The angel’s judgment inverts that of Balaam. It is not the recalcitrance of nature, here exemplified by a balky donkey, but the human intent of Balaam that has been judged as wanting and subject to consequences. It is only now, in the face of God’s judgment, that Balaam finally grasps that it has been his own avarice and greed that have led him into this lethal cul-de-sac, and that his donkey’s apparently perverse behavior has, to the contrary, saved his life. Restored to his senses, both by the remarkably clarifying power of a near death experience and by his newly discovered gratitude for the mercy shown him by his fellow creature, Balaam finds the grace to repent: “I have sinned; for I knew not that thou stoodest in the way against me: now, therefore, if it displeases thee (literally ‘if it be evil in thine eyes’), I will get me back again.” Recognizing the iniquity of the path he is on, he takes a step back. And that, as Robert Frost once put it, “made all the difference.”

Indeed, it is only now that Balaam is able to fulfill his true calling. Freed from the siren song luring him to wealth and acquisition, Balaam becomes a participant in the mystery of God and a conduit of grace for others, first by becoming an instrument of blessing for God’s people (blessing those whom King Balak had called upon him to curse); and then by prophetically proclaiming a series of messianic oracles so explicit in their fulfillment by Christ that the Prophet Balaam has been universally recognized by the Christian Church as one of those to whom the gift of Christ’s redemption was revealed anticipatorily by grace. Though in earthly terms, Balaam’s restored humanity is not gifted with riches, and his behavior further earns him the exasperation and enmity of a wealthy patron, how little it now matters to him is apparent in the moving conclusion of his blessing of Israel, where he cries out in ecstasy “Let me die the death of the righteous, and let my last end be like his!”[2]

In selecting The Book of Balaam’s Ass as the title of my own Eastern Orthodox contribution to ecological ethics, then, I have been moved by several apparent analogical similarities between our current ecologically calamitous situation and the circumstances of Balaam the prophet.[3] The Christian Church, like Balaam, believes in and bears witness to mankind’s special calling as a mediator between God and his creation, and this has frequently led to a recognition, even by those who do not fully share in its beliefs, of a kind of vestigial moral and religious authority not unlike that of Balaam’s; a perceived ability to make things stronger and more acceptable by blessing them, and to make things weaker and less acceptable by cursing them. That even this vestigial power is very much attenuated in the modern situation goes without saying, but that it has ceased to exist at all is equally false. The power of the Christian faith to recognize—and to motivate human beings in behalf of—a cause remains significant even at the present, and during the last twenty centuries this power has, at times, been enormous.

Unfortunately, recognition of this influence this has led individuals and movements, both inside the Church and out, to try and co-opt Christianity as a hireling, appealing to our greed, our fear, our avarice, and our pride, as a lever with which to obtain any number of blessings for a motley assortment of factions, practices, or ways of life that are often alien or inimical to the revealed will of God, and contradictory to the deepest instincts of our faith. Any blessing thus received is ontologically worthless, since the blessings of the Church have as their only source the antecedent creative will and power of the Holy Trinity. It is not generally, however, for the salvific or sacramental effects of such blessings that those who try to co-opt the Church have sought them out. On the contrary, the Church’s blessing is generally sought for its practical, political, and economic effects. A false blessing, like a false dogma is, in theological terms, a meaningless travesty. Like heresy, its parasitic relationship upon the good provides it with a kind of borrowed power that is far from insignificant, for it can destroy the souls of men. By afflicting their intellects and wills, such a travesty of blessing can extend outward in a spiral of destruction that is horrific in its consequences. For if a Christian has been taught anything at all by the theology of the Christian faith, then a Christian knows this: There are no insignificant actions in this world.

Christian history is a thrice told tale replete with such mistaken alliances and dubious encouragements. One need but mention the crusades, anti-Semitism, and the persecution of religious minorities to recognize that Christianity has at times provided fertile soil for projects and attitudes of great evil. More insidious than these blatant evils, and perhaps more difficult to assess, is the Christian Church’s historical propensity for snuggling up to political power and wealth, from the time of St. Constantine onward. The blessing that the Orthodox Church bestowed upon Roman, and later upon Russian Imperialism, explicable as it is in human terms, and possibly even in its historical unavoidability, should not, however, blind us to the fact that these alliances did not generally represent a high-water mark for the integrity and faithfulness of the Church to Christ himself who, after all, solemnly declared that it was the faithful poor who were to be blessed, and that the rich could enter the Kingdom of God only as if “through the eye of the needle.” The beggar Lazarus, rather than Dives, would rest in the bosom of Abraham. To its credit, the Church has never lacked lives lived and voices raised in opposition to this all too comfortable alliance, from the desert fathers of the 4^th century, and the Russian dispossessors of the 16th, to the Brotherhood of St. Herman’s in our own time. And while St. John Chrysostom’s oft quoted judgment that “a man with two cloaks is a thief” has seldom been very liberally or too personally applied, its fundamental truth has never been subjected to any serious rebuttal on theological grounds.

Nor has ordinary Orthodox Christian practice ever affirmed, as has that of certain Protestant sects, that holiness and wealth are positively related. A life of asceticism, fasting, privation, and self-denial has always been regarded as the material corollary of Orthodox sanctity, and the vital and central role of monasticism in Eastern Orthodoxy has generally served to cement this idea in the popular imagination of the faithful. If it has often been a conclusion of Orthodox Christian prudence that it was better for the Church if the rich, the powerful, and the violent were well disposed towards Christianity than otherwise, it has nevertheless also been the Orthodox Church’s solemn judgment that wealth, power, and violence are in no way conducive to human salvation. It is better for a Russian gangster turned oligarch to restore Churches or support orphanages with his ill-gotten gains than for him to build brothels and casinos—and it is certainly it is better for the rest of us—but salvation, as Jesus once told a rich young ruler with considerably better credentials, comes at a higher price. Mammon still will not pass through the eye of a needle.

Nor, historically speaking, have the Orthodox Church and the cultures for which it has played a formative role been all that assiduous in their efforts to modify and remake the world by technological and industrial means for the fulfillment of purely temporal, financial, hedonistic, and material goals. The highest type of activity in the mediaeval Christian world (East and West) was contemplative, and had nothing to do with what is practical, productive, or efficient as we understand these terms today. The scientific practices and technological methods of the Christian world were deliberately never developed in such a way that they would impede the realization of more basic and primary religious and social values. As a consequence, any practices or methods that upset the more basic social dedication to harmony, beauty, and balance remained dormant and undeveloped.

This apparent lack of technical genius in Christian Europe and the Levant was, as Philip Sherrard has commented, “emphasized, not counteracted, by the spirit of Christianity” – indeed so much so that:

The period from the second century A.D. to the fifth century A.D. which saw the rise of Christianity, and which in Buddhist India was marked by astonishing developments in the artistic, political, military and technological fields, was marked in the West by a technical decline so great that the Emperor Julian the Apostate could accuse the Christians of ruining the Empire’s industry. One of the architects of Hagia Sophia at Constantinople was quite capable of making a steam-engine (some 1200 years before James Watt ‘invented’ it), but he used his skill only to make the house he was living in shake as though there was an earthquake in order to get rid of an unpleasant neighbor living on the top floor. Except indeed for architecture – and nearly all large-scale architecture had a religious motive – the West in the medieval Christian period demonstrated a singular lack of technical will or mentality.

Industrialism and technology in the West have developed in a direct relationship to the decline in Christian consciousness, and this for the simple reason that the secularization of the natural world that has permitted it to be treated as an object and exploited accordingly is in flat contradiction to the sacramental spirit of authentic Christianity, even in the attenuated and cosmologically neutered form that this sacramentalism came to take in Roman Catholic Europe. It is a simple statement of historical fact that the industrial revolution was not an indigenous product of any Orthodox or Roman Catholic nation, and this is not, as certain English writers were wont to believe, because the inhabitants of Southern and Eastern Europe were lazy and undisciplined. It was rather because these societies preserved a sacramental understanding of nature that was rooted in the unitary cosmological consciousness of ancient Christianity. It was not until the wholesale abandonment of this underlying sacramentalism during the Protestant Reformation that the widespread manipulation and exploitation of nature for more than limited human needs was generally regarded as morally acceptable.

In spite of all of this, it must be confessed that in recent times (the last 100 years or so), the Orthodox, particularly those of us dwelling in the Western industrialized nations, appear to have had precious little difficulty in adjusting to a society and to an economy in which greed and ambition function less as sins than as regulative principles and economic virtues. Seduced by greed and a faithless desire for material security, and lacking a well articulated and coherent eco-theological vision to the contrary, we have become uncomplaining participants, and have thereby given our blessing, to a system of excessive production and consumption whose rationale has become ever less apparent even as its ecological consequences have become disastrously evident. The productive activity of human beings, so readily justifiable in terms of human need during the long ages of humanity’s precarious survival upon the Earth, has long since lost its ethical mooring. Indeed, largely ignoring the human need of those who live beyond the pale of our consumer societies, the telos of our civilization’s production is no longer that of genuine human need at all, but of affluence; and affluence, as I have already suggested, is very difficult to justify in our theological tradition save by some higher good, whether it be the good of charitably caring for others, caring for the natural world, or creating higher values of an enduring and sustainable culture. Indeed, it is only culture, in its highest, widest, and most religiously significant sense as cultus that can begin to rationally justify surplus consumption and production—and even that, equally surely, has its material limits.[4]

In our own civilization, however, culture itself has largely been debased. It is no longer a vehicle of the ideals and beliefs that we acknowledge and honor, but simply another component of a vast surplus of consumer products designed to satisfy our passions. The idea of someone attempting to justify the surplus of American production and consumption on the quality and significance of what is traditionally thought of as “high” culture—in the opera, ballet, painting, drama, and poetry of our nation—simply inspires derision. Moreover, I trust that one does not need to be a snob to recognize that the inclusion of low culture, in the forms of popular music, Hollywood movies, television sitcoms and reality shows, professional sports, and computer games of our society, does little to alter the fundamental absurdity of such an appeal. Yet what else can justify the surplus production and consumption of our civilization, and the ecological destruction that it engenders? Not religion, as we have seen, since in terms of Christianity at least, wealth and religious sincerity are virtually incompatible. Nor can it be justified more generally in terms of the diverse and heterodox religious beliefs and aspirations of our technological civilization taken as a whole. After all, ours is not a significantly religious culture in the first place, and equally obviously, little if any of the surplus production of our civilization is being directed to religiously significant or religiously meaningful projects, art, or architecture. Nor can it in any sense be justified by need—what conceivable need could we have for annually redesigned telephones, ever more complicated remote control devices, an infinitely expanding redesign of computer shooting galleries, and the almost daily re-engineering of athletic shoes?

All the same, individually and collectively we sacrifice precious time, life, and natural resources producing and paying for such stuff, and we are constantly assured by our peers, the media, intellectual pundits, and government officials that we must continue doing so, either in order (vacuously) to keep up with the Jones’s, or (circularly) to stimulate the economy and stave off destruction. More and more absurdly, increased production itself has become the sole justification for the ever greater and more ridiculous excesses of the consumption that feeds it, and this, as the ever perceptive Dorothy Sayers pointed out to her contemporaries almost sixty years ago, is unacceptable: “A society in which consumption has to be artificially stimulated in order to keep production going is a society founded upon trash and waste, and such a society is a house built on sand.”[5]

So it is, but it is precisely this sort of “house built on sand” in which a great many of us Orthodox Christians live, and our society has scarcely heard a peep out of us on the subject. Encouraged by King Balak and his minions to bless an insane economic system and lifestyle that cannot be blessed, and to curse and despise a simpler, gentler, and more sustainable manner of living (with such epithets as “primitive”, “counter-cultural”, “romantic”, and “naïve”), countless Christians have either quietly acquiesced in this assignment of values, or made pro forma protests while generally behaving very little differently from those around us. In return for this “going along and waiting to see what we shall see,” we have been offered heretical myths of progress, specious promises of ever brighter tomorrows, and the present assurance of lives of ease, sophistication, and constant sensual gratification, replete with ready made entertainments that cater to our every vice and permeate our every waking moment. Living in this way, however, saps our moral energy and scatters our consciousness. We are, for all of what we have been promised, mostly bored, exhausted, depressed, indebted and lonely.

Some of these unexpected consequences are a result of our growing estrangement from nature, and from nature’s God – expressed in purely Christian terms – from the Logos, the Second Person of the Trinity. For while it may still be the case, as the psalmist insist, that “the heavens declare the glory of God,” it is also true that we are in a poor position to notice this proclamation, since “we look up not at the heavens but at neon reflected on smog; we walk not on the good earth but asphalt.”[6] Our estrangement from nature, the green and lovely environment into which we were created and from which we have evolved, has become nearly total. Surrounding ourselves with the surplus products of our technological society, we live out our lives in climate controlled boxes filled with junk that we do not need, cannot love, and for which we lack even the most basic understanding of how to care for, repair, or alter to fit. We purchase electronic gadgets that jabber to us inanely like demons, inciting our passions and alienating us from our friends, families and neighbors even as they smother us with mountains of data to which we cannot hope to process or respond intelligently, reducing our intellectual powers to little more than behavioral stimulus and response. In our isolation we travel from place to place in gas guzzling automobiles and SUVs on proscribed pathways covered with asphalt through neighborhoods in which nature has been abolished as all but a window dressing of lawns and pocket parks. Our nights are filled with garish lights, our days are filled with frenetic activity, and the brief space between the two is filled with canned entertainment and pre-packaged meals. In such a manner we are increasingly distracted from the still small voice that says that we have, like Esau, sold our birthright as humans for a mess of pottage.

Moreover, as parents, we “hand on misery to man – it deepens like a coastal shelf.”[7] Many of our children, poisoned by a consumer culture that convinces them that everything should be easy, fun, and exciting, drift away from us and from the faith and end up rejecting, on the behalf of the banality to which we have accustomed them, our demanding and difficult religion of long services, daily prayers, fasting, commitment and asceticism. Tragically, we respond in kind, by shortening services, downplaying fasting and asceticism, and re-rigging our churches with cushy pews. The few remaining devout amongst them sense our lack of moral seriousness, and turn away in despair. We console ourselves by surfing internet sites on Orthodoxy and watching TV.

In spite of all of this, it may just be that nature, prefigured in our story as Balaam’s Ass, will come to our rescue yet, by startling us out of our complacency. For Mother nature, for those of us obtuse enough to not have noticed, is not behaving, and is becoming more and more vocal in her protests. Our arable land, artificially saturated with petrochemical fertilizers, and cultivated unwisely for short-term profits, is losing its fertility at a terrifying rate. Our remaining forests, weakened by clear cutting and rendered unproductive, are left to fallow undergrowth and are burning down around us. The air of our cities, saturated with the wastes generated by our automobiles, industry, and by the ever growing numbers of generator plants taxed with meeting our outrageous demands for more electrical power, grows poisoned, and smog alerts regularly greet us on the morning news programs. Our fresh water supplies grow ever more dubious in quality and uncertain in quantity, and the toxins with which our industry, our mining, our agriculture, our pharmacology and our own consumer-generated detritus permeate the water table and enter into our bodies, taking their vengeance in the form of cancer and a host of other allergies and environmental syndromes.[8] The oceans have been over-exploited, and fisheries are collapsing worldwide, while the effluvia of our civilization that runs off into the rivers and oceans results in the contamination of the very food we eat.

Over all this loom the continuing dangers of ozone depletion, the specter of peak oil production, the climatological disaster of global warming, the residual and unresolved dangers of nuclear waste and the toxic environmental effects of modern military warfare. Nature is “balking”, in ways that are beginning to puncture even the most inflated notions of human domination, and we need to learn to listen to what she is trying to say. In the road ahead lies a disaster, genuinely apocalyptic in both its spiritual and material implications for mankind. For whether we like it or not, whether we acknowledge it or not, when our land, our water, and our air have been sufficiently despoiled, and our climate becomes sufficiently irregular, not only polar bears and spotted owls will suffer. However much we may have been conditioned to overlook the fact, modern civilization and the global economy are no less fundamentally dependent upon the land-base than were the most primitive of ancient subsistence civilizations. Indeed, to the extent that our civilization is now genuinely global, it is far more so, since we can no longer evade or defer the consequences of our environmental degradations by means of migration. At this point in our history, any widespread collapse of our ecosystem tolls the death of untold millions; for all of our technological sophistication and economic power, we cannot eat, drink, or breathe GNP. If we do not change our ways, our civilization will, sooner rather than later, collapse into anarchy, war, and penury, and those who survive such times will look back upon the civilization that caused them with horror and loathing.

If, for the better part of three centuries, we have ignored the ravages our behavior has wrought on plant and animal kingdom alike with impunity, and barbarously tolerated the hideous ugliness with which we have afflicted nature, we can do so no longer. Balaam’s ass has spoken. Nature has found her own voice, and is taking issue with our idiocy before we completely succeed in our suicidal behavior. This fecund world that has more or less reliably sustained us for thousands of years of minimally reasonable stewardship is behaving unpredictably in the face of our efforts at total domination, and we need to learn to listen. For now it is not only our humanity – our sense of decency, charity, and love of the good – that we forfeit by business as usual, but rather it is our very lives and those of our children and grandchildren that are at stake. The way forward is forbidden, and nature has revealed the angel of death standing poised above it. In response, we can do as Balaam did and change our ways, or we can continue to bless what cannot be blessed, curse what should not be cursed, and die in our greed, our ignorance, and our folly.

At a fateful turning point in the wanderings of the Israelites, the Scriptures tell us that the prophet Moses set forth the situation that faced God’s people starkly, and his words apply to our own situation with equivalent force. “I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse: therefore choose life that you and your descendants may live.” The time of decision is at hand. If we would choose life, we must choose it now.

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[1] Joseph Brodsky, “A Halt in the Desert”, in Selected Poems, translated by George L. Kline, 1973. In this poem a dog continues to urinate, as he has always done, at the place where the corner of a Greek Catholic Cathedral, destroyed in the Soviet era, used to stand.

[2] These blessings by Balaam represent the end of the story as it is recorded in Deuteronomy. An independent and separate tradition briefly recorded in the book of Numbers has Balaam put to death for his intervention by stratagem on the behalf of the Moabites. The two traditions are difficult to reconcile in any case, and this secondary tradition is obviously irrelevant for our purposes here.

[3] This is also the name of a posthumously published and incomplete modernist poem by the Anglo-Welsh poet, artist and anti-technologist, David Jones, who seems to have seen the story in a similar light.

[4] Hagia Sophia, its dome, mosaics, icons, and gilded decorations may, as the pinnacle of a successful, stable, and prosperous nation’s aesthetic offering to God, have represented a generous one-of-a-kind creation of enduring cultural value and significance. A solid gold life-size replica would be an atrocity on any accounting.

[5] Dorothy Sayers, “Why Work,” in Letters to a Diminished Church, pg. 126

[6] Erazim Kohak, The Embers and the Stars, pg.12

[7] Phillip Larkin, “This Be the Verse”, Collected Poems, pg 180.

[8] This poisoning now directly affects the closest and most hallowed of human relationships in ways we can no longer directly control; throughout our civilization, mothers can no longer breast feed their children without dosing them with small, but ever-growing amounts of dioxin and other lethal chemical compounds and heavy metals..