Thomas Berry(1914-2009)是一位研究世界宗教的历史学家，并且很早就对于唤醒对于环境危机的敏感性表达意见。他最知名的研究莫过于他的关于宇宙的“新的故事”，“新的故事”包括了进化科学和传统文化用来创造繁荣的未来。 这门课研究了Berry的一生并且联系到了宇宙之旅的项目之中。我们抽取了他的著作，文章还有以前的讲课录像，都是为了研究Berry的理念，包括了“新的故事”，“伟大的使命”，还有新兴的生态时代。这门课深入地研究了Berry对于宇宙的见解， 定位人类在动态无垠的宇宙中的位置和参与到我们时代的创造工作中。我们会着重研究Berry对于生态，经济，教育，灵魂，艺术时代更新和重塑。 课程的原理： Thomas Berry是原生的创造性综合性思想家，特别关注于我们全球环境危机的本质。他对于生态危机的回应体现了他的智慧，这回应是在进化论的背景下，应该把人类和科学带到一起。另外，他解释道，我们对于世界宗教的参与的需求也是可以用来解决环境问题。 他从研究宇宙学和宗教传统，并结合两者开始实现。感知到故事作为功能宇宙学的重要性，他开始探索这些故事的广泛影响并且通过传统进行传播，用例子来说明的话，就是仪式，道德和生存之道。
“宇宙和宗教” 来自Thomas Berry（4）
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來自 Yale University 的課程
Thomas Berry的世界观：地球社区的繁荣 (The Worldview of Thomas Berry: The Flourishing of the Earth Community)
個評分
從本節課中
Thomas Berry有关世界文化和宗教的研究
Thomas Berry是一位地球文化的学者，他启发了人们懂得了宇宙的科学故事是最基础的启示，我们需要结合世界宗教和世界文化的背景来综合理解。
與講師見面
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
Well, the question is, how,
what do we replace with the various phases
of life that I mentioned this morning?
I mentioned the need to disengage from our religious structures,
the religious tradition, the humanist tradition,
the scientific mechanistic science and
our jurisprudence, that as these exist at the present time,
they are incompetent in dealing with the issues that confront us.
They're all immobilized,
or de-energized, or
confounded by this situation.
You cannot get our answers out of
any of those four as they exist at the present time.
So I suggest detachment from these without negating them,
detachment from without negating them.
And detach from, then
identify this story of the universe.
Put ourselves into the universe and then see how these fit into that universe.
But make the universe normative instead of making these normative for the universe.
Make the universe normative for these.
>> But human beings change so slowly.
That, too, as a historian, too.
>> Well, the question is that humans change slowly.
We do, but we have not changed slowly since the second world war.
Since the second world war, we have changed terribly fast.
In fact, let me give you this statistic chemically.
In the 1950s, we were making 500,000 tons of industrial chemicals each year.
That's half a million.
Now we're making 200 million tons each year.
We've gone from half a million tons of industrial chemicals each-
>> That's not.
In changing, that's psychologically.
>> Well, it's put us into a new, well it is a change psychologically.
It's changed us from a pre-chemical age into a chemical age,
and that is vast psychological change.
>> It doesn't affect me.
I was born in 1957.
>> It's affecting you every day.
It's affecting the air you breathe, it's affecting every bit of food you eat.
It's affecting every breath you breathe.
>> Thank you.
Okay, so.
>> [LAUGH] >> It may be an anachronism.
>> [LAUGH] >> The question was,
if I want to do away with the word religion, or
our understanding of it as it is now.
What about the word church?
And my answer is that it may be an anachronism.
And that is that church needs to be reconstituted as bio-regional communities.
The church, the vital church of the future will not be simply composed of humans.
In other words, I gave a talk to a mission sending societies,
all the mission societies of the Catholic church some years ago.
And, saying that you cannot have any longer missions to human communities.
Whether political missions, economic missions, or religious missions.
You cannot do anything for people so directly anymore.
You can only work through them, through there by a regional context.
People need water and soil and food and seeds.
And they need, in a place,
a viable context, which is the larger biological community.
And we have to learn to establish the biological communities and
the new substitute for church, or
the new church will be, to my mind, the bio-regional community.
Do you want to know what a bio-regional community is?
You can read that chapter in the Dream of the Earth.
>> [LAUGH] >> Excellent.
And Steve did you have your- >> [INAUDIBLE]
>> The question has to do with
the suffering that the Earth is involved in,
and whether we can understand it better by understanding the sacrifice
that I've mentioned as regards to the stars or this cosmological order.
My answer is affirmative,
that I think it's our most profound way to understand it is in this manner,
that sacrifice is a dimension of the universe.
It's a dimension of every being.
Every being is sacrificed for other beings.
The living beings die into each other.
We will eventually be, we will eventually feed bacteria.
And we have to think of bacteria when we think of our community,
that these are the great forces.
These are the most essential things.
These are the beings that we must be grateful for.
The bacteria that make the system workable.
And we're beginning to understand this, that we must include the insects,
that there is a very mysterious bond.
And we have to very, very careful
about where we bestow the honors, and what we are appreciative of.
We have to be appreciative of everything.
It's one of the characteristics Loren Eiseley, who I think is,
perhaps I would nominate him for the finest
essayist in the English language in the 20th century.
But particularly in his books, The Unexpected Universe and
The Night Country and a number of others, but
his essays have a depth and a profundity and
an insight Into this particular problem that is unique.
And particularly, there's a dark side in his personality,
I think, that enables him to probe deeply into the whole structure and
functioning of the universe, particularly in this tragic dimension.
So, to understand the Christ tragedy, the universe tragedy,
insofar as the universe has a Christ dimension.
The tragedies of the universe already have a Christ dimension.
We have Saint Paul, who is not content
with the Christ of the Gospels.
He insisted on the cosmological dimension of Christ,
particularly in the first chapter of the Epistle to the Colossians,
where he mentions in Christ all things hold together.
Well, this idea of the human as being
the best way of talking about, as being the best metaphor for
understanding the universe, peoples have heard that.
It's been the Hindu habit, the Buddhist habit,
the Chinese habit in a wonderful way.
We, Saint.
Paul brings it into a Christian modality.
That this, and it has a special reference, I think,
and it is very obviously adaptable, too.
In Christ, all things hold together.
There's no difficulty in the Christian seeing that an emergent
universe has a Christ dimension from the beginning.
In fact, in contemporary physics, there's the cosmological
anthropic principle, where the physicist
themselves see the human dimension of the universe from the beginning.
A lot of physics comes up with that.
And it was, who was it?
Was it Freeman Dyson comes up with the statement that
the more he studies the structure of the universe and its functioning,
the more convinced he is that the universe knew that we were coming?
It was not a predetermined thing exactly, but the whole,
the decision that had to be made from the very beginning of the universe was such
that it would seem to establish
a bias toward certain modes of,
certain moments, modes of the Earth's evolutionary process,
that enabled to, did not predetermine it exactly,
but it did enable the human to emerge eventually.
So, there are these ways in which a religious oriented people can
read the universe in all the grandeur of their religious background.
>> Thank you.
>> [APPLAUSE]
>> This is an amazing weekend.
A rare divide in the later use of a person's
thinking, and
to witness or
to participate in such a vital elaboration
of a person's orientation,
particularly when it's concerned with what might be called urgent issues, or
things on a scale that involve the destiny of so many people,
and which reaches so
deep into the tragic as well as the glorious dimensions of the universe.
Which really is what we're dealing with today.
The grandeur and tragic element,
the ecstatic and the foreboding side of things,
which balances off in kind of an excitement with existence.
It's a challenging thing.
And we witness somewhat
in these times, at least myself,
I am awesomely struck with the passage
of a work by Lawrence Vanderpost,
who is one of the most impressive of the journalists of our times.
He's a white South African that grew up with the Bushmen.
He tells some amazing stories of the Bushmen.
And he has one story about an older Bushman talking to a younger Bushman and
telling him about the universe and how to understand it.
And he says, no matter what you think, everything has its right to be.
Whether you think it's beautiful or less beautiful,
everything has its right to be.
And the Bush understands necessity.
And what's done by necessity, the Bush accepts.
But what is not done out of necessity, the Bush will never understand, never accept.
The Bush has its watchers.
You may think deep In the darkness of the Bush,
you may think that you are alone and unobserved.
And he said, that would be a most dangerous illusion.
>> [LAUGH] >> [LAUGH] In the Bush,
you are never unobserved.
I think this is something that we have lost our awareness of,
due to our technologies, due to our capacities
to defend ourselves from the heat of summer and the cool of winter.
To defend ourselves from starvation on a large scale,
at least those of us that are in the so called
first world, in the industrial part of the world, those of us that
are able to call upon the assistance of our contemporary science and
our capacity to manipulate the planet Earth.
And we develop a certain arrogance.
And I think that is something that is,
something we must be aware of,
of the overall arrogance of our times in our parts of the world.
And that the first attitude toward the universe,
there are several basic attitudes toward the universe that are needed.
The first is gratitude.
Gratitude for the universe, and for what it's given us.
Admiration and entering into the celebration of the universe,
gratitude, reverence, and awesomeness.
It puts us in a certain psychic mood of presence.
And it's with a certain humility.
And of course, humans and humility all go together.
A certain humility before the world that we live in.
And it is these experiences, perhaps,
that dominate world literature.
And when I think of the universe story,
I think of it in terms primarily of literature.
The new story I consider to be our
expression of
the epic context and interpretation of existence.
We have the Homeric stories that constituted the overall mentality,
the overall understanding that the Greeks had of themselves.
And it was in this context that the Greeks
articulated their existence, articulated their world meaning.
It wasn't philosophy.
It wasn't geology.
It was story.
A sequence of stories.
A sequence of images and experiences.
And so later,
intelligibility given to the Roman empire was given not
in any of the philosophies of the times primarily, or
the ethical reflections of Marcus Aurelius, or any of these.
It was given primarily by Virgil in the Aeneid,
where he interpreted the meaning of the empire.
What was the meaning of it all?
And that's where he wrote that glorious work of the Aeneid.
So that Virgil's Aeneid is such that
it was a German humanist ,Haecker was his name.
I've forgotten his first name.
Theodor Haecker, yeah.
He wrote a rather magnificent work called Virgil, Father of the West.
Because it was Virgil that guided the western
world into our basic orientation.
And it's why Dante, when he wrote the story, that wonderful story of
the universe, in which he put the real characters of history,
all the characters of the Bible, all the characters of the Greek and
Greek mythology, all the Roman persons, he summed up as no other person
could sum up, or ever has summed up,
the totality of the actual personal experience of humans.
And he put them into that magnificent context of
the Divine Comedy.
So that Virgil is an important person.
And he had, it was to explain the mission of the empire.
And Dante takes two people as his guides.
Virgil takes him through the greater part of the story and
later, of course, Beatrice.
Later after Virgil, after the empire, came that
terrible moment of western civilization in the story of the human,
as in the sequence that we are heirs to is the fall of Rome.
Virgil interpreted the rise of Rome, and
then Augustine interpreted the fall of Rome.
And in interpreting the fall of Rome,
which occurred in 410 when the gods destroyed Rome,
the whole world felt itself as at a total impasse.
When you read the letters of the devastation,
read the letters of Saint Jerome describing the times, and
you read the experience of the darkness of that time,
it was an awesome thing.
And the pride went up that the Christians were responsible,
because they had taken away the worship of the deities and
the gods were angry, and the gods had disowned Rome.
And so the Christians, and the empire had become Christian at that time.
And so somebody had to answer this.
And the western world was in a period of disillusion for
6 centuries or so, all the way up from the,
certainly from the 5th century through to the 11th century,
with a temporary interlude in the time of Charlemagne.
But it was a very dark period.
But it was carried by this great work of Augustine.
And the city of God is a history.
It, too, and it's a story.
It's a story of the universe.
And all these are always stories of the universe.
Homer is telling the story of the universe and the human story.
Virgil is telling the story of the universe,
with all the powers of planet Earth.
Augustine is telling the story of the universe, and
is interpreting this world of meaning.
What is the dynamism?
And so as no other work, the city of God created the medieval
period with two other works, with the Bible and the ritual books.
You wanted to know the basic sources and the mystical writings of Dionysus.
Dionysus, who gave us our depth mystical tradition.
And so on up through the medieval period, and
there Dante gives us the great work that he wrote to interpret his times.
He wrote it also to interpret his period and
to guide the future, so a person might say.
And then, after the Black Death, it was a further
problem of western civilization of how to manage the future.
And the person who more or less took charge of the thing and
wrote the vision that to a large extent has guided us would be,
perhaps, Francis Bacon, who projected a new world,
where he envisions a fact that we will deal with the problem of the evil
of the world not by escape into some salvation into eternity.
But by controlling the world.
And all of this comes after the Black Death that occurred from 1347 to 1349,
when a third of Europe died, apparently, and
when a half of the citizens of Florence died in three months.
The traumatic moment and the world, that's where the whole thing is rooted in.
They had no explanation.
They knew nothing about germs.
The only thing they could figure it was that the world had grown wicked.
And God was angry with the world, so
the best thing to do would be to escape out of the world some way.
And that's when we get the dance of death.
It comes in the 15th century.
And the ars moriendi, the art of dying.
There were 40 different manuscripts,
40 different versions of this manuscript that the, how to die.
Also at this time, come the morality plays.
And the morality plays that especially every man playing,
which tells us that the only things worthwhile are the,
the only things worthwhile are what you take with you when you die.
Which are your virtues, and everything else is inconsequential, basically.
So you get this movement into
a devotionalism of the 15th century.
And the return, and the aversion to the extravagance
of the gorgeous liturgies of the church back to the simplicity of the gospel,
back to the certain puritanical approach and so forth.
And to a severity in Western spirituality.
These are overarching
contexts in which our thinking is taking place.
And so the issue has moved on into our times.
And this extraordinary thing happened
is we discovered developmental time.
That is the issue, that is the issue.
The discovery of developmental time, and
none of the religions of the world have been able to deal with it.
It's that simple.
And it's why almost all the spiritual tradition, the religious traditions
now are in the state of neo-fundamentalism because they're seizing
on their frailty, they're being swept away by a mechanistic war that
we discovered time who discovered it in its mechanistic dimensions.
And it's not in spiritual dimensions.
It's in the dimensions that we could control and
could expand our physical comforts considerably at the expense however,
of course of the spirit dimension of things.
And this development, it was associated with and
gave us our control of developmental time.
But the religions and obviously this was secularistic,
this was mechanistic, this was alien to all our religious traditions,
all our spirituality because it's all in this world
where time moves and ever renewing seasonal cycles.
What is born dies, what dies is born and that is forever.
And it always was, always would be,
but it's a very secure mode of being.
It's easily spiritualized.
It's easily understandable and it's not threatening.
Because no matter what happens it can be renewed.
But when you get to the developmental irreversible time,
then you're into a world of real tragedy,
of real, the possibility of real tragedy.
You're into a world that's radically different.
It's irreversible, this destruction of species, irreversible and
over long periods of billions of years, we of course don't know what would happen.
But in terms of human historical time, assuming that humans
would be here for a certain period.
We might not be everlasting, it might be, but we don't know.
We need something that would deal with this question of a universe.
There is an emergent reality where the Divine has
never before been experienced in this context.
And in fact, it's completely devoid of the Divine.
And it's mechanistic, it's something that to be exploited by definition.
To be exploited.
It's by definition something that is waiting for
humans to give it value by exploitation.
And so that fascination with the exploitive side
of the natural world gives us an unfeeling attitude toward it.
When I called the autism, the pathology of the dead.
And so when we, Brian and
I, do this work, we actually have in mind,
something of the dimensions of this epic tradition.
In fact, Brian will be giving a course in California this fall
on the universe story and the epic tradition.
Because this is our epic.
It's this overarching context, it's not theological, basically, it's not
philosophical or ecological or any of the, all these words come into the picture.
But it's something that is more overarching so
to speak than any of these more technical categories in which we do our thinking.
Because these categories in which we do our thinking are already,
to a certain extent, invalidated,
not invalidated because we can't do without them but
they are already in need of a new context in which to function.
And so, it's in this context that I think we need to invisage what we are about.
Because this is not exactly an effort to resolve the social issue in a direct way.
But it's to say that until we have this peace with the planet,
until we have this world of meaning,
until we feel that we are integral with And
the great emergent universe.
And then our proper role is to be that being in whom
the universe reflects on, and celebrates itself,
and its numinous origin in a special mode of conscious self awareness.
That's who we are, and to have that as your
primary consciousness, now, Maria Montessori was very well
aware of this when she did that book of hers to educate six year old children.
And the way we educate,
she told the story herself rather well at the time, the story, the seed, the self.
But they need, the children need a story, and
they need a story, they need the universe story to be written for
their turn, the story needs to be told a thousand different ways.
It needs to be told, it needs to be danced, it needs to be put to music,
it needs to have its poetic expression and so forth.
And so that, I think as we gather and reflect on this,
I think that we need to keep some of these
over our chain issues in our mind.
So that, as we do these more technical studies in the theology,
they must be done, they're urgent, and they're urgent processes.
But I think you can see that from what was said this morning,
that the next
group of thinking people in our
interpretation of the religious traditions, or our thought traditions.
That the interpretation,
I think you can see how deeply they have gotten into this,
and how amazingly impressive the depth
of the discussion has become and this awareness.
In fact this morning, we were taught practically
the same thing in practically the same words,
that we are that being in whom the universe reflects on itself and,
Attains a new mode of being in the human as its latest expression.
Before I leave, I would just like to mention
once again though, the transition.
All these epic stories are journey stories, and
we are on the great journey and I mentioned that the last time.
And the story is to find an understanding of our journey, and
to provide some of the psychic energy that we need to carry through the journey
from the terminals Cenozoic, to the emerging Ecozoic.
Now in doing this, there are a number of things, and
that would be the subject for six or
eight other weekends, but I just want to mention the fourfold wisdom that we need.
And it's evident here, we heard the indigenous wisdom,
because it's indigenous wisdom that has such a remarkable
insight into what we've lost, and what we need.
We need the wisdom of women which has been lost or
has been set aside or ignored for such a long time.
And it's clear here from the participation of women here that the principle,
certainly the archetype of the future of the Ecozoic,
will be the archetype of the woman.
That is clear, just like the basic physical archetype,
I think is what I call the great compassionate curve of the universe.
We don't know if it's closed or open so far, but
it is that which brings everything together, and holds us in an embrace.
Now the third thing is the wisdom of the traditions,
and that is the patriarchal wisdom, and the patriarchy has a bad name
right now because it's so largely responsible for
what has happened.
But there's a wisdom that's there, it carries a deep wisdom
in its foundation and also in so many of its ideals.
As all traditions, it has betrayed itself in a profound way,
but the solution is not elimination, but rethought and
reactivation of its more creative possibility.
And the third thing is that the wisdom is the new
wisdom of science, and that, to some extent I think,
is the key element in this.
That finally, the universe,
a whole revelatory experience I think is available to us now.
It's a new revelation, that's why the chapter in the universe
story on the modern revelation, I think needs to be taken seriously.
We have a new revelatory experience that
we've avoided, and I don't think it's available to
the other traditions as immediately as it is available to ourselves.
Because if we can't enter into this new wisdom, then the other fixations,
the religious fixations that will provide and support a great deal of human effort,
and will guide us to a certain extent, it's just insufficient.
It can contribute a great deal, Buddhist tradition can contribute a great
deal, the Hindu tradition, Chinese, these are stupendous achievements.
But I generally say it this way, they cannot do what needs to be done,
but we cannot do what needs to be done without these traditions,
and so they're indispensable traditions.
For them to be able to really enter into the mystique,
the mystical dimension of the scientific endeavor,
when it comes to listening, because really, science is listening.
So listening to the stars, and I don't talk so much about science
as I do about experiential understanding of the universe.
We're having a new experience experientially
with all the instrumentations so far, but so far we've not learned how to do it.
And so I would leave you, then, with a suggestion that on our way,
as we develop our different wisdoms,
that we may find some help in this fourfold wisdom, thank you.
>> [APPLAUSE]
>> Because of Genesis, is it going somewhere and if so, where?
>> [LAUGH] >> Well, the question is,
is the universe going anywhere, and
if it is going somewhere, what is it?
Because that I see is the difference between Whitehead, basically and Teilhard.
In fact, this was the first question that Brian Swim asked me when we had met,
and I was talking, and he didn't know whether I knew anything or not.
And he asked me the question of what's the difference,
it didn't Whitehead do everything that Teilhard had done.
I said, but the answer was that Teilhard has the story and
Whitehead doesn't, but they both have development,
and they both have process thought.
The universe is going to itself.
The universe is going to the universe,
there's no final term that it's going to,
it's a progressive sequence of celibatory
episodes that we have not the slightest idea so
to speak of what they might be.
And that's why a story is so important, story,
there's always suspense of what's next.
We don't know, but we do know that we have an important role to play in the story,
and that we have to be sensitized to how we fulfill our role.
And our role, I would say, is certainly not to devastate
the entire project of the biosystems of the planet.
And to devastate our own existence,
also that the only way I know to identify a final end,
I don't know, there's no final end.
It could end, but it could've ended anytime and be complete.
I don't think that there is,
Teilhard talks about the Omega Point,
but I think that is taken from a biblical source and
is a part of his Christian devotion but
is not really an answer.
>> The questions in what you're saying.
>> The question is that I suggested put these four traditional forms
of our society, of our culture aside, or we step back from them.
But what I said is not to,
sometimes I say put them away at least for the present.
And so I am concerned that we be able to detach ourselves
from these enough to be able to really look at them.
I don't think the scriptures goes, ever look at scripture.
I don't think that Christians look at Christianity, basically,
they have a fixated attitude that's going to explicate.
But I don't want to, as I said, to detach from without negating and
establish a new context, and then see how these relate within the new context.
>> Praise the lord.
>> [LAUGH]
[APPLAUSE]
