I have lived almost my whole life in the greater St. Louis area, apart from the five years that I went to college in Springfield, some three to four hours away (dependent on how respectful one is of the traffic laws governing I-44) but still within the arbitrary limits of what we call the “state” of Missouri. Like most American descendants of European settlers and immigrants, I have lived a decent chunk of my life with some degree of cultural alienation—whatever distinct linguistic, ethnic, or religious identity I may have inherited from my ancestors was extinguished much earlier in my lineage, on both sides—but this sense of connection to Missouri, especially its central eastern and southwestern quadrants, has at least afforded some sense of belonging somewhere (even if that belonging, as any Missourian might tell you, more often than not feels like entrapment). The experience transcends my own ability to put it into words, but there is something in the spirit of Missouri’s impermeable clay soil, her limestone creek-beds, her brush-floored forests, her simple wildflowers, her small wildlife (only lately reintroduced to the greater herbivores and carnivores that settlers in the state previously eliminated), that I have an immediate spiritual affinity for. Even the urban and suburban city itself, and the counties surrounding it, share in this connectivity for me: the time I have spent here makes their psychic weight, both positive and negative, intelligible for me, their beauty and their brutalism alike meaningful for me. There are more beautiful parts of the country; I have been to several of them. There are certainly less spoiled or even entirely untainted natural wonders in the world, and unimaginably better cities: I have pined to see them with my eyes. But there is a real sense in which this is my land, or rather, I am this land’s, even when I rather wish I were from somewhere else, and even when I hope that I shall not spend the whole remainder of my days here.
By any other name, this is an experience of autochthony, which was an important concept to Greek antiquity. Herodotus employs the phrase to describe various indigenous ethne (Historiae I.171-172; IV.45, 109, 197; VIII.73; IX.73). Thucydides uses the word autocthon just once, in Historiae 6.2.2, about the Sikanoi, the previous inhabitants of the island of Sicily. He says that after the Cyclopes and Lystragonians (monsters from Homer’s Odyssey), the Sikanoi were the first settlers and then, later still, said that they were autochthones, typically transliterated as “autochthonous” or translated as “indigenous.” Autochthon is a fascinating word: literally, it means “the land itself,” chthon being an older Greek word for “land” (gradually muscled out by the more ubiquitous use of familiar words like ge). Greek and Roman myth have a handful of instances where, indeed, people “sprung from the land itself,” as LSJ has it (αὐτόχθων, s.v. A): Deucalion and Pyrrha, for example, throw “their mother’s bones”—that is, stones—over their shoulders to breed the new race of humans. Cadmus slew the guardian water-drake of the Ismenian, only to plant its teeth per Athena’s instruction, from which sprang a race of armed men; throwing a stone into their midst, they fought until five survived, who helped him to found Thebes. Claims to autochthony are wrapped up in myth because they are means of expressing ethnic and political identity, which myth can both relativize and reinforce: Demosthenes, for example, was happy to appeal to the concept of Athenian autochthony in his speeches as a source of Athenian superiority against the encroaching empire of Philip II of Macedon (De Falsa Legatione CCLXI; In Nearam LXXIV; Epitaphius IV). But mythic stories of a city’s founders springing up from the ground are at best allegories of the more literal truth of what it is to be autochthonous: that is, “the land itself,” in human form.
It is something like this that stood behind the vulnerable position, for example, of First Nations peoples in what is now North America when European invaders came: the concept that land could not be “owned” owed itself to a widespread conception among tribal entities in the continent that they belonged to the land, as much a part of the natural landscape and ecosystem as its soil, rocks, forests, and animals. There were, and are, resources in European tradition for exactly this kind of idea, beyond the classical sources surveyed above. In much of Europe, the concept of common land as land under no single ownership (or under royal, feudal, and thus often absentee ownership of the monarch or local noble) and therefore in which many different kinds of people were free to make use of the land for agricultural and related purposes of their own prevailed in the middle ages; the industrial revolution, the emergence of European capitalism, and the colonial enterprise all challenged these perspectives (some 20th century events, like the 1932 Mass Trespass of Kinder Scout, have helped revive a sense of the commons in places like England). For most of history, agriculture has happened in these sorts of collective spaces, and has operated on the conciliar wisdom of rural communities rather than on an individualist understanding of land ownership. Even when ownership of land has been asserted, it is often more true to say that a family owns a particular plot of which the individual head of household happens to be the temporary steward; that is, after all, the logic behind the biblical legislation of, say, the Jubilee. Autochthony might be phrased as the public recognition, as a matter of a people’s self-consciousness, of one’s belonging to the land rather than owning it, of the way that land yields and receives again the generations of a society; and in this sense, it is more a matter of one’s mindset than of one’s setting. First Nations peoples clearly have greater claim to belong to this and all continguous lands than do the descendants of European settlers, even when they dwell in exile; an ideal act of reparation would find a meaningful way of making room for them to restore their own sense of belonging to the land without displacing its more recently autochthonous generations.
Autochthony or indigenism is also now a matter of geopolitics due to the rise of the modern concept of the nation-state: the possession and regulation of territory, preferably territory with some sort of connection to a people group’s ancestry and self-understanding, continues to predominate in contemporary international discussions of nationalism. And the commodified, Mammonified approach to land as real estate, as something to be bought, sold, used, manipulated, leveraged, stripped, and “developed,” or even conserved, reserved, protected, rehabilitated, and so forth, testifies to the tragic victory of land ownership over the land’s ownership of us in our cultural consciousness. That indigenous peoples around the world have to advocate for their rights at all bespeaks a global order built on a fairly confused understanding of the existential connections between humanity and land, and the shape of that preeminent relationship.
Theirs are not the only rights in question, of course, as the land itself stands at threat from our ceaseless human attempts to poison it. The contamination of land by the intentional or unintentional waste products of human industry, its decimation and desolation by weapons of mass destruction, its poisoning with chemical abominations meant to exterminate life unwanted by humans (inclusive of other humans) all threaten the land as shared living space and as sacred ground. We, of course, defile its sanctity every day with the blood our governments, armies, and other rich and powerful spill upon it. And in a historical context where efforts to stop and repair such activities around the world are receiving new opposition from human greed and love of power, it is perhaps necessary to revisit our spiritual connection to the land, at least to understand more fully the consequence of our flippancy towards it.
The primary theme of the Hebrew Bible is easily land. Certainly, this is the binding motif of the Torah; the early chapters of Genesis introduce us both to the concepts of aretz, “land” in the general sense, and adamah, “soil.” “In the beginning,” of course, “God created the skies and the land” (aretz; Gen 1:1), but far more of the action and concern of the rest of the narrative from Genesis through 2 Chronicles (or through Malachi or through the relevant apocryphal or pseudepigraphal volume, dependent on one’s canon) focuses on the latter term. It is on the dry land that plants, animals, and humans, arguably the center of God’s concern in the Torah, appear (1:9-10). Heaven’s lights are for the land (1:15, 17). It is the land itself that yields animals (1:24-25), over whom the humans are to have some form of rule (1:26-28). But in the second, Yahwistic creation story of Genesis 2:4-3:24, the order is reversed: the land is first in priority, then the skies (2:4). Once, this author tells us, the land was fallow, without human laborers or rain from YHWH (2:5-6); so YHWH made a human (adam) from the soil (adamah) and planted a garden in the East, from which Eden’s waters irrigated the lands of the world as known to the ancient Israelites and Judahites who first made use of this story (2:11-13). Of interest, the sin of the man and the woman in the garden curses the soil (adamah), not the land (aretz) generally (3:17), such that the promise of land (aretz) which will later unify the legends about the patriarchs is indeed a divine blessing rather than a reiteration of curse. Before that, Cain is cursed to be a wanderer in the land (4:12, 14), an exile, settler, and city founder in Nod (4:16). Thereafter, in the episode of the b’nei Elohim (the Watchers of 1 Enoch 1-36), the reader is told that there are Nephilim “in the land” (6:4-5), and the wickedness of humans makes God regret making them “in the land” (6:6). In Noah’s day, not Adam’s, is the land corrupted, filled with violence in God’s sight (6:11-13); it can only be purified, in the story, by a universal flood to destroy all life from being “in” or “on the land” (6:17; 7:3). Interestingly, where Genesis 2:5-6 tells the reader that YHWH had as yet sent no rain on the earth, the first mention of YHWH doing so is in the Flood narrative: now YHWH sends rain enough to hide the land beneath the cosmic waters once more (7:4, 6, 10, 12, 17-19), requiring the salvation of those creatures which “creep upon the land” in the Ark (7:14). Then, just as before, another wind (ruach) from God upon the still waters to reveal the land once more (8:1, 3, 7, 11, 13-14, 17). Now the land belongs once more to its creatures and to Noah and his family; after Noah sacrifices, YHWH promises himself: “I will never again curse the soil (adamah) because of man, for the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth; neither will I ever again destroy every living creature as I have done. While the land (aretz) remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease” (8:21-22). Then a blessing from God—this time, Elohim rather than YHWH, implying that this is either the Elohist or the Priestly author’s version of the story:
“Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the land (aretz). The fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the land, and upon every bird of the air, upon everything that creeps on the soil (adamah) and all the fish of the sea; into your hand they are delivered. Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you; and as I gave you the green plants, I give you everything. Only you shall not eat flesh with its life, that is, its blood. For your lifeblood I will surely require a reckoning; of every beast I will require it and of man; of every man’s brother I will require the life of man. Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed; for God made man in his own image. And you, be fruitful and multiply, bring forth abundantly on the land and multiply in it.” (Gen 9:1-7, RSV lightly modified)
The concept of the imago Dei occurs in the Priestly creation story but not the Yahwist, explaining why in the Yahwist account YHWH makes a promise in his own heart about the world’s perpetuity despite human evil while here he establishes a lex talionis with qualification on the basis of humanity’s unique creation in God’s image. The land’s sanctity is not in question in this narrative the way it is in the Yahwist’s creation account, though there is a subtle distinction between what God says about the sacred status of the aretz and the adamah.
Genesis 10 and 11 both move to describe distinct accounts of how the land was divided among later descendants of Noah (10:5, 8, 11, 20, 25, 31-32; 11:1-2, 4, 8-9, 28, 31), which serves as the immediate preface both narratively and logically to the stories of the patriarchs, which are, again, punctuated and connected by the concern for land. Narratively, these stories serve for the redactor of Genesis to explain the connection between Noah as flood survivor and progenitor of the postdiluvian human race and Abram/Abraham, a Hebrew from Ur of the Chaldees; but logically, it is in these stories that we first find aretz used in the plural as something divided according to ancestry, custom, language, religion—what we generally mean when we talk about “ethnicity.” Hence, God tells Abram to go to a land (12:1, 7), which was unable to bear both himself and Lot (13:6, 9, 15-16); God promises the land to Abram again (15:7, 18), and includes him (now Abraham) in the loop of divine decision-making on the grounds that all the families of the land are to be blessed through him (18:18, 25). God is especially here the “judge of all the land” (18:25), the supreme court of appeal for those who dwell on the land, whose “way” Lot’s daughters coax him into with them (19:31). It is not just kindness to Abimelech and his house that he asks of Abraham, but to the land where he has sojourned as well (21:23); again, all the nations of the land will be blessed in him (22:18). Abraham prostrates to the “people of the land” (23:12-13). He asks that his servant swear by the “God of the land” to find Isaac a bride from his own kinship group (24:3), but the servant inquires whether the bride-to-be would willingly follow him back to this land, or should he take Isaac to that one (24:5)? No, don’t do that, says Abraham: YHWH swore to give me this land (24:7).
This is just Genesis up to around the end of Abraham’s story; both in that book (26:4; 27:28, 39, 46; 28:13-14; 31:13; 34:1-2, 30; 35:12, 16, 20; 41:30, 34, 36, 47, 56-57; 42:6, 9, 12, 30, 33-34; 43:11; 45:6, 18; 47:6, 11, 13, 20; 48:4, 16; 49:15; 50:11, 24) and beyond it, the land (aretz) is the central arena of focus. What brief glimpses there are to be had in the Hebrew Bible of the skies or heavens, especially the divine abode of God and the other gods, are far less important than the land and the things that transpire upon it. Admittedly, in the literature of postexilic Early Judaism, heaven comes more directly into view as an object of special concern: its personages, its politics, its turmoil and tenancy. And while a fair bit of that is reflected in the New Testament, the land is not thereby shortchanged. Jesus, for instance, quotes Psalm 37:11, that “the meek” or “the humble will inherit the land,” in the more famous Beatitude that goes like that (Matt 5:5). Jesus is affirming, and proclaiming as of present relevance, that the Psalmist’s prediction is now about to come true: the meek, the poor Galilean and Judean peasantry to whom he preaches, are about to inherit the land. The righteous inheritance of a future land is also in view in 2 Peter 3:11-18, and in the justly famous vision of “a new sky and a new land” in Revelation 21-22. Yes, the New Testament also contains heavily apocalyptic interest in the goings-on of the heavenly regions of the cosmos and some authors, like Paul and sometimes Jesus, posit the heavens as the future locus of the just; but these sorts of eschatologies include and coexist with ongoing concerns for the land in a fairly mundane way.
To be clear, I am not here drawing any sort of theological or political point about the Land of Canaan, in antiquity or in the present. My observation is more general than that: there is an existential relationship between the human, the animal, the botanical, and the land in the Hebrew Bible, which regulates the sacred drama of humanity’s mythic prehistory, Israel’s legendary origins, and Early Jewish hopes for the future. Landed, grounded concepts of selfhood and community proceed from the ubiquitous ancient sense that a true ethnos is one that belongs to the land, or at least a land—a place where the elemental fundaments of a people can be gripped in handfuls of soil and seen in the slope of hillside crags. More crudely, there is no humanity without humus.
The astute reader will notice that I have intentionally avoided the usual translation of aretz or its Greek equivalent, ge, as “earth.” The simple reason as to why is that “earth” usually signifies our contemporary sense of Earth as a globular planet, afloat in the ether, and these words do no mean that: even in the Hellenic context, where tellus is indeed spherical and surrounded by the celestial spheres of the wandering stars (planetai), it is still terra firma, the unmoving gravity well of the universe; in Dante, its gross entropy means that it is actually on the furthest margins of the cosmos from God, its center in whom rest and unimpeded movement are at last united, moving all things in concert around the Empyrean. Thinking about our autochthony in global terms can have a spiritual value, certainly, and represents one of the unique opportunities of our age; but to understand what sort of opportunity, we need to reacquaint ourselves with older senses of the grounded self. The world of the early layers of the Hebrew Bible sketched above, like the world of ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Homeric epic, is one in which the land is the cosmic floor cleared of the primordial waters restrained all about and above, covered by the sky dome (raqiya) and the heavens beyond. For South Asians, the land jutted out into the primordial ocean from the foot of the cosmic Mount Meru, in four cardinal continents in which dwelt plants, animals, hungry ghosts (Sanskrit: preta), asuras, and humans; up its rungs swirled the lower and higher svargalokas, where devas dwelt, from which gandharvas took flight, and to which talented rishis or yogis might ascend in ecstasy, or from which bodhisattvas and gods and goddesses devoted to the dhamma might from time to time decline. One’s particular autochthonous relations constituted one’s personally specific access to this greater world system, not infrequently depicted by cosmic trees of life and wisdom like Ygdrasil, Haoma, the Ashvatta, or the Fusang which grow from the peak of the axis mundi at the center of all lands.
Being from a specific place can thus orient one towards all places and justify life in all places, real or imagined. Most ancient Ioudaioi, “Judeans” or “Jews,” did not live in Ioudaia, “Judea,” and most lacked the funds or the interest in going there, enjoying as they did more generally prosperous lives in the Diaspora. And yet the ethnoreligious concept of “Jewishness” as something transcendent of place would not have existed without the common sense of Ioudaia as patria and Jerusalem as metropolis. The Indian Diaspora—some 32 million people outside of the subcontinent—still frequently identifies by home region: there is a Punjabi Diaspora, a Gujarati Diaspora, a Kashmiri Diaspora, and so forth. And yet at this point the dispersion is several generations old: many people have never been back “home,” consider home to be the land they now live in, and their children are often more or less fully assimilated into the dominant culture of their new lands, including the Diaspora community in those lands. Hinduism in America is a very different animal in some ways from Hinduism in India, just as being Italian-American is an almost completely different experience from growing up in Piedmont or Sicily (as a much-loved professor once insisted to me). Projects of forced migration and relocation, rights of return, threats of assimilation and the security of the majority culture, nativism and multiculturalism, autochthony and expatriation: all of these political and social realities, positive and negative, proceed from our deeply rooted assumption that land and identity go hand in hand. First Nations people groups suffer from a variety of involuntary realities of government oppression and exploitation which condition the high rates of depression, despair, drug abuse, and suicide that one can find on many reservations, but the spiritual reason cited is sometimes the disconnection from the land itself, which is the source and setting for most indigenous spiritualities. It is difficult, for example, to keep sacred medical traditions alive if the plants they require only grow in the true homeland, and not the dregs that a colonial government has reduced one to; it is difficult to keep alive the cultural memories of free movement and self-determination that characterized the pre-European experiences of nomadic tribes in the era of reservations. It is not that contemporary indigenous people necessarily want to roll the clock back to a fully premodern lifestyle that none of their grandmothers grew up with; it is rather that to remember past flourishing when future flourishing seems so difficult to envision can be a painful act of service to one’s community. It requires keeping alive the experience of communion with the land in a present context of alienation. Similarly, so lamented the Psalmist: “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down and wept, when we remembered Zion. On the willows there we hung up our lyres. For there our captors required of us songs, and our tormentors mirth, saying, ‘Sing us one of the songs of Zion!’” (Ps 137:1-3). And yet, the Psalmist asks: “How shall we sing YHWH’s song in a foreign land? If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither!” (137:4).
As is standard in most histories of the religious transition from late preexilic Yahwism to exilic and preexilic, “Second Temple” or “Early” Judaism, one of the strategies that the Judahite nobility employed for preserving a distinctive sense of their ethnic identity was a revolutionary theology of YHWH’s sovereignty. Under the normal protocols of ancient religion, conquest by a foreign power meant either the conquest of one’s indigenous gods by the foreign gods—all of whom were thought to be bound to their particular locales—or else the invitation of the local gods to the invaders to acquire their people and bring them home to the new seat of divine power. YHWH, on this reading, was either defeated by Marduk or else graciously accepted Marduk’s offer to come into his retinue at the cost of the Judahites. But exilic and postexilic authors like Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Deutero-Isaiah contrived a different narrative: YHWH abandoned his Temple and permitted the foreign gods and their nations to ransack Judah as punishment for Judah’s disobedience. Yet he himself was present with his people in exile (per the vision in Ezekiel 1), and he would return with his people on the road from exile (per the clarion call of the Servant Songs, beginning in Isa 40:1-2): YHWH was now a mobile god, untethered to his particular plot of land, which was the lot of lesser gods (the angelic “princes” of the Book of Daniel, for instance); and, in fact, as the summodeistic and later monotheistic king of the gods, God himself, YHWH could justly lay claim to the entirety of the land, and not merely some portion of it. “The land is YHWH’s, and the fullness thereof,” after all (Ps 24:1). The ancient world, and Early Jews, still knew of the local gods: the genii and djinn, the numina, the spirits, the daimons, the enshrined souls of dead heroes and theophanies of corporeally immortalized demigods, the terrestrial wraiths of the great gods in the temples, the celestial gods of Sun, Moon, and Stars, the encosmic and hypercosmic deities in their various orders, each patrolling their own regions of the cosmos, each having their own influenza on the fixed land of tellus in their courses, their divine goodness often irradiating down into the sublunary as perceptible evil to mortal eyes. But YHWH God now relativized them all.
While Jews, Christians, and Muslims have in many ways benefited from the versatility of such a theology, especially as it went on to become a genuinely classical monotheism or panentheism in late antiquity, none of them have ever fully escaped the grounded localism of religion, as is attested by the forms of community and religious life that each of them have employed in different strongholds over time. In the Christian world, this is perhaps most obvious, with the absorption of ancient pagan worship of the divine hierarchy in the cults of Christ, Mary, saints, and angels, and sometimes in the preservation of belief in the gods themselves as creaturely divinities or even symbolic spiritual faces of the ascended Christ.1 Just as Deborah of the Book of Judges, for instance, St. Brigid is probably in fact the local Celtic goddess of that name, just as St. George is Apollo Sauroctonus and Barlaam and Josaphat were together Sakyamuni Buddha.2 Insofar as these saints, too, have traveled with the Christian church, then, it might rightly be said that local gods have moved with their peoples: that there is a parish of St. Brigid’s in Pacific, MO ought perhaps to be no less surprising than the housing of ancient Indic gods in the Hindu Temple of St. Louis. Gods not infrequently serve as the spiritual nexus point expressing the connection of people and place; and their mundane makeovers, deaths and rebirths, and migration may well have a genuine parallel in their own experience as spiritual entities, or at least, we have nearly always thought and spoken so. It is perhaps such spirits that I acknowledge in the familiar beauty of the Missouri landscape where it endures, though as the descendant of invaders, I do not know their tongue so as to call them by name and expect that they will speak in kind.
Such divine anacyclosis is especially true for gods of particular cities, or the heavenly predators patronizing various empires; one cannot read, for example, the Johannine Apocalypse the way that an ancient Jew or Christian might have read it without allowing for the real possibility that Rome’s empire and its defeat might be the worldly shadow of the miserable link between a cosmic prostitute and a divinely evil dragon, or at least whatever preternatural realities are signified by such human images. And yet sacred ground has a habit of rehabilitating its vanquished gods. Rome has been one of the quintessentially Christian cities for the better part of two millennia now; the Pantheon, rebuilt and rededicated as a temple to all the gods by Hadrian around 126 CE, has been a Christian church to Mary and the martyrs since 609. Did the divine inhabitants of the temple change, did its rule simply change hands, or does the old religion now simply have a different look? One might ask the same about the Parthenon, which was a Christian church much longer than a pagan temple to Athena, despite the classical prejudices of 19th and 20th century archaeologists. One might also ask the same about the variety of Jewish and Christian sites converted for Muslim use during the long period of successive Islamic rule, frequently turned back over to Christian and/or Jewish use in the volatile anacyclosis of the Middle East in the medieval and Renaissance periods: at what point did their sanctity change, if it ever did? The question of claim or rights to such ground becomes complex when one considers the multiplicity and irreducible pluralism of all land, and the long view of history once more reminds us all that we belong to the land much more than it belongs to us.
It is here that some concept of our land as Earth, third planet from Sol on the outer skirts of the Milky Way Galaxy, becomes spiritually useful. For any and every argument that one can make about the cyclical successions of life, organic and spiritual, on any particular plot of land can easily be predicated of the Earth as a whole. The Silurian Hypothesis—so named for the creatures from Doctor Who—presents us with a fascinating thought experiment: could there have been civilizations of sapient creatures prior to humans (let us say, broadly, the genus Homo) on our planet in the ancient past, and could we know definitively? While the answer still appears, for the time being, to be that there do not seem to have been, the haunting character of the question itself is that we do not and cannot know—the Earth would long since have recycled their artifactual remains beyond identification or recovery. Time mocks our pretensions to immortality, at least by purely natural means. And even short of humanoid dinosaurs, we must reckon with the fact that the dinosaurs we know to have actually existed held the Earth in their generations for much longer than we have, and they, too, died an impossibly long time ago. We stand at best as coworkers together with them and with all our ancestors and cousins since in the mystery of God’s creation of this land, our Earth; but unlike nearly every other creature of whom we are aware, historically and today, we alone stand in a position of power to truly curse it for generations to come. Reckoning with the fact that we—our bodies at least—belong to the land, and not the land to us, is no longer merely a philosophical correction to our misguided, ungrounded sense of self: it is crucial to our survival on it. To curse the land is merely to curse ourselves; it will survive after and without us, just as it did before. Earth, our mother, has had many children; she will have still more yet. To some, perhaps quite limited degree, it falls within our power to decide whether we will continue to be among their number.
I continue to be at a loss to offer a better introduction to this worldview than Michael Ward, Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C.S. Lewis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
It is with no small amount of reluctance that I link anything to First Things, but the era when David Bentley Hart wrote for them was inarguably a different publication than it is today.
David,
Thank you for these fine ruminations. I am only now reading it, as I had been working on a review for Jonathan Geltner’s new novel, Absolute Music (posted on Fr. Kimel’s Eclectic Orthodoxy blog.) You and Geltner share an ecological concern and a sense of local habitation as inspiring particular consciousness. William Desmond writes, “The muse must be wooed, and wooed in relation to genius, and genius is not just my genius as this singular thinker or poet or artist, but also the genius of a place or locale, which too is the genius of a people. One is located.” I surmise you will be familiar with Black Elk Speaks. A lesser known work you should read is the fictional Okla Hanali by R. A. Lafferty. As a fan of Dr. Who as far back as the Tom Baker years, I am open to the possibility of other sapient life forms. (I don’t see how one could fundamentally exclude it.) Nonetheless, my caveat to your speculation is that if one believes that Incarnation and Resurrection is the continuation of Genesis, or perhaps better, it’s fully proper enactment, then I am dubious that one should or could relativize homo sapiens, as foolish as the species often is. I think Christ is the ultimate ground of the cosmos, and so there is some sense in which the victory on the Cross is the manner in which “the human thing in its perfection” is revealed to be both the antidote to death for all flesh and the hidden ground of being. At least, that is how I read the gospel in its intent.
I'd like to ask a question, if you allow me, as it's surely no coincidence that I've been dwelling upon some of these very ideas in the last few days.
Basically, I'm wondering how Christianity comes into all of this. Because, unless I'm wrong (which is very likely, given my only superficial knowledge of these matters) one of the tensions present in the Gospels is that of the Kingdom of God as described by Jesus versus the Promised Land of the Old Testament. Many expected the Messiah to be a prince who would conquer the enemies of Israel, free its people and deliver the promised plot of land... but Jesus said His kingdom was not of this world and delivered an invitation to transcendence that basically ignored the issue of land, race or people. If this is true, doesn't it mean that Christ turned the whole narrative related to land on its head? Perhaps it's one of the reasons behind Christianity's great success at evangelizing half the world.
Jesus also, as David Bentley Hart has written (on First Things!), established once and for all the supremacy of the one God; disempowering, so to speak, all other spirits and principalities. (I think the essay is called 'Christ and Nothing'.)
Considering both of these issues, we end up with an interesting teleological vision of the whole Bible, as well as of the history and spiritual evolution of Hebrew culture: a rather enigmatic and faceless God looks after, protects and punishes His chosen people, who will later be rewarded with the greatest gift of all: His one beloved son, Who comes to reveal the true, otherworldly meaning of the ancient covenants and promises. God delivers His part of the deal in a most unexpected way - their loyalty, however, is rewarded with unprecedented mercy, enlightment, and revelation.
Now, this radical approach to spirituality - radical in its otherworldliness and insistence upon faith in the one God - happens to be present in Gaudiya Vaishnavism as well. And, while attachment to place and even worship of lesser (semi) divine entities are not entirely condemned, they are seen as intermediate steps in the process of a realization that culminates in the surrender to the all-encompassing Ultimate Reality, Whose worship not only superceeds but also somehow includes due homage to all other benign gods and spirits, and Who dwells in an eternal abode which is our only true home. After all, we are purely spiritual beings and will always be out of place here on Earth, where every possible arrangement, good as it may be, is doomed to end sooner or later, more or less catastrophically (regardless of how much you spend on security and weapons).
Jesus told His followers not to worry about "What might we drink, eat or wear? But first seek His Kingdom and his justice, and all of these things will be supplied to you." Perhaps we could also add "Where shall we live?"
My claim is that the teachings of pure religion, as taught by Lord Jesus as well as Lord Caitanya Mahaprabhu, make the case for a radical transformation of consciousness that leads us beyond the specific concern with land but, ultimately, includes land and all its bounty as part of our rightful heritage when we finally awaken Christ the Son within our hearts. That is, groundedness is naturally and even automatically included in the spiritual pursuit, because that pursuit is the very purpose of life on this planet.
Any thoughts you may have will be most welcome. But please... don't just say "I don't buy that"! :D