“My name is Greta Thunberg. I am sixteen years old. I come from Sweden. And I want you to panic. I want you to act as if our house is on fire.... To panic, unless you have to, is a terrible idea. But if your house is on fire and you want to keep your house from burning to the ground, then it requires some level of panic.” (Speech before the EU Parliament - Strasbourg, 17 April 2019)
Greta Thunberg has become the new icon of our ecological struggle. Her language - which catches the world’s attention - is apocalyptic. Some people - politicians and business people mainly - think it is a bad idea. Apocalyptic language, panic, they say, paralyzes people. Is that true? How shall the “apocalypse” help forward our Christian duty to care for our common home? Let me give some hints.Apocalypse is “the single most powerful master metaphor that the contemporary environmental imagination has at its disposal.”The present environmental crisis – announcing itself as apocalypse – engenders a whole range of responses. On the one hand, its cataclysmic language provokes fear and paranoia, apathy and inaction – making it a self-fulfilling prophecy. On the other hand, its emotionally-charged rhetoric seizes people’s attention and imagination which can also possibly lead to some responsible social engagement.This article aims to propose some viable frames with which to read contemporary environmental apocalypticism in order to guide us toward an engaged Christian spirituality in the world.

1. Mapping Eco-Criticism

There are many ways in which to view contemporary responses to the present ecological crisis. Let me present three basic positions: the cornucopian, the pastoral and the apocalyptic.

The Cornucopian. 

Derived from the Latin cornu copiae (“the horn of plenty”) – the horn-shaped basket or container overflowing with fruits of the earth in Greek mythology, the cornucopian believes that the earth contains enough matter and energy for all and if ever population increases in leaps and bounds – so does technology to provide for its needs. If the Malthusians are called “doomsters”, the cornucopians are dubbed as “boomsters”. The problem of climate change, for instance, is seen as “scare mongering” which is not really proven by hard evidence. In short, these optimistic futurists believe that the world evolves in progress toward its perfect end. If challenges – ecological or political – appear in the present horizons, they are but part of the whole evolutionary process. The with this position is its instrumentalist view of nature which is decidedly anthropocentric.

The Pastoral. The second position points to the pastorals as response to the ecological crisis. In many instances, this refers to the idealization of the country and rural life, a retreat from the city and its technological progress. While the cornucopians look to the future in assured optimism, the pastorals go back to the past as “pristine existence” and lost ideal that needs to be recovered. The idea of “pure wilderness” as ideal existence – a state uncontaminated by civilization – becomes sacramental. The problem with pastorals, however, is the view that nature can only be genuine when it is untouched by humanity. Its purity is “achieved at the cost of an elimination of human history” and civilization – which also exonerates us from both responsibility and realistic engagement.

The Apocalyptic. 

The third response to the ecological crisis is the apocalyptic form. The classical precursor of environmental apocalypticism is Thomas Malthus’ Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) which posits that population can increase exponentially and our resources could not provide for its subsistence, thus, leading the whole humanity to grim competition for human survival. Although Malthus did not predict a dramatic endgame, his theory can lend inspiration to contemporary popular dystopian films like Mad Max or Hunger Games.

2. Environmental Apocalypticism: Religious and Secular Discourses

There are two main apocalyptic trends prevalent in environmental discourses. The first is the religious apocalyptic discourse (mostly present among the Christian “right”) which thinks that the environmental catastrophe is what the bible has already predicted. Some more fundamentalist quarters think that this “Rapture” and “Armageddon” is God’s vengeance and punishment for the world's moral decline. The impending ecological cataclysm also spells our eschatological end – sadly inevitable but necessary for God to ultimately establish his Kingdom. All we have to do is wait. Some among the Christian right, however, think that that there is actually no certainty to this positive end, thus, also challenge their followers to be responsible stewards of creation. The religious apocalyptic discourse is therefore double-edged: either passive or transformative depending on one’s theological interpretation and economic-political affiliation.The second trend is the secular discourse which mainly tends to be dystopic in character. Environmental degradation has been described in apocalyptic terms by secular eco-activists. Popular forms abound – from the “end of the world” blockbuster entitled “2012”; to Al Gore’s science-based An Inconvenient Truth. Unlike the religious rhetoric, it is not God who is punishing us but we ourselves with our uncontrolled carbon emission, etc. Beyond movies and literature, the secular apocalyptic can also be discerned in movements like Greenpeace or Earth First!.Even as the writers and activists acknowledge that what is predicted does not actually exist, “this imagined tragedy may easily become a stark reality we all shall know.” And since God is not there to save the world, there is no promised ultimate emancipation. The world as we know it will never be restored to an original splendor. While religious apocalyptic discourse aimed at providing its readers the hope of "a new heaven and a new earth", the secular discourse is mainly dystopic and pessimistic. To illustrate this, I want you to watch Hunger Games. Religious and secular apocalyptic rhetoric possesses some common features: the predictions are projected with absolute authority; the material threat and their advocates are “evil”; failure to listen would be catastrophic; and the disaster is not only imminent but is well under way. The consequent directions are quite ambivalent.On the one hand, environmental apocalyptic literature positively contributes in galvanizing otherwise disparate eco-critical positions into some united program of action through its use of imaginative-metaphorical rhetoric. On the other hand, the emotionalism that usually accompanies apocalyptic language tends to polarize other positions, simplify complex arguments and blur the concrete issues – making it an easy material for journalistic sentimentalism and consequent passive skepticism. Thus, in the end, dystopic apocalyptic genres either lead to the embarrassment of failed predictions or self-fulfilling prophecies.

3. Toward an Eco-Apocalyptic Spirituality

How do we rescue environmental apocalypticism from producing both despair and inaction? Can present apocalyptic rhetoric be constructive of Christian hope and responsible political engagement? With the limitations of space and time, let me just outline a viable apocalyptic spirituality with the help of three disparate sources: (1) James Berger’s analysis of the “post-apocalyptic”; (2) Johann-Baptist Metz’ reflections on the apocalypse; and (3) stories that I heard, experienced and read about at Haiyan’s Ground Zero more than a month after the “apocalyptic super typhoon” struck the Philippines on November 8, 2013.

After the End: Sense of Hope at the Post-Apocalypse

In his book, After the End, James Berger presents the idea of the “post-apocalypse”. He observes that almost every apocalyptic text is a paradox.

“The end is never the end. The apocalyptic text announces and describes the end of the world, but then the text does not end, not the world represented in the text, and neither does the world itself. In nearly every apocalyptic presentation, something remains after the end… Something is left over, and that world after the end of the world, the post-apocalypse, is usually the true object of the apocalyptic writer’s concern.”

  The Jerusalem Temple has fallen and the world continues; so with the French Revolution, the Holocaust, Hiroshima, Vietnam war, etc. These events were seen as decisive breaks from the past, “fulcrums separating what comes before from what comes after”. Yet these apocalyptic ends are not ends of the world. “[T]he world, impossibly, continues, and the apocalyptic writer continues to write.”Such an interpretation of apocalypse serves two purposes. First, it engenders a sense of hope among the victims. If God’s concern is not about the end but its aftermath, hope no matter how modest glimmers at the horizon. I have observed this at Yolanda’s “Ground Zero”. In the morning after the storm, even as the dead were not yet buried, people raised the nation’s tattered flag in act of defiance against defeat. A barber whose shop has been raised to the ground by the waves got an old chair and started to do haircut for his neighbors. He said that even without houses, it is always a good feeling to look handsome. When the small fishing boats were all gone, the fishermen floated old refrigerators to navigate the waters again. A group of women started to plant vegetables in an empty lot and, weeks later, the green backyard became the source of nourishment for the community. On a tree in front of what is left of one little hut is a board which announces to those doing relief operation: “We need house and lot, car, swimming pool!” A little joke is a sign of hope and one’s sheer willingness to survive. Not everything is perfect yet. Days after the event, bodies were still not buried. Weeks after, people still run after relief goods. And in their silent stares, ask God why things happen this way. But their defiant hope can be heard in what one mother's reply: "If there is no God, who else is there?" Today, many still do not have houses a year after the event. But people are back on their feet again. Life continues "after the end". Unlike present bleak apocalyptic predictions in film and novels, the victim-survivors enact a different narrative. The hope of these people on the ground is a stinging critique to the dystopia and pessimism ecological “doomsters” preach – both in their religious and secular varieties. Second, the apocalyptic also serves as a comprehensive critique of any existing order. Biblical exegetes tell us that this is the purpose of John’s Book of Revelation: a critique and non-violent resistance to the dominant Roman civilization which the author assesses as oppressive, demonic and “beastly”. Apocalyptic discourse tells people that only a total overhaul of the system can bring about survival and wholeness. This brings me to the next point.

Apocalypse as “Interruption”

Johann-Baptist Metz’s theology is a reaction to Nietzsche’s central concept of “eternal recurrence”, i.e., events will occur again and again infinitely. The world is nothing but a timeless repetition of one and the same. For Metz, this view of endless recurrence and omnipresent time has tragic repercussions to human suffering because, with it, radical change is never possible. An example of "eternal recurrence" is found in evolutionary thinking where “the category of fulfillment is regarded as an evolutionary process and the kingdom of God is seen as a pure utopia that is achieved by means of human progress.” For Metz, such a closed scheme does not offer any way out for the victims of history.

“Catastrophes are reported on the radio,” Metz writes, “in between pieces of music. The music continues to play, like the audible passage of time that moves forward inexorably and can be held back by nothing. As Brecht has said: ‘When crime is committed, just as the rain falls, no one cries: Halt!’.”

Apocalypse as “interruption” thus becomes salvific and necessary. Only through the apocalyptic vision can the Messiah enter and interrupt history. Unlike the assured optimism of utopian-evolutionary thinking, apocalyptic consciousness does not possess a sense of inevitability. Unlike the over-confidence of the cornucopians for world development (Fukuyama's "end of history") or the arrogant anticipation of victory and self-sufficiency by the Christian right, apocalyptic spirituality does not fully know what is to come. The Messiah's coming can only be an absolute interruption, totally different from our preconceived expectations. On the ground, doubts and fears born out of tragic and painful experience is a constant companion. Several weeks after the typhoon, hundreds would still run to the hills when it rained hard or someone maliciously shouts “tsunami”. But beyond these fears is a deep fragile hope that “previous hegemonic narratives – of religious, political, scientific kind, which had held the world in grip with their monstrous prognoses of a ‘glorious end’ (but one which turned them into victims) will not rule them again. The parish I worked with had its church building all washed away except its altar wall. The day after the storm, the people collected its headless statues, placed them on the altar and started to pray amidst the debris. During those early morning Masses which we celebrated in these destroyed chapels, people were just there with their flashlights (since there was no electricity yet) and their umbrellas (since it was always raining and the roofs have been blown away). I could sense their fatigue, fears and insecurity. Some were silent; others were singing as they waited to keep the cold and fears away. But they did not leave. As they were standing there, their fragile hope became a stinging indictment of the all the world’s indifference and self-sufficiency, those in my own heart included.

Apocalypse as Solidarity and Compassion

Apocalyptic discourse is blamed for apathy and inaction. If the world will surely end in catastrophe and dystopia, can our insignificant steps prevent it? What is the space of human responsibility in apocalyptic spirituality? Metz writes:

“Our apocalyptical consciousness is not threatened with a paralyzing fear of catastrophe. It is, on the contrary, called upon to display a practical solidarity with the least of the brethren; that is clear from the apocalyptic chapters at the end of the gospel of St. Matthew.”

A Navy officer was assigned by his unit in another island of Mindanao. Before Haiyan struck, his children in Samar called him to come home and bring with him their favorite delicacy. Before long, he heard that the cataclysm happened. He hurried home and brought with him the food that his children requested. When he arrived the place, his house is gone and there was no one around. His neighbors told him that his wife is at the cemetery for the funeral of his children. He was devastated and, out of despair, wanted to throw the food that he brought for them. But he did not do so at the thought of hundreds of hungry children around who have in turn lost their parents. In one of those debriefing sessions, I asked a group of farmers: “What is next after Yolanda?” One old farmer stood up and said: “We want to go back to our farms.” On Christmas morning, it was raining hard after I finished my Mass. From afar, I was watching a group of farmers starting to plant rice under the rain. I told myself:

“There are no angels who come down from heaven singing Alleluia. But I guess Jesus is born here to today.”

Metz writes: “The Christian idea of imitation and the apocalyptic idea of the imminent expectation belong together. It is not possible to imitate Jesus radically, that is, at the level of the roots of life, if ‘the time is not shortened’. Jesus’ call: ‘Follow me!’ and the call of Christians: ‘Come, Lord Jesus!’ are inseparable.”

Daniel Franklin Pilario, C.M.
St Vincent SchoolofTheology - Adamson University
danielfranklinpilario@yahoo.com

The full article is found in D. F. Pilario. "Ecology and the Apocalypse." In Fragile World: Ecology and the Church,ed. William Cavanaugh. Oregon: Cascade Books, 2018, pp. 271-285.