The first time I visited Thomas Berry I was hopelessly late. The reason was a massive traffic jam on the Henry Hudson Parkway going north from Manhattan. As a naive Australian, inexperienced in the ways of New York traffic, I blithely thought that I would drive straight to my appointment with no impediments.
But I had forgotten something that Berry has often argued. We are in the dying phase of industrial society, and many roads — like the Henry Hudson — are falling apart. Traffic was banked up for miles and I was close to apoplectic by the time I reached Berry's Riverside Center. He was very forgiving.
Thomas Berry died on 1 June aged 94. He was Catholicism's most significant thinker in ecological theology, the Teilhard de Chardin of our time. Berry's thought didn't span mere centuries, but millennia and aeons.
A cultural historian and anthropologist of vast erudition and vision, he was a polymath in the truest sense. Much of his early writing is to be found in the periodical, Cross Currents. His first major work on ecology was The Dream of the Earth (1988), followed by The Universe Story (1992). In 1999 he published his most comprehensive book, The Great Work.
He was born into a Catholic family of 13 in 1914 in Greensboro, North Carolina. He said that the great determining element of his early life was his experience of the natural world. He joined the Passionist order at 20.
As a student he read the Chinese, Hindu and Buddhist classics. Much later he learned to read classical Chinese and Sanskrit. He was ordained a priest in 1942. He never did much ministerial work in the conventional sense. He went to China as a missionary in 1947, but had to leave with the advent of the Communist regime.
Acquainted with the thought of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin since his student days, Berry realised that a Christian need not be alienated from the natural world. By the 1970s his study and reading had given him an extraordinary historical and cultural context for understanding what was happening to the world.
'I started off as a student of cultural history. I am primarily an historian. What I have to say are the probings of an historian into human affairs in a somewhat comprehensive context ... The more I gave to the study of the human venture, the more clearly I saw the need to go back to the dynamics of life itself. I was progressively led back to the study of the earth community, including its geological and biological as well as its human components. I call myself a geologian.'
Religion, he argued, was meant to provide an interpretative pattern, a way of making sense of ourselves and the cosmos. But it has failed. 'The greatest failure of Christianity in the total course of its history is its inability to deal with the devastation of the planet.' Christians have sensitivity to suicide, homicide and genocide, 'but we commit biocide (the killing of the life systems of the planet) and geocide (the killing of the planet itself) and we have no morality to deal with it'.
'Religion', he concludes, 'is absorbed with the pathos of the human.'
Our theological view of God is incomplete if we do not take seriously the fact that it was God who made the world and is therefore profoundly related to it. 'If we lose the splendour of the natural world, we lose our true sense of the divine.' The only solution is to shift Christian faith out of its sin-redemption myopia into a whole new ecological context.
He considers that science has also failed in helping us interpret the significance and meaning of the natural world.
'The supreme irony is that just at this moment when such expansive horizons of past, present and future have opened up, humankind is suddenly precipitated into an inner anxiety and even into a foreboding about themselves and the meaning of it all. Unable to bear such awesome meaning, men reject themselves as part of the world around them, the past as well as the future ... We are beset by a sense of confusion and alienation ... Contemporary men have no spiritual vision adequate for these new magnitudes of existence ... To create such a skill, to teach such a discipline, are the primary tasks of contemporary spirituality.'
Eventually Berry returned to rural North Carolina. It was there that he died last week, one of the most significant Catholic thinkers of the 20th century.
Paul Collins is a former head of religious broadcasting at ABC Radio.