Customer Reviews

Man and the Environment: A Study of St. Symeon the New Theologian

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I read the review below after going through the book and had trouble connecting findings of Augustinian Original Sin with the book I'd read, and wondered is the author an anti-Western Orthodox who wants Orthodox truth or just an anti-Western person from the West who wants to criticize the West?

The book talks about ascetical (spiritually disciplined) interactions with the world and states that sin can poison our relations to the material world. I think this is what was misinterpreted as Augustine's heavy influence--as if Augustine were the only Church Father to take sin seriously--but that's a misinterpretation of the text (and possibly Augustine). Keselopoulos argues that our spiritual state matters and affects our treatment of a world which is created good.

If you're looking for West-bashing and an Orthodox rubber stamp on (Western) environmentalism, this isn't the book for you. If you want a sense of how an Orthodox might understand and construct a view of material creation and our right relationship to the world, this is valuable and its "failure" to sugar-coat the reality of "sin" (among other things, sin includes deifying and maltreating the material creation--Keselopoulos works hard to help us consider that these might be two sides of the same coin), this is an excellent introduction, and handles several difficult concepts with aplomb.

Speaking as an Orthodox theology student, Orthodoxy can be hard to understand, and this book helps understand Orthodoxy as viewed in relation to the environment, which has been important to Orthodoxy long before the West sensed it needed to make a movement called "environmentalism." Original sin is not an Orthodox doctrine, but sin is, and if you try to short-circuit the idea that our sin matters for the environment and write a theology of the environment without the dirty word "sin", you're selling yourself short. This book is an opportunity not to sell yourself short.

Ostensibly about the works of St. Symeon the New Theologian in relation to our environment and how the Orthodox Church views the world and man.

The book starts off with a 40 page summation to Orthodox and Trinitarian theology.. The initial view given of the world and man is a essentially a positive one.

The book then proceeds through various topics such as: The World and Man, Misuse of the World , Right use of the World and lastly The Transfiguration of the World in Christ.

However I noticed the Orthodox view of the world and man, which was so positive in the beginning was slowly transformed in the later chapters into the same Augustinian pessimism that permeates western Christianity, replete with Original Sin though the author includes it without directly mentioning it. Despite being about the works of St. Symeon, I felt at times I was reading excerpts from Augustine's Confessions for all intents and purpose.

The picture which emerged from my reading, especially when I got to the last chapter was that the World is a corrupt, demon infested place because of Adam and his fall. And that the only good place in the world was the Church and everything outside of it was bad. With the role of the Church to redeem God's corrupt creation and all the creatures contained therein from their innate state of sin. All in all the author paints a legalistic, baneful and manichean view of man and creation. Its all spelled out in the last chapter.

By the end of the book I felt as if I read two different books. One that extolled splendor and goodness of Creation and the other one which condemned Creation and man as corrupt and in a state of sin.

Needless to say this book is hardly one that can be used by Christians to refute Lynn White's claim that Christianity is the cause of ecological destruction of the Earth. In fact the book inadvertently supports White's claim.