Learning from Thomas Berry

Learning How Land Speaks is deeply influenced by the living cosmos panpsychism articulated by Freya Mathews¹ and this perspective has substantially informed our work with Rivers. But, leafing through old papers and files, I remembered the earlier influence on me of Thomas Berry, a Catholic priest and monk who taught that the world has a mystical as well as physical reality and is the primary manifestation of the divine and the primary sacred community.²

One thing both Freya and Thomas share in common is that their perspective starts from a view of the universe or cosmos as a whole. Thomas, influenced by Teilhard de Chardin, did not call himself a panpsychist; however, his work, in my view, resonates with living cosmos panpsychism.

This story of meeting Thomas is taken from my book Spindrift, A wilderness pilgrimage at sea,³

Thomas Berry c2000. Photo: Peter Reason

About ten years ago, I sat on the low wall outside a hotel in the Southern Appalachians waiting for Thomas Berry. Thomas was a Catholic priest and monk in the Passionist order who called himself a geologian or ‘Earth scholar’. I count him among my greatest intellectual and spiritual teachers, although I only met him personally this once. He died in 2009 aged 94. The previous evening I had flown down from New York and Thomas had met me at the airport.⁴ I had come to interview him and write an article about his new book, The Great Work.⁵ In this he emphasized that the task of our time, to which all humans are called in some way, is to restore the balance in human-Earth relations and heal the devastating impact of human activities on planetary ecosystems.

“Let’s go and have a beer,” he said as he greeted me. This was maybe the last thing I expected of him. I was thinking I had come to meet a Great Man, and here we were going off to a bar! We chatted for a while, and I was completely bowled over by his charm and generosity. He dropped me at my hotel and we arranged to meet next morning for breakfast.

From my seat on the wall in the autumn South Carolina sun, the trees bright with the red and gold of the fall, I watched him drive his rather battered silver Honda into the car park. At the time Thomas was in his mideighties. He was not a large man and his emphysema and difficulties with breathing made him seem physically fragile. Nevertheless, he had a strong presence, scholarly, saintly and radical in his views. He walked toward me with a broad smile of greeting over his lined and battered face.

We didn’t go in to breakfast straight away. He just came and sat down next to me on the wall and launched into a long explanation of his understanding of the nature of the universe. I panicked, for I did not have my audio recorder with me, but then relaxed and simply listened. I knew the story he was going to tell me, since I had read all his books, studying them again in preparation for this visit. But sitting on the wall together, listening to him explain this to me, was very special. I felt I was being initiated into an understanding that I could never have got from just reading. While he used words to explain what he meant, my experience was almost of a direct transmission of his perspective.

Thomas explained to me that it is a mistake to see the universe as a collection of objects. Rather, mind and matter are two aspects of a single reality. The universe as a whole, with its immense diversity, has both an inner, spiritual or subjective dimension – a being for itself – and an outer, physical dimension. There is a spiritual capacity in carbon just as carbon is implicit in our highest spiritual experience. The inner dimension provides the capacity for self-organization and self-transformation that drives the evolutionary process of the universe. This is expressed in its outer being through the matter and energy of which it is composed. These two dimensions are like two sides of the same coin, different but inseparable.

I had read Thomas’ assertion that ‘the universe is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects’ many times before. His view was that this must be the starting point for our understanding of all things, and the only place from which we can act if we are to contribute to what he calls the Great Work. But listening to him now, I was touched more deeply with the idea that the universe and the Earth should be understood as sacred communities.

Thomas felt strongly that all understanding begins with story, and that modern Western humans lack an adequate story of who we are, where we came from and what our purpose is. He went on to tell me how the understanding of the universe that arises from recent cosmological discoveries offers a new story of human origination, a story with the potential to give meaning to our lives. This is not the story of a static thing, but of a great evolutionary, self-organizing and self-transforming process of which everything is a part. As Thomas’ colleague, the cosmologist Brian Swimme, puts it, ‘you take hydrogen gas and you leave it alone and it turns into rosebushes, giraffes and humans.’⁶ It is a story in which great transitions occur that are irreversible: the original flaring forth in the ‘big bang’, the clustering of the first galaxies, the creation of heavy elements in the explosions of the first supernovae, the formation of the sun, the solar system, the Earth itself and the emergence of life. These are all moments of grace through which the universe articulates itself in more and more diverse and complex forms, and from which sentience in plants and animals and eventually human consciousness emerge.

This new story shows us that we humans, with our particular intelligent, emotional and imaginative capacities, reflect one of the deepest dimensions of the universe. It is a story that is both profoundly scientific, drawing on and emphasizing evolutionary cosmology; and at the same time profoundly spiritual, showing how our understanding will be distorted if we only see the world in its external, objective aspect. The universe, Thomas explained, is the only self-referential being: everything else originates in, refers back to and is part of it. The story of the universe is the story of which we are all a part and which every being tells in its own way.

We sat there on that low stone wall, surrounded by the tatter of a commercial hotel, with men and women hurrying in and out as they went about their business. I listened to him straining through his damaged lungs and vocal cords, urgently passing on to me this perspective that was so different from anything I had been brought up with, but which appealed directly to what I knew to be true.

Philosophically, this is a ‘panpsychic’ perspective, one that embraces the view that all matter has inner ‘psychic’, ‘subjective’ or ‘experiential’ qualities. While the panpsychic perspective contradicts many modernist assumptions about the nature of the world, it actually forms a strong thread through Western philosophy connecting Plato through the Renaissance to the present day. Yet it remains difficult to find appropriate words for this sense of the presence of the world. Words like ‘subjective’ or ‘psychic’ or ‘spiritual’, are contaminated by the dominant materialist perspective when applied to the physical world. One might borrow words from other traditions, and call it Tao, or Atman, or Great Spirit, but this may not offer any clarity and distort the meaning of these words in their original discourses. Or one might follow the philosopher Spinoza – who is often described as the originator of modern panpsychism – and simply call it God, seeing God as synonymous with Nature. But the word God carries with it such strange baggage that is likely to lead to yet another set of misunderstandings.⁷ I am inclined to follow my friend Stephan Harding and adopt the ancient term anima mundi, literally the ‘soul of the world’ that permeates the cosmos and animates all matter. Anima mundi is not associated with modern meanings of subjectivity, sentience or consciousness, and points to a mysterious and indefinable aliveness permeating everything.

At the beginning of Spindrift, I quoted one of my favourite passages from Thomas Berry, which in many ways reflects the spirit of our Living Waters inquiries and of Learning How Land Speaks:

…if we do not hear the voices of the trees, the birds, the animals, the fish, the mountains and the rivers, then we are in trouble… That, I think, is what has happened to the human community in our times. We are talking to ourselves. We are not talking to the river, we are not listening to the river. We have broken the great conversation. By breaking the conversation we have shattered the universe. All these things that are happening now are consequences of this ‘autism’.⁸

1. Freya’s contributions to Learning How Land Speaks include The Deep Law of the Living Cosmos, Ontopoetics Part 1: The meaning of ‘ontopoetics’; Ontopoetics Part II: Contemporary Examples.

2. The Thomas Berry Foundation

3. Reason, P. (2014). Spindrift: A wilderness pilgrimage at sea. Jessica Kingsley Publishers (originally published in Bristol by Vala Publishing Cooperative). Spindrift is an account of a voyage from the south coast of England to the Blasket Islands off the west coast of Ireland. My purpose was to explore how we might again experience ourselves as participants in a wider, more-than-human world.

4. This was a while ago. Since then I have chosen not to fly because of the extreme impact air travel has on carbon levels in the atmosphere

5. Earth Community: Interview with Thomas Berry. Resurgence, 204, 10-14.

6. From an interview in 2001 republished in Enlightenment Magazine

7. For a clarification of Spinoza on God and Religion see Carlisle, C. (2021). Spinoza’s Religion: A new reading of the Ethics. Princeton University Press. 

8. Berry, T., & Clarke, T. (1991). Befriending the Earth: A theology of reconciliation between humans and the earth. Twenty-Third Publication, p. 20.