Why Creation Matters: The Trinitarian Case for Environmental Stewardship

I was delighted to recently learn that Pope Leo had just authorized the publication of a substantial new study by the International Theological Commission (ITC) on a subject close to my own heart: Caring for Our Common Home: A Responsible and Fraternal Response to the Trinitarian God. While ITC texts don’t themselves constitute acts of the Church’s magisterium, I came away convinced that this one deserves serious attention. And I’m not saying this just because the Vatican’s vision closely parallels themes I develop in a book of my own that, by a lovely coincidence, was released at virtually the same time.

But, given the seemingly constant drama surrounding ecclesial documents these days, I can understand if some readers reasonably ask what use there is in paying attention to yet another Vatican document. In particular, you may wonder what one on ecology has to add. After all, several popes in a row have spoken extensively about our Christian responsibility toward creation.

Fair enough. But for a theological giant like Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI, the recovery of creation was anything but optional. Indeed, he regarded its retrieval as so urgent that he declared: “The renewal of our world can be accomplished only if the teaching on creation is developed anew”—an undertaking he regarded as “one of the most pressing tasks of theology today.”

So, I’d say the ITC is on solid ground here. More interesting, though, is how the commission goes about the task. In lieu of generic platitudes about caring for the planet, the commission takes up a more fundamental task: articulating the theological foundations for a distinctively Christian response to the real and serious ecological problems of our time. And the commission stays within that theological lane, without proposing technical solutions to these challenges. Instead, in its own words, the “fundamental goal” of the text is to elucidate “the theological foundation of the care of our common home” (§6).

Why Creation Matters for Faith

My purpose here is to analyze rather than summarize this document, but you may find a little background helpful before we turn to that. Allow me, then, to begin by noting that its three chapters treat, respectively, (1) creation as the work of the Triune God, (2) the place of the human person within creation, and (3) our Christian vocation to care for it. And then it’s also worth knowing just how much ground the document covers along the way. Its themes range from the sacramental character and interconnectedness of creation to man’s distinctive dignity and place within it, sin against creation as an offense against the Creator, the Eucharist as an “ecological school,” interreligious collaboration in caring for the planet and the hope of a new creation.

As theological starting points go, it’s hard to do better than the ITC does here, because it begins with the mystery of the Holy Trinity. From there, the commission advances its central claim: “All creation bears the imprint of the Trinity, through which God makes himself present in his work. Therefore, the relationship with creation always implies a relationship with the Creator” (§42).

That “therefore” is crucial. Creation is never religiously neutral terrain, because how we receive and treat it bears upon how we relate to the God whose imprint it carries. Far from being the preserve of professional environmentalists, the ecological question thus belongs squarely within the life of Christian discipleship. As the ITC goes on to say, in our interaction with the natural world “we are practicing a dimension inherent to faith.” Accordingly, the commission pushes back against the oft-heard claim that care for creation is somehow too peripheral to warrant our attention as Catholics: “For this reason, it is not consistent with the logic of faith to belittle or exclude the ecological question, branding it as something foreign to the Christian faith itself” (§42).

Nor is this engagement important only for our individual spiritual lives. Indeed, the ITC goes considerably further, laying down the gauntlet with its claim that “in the formation of a culture of Christian inspiration, the main emphasis should be placed on the discovery of the Trinitarian imprint in creation.”

That’s an extraordinarily ambitious claim. The logic, as I see it, is this: learning to see creation through a Trinitarian lens can help reshape an entire culture. And why? I take the point to be that a world perceived as gift and communion calls forth a way of life shaped by those same realities. This divine signature, the commission argues, reveals the cosmos as a “web of relationships,” which in turn furnishes the theological basis for a “spirituality of global solidarity which flows from the mystery of the Trinity” (§33).

But to understand why the ITC places so much weight on this Trinitarian imprint, we need to look more closely at what it means to say that creation bears the signature of its Creator.

The Trinitarian Imprint: Creation as Book and Sacrament

On this subject, it’s worth bearing in mind that the notion of creation bearing a divine “signature” is hardly an innovation of the ITC. In truth, the commission is retrieving an ancient Christian tradition that envisions the natural world as God’s “first book.” Among the figures it invokes to advance its point here is St. Hildegard of Bingen, a Doctor of the Church who described creation as a “second Scripture” (§19). Hildegard, for her part, reverses the ordering more commonly associated with the two-books tradition, in which creation is God’s first book and Scripture the second. I prefer that ordering, but I’m glad to see the ITC retrieve Hildegard’s formulation all the same.

While the ITC mentions other ancient representatives of this tradition in this connection, it draws especially upon St. Bonaventure, for whom all creatures in the book of creation reflect their Creator as “shadows” or “vestiges.” (§22). More specifically, the commission is keen to reference Bonaventure’s powerful insight that, in Pope Francis’s words, “every creature bears within itself a properly Trinitarian structure” (Laudato Si’, §239). In this respect, the ITC is also retrieving Vatican II’s teaching that God has given mankind “a perennial testimony of himself in created things” (Dei Verbum, §3). What’s more, the document stresses that creation’s traces are meant to achieve something in us. As Augustine put it, knowing the Creator through his works should enable us to “raise ourselves to the Trinity.” (§18)

Bonaventure, however, sees a problem with this otherwise beautiful picture: we’ve become poor readers of the book of nature. For Bonaventure, sin has obscured the scala, the “ladder” by which creatures were meant to lead us toward their Creator. The divine signs are still out there in creation, but fallen man has become “deaf” to their message. This, Bonaventure explains, is why the Lord gave us a second book, Holy Scripture, by means of which Christ restores the broken ladder and enables us once again to recognize his creatures as signs and gifts. And the Seraphic Doctor has a wonderfully evocative name for this renewed conjunction of natural knowledge and the light of grace in the soul: the liber vitae, the “book of life.” (§§26–28)

This restored ability to recognize creatures as signs is crucial to understanding what the ITC means by creation’s Trinitarian imprint. When we pause in contemplation to appreciate the Lord’s handiwork in creation, we aren’t imposing theological meaning upon an otherwise mute or meaningless cosmos. As the commission emphasizes, the human person “neither invents nor imagines” the Trinitarian imprint of creatures. It’s really present in them, whether or not our clouded vision manages to perceive it (§17).

From here, the document takes an important next step by echoing John Paul II’s teaching on the “sacramentality” of creation. At the same time, I was impressed that the ITC managed to give this concept more clarification than the great saint ever did. The term is being used analogically, the commission explains, as it takes pains to avoid giving the impression that the natural world should be thought of as an eighth sacrament (§35).

To illuminate John Paul’s turn of phrase, the commission points out that this sort of analogical language is well established in the Christian tradition. For instance, it recalls that Augustine himself used sacramentum in a broader sense when speaking of the sacraments of the Old Law (And, while the commission doesn’t do this, I might add that Vatican II also deploys the term analogically when it speaks of the Church herself as a “sacrament of salvation”). At any rate, the basic point advanced by the commission is the same that John Paul II was striving to make: by its very being, it refers beyond itself to the Triune God. In this way, the ITC goes on to describe the world as a “vast sacramental system,” seeing as every creature bears within itself a reflection of its Creator “engraved in the radical depths of its being.” (§35)

Having said that, this sacramental character of creation can be fully understood only in relation to the incarnate revelation of the Triune life in time, which is to say, through the person of Jesus Christ. With this in mind, the ITC stresses that all creatures find their ultimate meaning and fulfillment in the incarnate Word. In the commission’s own words, Christ’s Incarnation “reveals and brings to completion the sacramental character of all creation,” directing the cosmos toward its definitive fulfillment in him (§34).

A Relational Creation and a Relational Human Person

This vision of creation centered on the Trinity and Christ leads naturally to another of the document’s central themes: the fundamentally relational character of reality itself. As the ITC puts it, contemplation of God’s traces in creation reveals the world as a “web” (intreccio) or “network” (rete) of relationships— a vision of creation that Pope Francis regarded as a “fundamental guiding principle” of integral ecology (§33).

And here I think the ITC manages to reveal the deeper theological logic behind Francis’s recurring refrain in Laudato Si’ that “everything is connected.” In other words, if creation bears the imprint of the Triune God, then the relational architecture of the natural world so forcefully emphasized by Francis now emerges as theologically far more significant. As the ITC sees it, the very fact that relationality belongs to the cosmos at its core gives it a particularly powerful analogical resemblance to its Triune Creator.

Here, the commission frames the point in terms of a “relational ontology” of the Trinity. As we know from the classical Trinitarian theology of figures such as Augustine and Aquinas, the divine persons are themselves “subsistent relations,” each constituted precisely by his eternal relation to the others within the perfect communion of divine love—a communion of mutual indwelling traditionally expressed by the term perichoresis (§37). The ITC accordingly characterizes Trinitarian ontology as an “ontology of mutual gift”—indeed, an “ontology of love” whose dynamism of self-giving is manifested supremely in the Son’s gift of himself upon the cross (§§37–38).

It’s at this point that the commission makes what I found to be one of its most creative and insightful moves, bringing this relational ontology into conversation with contemporary science. Echoing both an earlier ITC document and Pope Benedict XVI, it takes the universe’s evolutionary character as “indisputable” and argues that a “Trinitarian ontology” is uniquely capable of making sense of the evolutionary character of the natural world.

Of course, this isn’t to say the doctrine of the Trinity can be derived from evolutionary science. The commission’s more modest yet interesting point is that the relational character disclosed by the sciences is remarkably consonant with a creation proceeding from the Triune God. For Catholics familiar with the Church’s robust teaching on the harmony of faith and reason—especially its longstanding affirmation of the compatibility of faith and evolutionary theory—this conclusion should hardly come as a surprise. Still, it was a joy to see the Vatican develop this particular connection so insightfully.

And then there’s this. The ITC draws attention to how the same relational ontology that illuminates the cosmos also illuminates the human person within it. Thus, against any picture of the individual as a self-contained “monad,” the commission argues that relationship belongs to the very structure of human existence (§41). Created in the image of the Trinitarian God, the ITC notes, every person is “constitutively made for relationship” and called to communion with God, with other human beings, and with the broader created order (§64). This strikes me as exactly right: all three of these “constitutive relationships” must flourish if the human person is to become fully who he was created to be (§75).

Happily, and in contrast to what one often encounters in contemporary environmental thought, this relational anthropology doesn’t reduce the human person to merely one node among countless others in creation’s web. It also recognizes that humans have a distinctive role to play within it. Drawing again on Hildegard, the ITC here describes the human person as the summa creaturarum, the “sum of creatures,” and even as the “hermeneutical key to creation.” Precisely because man can discern the deeper meaning inscribed in creation, he has a distinctive vocation which Hildegard describes as revealing “the Holy Trinity in all things” (§20).

Putting Man in His Proper Place

But what does it mean, concretely, for the human person to occupy such a distinctive place within creation? Here we arrive at what I consider one of the document’s most helpful contributions: its attempt to navigate the virtuous mean between two opposed anthropological visions on offer in society today. On the one side lies what the ITC calls “predatory anthropocentrism,” where we treat the rest of creation as little more than raw material available for human exploitation (§98). On the other side, we encounter radical biocentrism and ecocentrism (§100) that reduce the human person to simply one organism among others within the larger community of creation. As Ratzinger once described it in an extraordinary homily, this vision holds that man is essentially a parasite in creation whose job should be to get out of the way of other creatures.

Against both extremes, the commission appeals to Pope Francis’s helpful expression “situated anthropocentrism” (§102). Christianity’s answer to destructive anthropocentrism, in other words, lies in recovering man’s proper place within creation. The phrase holds together two truths that are easily pulled apart: man possesses a distinctive dignity, yet he remains situated within a web of relationships upon which his flourishing depends. In this respect, “situated anthropocentrism” gives ecological expression to what Pope Leo XIV recently called an “integral anthropological vision” in which the human person is understood in relation to God, neighbor, and the rest of creation.

Take, then, the first half of “situated anthropocentrism.” Christianity really is anthropocentric in an important sense. The human person is no mere parasite upon the natural world, nor simply another creature among creatures. As beings created in God’s image, we enjoy the distinctive dignity of being, as the ITC puts it, God’s “direct interlocutor and intentional collaborator” (§102). This distinctive role means that we can and indeed must interact with the natural world, drawing gratefully upon its bounty for food, clothing, shelter, and the other necessities. As the commission rather practically observes, “Human beings, as living beings that are part of the food chain, must inevitably intervene in nature and benefit from it in order to live.” (§100)

But the second half of the formulation matters just as much: our anthropocentrism must remain “situated.” As a number of our recent popes have emphasized, to be human is to be a creature among creatures, embedded within an order we didn’t make and can’t exist apart from. And the Church is clear that our distinctive dignity doesn’t somehow remove us from the created order or license its despotic use. As the commission nicely puts it, man can “neither understand [himself] nor survive without other creatures,” which remain our “companions on the journey.” (§102)

Christianity’s answer to destructive anthropocentrism, then, isn’t to demote the human person but to situate him properly within the created order. And that distinctive place carries with it a distinctive responsibility. In the words of the ITC, man is called to serve as the steward or administrator of the created order. While they aren’t my favorite terms in this context, servitore and amministratore capture something important: the steward or administrator isn’t the owner. He receives something belonging to another and is accountable for how he treats it. Hence the document’s reference to John Paul II’s insistence that man should act upon nature “not as an irresponsible exploiter, but as a wise and responsible steward” (§104).

At the same time, I was grateful to see the commission recognize the limits of this language. The term “administrator” risks understating the creative responsibility entrusted to the human person, whereas our vocation is more dynamic than that of a mere managed: namely to cultivate creation so that it can flourish according to God’s design (§104). And here the ITC’s vision of entrusted responsibility opens onto a deeper biblical category that remains largely implicit in the document: covenant. As Benedict XVI and Francis often emphasized, Scripture teaches us that man’s stewardship of creation is ultimately a covenantal affair, placing those who bear the divine image within a “covenant between human beings and the environment.’” We see the foundations of this in Genesis, for instance, where God’s covenant with Noah explicitly embraces “every living creature” alongside humanity (Gen. 9:9–10).

I could go on and on about the biblical foundations of the Church’s teaching on man’s covenant with creation, but let me add instead that the ITC rightly acknowledges, if only briefly, how the Christian language of man’s priestly vocation toward creation captures something that “stewardship” by itself can miss. The human person is capable not only of caring for creation but of receiving it as a divine gift, giving thanks for it, and gathering creation into an offering of praise to its Creator (§106). And, once again, Bonaventure makes the point beautifully: God created all things to proclaim his glory by their very act of existing, but he insists that its revelatory character remains incomplete without someone capable of understanding and appreciating it (§28).

And that brings us back to why this document matters. The ITC’s most important contribution isn’t another exhortation to care for the environment. It’s to remind us why creation matters in the first place: because the world comes from the Triune God, bears his imprint, and is entrusted to creatures uniquely capable of recognizing it as gift and returning it to him in praise. That strikes me as precisely the kind of theology of creation Ratzinger believed needed to be developed anew, and one that just might contribute to the renewal of our world.