Curses and Creation

[jaybreak]

Ed wrote a post some time ago, Antidote to Fear 05, on the Biblical view of curses and addressing them via your prayer life. I won't reprint the post here, but it would be good to review it before continuing on this post any further.

Much has been said about the subject of curses in the last few hundred years of fiction. Modern literature borrows heavily from the paganized Western idea of curses, which finds their source in the folklore and legends of that area and period–consider Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, all the way up through Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm; Poe, Kafka, Lovecraft; Stephen King and the current overload of modern retellings of the classics.

While curses can make for an effective storytelling mechanic (Lovecraft is one of my favorite writers), the Western view of curses are nearly entirely wrong. As in the various manifestations of materialism, it presumes we have utter control of creation–in the case of curses, control over what happens to peoples bodies, or the weather, or the ground, etc.–so long as people have some kind of key: the right formulation of words or prayers, the sufficient amount of willpower, or a vaguely mystical "gift" of supernatural control.

I reiterate here a core teaching of Radix Fidem of creation being a person unto herself*. This view fails to appreciate the "personhood" of Creation, not as made in the image of God as humans are, but the sensual result of an act of organism-making by God's hand. Creation is under no obligation to do our bidding, as though it were a form of input-output machinery. As a sign of things further down the road of God's plan, God grants us some control over Creation as He sees fit for us to implement our marching orders. There's no one way we're given access to Creation; it's personal our particular mission, and bound tightly to that. With this assistance from Creation can issue forth both curses and blessings as God directs it.

“The main point of Christianity was this: that Nature is not our mother: Nature is our sister. We can be proud of her beauty, since we have the same father; but she has no authority over us; we have to admire, but not to imitate. This gives to the typically Christian pleasure in this earth a strange touch of lightness that is almost frivolity. Nature was a solemn mother to the worshipers of Isis and Cybele. Nature was a solemn mother to Wordsworth or to Emerson. But Nature is not solemn to Francis of Assisi or to George Herbert. To St. Francis, Nature is a sister, and even a younger sister: a little, dancing sister, to be laughed at as well as loved.” 

-G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

* Creation has no sexual identity, but there's no harm in designating her as such in most contexts. I'd prefer to when we consider Jesus' former bodily presence on earth. Creation is feminine in the sense that she "receives" the incarnated Son as a person within her.

[Ed Hurst]

Excellent chasing out of implications. Our world was originally under our management, so depicting it as a younger sister is quite consistent with Scripture.

[jaybreak]

Excellent chasing out of implications. Our world was originally under our management, so depicting it as a younger sister is quite consistent with Scripture.

It's regrettable that the political left in terms of the environment has a better grasp of the idea of being a manager of creation than the right does, though the left go about it in a completely ass-backwards way. Governments are in no way effective managers in this regard. There are some conservation groups that aren't so politically affiliated that may do a decent job if the right people are involved. Those groups at least have the necessary basis for collectively looking after parts of Creation.

Side note: is it weird to capitalize Creation, to you? I did it automatically in the original post, for some reason.

[Ed Hurst]

Context: If it's referred to as a person, it's a title, a proper noun. When using "creation" as a verb, it's lower case.