Greening the Gods: Ecology and Theology in the Ancient World

A seismic shift in thinking about the environment from the 1960s onwards can blind us to the fact that inhabitants of the ancient world (c. 800 BCE - 400 CE) were also acutely aware that they existed as part of an ecological system. Yet for these thinkers it was not rapidly melting icecaps which made examining their relationship with the environment so urgent, but the theological questions it raised. This conference will embrace pagan, Jewish and Christian thinking about the intersection of theology and ecology, whether expressed in sources we might now label philosophy, scripture, natural history, science, liturgy or folklore. How did these thinkers understand their natural environment to stand in relation to the divine? And how did this understanding condition human interaction with the natural world? By bringing together biblical scholars, classicists, philosophers and theologians the first aim of this conference is to paint a cohesive and multi-disciplinary picture of the theological sophistication of ancient thinking about nature.

At the same time, the conference will not lose sight of our current ecological crisis. What impact, if any, should ancient thinking about the environment have on our own ecological thinking? While individual advances have been made in theorising how ancient thinking might inform modern responses to ecological issues, there is still vital need for cross-disciplinary discussion of the impact of such thinking on relatively new disciplines such as environmental philosophy and eco-theology, and on contemporary calls to environmental action. As such this conference aims, in a mutually reinforcing process, to shape both our knowledge of the ancient world and the work of those who are writing the theology, philosophy and ethics of the twenty-first century.

The delegate fee is £40, or £25 for students and the unwaged. Please use the following link to register: https://www.faraday.st-edmunds.cam.ac.uk/Conference_apply.php?CourseID=60.

Please find the programme below:

Tuesday 18th March

09.00-09.30     Registration

09:30-11.00     Plenary           

Michael Northcott (Edinburgh): Learning from Ancient Mesopotamia about Climate Change Mitigation

Helen Van Noorden (Cambridge): The Sibylline Oracles and Apocalyptic Discourse

11.00-11.30     Coffee

11.30-13.00     Panel A

Jula Wildberger (American University of Paris): Beauty and Sociability in Stoic Accounts of Providence and Human Nature: A Foundation for an Environmental Ethic as Love of the Other?

Georgia Tsouni (Bern): The argument of oikeiotes (relatedness): Theophrastus against the Stoics in Porphyry

Christoph Jedan (Groningen): Stoic Eco-Theology? A Cautionary Tale

13.00-14.00     Lunch

14.00-15.30     Plenary

Emmanuela Bakola (KCL): Earth as oikos and oikos as Earth: Interiority and the Eco-logical Discourse in Aeschylus' Oresteia

Richard Seaford (Exeter): Limiting the Unlimited in Ancient Greek Thought and Practice

15.30-16.00     Coffee

16.00-17.15     Research Presentations

Tanhum Yoreh (York, Canada): Creating Boundaries, Creating Ethics: The Shaping of Jewish Environmental Attitudes

Annette Mosher (VU University Amsterdam): Genesis 8 and 9: For the Sake of the Earth

Matt Humphrey (A Rocha, Canada): At the edge of Civilization: a Primitivist reading of the Hebrew Bible as a resource for the food movements of tomorrow

Kristel Clayville (Chicago): The Ecological Imagination: Reading the Bible through Environmental Ethics

Johannes Kleiner (Emory): Cult and Intact Ecosystems: Nature's Grip on Israel's Relationship with God

17.30-18.30     Keynote Address

Melissa Lane (Princeton): Sustainable Citizenship

19.15               Drinks Reception and Conference Dinner at Fitzwilliam College

Wednesday 19th March

09.00-10.30     Panel B

Tua Korhonen (Helsinki): Joys of virtuous (and ecological?) living: Plato's Laws

David Sedley (Cambridge): Self-Sufficiency as a Divine Attribute in Greek Philosophy

Lucio Florio (Buenos Aires): Ecological perspectives of the idea of God as communion according to the primitive Christian Theology

10.30-11.00     Coffee

11.00-12.30     Plenary

Robin Attfield (Cardiff): The Treatment and Deployment of Ancient Thought by Environmental Philosophers

Edward Adams (KCL): Platonic worldviews and the cosmos

12.30-13.30     Lunch

13.30-14.30     Research Presentations

Rebecca Taylor (Warwick): The emergence of man from the natural environment: theories concerning the body and soul and their relation to the natural world in the fifth and fourth centuries BC

Clara Bosak-Schroeder (Michigan): Natura Divina and Classical Anthropocentrism

Aikaterini-Iliana Rassia (KCL): Greek leges sacrae concerning sacred groves of the gods

Barbara del Giovane (Florence): In fundum telluris intimae mersit: Seneca and the effects of mining. An exegesis.

14.30-15.00     Coffee

15.00-16.30     Panel C

Hilary Marlow (Cambridge): “Why is the Land Ruined?” Social, Political and Religious Disjuncture in the Hebrew Bible

Holmes Rolston, III (Colorado): Loving Nature: Christian Environmental Ethics

Rebecca Watson (Cambridge): Creatures in Creation: Human Perceptions of the Sea in the Hebrew Bible as Conducive to Environmental Health