On a hill near my home in Northern Virginia lie the remnants of the winter campgrounds of the Native American tribe known as the Doegs. It is easy to see why they chose the site. Large hills all around funnel water into a stream and floodplain there, making it a natural gathering place for wildlife. Deer still come quite often to drink; they are by now so used to the human beings who walk the paths through the woods that does and fawns are not particularly fearful until you get very near. Waterfowl and other game were also once plentiful. Unfortunately, they no longer exist there. Insects are a bother, as they must have been for the Indians. The campground is on top of one of the lower hills overlooking the water, probably for the fresher air as well as for an unhindered view of approaching enemies. Sometimes in the evening, when the sun is slipping through the trees and there are no sounds of civilization, it is not difficult to imagine—perhaps accurately, perhaps not—a kind of peacefulness and simplicity that once may have made up human life in these hills and valleys.

We once had a single-lane wooden bridge across the stream. But because of the traffic that chokes Washington, D.C., and its suburbs, it was replaced a few years ago by a modern multilane, multimillion-dollar road. The old wooden structure got us over the water slowly but surely. The new concrete road is much faster, but it floods over and has to be closed whenever there is heavy rain. Whether the engineers deliberately planned it that way for some purpose, practical or environmental, I cannot say. The only thing certain is that even in the small corner of the world that I know in the most immediate sense, man and nature are still torn between two modes of coexistence. One seems to unite us into something larger than ourselves; the other seems to set us in greater or lesser opposition.

When I walk in the woods, especially with my younger daughter, I sense a reconnection with an origin, a living tie to a world of varied textures and modes of being, more varied in some ways than the houses with computers and cable television that dot the hillsides. Nature in these moments is an "antidote for civilization," as an upscale travel club bills its Caribbean vacations. And that is part of the problem. For lurking within the quite proper sense of ease and sublimity many of us feel in woodlands—the feeling that gave rise to Longfellow's forest primeval and Tolkien's Middle Earth—is the hope that we can escape the bewildering complexity of the human. That is a fantasy only certain people prosperous to the point of having for gotten about the human struggle with nature can allow themselves. As Santayana observed at the beginning of this century, "Nothing is farther from the common people than the corrupt desire to be primitive."

For primitivism, even in small bites, also reminds us of other human longings and fears. Sometimes when I am walking near nightfall in the woods and the bats take over from the birds in keeping the insect population down, a sense of the more threatening and inhuman side of nature comes over me. Then the woods seem not so much an origin enriched with literary associations as a trackless confusion, more like Dante's disorienting dark wood than an uplifting fabric of fellow creatures. At such moments, it is easy to see how the consciousness of another world beyond nature may have grown with the development of language and the creation of safe human settlements. But it is difficult to believe, as some have theorized, that this rise of human culture departs from our better instincts. Built into some of the deepest recesses of the human psyche are instincts about the dangerousness of the world. Few human beings sleep with arms or hands spread out and exposed—they might easily be vulnerable to attacks. Similarly, it appears that the development of human sight was one of the physiological advantages we achieved over animals that sense more by hearing and smell, hence our preference for open spaces where we can see potential threats coming rather than dark jungles where we may be easily outmatched by wild beasts.

Human beings have an instinctive fear of the dark. Ghosts may be just one manifestation of the archaic, unconscious dimensions of the psyche that make us concerned about what lurks where we cannot see. The dark hides from our keenest sense organ the vital information and advantage we need, given our relative physical weakness compared with predators. The image of a tribe around a campfire is a soothing one. Fire and light help ward off the beasts that we may more easily contend with during the day. A camp, however, is reassuring not only because it shows human warmth and community, but because it marks out a human space different from unrelieved natural challenges.

When Jesus asks the first time in Matthew 11 what people went out into the wilderness to see, he answers his own question with another: "A reed swayed by the wind?" What are we to make of this? Is Jesus, the central figure of Christianity, displaying a characteristically Western blindness about the value of nonhuman nature, in this case with a slighting reference to what we think are environmentally valuable wetlands? Or what shall we say about his next answer to the same question: Did you go out to see "someone dressed in fine clothing? Those who wear fine clothing are in royal palaces." Perhaps Jesus is saying here that the comforts produced by human artifice are hollow, a distraction usually connected with unjust social and political hierarchies.

As if these apparent contradictions were not enough, Jesus tells his listeners what they really went out to the wilderness to see: a prophet, "yes, I tell you, and more than a prophet." John the Baptist, we are instructed, is the greatest of all men born of woman, but even "the least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he." John was Elijah, making the way straight for the one who was to come. But the generation that he and Jesus found living in their day neither danced when the two of them played a happy tune nor mourned when they played the funeral dirge. That is, the asceticism of John was unpalatable to them, as were the easier ways of eating and drinking that Jesus' disciples practiced. Why? Difficult as these passages are to interpret, we might say that the sin common to those who opposed asceticism and those who opposed abundance is that, at all costs, they were determined not to hear the good news, not to repent or to change their lives.

It would be a fanciful reading of these biblical passages (eisegesis, as the Bible scholars call it) to try to enlist them in the environmental debate. But it may not be so unrealistic to see here at least some biblical wisdom that might inform our thinking. We know from many biblical verses, if not from our own personal experience, that we have to be wary about attachments to fine garments, wealth, power, and influence. All of them pass, either because of changes during our lives or because we die. To put our hearts' treasure there is foolish. We also know from the Bible, and now increasingly from science, that the earth too is passing away, that the seas and landmasses, the plains and what the Bible sometimes calls the "everlasting hills," are not everlasting. They, too, will pass, if not in our lifetimes then sooner or later, through various forces, natural and manmade.

Neither of these truths is particularly pleasant to contemplate, hence the resistance of some Israelites to John and Jesus. Whether we are ascetics or more easygoing in the robust Hebrew fashion, either we find our ultimate safety and salvation in faith in God, a frightening trust that demands everything, or we trust that created things, in nature or in human action, will provide us with peace of spirit until we go the way of all flesh. The latter course, though ultimately baseless, seems easier: we can see and touch, taste and feel the material world. By contrast, the call for a change of heart in John and Jesus sounds like a request that we turn literally to nothing, no thing, no activity.

Both unspoiled nature and human action may be viewed as participating in God's intentions for the world. Some times nature seems to manifest evils, sometimes our activities—even those undertaken to secure moral goods—reveal a sinister cast. We are enmeshed everywhere in mysteries, mysteries about why the world is as it is, mysteries about the self-deceptions and occasionally unexpected graces in the human heart. We have no clear-cut rules when we consider ourselves and nature. God seems to have built into the world some limits and an equally important plasticity that complicates our notion of what is natural. Human nature, too, is both limited and plastic, and the notion of what is human has expanded as all parts of the world have been brought into contact with one another in recent centuries.

Ultimately, we are left with two truths. The first is that in creating the world, God had something in mind and saw that it was good. The other, the truth that is meant to set us free, tells us that beyond all the uncertainties and transience of this life, something, or someone, remains that is the final resting place for human hearts. Or, as Augustine expresses it at the beginning of his Confessions, "you have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you." The peace we feel at times in nature is, properly understood, an anticipation of that rest. But if it is to be more than a mood, it has to find a deeper confirmation.

For many environmentalists, religious environmentalists among them, putting our ultimate faith and trust in something beyond nature is to risk re producing the otherworldly neglect of nature that allegedly has been the be setting sin of the West since Plato. It seems to make the world a secondary realm unworthy of our full allegiance. Rousseau made a similar complaint against Christianity when he claimed that Christians, ultimately concerned about their eternal destiny, cannot be full citizens: they will look on the realm of politics as of only moderate importance. The criticisms of Plato and the complaints of Rousseau, though ultimately wrong in theory, perhaps point to some real problems in our practice.

If the truth that both we and the world are merely transitory leads us to give up striving for all the goodness and justice that we can achieve, we are poor interpreters of the Bible. The God who sends his only Son into the world to die for it is not a God who takes a light view of history and human existence. But the certain knowledge that our lives and all of nature are destined to disappear may actually help us do better at our worldly tasks. We now think, on good secular as well as religious grounds, that making politics an ultimate good, in the fashion of certain ideologies of the past two centuries, leads to narrowing horizons and dangerous tyranny. As Doctor Johnson wisely observed: "How small of all that human hearts endure / The part that kings or laws can cause or cure."

That kind of wisdom may also be of use when we turn to the environment. The development of human powers has led to a remarkable reduction of some ills and the outright elimination of others. Yet we know as well as we know anything that our technologies and therapeutic techniques cannot make human life in this world a paradise. To believe so would be an idolatry. By the same token, our concern for nature has to acknowledge the imperfections of the world even as it recalls the biblical assurance that creation is good. We may hope to manage our impact on the world with some intelligence, but recognizing our own limits and limitations vis-a-vis nature may help us ultimately to remain calmer and therefore to respond better in the face of environmental threats.

The basis for value judgments in most environmental issues is natural versus artificial—the first, it is assumed, always good, the second, usually bad. This is only a symptom, however, of the skepticism in the last few centuries over speaking about what is good or bad per se. If we can claim that "nature" re quires something, we don't have to engage in the acrimonious human debates about ethics that we feel are hard to resolve. We can claim absolutes for nature that we would not dare claim for ourselves. But anyone who begins to look at the constantly shifting, complex, discordant, and sometimes antithetical directions nature takes will be tempted to give up entirely on making natural claims. Animals and plants harm one another without our intervention, sometimes rendering one or another species extinct. "Bad things happen to good creatures," even in the absence of man, as one environmentalist has noted. So we may be forgiven—if there is indeed anything to forgive—if we do what the human race has done throughout history: decide what is good for human beings and the things they most value and try to fit those as well as possible into a biosphere that, properly managed, we may hope to preserve and enhance even as we know it will both nurture and threaten us.

At the end of all our speculation, we have to confess that we do not know why God made the world as he did, or why he chose to make a world at all. The best reflection on the biblical revelation has maintained that the world is not some realm that God rules over like the ultimate tyrant, but his communication of existence and love to beings that, strictly speaking, do not need to exist. God would have been perfect God without us or the entire universe. Yet in the generous creation of the world, something about the nature of God reveals itself. He is someone who wanted there to be a world that might freely come to know and love him, and he wants us to reproduce that love in our relations with one another.

In the basilica of San Clemente in Rome, there is a mosaic that reflects the concrete understanding of these truths. Above and behind the central altar, a crucified Christ sends out vines from the foot of the cross, which encircle John the Baptist and the doctors of the church. The rivers of paradise flow from the same source to quench the thirst of stags and to water pastures and other parts of the creation. The pictorial message seems to be that the whole world emanates from, and is cradled in, that suffering love. The basilica itself stands on top of the ruins of imperial buildings and earlier churches and, at a level now several stories below the street, an ancient temple of Mithras. Unintentionally, but with a remarkable significance all the same, that medieval work of art re minds us that we are only one moment in an ongoing history that gathers into a universal story some of the insights of nonbiblical civilizations and religions along with the biblical tradition.

That story has no final ending in this life. In our interaction with the world, we are in very much the same situation as in our interaction with one another. We struggle with internal and external obstacles on our uncertain path toward the good, the true, and the beautiful. Our certain obligations toward our neighbors—now grown numerous by the very powers God and the world have built into us—must include obligations toward a nature without which we cannot flourish. We discover great challenges and uncertainties on every side. But that is part of the inspiring drama of human existence. And the outcome of that struggle is assured, even if we are not sure about it. The Creator who brought the world into being is certainly still at work within it and us.

Robert Royalis vice president for research and a senior fellow in religion and ethics at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C. This essay is excerpted from his book The Virgin and the Dynamo: Use and Abuse of Religion in Environmental Debates, just published by Eerdmans. Used with permission.

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