Читать книгу Environmental Thought - Robin Attfield - Страница 20

This is the period from the fall of the Roman Empire in the West to 1500 and the dawn of the modern period. It includes the centuries which were at one time known as the ‘Dark Ages’, but which turn out to have been a period of considerable agricultural and technological development. It is also the period in which Christianity reached lands outside the Roman Empire, and returned to lands overrun by non-Christian invaders after the Romans withdrew. Many of those commemorated as saints, such as Patrick, Brendon, Columba and Cuthbert, played leading roles in this latter process. Several of these saints also enjoyed friendly and cooperative relations with wild animals, in the tradition of St Antony, the third-century founder of living as a hermit, in his case in the Egyptian ‘inner desert’ (Bratton 1988; Coates 1998: 55).

This section traces the attitudes to nature, land and animals of people in the Middle Ages, from St Cuthbert of Northumbria to St Thomas Aquinas. It also encompasses the rise and spread of Islam, and the life’s work of Hildegard of Bingen and of Francis of Assisi. The narratives to be related are divergent and diverse. The one common factor was belief in God and the divine purposes, together with attempts to comprehend them. Lynn White has claimed to detect further common factors, and these claims are also discussed.