The field of religion and ecology is a movement that was founded based upon certain figureheads (Tucker & Grim, Berry). The field is constantly transforming and growing as the environmental crisis demands more thoughtful and nuanced ways to think about religion and ecology. This panel welcomes a rejuvenated engagement with old thinkers–Agnes Arber, Simone Weil, and Bernard Charbonneau–as figureheads of religion and ecology. This panel explores new dimensions of vegetal philosophy, political ecology, and labor at the crux of ecospirituality.
This paper explores the spiritual significance of labour in the philosophy of the twentieth-century French philosopher and mystic, Simone Weil. Weil developed an incisive critique of industrial labour, yet she also spent a brief period of her life as a farm labourer. This paper will consider Weil’s philosophical and religious writings from this period, arguing that her agricultural experience informed her later claim that a new conception of labour—and in particular, of manual labour—must be the “spiritual core” of a well-ordered social life. I argue that Weil’s concept of “decreation,” a term she uses to describe God’s loving withdrawal and self-limitation in Creation, Incarnation, and Passion, is embodied in her theory of labour. The self-emptying, kenotic form of work exemplifies a relationship to the natural world through labour that is characterized by a posture of restraint and withdrawal, rather than one of control or mastery.
The mid-twentieth century Cambridge botanist Agnes Arber (1879-1960) has been woefully neglected in the scholarship of critical plant philosophy and religion. While botanists have engaged her reflections on botany and scientific method, Arber’s vegetal philosophy in its more metaphysical, cosmological, and mystical registers still offers much to scholars in critical plant studies, especially in religion and science. This paper engages cosmological-mystical fragments in The Natural Philosophy of Plant Form (1950), The Mind and the Eye (1953), and The Manifold and the One (1957). Many scholars view her latter scholarship as a rift or departure from her earlier approaches in plant morphology and philosophy. Instead, I’ll argue that Arber’s contemplative practice of “giving an account” of a plant (evoking and dialoguing in a posthuman way with Judith Butler’s work on the moral self), expands into a lush and strangely apophatic vegetal cosmology where a form of moral ecospiritual regard might emerge.