Aquinas: Help or Hindrance Part I

One of the questions I'd like to address in this project is whether the traditional theologians of the church, those who established the Christian doctrines regarding the planet, are a help or a hindrance to the urgency of the environmental movement.  Embrace of the concerns of environmentalism surely seem to be slow to catch on in religious circles.  A quick exegesis of Genesis 1 and 2 would seem to contradict that resistance - so why the clay feet?

While theology and doctrine has certainly evolved since Aquinas' time (and had already been involved in the process of evolution by Aquinas' time), examination of some of the ideas he initiated may help address this phenomena.  It seems a fitting place to start considering Aquinas' own idea of causality - that God creates by setting things in motion, so to speak, and allowing the causality of said motion to play out.  What attitudes and practices might Aquinas' doctrine of creation have set into motion?

His discussion on Creation in The Book of Faith begins by asserting God as the creator of all things, saying that "things that can be brought into existing only by creation come directly from God."  That certainly seems to support Gen. 1 and the environmentalist movement.  We can reason that if all things that exist are creations of our God, then we should be taking care of them as we would any precious relic of our faith.  How much more valuable and precious than fragments of the garments of the saints is that which was created directly by God?  However, he goes on to make statements about creation that seem to suggest that only God is capable of altering creation - and that, therefore, creation is unalterable.  For instance, he asserts that 'heavenly bodies' are incapable of "coming to be and passing away" on their own.   (Aquinas, Compendium of Theology, translated by Richard R. Regan, #95) Of course, we know that stars are born and die all the time.  If we were to assign this 'impassibility' to creation as a whole, we might make the false conclusion that anything that changes on the earth or in space must be God's will and action.  This obviously presents a problem for those of us that believe the multiple scientific claims that the earth's temperature is rising and that human activity is the ultimate cause of this warming.

Now, certainly, Aquinas wasn't presented with evidence of global warming or human effects on the planet.  The thinkers of the thirteenth century would not have even conceived of such a possibility.  However, this idea of an immutable God creating an unchangeable universe that reflects that immutability can be followed to the destructive conclusion that, if God is absolutely in charge, then there is nothing that we need to do to 'fix' the mess we've made of our planet.  If temperatures are changing, then it must be God's will that they do.  This may very well be a perversion of Aquinas' doctrine but it is an attitude that can be found in modern day Christians.  It is just one example of the danger of leaving ancient ideas unquestioned.