Ecology and Christianity in Late Antiquity (fourth-sixth centuries AD) - EChLA Comparing Sources on Nature as Fruitful Mother and Human Labour

Since the last decades of the XX century, several studies have addressed the issue of ecology and the environment in Greece and Rome. Recently, they have also begun to reflect on the possible relationship between ecology and theology [Hunt-Marlowe 2019]. What is still missing is the extent to which Christianity – from the fourth century A.D. to the age of Gregory the Great – elaborated a new perception of nature and human work. Such research responds to the call of the United Nations General Assembly (September 25, 2015) to address ecological issues [Agenda 2030: Preamble]. The fact that it may bear good fruit is suggested by Pope Francis’ encyclicals. Imbued with ecological thinking, they refer in several places to the Church Fathers of the Late Antiquity. In the encyclical “Fratelli tutti” [Bergoglio 2020], the words of Basil, Ambrose and Augustine provides the inspiration to express a conception of land ownership and land work anchored to the need «to care for our common home, our planet», and to reflect on the «social role of property» [Bergoglio 2020: §117]. Referring to the ownership of land by the family of the individual farmer, these ideas already appeared in the encyclical “Laudato si’” [Bergoglio 2015]. Our research, therefore, intends to understand whether the first signs of the environmental and ecological concern, so characteristic of the contemporary world and Church, can be discerned in the way Fathers of the fourth-sixth century conceived Nature as a fruitful mother who gives to all without distinction and creates common rights, while usurpation gives rise to private rights. Alongside the survey of the most significant patristic sources in Latin up to Gregory the Great, including the Rule of the Four Fathers and the Cassian’s De institutis coenobiorum, and some of the Greek patristic ones, we think necessary to read the contemporary scholiastic literature to Virgil, Terence and Horace (Servius, Porphyrion, ps. Acron), the agronomic literature of the time (Gargilius Martial, Palladius, Geoponica), the legal codifications of the fifth-sixth century (Theodosian and Justinian Codes). One wonders whether this ante litteram ecological awareness and a different concept of wealth and poverty [Brown 2012] developed new relationships between modes and forces of production both in the various types of farms, which continued to characterise the late antique scenario, and in the late antique villa. Compared to the villa servilis of the early imperial period, with intensive production, the new productive unit was a less extensive property cultivated by tenant farmers and was characterised by a different way of conceiving the land ownership and the market [Vera 2020a-b]. Our project also aims to digitalise all the lesser-known literary evidence useful for this type of investigation and to compare these different typologies of texts in search of a common ecological thought.