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Ecologies of Grace
This page intentionally left blank
Ecologies of Grace
Environmental Ethics and
Christian Theology

willis jenkins

1
2008
3
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Copyright © 2008 by Oxford University Press, Inc.

Published by Oxford University Press, Inc.

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Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without the prior permission of Oxford University Press.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Jenkins, Willis.
Ecologies of grace : environmental ethics and Christian
theology / Willis Jenkins.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-19-532851-6
1. Human ecology—Religious aspects—Christianity.
2. Environmental ethics. I. Title.
BT695.5.J464 2007
261.8'8—dc22 2007018720

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free, recycled paper
for two wonderful naturalists:

my father, physician and farmer

my mother, nurse and nature photographer
This page intentionally left blank
Preface

Ecologies of Grace interprets environmental issues through the practi-

cal responses of Christian communities and the central resources of
Christian theology. It shows how environmental problems trouble the
heart of Christian experience and identity, and how theologies of grace
can engage, reframe, and maybe transform responses to them.
This project developed over years of international work with
Christian communities, study in theological ethics, and teaching envi-
ronmental thought. More precisely, it developed from the difficulty of
integrating those three things: the challenge of environmental prob-
lems, the resources of moral theology, and the social practices of faith
communities. This book makes an attempt at modeling that integra-
tion, bringing together two worlds of professional practice and several
literatures in a search for practical environmental theologies.
Living in those worlds and reading in those literatures I have been
guided by some wonderful teachers, students, colleagues, and friends.
As this book began to take form, it was particularly supported and men-
tored by Jim Childress and Gene Rogers. Their respective habits of
thought shape the project throughout, if only in its aspirations toward
Jim’s clear ethical framing and Gene’s elegant theological argument.
At the beginning of my work overseas I was welcomed into a
household that knew the ways of grace in the midst of difficulty and
helped lead me to the approach of this inquiry; thanks to Robbinah
and Amos Turyahabwe, and Tayebwa, Taremwa, and Tashobya. Later,
David Fox took a chance on a young community development worker
viii preface

and encouraged me into successive arenas of cross-cultural partnership.

I thank all those who invited me to see their environmental mission initiatives,
including Father Pablo Buyagan, J. B. Hoover, Takao Okemoto, Mark and Karen
McReynolds, Ben and Vanessa Henneke, Scott and Carol Kellerman, Geoffrey
Abaho Tumwine, and Bishop William Magambo.
I have come to see many environments anew from the students who have
journeyed with me to Uganda, and with the Young Adult Service Corps volun-
teers who let me accompany their cross-cultural journeys in other parts of the
world. Rob Mark has kept up a running conversation on faith, justice, and envi-
ronment that has animated project journeys through Uganda, Kenya, Ethiopia,
the Crow Reservation in Montana, Nova Scotia, and Honduras. Rebekah
Menning has been a sustaining companion throughout, quick to ask the practi-
cal question and generous with careful readings of many draft chapters.
I came to appreciate the complexity of teaching environmental problems
while a fellow at the Institute for Practical Ethics and Public Policy at the
University of Virginia. Especially formative was participation in the Institute’s
faculty workshops, which brought together specialists from across the univer-
sity to develop interdisciplinary environmental courses. An early attempt to
represent and reorder environmental ethics, as appears in chapter 2, was given
as a talk there in 2003 and subsequently much revised as a result of my col-
leagues’ responses.
Some of my reflections on lived theologies I first put to words for training
sessions on mission and environment for cross-cultural personnel of the
Episcopal Church. Their practical and theological feedback from year to year
has been most useful. Further reflection on the ecological dimensions of
Christian experience and mission commitments grew out of a 2003 presenta-
tion to the Costas Consultation on Mission, and six years of deliberation with
the Standing Commission on World Mission. I am especially grateful to the
Commission for sending me to participate in the 2002 United Nations World
Summit on Sustainable Development and the accompanying meeting of the
Anglican Communion Environmental Network.
Early work on Thomas Aquinas was presented to the Lilly “Ecology and
Theology” conference at Notre Dame in April 2002, and then published in the
Journal of Religion in 2003. An early exploration of Sergei Bulgakov was pre-
sented to the “Illuminations” conference at Oxford University in June 2002.
A portion of chapter 3 on ecojustice was developed for the 2005 Spring Institute
on Lived Theology at the University of Virginia, as a presentation with Jürgen
Moltmann, whose generous consideration I especially appreciate.
Writing began in earnest while I was a Sara Shallenberger Brown Fellow in
Environmental Literature at Brown College in the University of Virginia. The
 preface ix

fellowship offered two idyllic years living in Monroe Cottage, the opportunity to
teach seminars in the departments of Religious Studies and Environmental
Thought and Practice, and conversation with visiting nature writers.
Teaching courses in interdisciplinary environmental thought, I have been
continually pushed by the enthusiasm of many students. I have especially learned
from the environment and humanities double-majors at UVA, and count myself
peculiarly fortunate now to work with students in a joint graduate program of
Yale Divinity School and the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies.
I took my first course in environmental ethics with Jon Cannon, and later
came back to teach with him at the UVA School of Law in Fall 2005. This EPA
veteran’s pragmatic tests for theory chastened my interpretation of environ-
mental ethics, if not the theological ventures that followed. For those Chuck
Mathewes has provided unrivalled bibliographic enthusiasm and steadfast
encouragement.
I am grateful to many others who took time to read and improve draft chap-
ters. Mary Evelyn Tucker, John Grim, and Christiana Peppard helped me clarify
the introductory remarks on cosmology and ethics. Holmes Rolston commented
extensively on an early draft of chapter 2. Margaret Mohrmann helped clear up
ambiguities in the chapters on Aquinas. At various stages I received gifts of
reading from Tony Baker, Tim Gorringe, Laura Hartman, Rose Jenkins, Chris
Morck, Aaron Riches, and Michael J. Smith. Joshua Hill, Khalial Withen, and
Anne Jenkins helped bring the manuscript to final form, and Matthew Riley did
the index. The care and erudition of copy editor Mary Bellino saved it from
many sins. Mistakes remaining despite so many wonderful teachers and friends
are my own, by error or obstinacy.
This book was published with the assistance of the Frederick W. Hilles
Publication Fund of Yale University, for which I am grateful to the Council of
Fellows at the Whitney Humanities Center.
This page intentionally left blank
Contents

1. Saving Nature, Saving Grace, 3

Part I: Ethical Strategies

2. Three Practical Strategies in Environmental Ethics, 31
3. The Strategy of Ecojustice, 61
4. The Strategy of Christian Stewardship, 77
5. The Strategy of Ecological Spirituality, 93

Part II: Theological Investigations

6. Sanctifying Biodiversity: Ecojustice in Thomas Aquinas, 115
7. Environmental Virtues: Charity, Nature, and Divine
Friendship in Thomas, 133
8. Stewardship after the End of Nature: Karl Barth’s
Environment of Jesus Christ, 153
9. Nature Redeemed: Barth’s Garden of Reconciliation, 171
10. After Maximus: Ecological Spirituality
and Cosmic Deification, 189
11. Thinking Like a Transfigured Mountain: Sergei Bulgakov’s
Wisdom Ecology, 207

12. Conclusion: Renovating Grace, 227

Notes, 245
Works Cited, 315
Index, 353
This page intentionally left blank
Ecologies of Grace
This page intentionally left blank
1
Saving Nature, Saving Grace

Christian communities struggle to talk about life on earth and life

with God. That is not a new problem; the tensions of worldly life
and Christian life generate enduring discussions for Christian ethics.
But environmental issues challenge theological traditions in ways
unprecedented by debates over Christian attitudes toward war or sex-
uality or poverty. For environmental issues present moral problems
that escape the received frameworks of theological ethics. Species loss
and degraded biodiversity obviously arrest our moral attention, but
how do they matter for Christian life? New technological capacities
seem to exercise transgressive control over organisms, but what part
of the Christian story offers approval or critique? Globalizing capital-
ism changes everything from agriculture to local economies, but how
is it measured by theological wisdom? In an urbanizing world, the
need for sustainable planning, housing, and energy use calls for
imaginative new political forms, but how are they intelligible to
Christian communities? Climate change places new dimensions of
society in moral jeopardy, but how is that preachable on Sunday
mornings?
Some Christian ethicists think those questions outstrip the
competency of traditional theological approaches, forcing novel
revisions. Others think they can find new capacities in traditional
resources. Either way, Christian environmental ethics attends the
challenge these troubling social problems present to theological tra-
ditions and moral practices. It works to make environmental issues
4 ecologies of grace

intelligible for Christian communities, significant for Christian experience.

This book first investigates how ethicists, activists, and Christian leaders
draw on their respective traditions in order to meet that challenge, and then
contributes to the project by posing to representative theologians the diffi-
culties their strategies encounter. In the first part I trace strategies of ethical
response; in the second I explore theological resources that can help their
cause.
One could map those strategies by a number of methods and topics. In
order to show how closely environmental issues come to the heart of Christian
experience and identity, this book charts the relation of salvation stories to envi-
ronmental ethics. It shows how the metaphors, logics, and narratives of grace
shape major patterns of Christian response to environmental problems. The
map thus depicts Christianity’s environmental strategies following the contour
lines of traditions of salvation as they pursue the practical goals of environmen-
tal ethics. This book follows three major contour lines, showing how several
distinct strategies make environmental issues matter for Christian experience
by situating them within one of three ecologies of grace: redemption, sanctifi-
cation, or deification.
At first glance, soteriology appears an unlikely starting place, for it seems
to focus on the human, the spiritual, the interior, the otherwordly—quite the
opposite of environmental concerns. Indeed, some compelling critiques blame
the human-centered, spiritualized ambitions of salvation stories for generating
the bad worldviews that underlie environmental problems. For better
worldviews, therefore, Christian environmental ethics often begins from the
doctrine of creation, reconsidering the moral dimensions of religious cosmol-
ogy. Yet, as we will see, ethicists still rely on the tropes and concepts of grace to
make those cosmological reformulations come to life within Christian experi-
ence. Even while talking about other things, Christian environmental ethics
tends to draw on background stories of salvation at the moments it wants to
make environmental issues matter for Christian life.
They draw on soteriological narratives, I think, for reasons of pragmatic
resonance. Species loss and threats to biodiversity require urgent and whole-
hearted responses; relationship with God animates Christian responses.
Changes in agriculture and land use alter basic patterns of human experience;
views of salvation shape the patterns of basic Christian experience. Technologies
grow ominous with gargantuan and transgressive power; Christian conversion
envisions powers overthrown and transformed. Unsustainable economies and
climate change jeopardize contemporary forms of community; Christian com-
munities form within economies of grace.
 saving nature, saving grace 5

Revival and Reforestation

I came to this inquiry while working with several Ugandan community devel-
opment organizations. I had previously taught in a Church of Uganda (Anglican)
seminary, in a small regional school for village priests. As I moved from semi-
nary to village organizing, I learned how Ugandan churches theologically
mobilize community responses to new social problems. Core parish commit-
tees, sometimes centered around revivalist prayer groups, have adapted com-
munity responses to HIV transmission and developed AIDS outreaches; they
help feed and school orphans; they start and manage local clinics and schools;
they protect water sources, organize microdevelopment loans, and plan com-
munity land use. And, as priests give voice and authority to their organic theo-
logical innovations, all of those practical responses somehow inflect the
community’s preaching, prayer, and worship.
For each new social problem, church communities were finding ways to
redeploy their traditions (both theological and cultural). New forms of Christian
practice were striving to keep unprecedented socioeconomic changes from
fracturing the centers of common life. Each mode of response, I began to see,
invented some new capacity from their traditions.
Many of these church groups, especially in the deforested hill country of
western Ankole and Kigezi, include tree-planting initiatives in their activities.
Despite familiarity with their expansive register of social ministries, I was sur-
prised to see very poor church communities, possessed of revivalist evangelical
faith, working to replant native trees. To my mind, reforestation was an “envi-
ronmentalist” issue somewhat removed from more immediate concerns, like
treating malaria, and traditionally evangelical concerns, like caring for orphans.
Yet here were Christian groups who had started a nursery for seedlings and
were planting trees all around the village. Priests regularly approved the prac-
tice from the pulpit, and when the local bishop made the rounds his exhorta-
tions always included tree-planting (along with marriage, sexual fidelity, and
good schools).
Why should the revivalist faith of poor community groups express itself in
reforestation? How should we understand this practice? If we were to ask the
usual diagnostic questions, we would query their background worldview by
tests for nature’s moral value and for the relative degree of anthropocentrism.
Does the community recognize intrinsic value in the integrity of creation? Does
it remove humanity from the center of its worldview? My inquiry in this book
began in the apparent unhelpfulness of those standard questions. Results for
6 ecologies of grace

nature’s intrinsic value (low) and anthropocentrism (high) seemed to do a poor

job of explaining why revival groups would care about reforestation. Why would
tree-planting make it into a sermon headed for an altar call and an outburst of
ecstatic dancing? I suspected that I needed to ask theological questions closer
to the heart of the community’s identity, which meant, for these communities,
asking soteriological questions.
That seems true beyond revivalist faith communities. During my time in
Uganda I came across Scott and Carol Kellerman, American medical mission-
aries with the Church of Uganda, who were discovering the environmental
dimensions to salvation in another way. The Kellermans had gone to southwest
Uganda to serve the Batwa, an indigenous people recently displaced from their
home in what is now Bwindi Impenetrable Forest National Park. The forest-
dwelling Batwa found themselves adrift in open cultivated landscapes and,
marginalized from even subsistence agriculture, their culture and living condi-
tions deteriorated. The Kellermans went to Uganda anticipating medical ser-
vice and gospel friendship with an outcast people, but found that caring for the
Batwa meant caring for the forest they still know as their only home. They have
since been working to reconnect the Batwa to the forest by lobbying the govern-
ment to allow regulated access and by soliciting international grants to create
inhabitable buffer areas along the edges of the forest.
The Kellermans came to understand the significance of forest protection and
access when they heard Batwa leaders locate their dignity within the forest. It pro-
vided not just their foods and medicines, but their stories, skills, and virtues.
When encouraged to remember that God still loved them outside of the forest,
several Batwa leaders replied that their children were losing the names for God
because they no longer knew the names of the forest. What could God’s love mean
apart from its known habitat, the forest of Batwa culture, language, and divine
names? The Kellermans realized that God’s special friendship with the Batwa
inextricably involved their special connection to that forest. Where, they asked me,
do environmental theologians offer ways of understanding that involvement?
A few years later, on the other side of the world, I visited the Asian Rural
Institute (ARI) in Nasushiobara, Japan. ARI is at once an experimental farm for
sustainable agriculture, a training institute for non-governmental organization
(NGO) leaders from the two-thirds world, and a remarkable interfaith community.1
Working among its organic chickens, high-yield rice patties, bio-gas generators,
and onsite cannery, college volunteers, staff leaders, and NGO participants from
around the world form a life together. The community requirements: everyone
works and everyone attends chapel. They decide together how to run the farm
and why, and they take turns holding chapel, each in the tradition of her or his
own faith.
 saving nature, saving grace 7

ARI believes that spiritual, economic, and ecological alienations must be

healed together, and that the path to restored communion with each other and with
God comes through learning the earth’s lessons. Roommates Father Jovy, a Filipino
Anglican priest, and Markuse, an Indian Hindu, exemplify ARI’s lived theology.
Both had graduated from the ARI program and started successful ecumenical envi-
ronmental initiatives in their home countries, and had now come back as staff.
Now they share a simple dorm room and a vision for reconciliation through sus-
tainability. Jovy and Markuse believe that interfaith peace comes through collabora-
tive work to restore human communities to ecological harmony. The daily work of
understanding and tending fields is for them also the theological work of under-
standing one another and creatively entering communion with the divine.
This book began from reflection on those innovative theological responses
and keeps them close to mind in its way of proceeding.2 As I reflected on the
implicit theologies of ARI, the Batwa, and the revivalist tree-planters, I began to
suspect that the usual ways of writing and teaching Christian environmental
ethics do not help us understand them as fully as we might. Those lived envi-
ronmental theologies no doubt enact worldviews as they embody attitudes
toward nature’s value and humanity’s place among it. But they seem to narrate
those worldviews according to distinctive grammars of grace. The patterns of
their environmental responses seem contoured by their notions of relationship
with God. This book follows that suggestion by showing how Christian envi-
ronmental theologies reshape ways of living on earth within patterns of living
with God—how they reinhabit distinct ecologies of grace.3

Religious Environmentalism

Maps have their dangers and distortions, of course. Their depictions must sim-
plify landscapes, which can mislead wayfarers or, worse, insulate the observer
by lending her a surveyor’s sense of control. The best maps not only show a
navigable way through; they overlay terrain with references that express the lay
of the land. They help readers rediscover and reorient themselves to a place
they perhaps already know. Serene Jones, for example, maps together Christian
theology and feminist theory “not so much to reconstruct the terrain of faith as
to provide markers for traveling through the terrain in new ways.”4 The first
part of this book develops markers by describing practical strategies in environ-
mental ethics. I call these “ecologies of grace” to keep the cartographic meta-
phors close to earth, for these contour lines shape actual patterns of inhabitation.
The second part of the book puts the map to a field test, using it to travel through
familiar theological terrain in new ways.
8 ecologies of grace

My map of Christian environmental ethics charts a known landscape, but

its outlines will appear different from most other maps. The contours of grace
in Christian environmental ethics have not often been rendered visible, in part
because of charged relations between religion and environmental thought.
Especially on the contemporary American landscape, religion and nature some-
times appear antagonistic, sometimes symbiotic, sometimes conceptually
fused. Those charged relations sometimes produce organic similarities between
descriptions of environmental experience and descriptions of religious experi-
ence, yet they also have led to the excision of grace from mappings of Christian
environmental ethics. Let me illustrate.
Consider how commonly nature writers reach for a salvific metaphor to
communicate the power of an environmental experience. Of course, the raptur-
ous John Muir, who saw cathedrals in the forest and choirs in the storms, and
who put the words of Jesus into the mouths of trees, often did. His register was
blatantly soteriological (“I pressed Yosemite upon him like a missionary offer-
ing the gospel”).5 I have in mind the more subtle reaches of down-to-earth
environmental writers, like the scientist Rachel Carson: “There is something
infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature.”6 Or the usually plainspo-
ken forester Aldo Leopold; when explaining what he learned from “the fierce
green fire” in a wolf ’s eyes and from trying to “think like a mountain,” Leopold
misquotes Thoreau’s dictum, “In wildness is the preservation of the world,” to
say “In wildness is the salvation of the world.”7 He immediately goes on to say
that “this is the hidden meaning of the wolf, long known to mountains.”8
Contemporary environmental writers do this too. Scott Russell Sanders
writes that encountering nature involves a kind of faith “in the healing energy
of wildness, in the holiness of creation. One of the reasons many of us keep
going back to Thoreau and Muir and Leopold and Carson is because they kept
that faith.”9 Environmental writing seems to dwell within the literatures of
faith, as is attested by the fact that an editor would ask the nature writer Barry
Lopez to introduce an anthology of spiritual writing. Lopez does so by focusing
on the cultivation of reverence, which allows a landscape to enter and elevate a
person.10 Humans are “creatures in search of . . . a pattern of grace,” writes
Lopez elsewhere.11 When “the land gets inside of us,” says Lopez, those pat-
terns of grace are crucial for deciding what we will do about it.12
These writers seem to sense that they hold a sacred trust, remembering
forms of holiness and salves of healing nearly forgotten by an alienated world.
Terry Tempest Williams: “There is a holy place in the salt desert, where egrets
hover like angels . . . I am hidden and saved from the outside world.”13 Even
David Gessner, who professes to be sick of pious writing about nature, cannot
help saying in the concluding words of one book, “If we look for it, we will find
 saving nature, saving grace 9

that a whole world is waiting for us. And it is in that world that we, not seeking
it, will find a sort of salvation.”14 Some of our best environmental writers exhibit
an organic reach toward grace.
Other cultural observers have noticed this spiritual creep in environmental
thought and trace religious valences in American environmentalism, some-
times with dismay. The veneration of nature, the feelings of prophetic alien-
ation, the raptures and epiphanies, the sense of apocalyptic doom, the missional
project of personal and cultural transformation—all this makes the environ-
mental movement look religious.15
Meanwhile, the religious are beginning to look environmental. Religious
leaders from many traditions have committed their respective faiths to address-
ing environmental problems. Religious communities in many nations have
begun to lift their voices for greener policies, and faith-based grassroots organi-
zations around the world work to reclaim, restore, and replant. Religious think-
ers regularly propose ecological retrievals, critiques, and revisions of their
traditions.16
The charged relations amidst religious and environmental thought produce
an ambivalence in what we might mean by “religious environmentalism.” It
could mean the environmental responses and practices of established religious
communities. These include a range of phenomena from religious redefinitions
of environmental goals to the participation of religious adherents in broader
social reform movements. Or religious environmentalism could mean the reli-
gious themes of environmental thought. These include a range from the mis-
sionary postures of the environmental movement to the spiritual dimensions of
environmental experience. And there are hybrid uses of the term, used to describe
the reemergence of nature religions, or to communicate the perception that
global environmental problems are so complex, terrifying, and significant that
they require a religious register for understanding and responding to them.17
The diverse, charged, and urgent conceptions of religious environmental-
ism challenge the organization of mutually intelligible conversations—let alone
practical coordination and research collaborations. Participants may arrive to
vindicate or vilify religions, and vindicate or vilify modern science; to mine reli-
gion’s conceptual resources or politically mobilize its constituents; they may
represent dominant or minority views from a tradition, and conservative or
revisionary approaches to interpreting them; they may have particularist or
universalist regard of other traditions, and eagerness or wariness to engage
them. They may found their primary hope (or despair) in a view of politics, a
particular faith, or a sense of nature.
The pluriform, ambivalent relationship between religious and environmental
thought has indirectly led to some confusing maps of Christian environmental
10 ecologies of grace

ethics. For not only do its cartographers work with one or another sense of that
relationship and organize their terrain accordingly. In recent years one particu-
lar sense of “religious environmentalism”—a sense formed by suspicion of sal-
vation stories—has informed work within specifically Christian environmental
ethics and shaped its representation to wider arenas of religious and environ-
mental thought. The curious result: Christian environmental ethics often
avoids making visible the soteriological concepts used natively by revivalist
reforesters and instinctively by environmental writers.

After Lynn White: Cosmology and Christianity

For the purposes of enabling useful conversation in so ambiguous an arena,

with such diverse participants addressing urgent questions, the interdisciplin-
ary arena of “religion and ecology” has constructed a framework of proven
worth: look to how religions shape worldviews, for better or worse, regarding
nature’s value and humanity’s place amidst it. By focusing discussion of reli-
gious environmentalism on ecological cosmology, collaborative exchanges can
not only accommodate great religious, political, and methodological diversity,
but also refer to shared criteria of interest.
Cosmology thus makes a capacious forum, inviting mutually intelligible
and practically useful conversation. It entertains analyses of religious narratives
or religiously inflected worldviews that shape environmental values or interpret
forms of human inhabitation. Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim, convenors of
the Forum on Religion and Ecology and editors of the Harvard book series
Religions of the World and Ecology, thus begin the invitation in their series
foreword by connecting religious cosmology and environmental ethics:

Religions provide basic interpretive stories of who we are, what

nature is, where we have come from, and where we are going. This
comprises a worldview of a society. Religions also suggest how we
should treat other humans and how we should relate to nature. . . .
Religions thus generate worldviews and ethics which underlie
fundamental attitudes and values of different cultures and societies.18

No matter one’s sense of religious environmentalism, then, participants can

share the practical task of examining how environmental values are shaped by
basic interpretive stories.19 By focusing on worldviews, the Forum on Religion
and Ecology brings together academics, activists, and religious leaders to illumi-
nate the “role that religious traditions play in constructing moral frameworks and
orientating narratives regarding human interactions with the environment.”20
 saving nature, saving grace 11

Evaluating that role, participants can work in their various capacities to celebrate,
criticize, redirect, strengthen, or revise it.
Within Christian environmental theology, however, the cosmological arena
for religious environmentalism has indirectly led to some unhelpful ways of
understanding and organizing its own internal pluralism. Cosmological map-
pings can obscure the native terrain here because, by historical accident, a par-
ticular sense of “worldview” already shapes recent theological responses. That
is to say, Christian environmental theology has so oriented its contributions to
the worldviews discussions that it can misrepresent or obscure significant con-
tours of its own “moral frameworks and orientating narratives.” Consequently,
it often enters discussions of religious environmentalism with its most power-
ful and most useful theological resources concealed beneath cosmological
overlays.
In 1967, Lynn White published a now famous article, “The Historical
Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis,” which indicted a Christian worldview for envi-
ronmental problems.21 Accepted or disputed, his remarkably generative thesis
set the agenda for Christian environmental theologies in the following decades:
if problems arise from a religiously anthropocentric worldview with little intrin-
sic value for nature, then Christian thinkers needs to vindicate their cosmology
on those terms, recuperate minority resources from forgotten cosmologies, or
propose a new cosmology. Obviously that agenda makes room for great diver-
sity, and quite alternative proposals have proliferated. However, in the success
of White’s article in sustaining debate, the diverse literatures of late-twentieth-
century Christian environmental thought concentrated their development in
reference to White’s peculiar notion of environmental worldviews.22
White’s critique of Christianity operated with three assumptions about
religious worldviews: that they generate social practices, that they should be
measured by the criteria of intrinsic value and anthropocentrism, and that sal-
vation stories threaten environmentally benign worldviews.23 The legacy of
those assumptions can simultaneously overemphasize and overdetermine the
significance of cosmology for Christian ethics.
The first assumption permits scholars to focus on how worldviews gener-
ate ethics without asking where worldviews come from. What logics of produc-
tion shape the making of worldviews? Directly after calling attention to the way
“religions . . . generate worldviews,” Tucker and Grim quote White: “What
people do about their ecology depends on what they think about themselves in
relation to things around them.” The editors want to point out the environmen-
tal consequence measured by White’s worldview diagnostics: “Have issues of
personal salvation superseded all others? . . . Have anthropocentric ethics been
all consuming? Has the material world of nature been devalued by religion?”24
12 ecologies of grace

Those questions underscore the practical significance of paying attention to

cosmologies. In an age of environmental distress, such questions indicate that,
as Larry Rasmussen says, “ethics and cosmology are inextricable, indissoluble,”
because we know that our stories about the world involve a terrible alienation
of humanity and ecology.25
Within Christian theology, however, accepting the moral significance of
cosmology should not distract attention from the patterns by which religions
tell their stories, or the practices by which worldviews are generated. What are
the grammars of narration? Within Christianity, I am suggesting they may be
grammars of grace.26 How do cosmologies take shape within patterns of reli-
gious experience? I am proposing that, within Christian environmental theol-
ogy, patterns of salvation can help us understand the way cosmologies come
alive in Christian experience. To understand how Christian attitudes to the
world may be revised and reformed, we need to explore their theological roots,
finding their resources for revision and practical logics of reform. Perhaps
worldviews give rise to ethics, but suppose that religious communities generate
and regenerate worldviews through innovative social practices. Following a
clue from the revivalist reforesters, I wonder whether soteriology might illumi-
nate logics of practical adaptation. Following the hunch of the nature writers,
I wonder whether vocabularies of grace might name resources for restoring
cosmologies broken by alienation.
White’s second and third assumptions about worldviews, however, tend to
turn attention away from such proposals. By casting suspicion on salvation and
organizing debate around criteria of anthropocentrism and nature’s value,
White’s assumptions keep the focus away from soteriological roots while at the
same time determining the acceptable content of decent worldviews. Yet both
assumptions seem less than certain. In the next chapter we will find a number
of scholars in secular environmental ethics questioning the usefulness of
anthropocentrism and nature’s value for organizing environmental ethics.
Should they remain authoritative in the religious field? Then, in subsequent
chapters, we will see how Christian environmental thinkers regularly draw on
salvific metaphors to restore our lost senses to earth. What theological roots
generate that organic reach toward grace?
Ever alive to White’s critique, the response from Christian environmental
theologies has been garbled. They tend to downplay talk about salvation even
when they follow patterns of grace or reach for symbols of redemption. Thus
White’s notion of cosmology still shapes responses even when a theologian
overturns the White hypothesis and blames environmental problems on the
demise of a Christian worldview. George Rupp, for example, argues that it “is
only when the transcendent God of biblical religion is no longer thought to
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of Nineveh with an army of (it is said) 500,000 men. The Persians fought
with desperation, and “it was easier to kill than to break them,” but once
more the skill and good fortune of the warrior-emperor triumphed; and he
himself with his own hand slew Rhazates the Persian Commander,[67] in
single combat between the armies before the battle was joined. The power
of Chosroës was crushed: but the Romans were as much exhausted by the
long-drawn struggle as the Persians; and, within a few years, both empires
alike succumbed to the onslaught of the Mohammedans.[68]
{116}

In a bird’s-eye view from the mountains this country seems all one dead
level, with the solitary height of Jebel Maklub rising like an island in the
midst. But, to the wayfarer actually traversing it, it is a range of hills and
hollows, with marshy valleys[69] intervening between sparsely cultivated
downs. A few good-sized villages are passed, the largest being Tel Keif and
Tel Uskof—each, as their names imply, grouped round the base of an
ancient tel: and after a long day’s journey (performed at the pace of the
mules, which is rather slower than walking) we reach the township of
Alkosh, placed just at the foot of the hills.
A glance at the map would suggest that it is by no means easy to
determine the precise point where the plains end and where the mountains
begin. But actually there is no such uncertainty. The breastwork range of the
mountains rears itself up like a wall above the minor inequalities of the
plateau, and the heights stretch away right and left continuously as though
they were toeing a line. Of all the countries of Europe, Spain is the land
which is nearest in sympathy with the Orient; and the sudden uplift of the
Cantabrian mountains above the basin of the Duero is an excellent
reproduction of the rise of the Kurdistan ranges above the plain of Mosul.
Alkosh, at the foot of the steeps, is just an unmitigated sun trap; and the
town seems positively sizzling under the blaze that is poured on it from the
south. It is a mean little hole; but its synagogue boasts a notable shrine in
the tomb of the prophet Nahum, who of course also holds local brevet rank
(like Jonah) as a Mussulman saint. Commentators generally assert that the
Elkosh of Nahum was in Palestine; but local tradition adheres unshakenly to
the claims of the Assyrian Alkosh, and the Jews make an annual pilgrimage
in order to visit this shrine. After{117} all there is much to be urged for it.
Nahum was “of the children of the captivity,” and he certainly knew his
Nineveh better than most dwellers in Palestine can have done.
It was a weird and striking effect that we witnessed from it next
morning. The clouds lay low and horizontal above the plain beneath us; and
many of them seemed to have sunk on to the ground, and looked exactly
like lakes under the level rays of the rising sun. As his orb rose higher they
lifted, and dispersed into wreaths of vapour. How well might such an effect
have inspired the words of the Prophet, “Nineveh is of old as a pool of
water: yet they shall flee away!”
Some three miles east of Alkosh lies a great recess in the mountains—
hardly so much a valley as a deep pocket among the cliffs. And at the end of
this pocket is ensconced one of the most interesting Christian relics in these
regions—the ancient monastery of Rabban Hormizd, the Scetis of the
uttermost east. Rabban Hormizd is no western monastery; it is a typical
Oriental Laura: a rookery of independent hermits rather than a community
of monks. And to speak of it as a “rookery” is hardly so descriptive as to
call it a warren of sand-martins; for the anchorites’ cells are all caves, some
natural and some artificial, burrowed into the escarpments of a great natural
cirque.
Rabban Hormizd, the original and eponymous hermit, established
himself here in the eighth century; and the fame of his singular sanctity
soon drew hundreds of other eremites to the neighbourhood of his lonely
retreat. Here he lived praying, fasting, and macerating himself after the
manner of the Great St. Anthony; and wrestling mightily with the devils
who notoriously frequent such desert spots. He was evidently a believer in
“close action,” for the adjoining pocket is known as the Vale of Devils; and,
appropriately enough, a little village of “Devil-Worshippers” is situated at
the mouth of it to this day.
But perhaps in the eyes of Rabban Hormizd even the very devils
themselves were not so foul an abomination as{118} the great rival monastery
on Jebel Maklub,[70] which rises conspicuous in the midst of Mosul plain in
full sight of his cell. For Rabban Hormizd was a “Nestorian,” while the
monks of Sheikh Mattai were “Jacobites;” their monastery being still the
abode of their Maphrian, the second dignitary in their church. Both sects
are equally obnoxious to the intermediate orthodox; but they are even more
obnoxious to each other, for they draw towards opposite poles.
 His zeal against the monks of Sheikh Mattai roused Rabban Hormizd to
the great deed of his lifetime. He actually quitted his cell (for the only
occasion on record) and started on a lone-hand raid against his adversaries’
stronghold. The monks of Sheikh Mattai received him hospitably, and gave
him lodging in their monastery. But at dead of night he arose and groped his
way to their library, where the works of “the accursed Cyril” stood stored
like cordite shells. By virtue of his prayers he summoned up a miraculous
spring in the centre of the floor, and carefully washed every line of writing
off every page of their books! Then leaving them a collection of nice clean
leaves free from every taint of heresy, he departed joyfully to his hermitage
and thereafter stirred from it no more.
This scandalous transaction was of course accounted to him for
righteousness; and indeed Oriental religious controversies continue to be
conducted on very similar lines to this day!
The monastery of Rabban Hormizd has always been kept going ever
since the date of its foundation; but now it is only the Succursale of the big
modern monastery established on the plains below it, and there are but
some four or five monks still left in the old mother house. They are Uniat
Nestorians who have submitted themselves to the Papacy, and are
consequently not at all in charity with the independent Nestorian church
from which they have seceded. Hearing that we were going to Tyari, the
home of the independent Nestorians, they inquired artlessly “Pray, do{119}
you know anything of a deacon there? one Werda, a very wicked person—a
tall man with a red beard?” (Our deacon is short and rotund, and his beard
is black).
“I am Shamasha Werda,” replied that worthy with a twinkle.
“Oh! but we don’t think you can be the man we mean!” protested our
hosts in some consternation.
“Oh, yes! I am,” persisted the delighted deacon.[71]
Despite this contretemps, however, we got on with our hosts very
amicably. They fed us with tea and cake, and wine from their own vineyard;
and finished by conducting us over their monastery and showing us all the
sights.
The place must be a furnace in summer time, for the cirque faces due
southward; the tawny precipices are completely destitute of vegetation, and
must radiate the heat mercilessly all round that breathless pit. In the caves
would lurk such coolness as was going; but the lack of water must have
been a sore trial in summer. Hermits, however, are generally credited with
requiring a very moderate supply.
The cells lie some way up the ramp, and are reached by a steep zigzag
pathway. How many of them there may be we do not pretend to guess; but
we think we may safely say hundreds; for they extend laterally for several
hundred yards along the concave sweep of the corrie, and (like the port-
holes of an old line-of-battle ship) they are ranged up in tier above tier.
They are not of any uniform pattern, like the older hermitages at Dara; and
some few (probably those which have been most recently occupied) are
furnished with windows and doors. A series of narrow pathways and rude
rock staircases strings the whole assortment together, and by these the
solitaries were enabled to assemble at their church.
Here and there the main pathway is barred by the erection of a rude
arched gateway: but the only real building is the church, which is terraced
out on a buttress of rock. This church is comparatively modern, dating from
about 1500;{120} but behind it, jammed against the face of the cliff, is
another and much older church erected in the ninth or tenth century, and
adorned with some nice bits of carving somewhat similar to the Runic work
of our own land. Behind this again, excavated in the rock itself, is the
veritable cell of Rabban Hormizd—a chamber some eight feet square, and
approached by a sort of winding rabbit burrow. The original door and
window of this cell are now closed, the church having been built up against
it; and the grave of the hermit is placed in one of the walls, at a spot which
is situated immediately behind the altar.
The church of Rabban Hormizd is very much “Lord of Name,” that is it
enjoys great repute as a place of pilgrimage; and the virtue for which it is
chiefly celebrated is the healing of the insane, or (as they are more
commonly called in this country) the “possessed.” The lunatic (often quite
willing) is solemnly conducted to the church, and is tethered up in it for the
night with a ponderous iron chain and collar affixed to a staple in the wall.
[72] By morning (unless he is very mad indeed) he will usually profess
himself cured. Quite a number of other mountain churches can boast a
similar reputation, but their methods of treatment (as will be hereafter
related) are often more drastic still.
 We rejoined our caravan at the mouth of the gorge, and pursued our way
steadily eastward along the foot of the mountains; passing first the village
of Baadri, dominated by Ali Beg’s castle, and then rejoining the road which
we had followed previously on our visit to the Yezidi shrine. Some two
hours beyond Ain Sufni, we reached the river Gomel, a fairly large
mountain stream; and here we swung round to the left, perhaps half a mile
up the river, in order{121} to get a passing glimpse of the famous “Picture
Rocks” of Bavian.[73]
The Gomel emerges from the mountains by a flat-bottomed winding
valley shut in on either hand by vertical walls of rock; and along the cliffs
on the right bank a little above the point of exit, hangs that marvellous
gallery of “pictures” so well known to Assyriologists. The principal bas-
relief is a huge square panel, graven on the face of a rock bastion which
immediately overhangs the stream. It comprises four gigantic figures; now
wofully battered and weather-beaten, but awesome beyond all telling in the
loneliness of that desolate glen. Some dozen smaller panels are ranged
above it, along an upper story of the cliff; and at its foot two great detached
stone tables lie half submerged in the waters of the stream. The design of
the big panel is self-repeating, each half being mirrored by the other; and
this circumstance is of great assistance in deciphering the details of the
work. For, some thousand years after the carvings were executed, a party of
mis-begotten hermits came to settle down in the valley, and burrowed a set
of cells for themselves along the face of the cliff. Two or three of these
vandals chose to excavate immediately behind the great panel, and cut out
their windows in the middle of it, quite regardless of the “idols” outside.
With fortunate carelessness, however, they did not do their damage
symmetrically, and the portions destroyed upon one side remain on the
other intact. The subject is King Sennacherib making an offering to the
goddess Ishtar; and the inscription records the destruction of Babylon,
which had rebelled against him at the commencement of his reign, and
which he took and razed to the ground.
The panels on the cliff above are all identical with each other. They have
semi-circular heads, and are carved with the figure of the king. Of the two
great slabs in the water, one bears on its face three figures—apparently the
god Bel and two worshippers—and is carved on one of the{122} angles into a
small human-headed bull. The second is so much eroded that it is
impossible to distinguish the design.
 It seems that the cliffs of the Gomel were one of the principal quarries
which supplied the materials for constructing the ancient palaces of
Nineveh. Most of the great slabs were quarried from the upper beds of the
limestone, and were brought down to the river bank, at the foot of the
principal bas-relief, by a broad inclined way which can still be distinctly
traced. Down this they could be lowered on rollers, and would then be
safely deposited upon the spit of sand and shingle piled up under the bank
by the river; for this work would be done in summer, at a time when the
waters were low. The gravel beneath the slab would then be dug away in
sections; and, bit by bit, there would be inserted under it a wicker-framed
raft or keleg supported on inflated skins. Given a sufficiency of skins such a
raft can be made to float anything, and in autumn, when the river rose
again, the slab would be floated down to the Tigris, and landed under the
walls of Nineveh near the palace for which it was destined. The two slabs
now lying in the water were evidently intended to be transported in this
manner, but for some cause (which we can now only guess at) they were
eventually abandoned unshipped. Possibly they were mis-handled and
damaged. Possibly the building of the palace was interrupted by the
assassination of Sennacherib, and was never resumed subsequently when
Esarhaddon had quelled Sharezer’s revolt.
It is conceivable that the great panel also would eventually have been cut
from the rock behind it, lowered on to the spit beneath, and dispatched in
similar fashion; but it is perhaps more likely that this was always intended
to remain as a permanent monument in its present site. The smaller panels
along the crest of the cliff do not look as if they had been destined for
removal. They were probably carved for mere “swank,” to give dignity to
the royal quarries; or to keep the carvers’ hands in, at a time when contract
work was slack.
The handling and moving of the ponderous blocks habitually employed
by the ancients would tax even modern{123} constructors, with all the
resources of machinery and steam power which nowadays they have at
command. But the Assyrians (like the Romans after them) could avail
themselves of a limitless amount of dirt-cheap labour. The hordes of
captives taken in their wars had to be used somehow; and no one raised any
objection if they were rather rapidly used up. Men cost less than oxen or
asses, and their strength could be applied more effectively. They could be
drilled to keep step, and to give their tugs in unison. Moreover the old
Oriental task-masters possessed an asset which we have lost—a supreme
scorn for being unduly hurried. They could well afford to spend a
generation or so on buildings which were designed to endure for centuries,
and which might have endured for millennia if only they had been left
alone.
But even their works of utility have been no more spared by posterity
than the tablets which recorded their learning, or the palaces which were the
trophies of their pride. And such a work also had its source at the quarries in
the Gomel valley; one of those splendid irrigating channels which used to
feed the desert with the waters of life.[74] Its course can be traced for some
distance alongside the banks of the river; where for yards upon yards the
ample conduit is hewn through spurs of solid rock. Werda had seen further
remains of it far away on the plains to the southward; “and the villagers
were carrying off the stone facing of the embankments to use in building
their huts.” It was “only the work of infidels,” and consequently fair loot for
anyone. Now European engineers are labouring to re-establish what might
have been so easily preserved.
The “Pictures of Bavian” are at least exempt from the fate which has
befallen most pictures. They are fixed for ever immovably in the position
for which they were designed. They are like some forgotten “Old Master”
which still hangs tarnished and ill-lit above the altar where it was dedicated;
and which shows there far more nobly than{124} when restored and exhibited
in a brand-new gilded frame on a glaring gallery wall. There are far finer
Assyrian sculptures in the Louvre and the British Museum than the grim,
gaunt, battered sentinels that keep watch over the Gomel vale. But ranged
along a Bloomsbury corridor they are obviously mere graven images; while
enthroned amid the solitudes of their own eerie mountains they seem to be
the very gods themselves.
There are several similar bas-reliefs scattered here and there about the
mountains—some fairly well preserved like those at Malthaiyah between
Dohuk and Alkosh, some now almost obliterated like that by the gate of
Amadia. The great king seems to have delighted in setting his seal upon any
conspicuous point that was reached by his conquering armies: and to this
day that instinct re-asserts itself in the behaviour of Private Atkins, who
delights to carve the badge of his regiment upon any conspicuous precipice
in Afghanistan.
 A caravan moves but slowly, but it generally wants to keep moving, and
the novice who is travelling with it finds that he is allowed few lengthy
halts. The old stagers always seem thinking of some point a little way ahead
which they would much prefer to have behind them. Sometimes it is a bad
bit of road which can only be traversed in broad daylight; sometimes a river
which may suddenly be rendered unfordable by the intervention of an
unforeseen spate. On this stage the unknown factor was the conduct of the
Khozr river, a much more considerable stream than the Gomel, which lay
some four hours further east; and whose behaviour on the present occasion
was more problematical than usual because the dark clouds to the
northward might imply heavy rain in the hills.
“Rabbi Mr. Wigram” had lively recollections of his last experiences with
the Khozr. He had been kept for three days on the banks of it, waiting for
the floods to subside. And he had forded it at last “in his birthday suit,” with
the water over his horse’s withers, and his clothes slung over his shoulders
to keep them out of the wet. We are wont to deride the rustic who expectat
dum defluat amnis;{125} but our derision only shows our own ignorance as
much as his expectancy showed his. The rustic was quite well acquainted
with the behaviour of his own mountain rivers, and knew that when they
were in spate there was simply nothing else to be done.
And our chances of passing the Khozr were rendered additionally
dubious by the fact that none of our party knew the right road to take for the
fords. The zaptiehs had never been in this district and could offer us no
assistance. The Rabbi Effendi had approached the river from a different
direction, and that some years before. We caught a guide in one of the
villages; but as his first step was to ask the way himself at the very next
village that we came to, we grew distrustful of his capacity and dismissed
him again to his home. Few of the inhabitants ever stray beyond the bounds
of their own village, and on a more extended excursion they are often
hopelessly at sea.
Thus thrown on our own resources we took a bee-line across the
moorland, steering our course by the light of nature and by a very small
scale map. And fortune so far favoured us that we found the river in its very
mildest mood; and though we had struck it at none of the recognized
fording-places, there was no difficulty in getting across.
 But safe on the further bank our perplexities recommenced again. The
dusk was falling rapidly, and we needed a lodging for the night. By now we
should have been at Khalilka, a prosperous and desirable village, which is
part of the private estate of the ex-Sultan Abdul Hamid, and which on that
account enjoys immunity from taxes and conscription and raids.[75] But of
course in missing the fords we had also missed Khalilka, and not knowing
whether it were above or below us, were uncertain which way to turn.
However, it was tolerably obvious that if we followed the river either way
we should presently find a village of some sort; and a little distance down
the left bank we alighted{126} upon a straggling hamlet of miserable Kurdish
hovels, which we unanimously accepted as being “Hobson’s choice.”
Of course no khan is to be looked for in any of these outlying villages,
and it is customary for the traveller to quarter himself upon the rais or head
man. He will obtain fire and shelter, and liberty to eat his own provisions,
and possibly (if he is fortunate) will be able to purchase bread. Such
entertainment should be requited, if mine host is poor, in money; if he is a
person of importance, by some kind of trifling gift. Hospitality is hardly
ever refused even to the humblest wayfarer, and public opinion quite backs
a man who enforces it if it is denied.
In the present case the only shelter available was the veranda of the rais’
house; which afforded us a roof certainly, but no outer wall—only a wattle
hurdle about five feet high. Here, however, we kindled a fire, and packed
ourselves in pretty comfortably; though the night was made constantly
hideous by the howling of the village dogs. Their uproar was not
unjustified, for (as we were informed next morning) a scavenging pack of
“you-eë-yahs” had been prowling round the hamlet all night. A “you-eë-
yah” is a sort of hyæna which haunts the neighbourhood of villages, and
gives intimation of its presence by incessantly howling out its own name. It
is known alternatively as a Ghul or Sheitan because it is addicted to digging
up and devouring the corpses buried in the graveyards; a foul and stealthy
brute, but not dangerous to man. We had heard the howls all night
intermittently between the volleys of barking, but had thought it was only
the village cats taking their share in the row.
Next day the road was easier to follow; not because it was marked more
clearly, but because its direction was defined by a string of Mohammedan
cemeteries which were dotted across the moorland at intervals of three or
four miles. These are small square walled enclosures, generally with a
santon’s tomb in the middle, and with tall slender Moslem head-stones
marking some of the principal graves. The country was open and
undulating, but everywhere barren and pebbly; one can hardly as yet call it
stony, as{127} that more emphatic word will be urgently needed later on.
Here and there were traces of villages; but these were all abandoned and
ruined, with nothing left but foundations, or a fragment or two of broken
wall. The only inhabited villages stood high on the hills overlooking us,
generally with an Agha’s castle planted somewhat aggressively in the midst.
There is something unnatural in this desertion, for the land might
obviously be cultivated, and within the walls of the cemeteries there stand
many well-grown trees.[76] But the key to the flight of the inhabitants is not
the parsimony of nature:
 Rookhope stands in a pleasant place
If the false thieves wad let it be.

And this essential condition is very conspicuously lacking in the country

between Bavian and Akra, not to mention several districts further north; for
across this ground twice a year pass that horde of human locusts, the
wandering Heriki tribesmen; and one skinning every six months is more
than any village can survive.
The Heriki are a large tribe of Kurdish nomads who possess no
permanent domicile. They encamp in winter on the plain of Mosul, and in
summer on the loftier and cooler plateau of Urmi; and with all their flocks
and herds and their other possessions, they migrate every spring from
Mosul to Urmi, and every autumn from Urmi to Mosul. It is not a good
thing for a village to lie in the track of the Heriki, for everything that is not
too hot or too heavy they annex and carry away. They “lift” the sheep and
cattle first; then the rugs and kettles and pitchers and the scanty household
plenishing; and they leave their hapless entertainers with nothing but bare
walls and rags.
We had learned something of their thoroughness at our last night’s
lodgings on the Khozr; for in the veranda of the rais’ house we had found
three or four large bales, securely corded up in pieces of carpet, and had
casually{128} asked what they were. Our poor host replied despondently that
he was “warehousing” them for the Heriki. They would call upon him and
claim them when next they passed that way. No; they paid him nothing for
“warehousing,” but he had to be responsible for them; and he had to restore
four-fold if any of the contents were lost.
“And what is in them?” we asked. The poor wretch grew even more
dejected. “Oh, it is all my own property; my own rugs and cooking pots,”
he replied. “That is to say part of it mine, and part the property of the other
villagers, which the Heriki took from us when they plundered the village
last time!”
So complete was the reign of terror which the impudent scoundrels had
established, and so powerless was the Government to keep their
depredations in check, that they could actually dragoon their victims into
keeping their own plunder till they called for it, and go off for six months
quite confident that their orders would be implicitly obeyed!
 Our day’s stage ended at Akra; a considerable mountain township and
the seat of a Turkish kaimakam, a departmental governor, subordinate in the
present instance to the Vali of the province of Mosul. Akra displays itself
most imposingly to a traveller approaching from the westward, and indeed
forms a striking spectacle from whatever point it is viewed. Behind it a
group of steep-pitched ridges are gabled out from the main mountain chain
like a range of gigantic dormers, and drop down in rugged hipped ends to
the level plain far below. Their crests are hacked and indented like the
“dissipated saw” of the Bab Ballads, and the intervening gorges are half
choked with the avalanches of boulders which have cascaded down their
flanks. The lower portions of these gorges are filled with trees which grow
in the terraced garden plots alongside the little rivulets, but the upper slopes
are all bare and tawny like broken craters of half-baked clinker brick.

ORAMAR.
Looking northward across the gorge towards
the crags of Supa Durig between Jilu and Baz.
No. 6

One of the most prominent of these ridges breaks down into a sort of
saddle, and surges up again into a rocky knoll before its final descent to the
plain; and across this saddle are hung the houses of Akra, with the ruined
fragments of{129} its ancient citadel crowning the highest point of the rocky
ridge above. The bulk of the town overflows into the ravine on the western
side, where the houses are ranged round the sweep of the hollow like the
stepped seats of an amphitheatre. So steep are the slopes on which they lie
that the roof of each house serves as a front yard to its next door neighbour,
or perhaps one should say to its neighbour on the next story; and the streets
are all so narrow that they are quite undiscernible from a distance, though
one of them is in fact wide enough to accommodate a rudimentary bazaar.
Akra does not boast a khan, but our zaptiehs had already decided for us
at what house we were to spend the evening. We were to put up with the
malmudir, the departmental treasurer;[77] and one of our escort had already
spurred ahead to inform that worthy functionary of the treat that was in
store for him. This seemed rather an arbitrary proceeding, but the malmudir
quite acquiesced in it. We met him at the entrance to the town, walking out
to make us welcome; a young and pleasant looking man, who greeted us in
French very hospitably, and guided us up the steep stepped streets to his
house on the saddle above.
None of the houses in Akra can be called in any way palatial, and
probably the malmudir’s lodging was a typical residence of the better class.
He occupied a single apartment on the first floor, the big landing outside
serving as his kitchen and servant’s room, and the ground floor consisting
only of an entrance hall and lumber room. The furniture of his living room
(as usual) consisted only of carpets and cushions. The windows were set
very low down, so that one could see out of them comfortably when
squatting on the floor; and above them were square recesses which served
as receptacles for books.
He gave us a capital supper, consisting of fried eggs,{130} rissoles
wrapped in cabbage, and a curry of meat and fruit. This was served in
several dishes on one large tray, round which we all sat cross-legged
straying from dish to dish with our wooden spoons. We had only one
tumbler between the three of us, which we all used in turn; and the meal
was concluded with the usual tiny cups of coffee.[78]
Meanwhile he poured out his woes to us: woes with which we could
heartily sympathize, and which afforded an instructive commentary upon
the progress of Turkish “Reform.” He himself was a native of Aleppo, a
Syrian Catholic Christian. He had been duly trained for his post in the
Government offices at Constantinople; and had received his present
appointment in pursuance of that great Principle which was first enunciated
at the Revolution, recognizing that Christians and Moslems should possess
equal standing in the State. This admirable theory worked fairly in
Constantinople itself, and even at the more accessible provincial capitals
such as Smyrna and Aleppo; but alas for its practical efficacy in such out-
of-the-way districts as Mosul! It would take at least a generation for reform
to filter through here! Here all the administrative offices had been long
since cornered by the invincibly corrupt “Old Gang;” a set of pig-headed
reactionaries whose dead weight nothing could shift. What use was it to tell
them that Christians and Moslems were equal, when the Koran expressly
stated that they were emphatically not? Why should they use the powers
that were their inalienable birthright to make true believers obey a Christian
dog?
Accordingly the poor malmudir found himself cold-shouldered and
thwarted at every turn by the officials who were nominally his colleagues;
by the cadi, or judge of the district; by the binbashi who controlled the
police. They persistently refused to support him in carrying out his own
duties, particularly if the defaulters whom he wished to bring to book
chanced to be their own private friends; and{131} their continual snubbing of
him had infected even his own subordinates who obeyed him grudgingly
and reluctantly. The kaimakam, his immediate chief, had indeed always
shown himself friendly; but even with his support he felt he could make no
headway; and, though still but new to his office, he was already sick of the
job. Indeed he had already written twice to the Vali begging to be
transferred to Beirut or Aleppo, but as yet he had received no answer. This
however, we privately thought, was not surprising; for Tahir Pasha never
answers anybody; and every official in his vilayet would like to be
transferred to Beirut or Aleppo if he could!
Of course it is not at all improbable that centuries of subjection have left
the Christians in Turkey constitutionally unfit for positions of authority:
that, for all their superior intelligence, they are at present as incapable of
governing Turks and Kurds and Arabs as the Bengali Babus are of
governing Pathans and Sikhs. But even if the power is latent in them, it is
bound at first to be exercised in the face of intense resentment; and this fact
will long constitute a formidable obstacle to any constitutional reform.
It seemed that the malmudir’s welcome to us was to some extent
accounted for by the distinction which European visitors would confer upon
him in the eyes of his carping colleagues. He was earnest with us to remain
as his guests for a second day in order that he might exhibit us; but from
this we begged to excuse ourselves as we could not spare the time.
However, faute de mieux, we might at least call on the kaimakam, and
thither our host conducted us as soon as we had finished our coffee.
 The kaimakam resided in the Government House, a dilapidated two-
story building disposed around a forlorn courtyard and generally resembling
a khan. It was picturesque enough in a slummy way, and the groups of
soldiers snoozing under the lanterns in the deep entrance archway would
merit yet higher commendation. But there was little enough of traditional
“Oriental glamour” about the dirty white-washed walls; and the governor’s
official audience hall resembled an ill-kept village school-room.{132}
Conversation turned on the Italian war; a subject on which all parties were
profoundly ignorant; for we had heard nothing since leaving Europe, and
the kaimakam nothing but what Government channels allowed to filter
through. The Government does not encourage the dissemination of
inauspicious news; and herein no doubt they act prudently, for such news
might easily excite the Kurds to break out in reprisals against the nearest
Christians. But it is certainly somewhat amazing to discover how
thoroughly authentic intelligence can be stifled. They had heard of nothing
but Turkish victories: have very likely heard nothing else to this day.[79]
Two or three of the prominent residents dropped in to chat while we
were sitting there; but the resident whom we would most have wished to see
was unfortunately not among them. For among the inhabitants of Akra is an
old gentleman of the bluest blood in Asia—the last living descendant of the
Khalif Harun al Raschid the hero of the Arabian Nights. Akra formed a part
of the Abbassides’ ancestral principality before they attained to the
Khalifate; and when their dynasty was overthrown by the Seljuk Sultans in
1050, it was to their ancient patrimony that they retired again. Now even
this last possession has also slipped through their fingers; and the poor old
survivor, though his social status is impregnable, lives on, as a private
citizen of Akra, in very reduced circumstances indeed.
Our final impressions of Akra were gleaned in the bazaar, and induce us
to rank it more highly as a centre of sport than of business. “Rabbi Mr.
Wigram” had needed some trifling repair to his boots, and had accordingly
sent them overnight to a cobbler. But when the boots were returned next
morning, the part that needed repair had been ignored completely, and the
repairer had only displayed his forethought by appropriating the English
nails.
Akra, however, in this respect had certainly shown more{133} enterprize
than Mosul; for the Sheikh Birader Effendi had previously tried his fortune
there. He had the prescience to allow three days for the job; but when the
boots were demanded on the morning of the fourth day they had not even
lost their nails. Friday (it was explained) had been the Mohammedan
Sabbath, and Saturday the Jewish, and Sunday the Christian; and no doubt a
Bank Holiday on Monday was only averted by the fact of the boots being
prematurely reclaimed.[80]
The second incident at Akra was of a still more farcical character. A
Kurd had come in from the mountains in order to purchase a mule, and after
a good deal of chaffering had traded off a pistol in exchange. The seller had
promptly proceeded to test the purchase money by the rather drastic method
of firing a bullet through his leg; and, on the accident being reported to us,
we had deemed it our duty to go and volunteer “first aid.” The patient,
however, was quite content with his own remedies, and not at all anxious to
experiment in new-fangled treatment a la Franga. He was plugging the
hole himself with a mixture of butter and cow dung which he was poking in
with a stick! Probably this dressing possesses some kind of antiseptic
qualities; for it is much favoured in the mountains, and somehow does not
seem to prevent the wounds healing. But perhaps the cure results not by
virtue, but in spite, of the remedy, for with these tough-fibred mountaineers
“first intention” will hardly be denied.{134}
 CHAPTER VII

AN ORIENTAL VICH IAN VOHR

(THE SHEIKH OF BARZAN)

“IT is real rough travelling in the mountains,” says the Mosul resident
casually; and the traveller just arrived from Europe hears that innocent
observation with dismay. He has undergone a fortnight of arabas and khans
and chóls and zaptiehs, and lo! that purgatorial experience is dismissed as a
holiday jaunt. It is therefore with some misgiving that he enters those
formidable mountains where he has been promised enlightenment as to
what “real rough travelling” means.
Let it be recorded for his consolation that he will learn the worst at the
outset. If he is not daunted at Akra he may quite fairly count on winning
through. The ascent from that town to the top of the pass behind it is as
nasty a bit of climbing as any in all Hakkiari, and he who achieves it with
credit may pass as a graduated mountaineer. The path is not so nerve-
shaking in appearance as some of the dizzy goat-tracks that have to be
encountered beyond it; but it is an epitome of every trial which can be
ordinarily presented in concrete form. It is steep and rugged and rotten. It
traverses slabs of sloping rock, and sheets of slippery scree. Its surface is
pitted like honeycomb with holes about twelve inches deep and six or eight
inches in diameter; and if any better traps could be devised for tripping
unwary pedestrians, or breaking the legs of horses, no doubt they would be
provided to make the entanglement complete. Our katarjis admit that it is
bad, but regard the badness as incorrigible. “Her nainsell didna mak ta
road” (a fact that is quite self-evident), and “if shentlemans{135} are seeking
ta Red Gregarach” what better going can they expect?
From the summit of the pass (full three thousand feet above the plain)
we descend into a fertile valley, well watered by a mountain rivulet, and
feathery with lofty pampas reed; and an equal ascent on the further side
brings us to the top of a second range of mountains, from which we can
take our first survey of the wild land whither we are bound.
Beneath us lies the Zab valley, a chaos of hummocks and hollows all
flung together confusedly like the waves of a choppy sea; and the broad
bright ribbon of the river, almost equal in volume to the Tigris, picks out a
devious passage through a maze of interlacing bluffs. The opposite side of
the chasm is defined by a bold escarpment, scarred by the tracks of winter
torrents and buttressed by jagged limestone fins. And above this, along the
horizon, tower the great snow peaks of the Hakkiari Oberland—the rigidus
Niphates of Horace; the spot where (according to Milton) Satan first planted
his feet when he alighted on the new-made world.
An iron-bound untamable fastness—a regular Brigands’ Paradise—it is
known as the Ashiret country, that is to say, “the Country of the Clans.” And
the inhabitants (to do them justice) are quite ready to exploit its capabilities.
Though nominally Turkish subjects they are actually semi-independent; half
borderers of the type of Johnny Armstrong, half highlanders of the type of
Rob Roy. Here the Sultan’s decrees are worth little without a visible
backing of bayonets; and every individual filibuster does that which is right
—or more accurately that which is expedient—in his own eyes. Such
authority as exists anywhere is for the most part in the hands of the tribal
chieftains: and the suzerainty of the Stamboul Government is just about as
effective as the suzerainty of the old kings of Scotland on the north side of
Stirling Bridge.
There are three degrees of security for a traveller in Asiatic Turkey.
There are districts where he is safe: there are districts where a zaptieh can
keep him safe: and there{136} are districts where a zaptieh can’t. Our
knights-errant brought us down loyally to the village of Biri Kupra, a
ramshackle Kurdish hamlet which stands at the foot of the pass. They
escorted us on the next morning as far as the banks of the river—but when
we reached the ferry their responsibility came to an end. Across they could
not follow us. It was the Sheikh of Barzan’s country. And the Hukumet felt
some delicacy about parading their officials in his domain. No doubt he
would receive them graciously—under favour and without prejudice; but
there was no earthly use in pretending that zaptiehs could protect us there.
It is rather an adventure for a native to travel in the Ashiret country.
Supposing that he is at all worth robbing, he should sound his way carefully
as he goes. But Europeans enjoy more security. The tribesmen have made
the discovery that if a European is molested there is almost inevitably a
row. His ambassador prods up the Hukumet, and the Hukumet sends an
expedition; and “a mort o’ troops” march through the country, and live at
free quarters in the villages, and imprison a number of people who are
probably not at all to blame. Thus, though the original aggressor is
generally the last person to be directly incommoded, he incurs quite a lot of
unpopularity for “breeding such a function” in the land. Even the most
reckless marauder will think twice before pulling his trigger upon a convoy
that is travelling under the protection of a European hat: and thus the wearer
of the hat aforesaid finds that every native who is travelling in his direction
will tack himself on to his party and “walk under his shadow” as far as their
ways coincide.
We ourselves in the present instance had no cause for any disquietude;
for the Sheikh of Barzan is not only one of the most powerful but one of the
most respectable of the mountain chieftains, and is pleased to regard all
Englishmen as his particular friends.
The Zab, at the point where we struck it, is a broad, deep, rapid, river;
and fording is out of the question either for man or beast. The Sheikh
usually maintains a horse{137} ferry, of the type we used on the Euphrates;
but this was temporally hors de combat, being reported to have sprung a
leak. We found it beached on the further shore, and it certainly seemed to us
that a little human ingenuity and two or three gallons of tar were all that it
needed to make it seaworthy; but all parties seemed quite content to put up
for a time with the keleg—a little wattle hurdle buoyed up on four inflated
skins.
The keleg could only carry two passengers at a time, or alternatively a
very small cargo; and the beasts had all to be unloaded, and induced (most
reluctantly) to swim. Thus it took a long time to transport us; but presently
we were all loaded up again and proceeded about an hour’s march up a little
lateral valley, till we reached the village of Barzan at the foot of the great
flanking hill.
Barzan is rather larger than an average Kurdish village, but boasts no
distinguishing feature to suggest its importance in the land. Most of even
the less powerful chiefs are housed in defensible “castles”; but the Sheikh
of Barzan “dwells among his own people,” and his palace is just an
agglomeration of several ordinary houses joined in one. It possesses no
outer door at all (or none that we have ever discovered), and we entered it
by the simple process of stepping on to the roof, and walking across to the
summer reception room, a rude belvedere on the farther side. The Sheikh, it
appeared, was absent. He had gone on a visit to Amadia, and was expected
back the day after to-morrow; but as we were journeying westward we
should certainly meet him next day. Meanwhile we were made warmly
welcome by his old major-domo the Imaum[81] (an old friend of some of
our party), by his young mollah or domestic chaplain, and by several
truculent-looking duinhewassels who formed part of his regular following.
We could not, of course, be allowed to pass by the house without eating;
but we specially begged of our hosts that (as we were anxious to push
forward) they would only give{138} us such food as they could quickly and
easily prepare. And we hold it a genuine proof of their friendliness that they
actually did as we asked them, bringing eggs, bread, honey, and tea. A big
man, who wishes to do you honour formally, would consent to no such
curtailment. He would probably keep you waiting for hours while he killed
and dressed a sheep.
When we arose to depart the imaum and mollah went with us to a certain
tree beyond the village in order to “pour us on our road.” All important
houses in these parts have some recognized point on the approach to them,
whither the owner proceeds to welcome and dismiss his guests. It is
recorded that on one occasion only (in order to meet the British Consul) the
Sheikh rode out in person as far as this statutory tree.
Our hosts had provided us with an armed escort—a “Boy of the Belt” in
a red turban, indicating that he belonged to the Sheikh’s personal body-
guard. And under his guidance we proceeded for a day and a half up the
valley, a journey somewhat comparable to the progress of a beetle across
the ridges and furrows of a ploughed field. The hills are too stony for
cultivation; but here and there a fan of good soil has spread itself out from
the mouth of one of the gullies, and has been terraced into grain plots by the
inhabitants of the village hard by. These villages (judged by local standards)
may be called fairly prosperous-looking, for the Sheikh is a merciful over-
lord: but the “roads” are consistently villainous; the “Far Cry” was an asset
at Lochow!
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