Christianity alone among the monotheisms sought premature reconciliation of civilization with nature

Evidence

There is reason to believe that domination over nature has its primitive origins in European Christian dogma that was transformed in modernity, as often is the case, into secularized forms. I say “primitive origins” for at least three main reasons: First, it is true that Christian Europe as a social and political tradition developed, for centuries before the Renaissance, a complex form of what the philosopher Murray Bookchin, among others, has called domination of man over man, which Feudalism, the Church, and, later, absolute monarchism made effectively possible. Yet, if European Christianity as an intellectual tradition and doctrine were to be held as the common or exclusive source of this domination, as the technology historian Lynn White has famously maintained, then several phenomena occurring only in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries would have had to happen at an earlier stage, the eleventh or fourteenth century being as auspicious a context for such developments as any later time. That domination in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries qualitatively exceeded any earlier bounds calls for an explanation that transcends Christian doctrine and practice. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 169 (#qualifies, via linked claim)

It is no longer accurate in this context to employ the term domination, for it underrepresents the force of modern Europe’s structure of thought and its performativity. Domination is merely control and influence exercised over someone or something else, a characteristic that may be attributed to all complex societies and empires of the past, since the dawn of “civilizational” time. The term, I think, might be adequate to describe the way empires ruled over subjects, especially the conquered; and it is certainly too strong to describe premodern domination over nature in the material, physical sense. However much the environment and ecology were exploited, and to a limited extent they undoubtedly were, the conception and understanding embedded in domination did not extend to a consciousness of control-for-the-sake-of-transformation to one’s will, if not one’s pleasure. Nor did premodern domination over conquered subjects involve conscious or even semiconscious designs that began with the assumption that they were an extension of a controllable and—as Scheler put it—manipulable nature and thus subject to domination that integrates the power to transform. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 192 (#contradicts, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Domination of nature cannot be explained by Christian doctrine alone — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism: A Critique of…, 169; Premodern empires lacked the will to transform nature that defining modern sovereignty — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism: A Critique of…, 192; Modern domination both reacted against and transformed premodern Christian forms

Broader Connections

• Domination of nature cannot be explained by Christian doctrine alone #qualifies (0.75) — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 169
• Premodern empires lacked the will to transform nature that defining modern sovereignty #contradicts (0.72) — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 192
• Modern domination both reacted against and transformed premodern Christian forms #qualifies (0.72)