Domination of nature cannot be explained by Christian doctrine alone

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

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the familiar ‘Lynn White thesis’ that Christianity caused ecological domination; Hallaq is complicating it by noting the temporal lag. — connects to: Christianity alone among the monotheisms sought premature reconciliation of civilization with nature