Orthodox Environmental Ethics: Creation as Sacrament

Orthodox creation care rests not on modern ecology but on an ancient sacramental cosmology: the world is God’s gift, and the human being is the “priest of creation” who offers it back to God in thanksgiving. This file sets out the theological basis (Schmemann on creation as sacrament; Zizioulas on man as priest of creation), the institutional history from Patriarch Dimitrios’ 1989 encyclical through Patriarch Bartholomew the “Green Patriarch” and the 2017 declaration with Pope Francis, the scholarship of John Chryssavgis, attributed Orthodox cautions about ideological environmentalism, and the ascetic ethos of restraint as ecological practice.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Theological Basis

Creation as Sacrament (Schmemann)

The starting point of Orthodox environmental thought is not a doctrine of stewardship in the legal sense but a sacramental vision of the cosmos. Fr. Alexander Schmemann (1921–1983) argued that the world is given to humanity as gift and communion: “The world was created as the ‘matter,’ the material of one all-embracing eucharist, and man was created as the priest of this cosmic sacrament” (Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World: Sacraments and Orthodoxy, SVS Press, 1973, p. 15). For Schmemann the human being is homo adorans, the one who blesses God for the world and in that blessing receives the world back transfigured. Sin, on this account, is the refusal to offer the world eucharistically — the reduction of creation to mere matter for consumption. Environmental degradation is therefore a symptom of a deeper, liturgical disorder.

Man as Priest of Creation (Zizioulas)

Metropolitan John Zizioulas of Pergamon (1931–2023), the Ecumenical Patriarchate’s leading systematic theologian, developed this insight into the formula for which he is best known. The human vocation, he argued, is to act as the “priest of creation”: uniquely capable of referring the whole material world back to God in freedom and thanksgiving, the human being mediates between Creator and creation rather than merely using it (John D. Zizioulas, “Priest of Creation,” in Toward an Ecology of Transfiguration, ed. John Chryssavgis and Bruce Foltz, Fordham University Press, 2013; and the posthumous Priests of Creation: John Zizioulas on Discerning an Ecological Ethos, ed. Chryssavgis and Nikolaos Asproulis, T&T Clark, 2021). Zizioulas distinguished this priestly model sharply from the modern “steward” or “manager” image: stewardship can remain utilitarian, whereas priesthood is doxological — the world is offered, not merely managed. He warned that when humanity ceases to be priest of creation it becomes its tyrant, and the ecological crisis follows. (Zizioulas drew explicitly on Schmemann’s homo adorans; the lineage from one to the other is direct.)

Institutional History

Patriarch Dimitrios and the Day of Prayer for Creation (1989)

The Ecumenical Patriarchate’s formal environmental witness began with Patriarch Dimitrios I. In his patriarchal encyclical of September 1, 1989 — the first day of the ecclesiastical year — Dimitrios established September 1 as a pan-Orthodox Day of Prayer for the Protection of the Natural Environment, and urged “all the faithful in the world to admonish themselves and their children to respect and protect the natural environment,” calling likewise on “all those who are entrusted with the responsibility of governing nations to act without delay” to protect creation (Ecumenical Patriarch Dimitrios I, Encyclical of 1 September 1989; text reproduced by the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America and the Ecumenical Patriarchate). Because September 1 already opens the Orthodox liturgical year, the new observance bound creation care to the Church’s own calendar. It was subsequently adopted by the other Orthodox Churches, and in 2015 Pope Francis brought the Roman Catholic Church into the same September 1 observance, which the World Council of Churches developed into the “Season of Creation.”

Bartholomew, the “Green Patriarch”

Dimitrios’ successor, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew (enthroned 1991), made the environment a signature of his patriarchate and earned the epithet “the Green Patriarch” (used, among others, by U.S. Vice President Al Gore and widely in the press). Bartholomew convened a series of international, interdisciplinary gatherings — the Halki ecological seminars (held at the Theological School of Halki, 1994–1998) and the waterborne Religion, Science and the Environment symposia on the Aegean, the Black Sea, the Danube, the Adriatic, the Baltic, the Amazon, and the Arctic (1995–2009) — that brought theologians, scientists, and policymakers together.

The Halki seminars in particular gathered theologians, scientists, environmentalists, journalists, and civil servants at the historic Theological School on the island of Halki (Heybeliada) — itself closed by Turkish authorities since 1971 — to examine themes such as religious education and the environment, ethics and the environment, and the relationship between justice and ecology. Bartholomew framed these as efforts to awaken in the faithful an ecological conscience rooted in the Church’s own theology rather than imported wholesale from secular activism. The waterborne symposia carried the same conviction to specific imperiled waters and regions, deliberately pairing scientific testimony about a given ecosystem with theological and ethical reflection, so that the ecological crisis would be felt as a concrete and spiritual reality and not an abstraction.

His most theologically consequential contribution was to name environmental destruction as sin. At the Santa Barbara symposium on November 8, 1997, Bartholomew declared: “For humans to cause species to become extinct and to destroy the biological diversity of God’s creation; for humans to degrade the integrity of the earth by causing changes in its climate, by stripping the earth of its natural forests, or destroying its wetlands; for humans to contaminate the earth’s waters, its land, its air, and its life, with poisonous substances — these are sins” (Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, Address at the Environmental Symposium, Santa Barbara, California, 8 November 1997; in John Chryssavgis, ed., Cosmic Grace, Humble Prayer: The Ecological Vision of the Green Patriarch Bartholomew I, Eerdmans, 2003). This was the first time a major religious leader framed ecological harm in the explicit vocabulary of sin. In Bartholomew’s usage “ecological sin” reflects the patristic sense of hamartia as “missing the mark” — a disordered ethos of greed and excess, individual and civilizational, rather than merely the breach of a rule (analysis in “The Green Patriarch and Ecological Sin,” Public Orthodoxy, 2021).

The 2017 Declaration with Pope Francis

On September 1, 2017, Bartholomew and Pope Francis issued a Joint Message on the World Day of Prayer for Creation — the first such joint statement by the leaders of the Orthodox and Roman Catholic communions, who had previously issued separate messages. They confessed the earth as a shared gift, lamented “our wounded creation,” and appealed to those “in positions of responsibility” in economic, political, and cultural life “to support the consensus of the world for the healing of our wounded creation” (Pope Francis and Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, Joint Message, 1 September 2017; vatican.va). The text came two years after Francis’ encyclical Laudato Si’ (2015), which itself cited Bartholomew at length.

John Chryssavgis

Much of the intellectual and editorial work behind this witness is owed to Archdeacon (later Archpriest) John Chryssavgis, theological advisor to the Ecumenical Patriarch on environmental issues. He has edited the principal English collections of Bartholomew’s ecological addresses (Cosmic Grace, Humble Prayer, 2003; On Earth as in Heaven, 2012) and the scholarly anthology Toward an Ecology of Transfiguration (2013), and authored Creation as Sacrament: Reflections on Ecology and Spirituality (T&T Clark, 2019), which synthesizes the Schmemann–Zizioulas sacramental cosmology for an ecological age.

Orthodox Cautions About Ideological Environmentalism

Orthodox writers who affirm creation care have at the same time warned against absorbing the Church’s witness into a secular or ideological environmentalism. The point made by figures such as Zizioulas and Chryssavgis is that Orthodox ecology is theocentric, not biocentric: it values creation because it is God’s gift offered through humanity, and it refuses any pantheism that would divinize nature or any anti-humanism that would treat the human person as a mere blight on the biosphere (Zizioulas, “Priest of Creation”; Chryssavgis, Creation as Sacrament). Some Orthodox commentators have further cautioned that ecological concern must not be reduced to political activism detached from repentance and the ascetic life, lest “creation care” become one more form of secular moralism. The consistent Orthodox framing keeps the crisis a spiritual one: its root is human passion (greed, pleonexia), and its remedy is metanoia (repentance) lived sacramentally and ascetically — a framing the social documents share (cf. For the Life of the World, 2020, ch. on the cosmos; Basis of the Social Concept, 2000, ch. XIII).

The Ascetic Ethos as Ecological Practice

The distinctively Orthodox contribution is to locate the ecological remedy in asceticism. Where much secular environmentalism appeals chiefly to policy, technology, or fear, the Orthodox tradition proposes a transformation of desire — a re-ordering of the human will away from acquisitiveness and toward gratitude. Bartholomew has repeatedly taught that fasting, self-restraint, and contentment are the Church’s native ecological discipline: to fast is to learn to receive the world as gift rather than to seize it as possession, to consume less and bless more. “Asceticism,” he has said, “offers practical examples of self-restraint… it provides an example whereby we may live simply” (Bartholomew, in On Earth as in Heaven, ed. Chryssavgis, 2012). The Church’s fasting seasons, its monastic ethos of autarkeia (sufficiency), and its eucharistic offering of bread and wine — the fruit of the earth, returned to God — are presented as a centuries-old ecological practice that long predates the modern environmental movement. The cure for a consumerist disorder of the will, on this Orthodox account, is the ancient discipline of the fast.

References

Alexander Schmemann. For the Life of the World: Sacraments and Orthodoxy. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1973.
John D. Zizioulas. “Priest of Creation.” In Toward an Ecology of Transfiguration: Orthodox Christian Perspectives on Environment, Nature, and Creation, ed. John Chryssavgis and Bruce V. Foltz. New York: Fordham University Press, 2013.
John Zizioulas. Priests of Creation: John Zizioulas on Discerning an Ecological Ethos. Ed. John Chryssavgis and Nikolaos Asproulis. London: T&T Clark, 2021.
Ecumenical Patriarch Dimitrios I. Encyclical Establishing the Day of Prayer for the Protection of the Natural Environment, 1 September 1989. Texts at goarch.org and the Ecumenical Patriarchate.
Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew. Address at the Environmental Symposium, Saint Barbara Greek Orthodox Church, Santa Barbara, California, 8 November 1997.
John Chryssavgis, ed. Cosmic Grace, Humble Prayer: The Ecological Vision of the Green Patriarch Bartholomew I. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003.
John Chryssavgis, ed. On Earth as in Heaven: Ecological Vision and Initiatives of Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew. New York: Fordham University Press, 2012.
John Chryssavgis. Creation as Sacrament: Reflections on Ecology and Spirituality. London: T&T Clark, 2019.
Pope Francis and Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew. Joint Message on the World Day of Prayer for Creation, 1 September 2017. vatican.va.
“The Green Patriarch and Ecological Sin.” Public Orthodoxy (publicorthodoxy.org), 2021.
For the Life of the World: Toward a Social Ethos of the Orthodox Church. Ecumenical Patriarchate, 2020; The Basis of the Social Concept, Russian Orthodox Church, 2000, ch. XIII (Ecology). As of 2026.