Care for Creation

Behind Amphilochios’s tree-planting lay a theology: the Orthodox reverence for creation as the good work of God, the human being as the priest of creation called to offer it back to its Maker, and love of creation as inseparable from love of the Creator. This file sets his ecological practice within that theology and within the wider Orthodox ecological witness of which he was a forerunner.

Tradition: Greek Orthodox (20th-c. elder; Ecumenical Patriarchate)

Creation as the Good Work of God

Amphilochios’s love of trees was not sentimentality but theology in practice. Its root is the first and most basic Christian confession about the world: that it is the good creation of God. “And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good” (Genesis 1:31). For the Orthodox tradition the material creation is not a neutral stage or a mere resource but the handiwork of God, charged with His glory and destined, with humanity, for transfiguration. To reverence a tree, on this understanding, is to reverence the God who made it; to despise or destroy creation wantonly is a kind of impiety toward the Creator. This is the plain sense of the elder’s most pointed saying, as Ware records it: “whoever does not love trees does not love Christ” (Metropolitan Kallistos [Ware], on Amphilochios and the creation, in his writings on Orthodoxy and the environment; see Whoever Plants a Tree).

The saying is startling only if one has forgotten the doctrine. If all things were made through the Word — “all things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made” (John 1:3) — then love of the Word who is Christ cannot be indifferent to the things He has made. Amphilochios drew the conclusion with a directness that his more comfortable contemporaries had not: love of Christ and love of His creation are of a piece, and a Christianity that reverenced God while despoiling the earth would be self-contradictory.

The Human Being as Priest of Creation

The deeper theological frame for Amphilochios’s practice is the Orthodox understanding of the human being as the priest of creation. In this teaching — articulated in the modern period by Orthodox theologians and made central to the Ecumenical Patriarchate’s ecological witness — the human person stands at the center of the material world not as its exploiter but as the one who gathers up creation in thanksgiving and offers it back to God, so that the world is fulfilled in becoming Eucharist, a gift returned to the Giver. The human vocation “to till the ground and to keep it” (Genesis 2:15) is thus a priestly and not merely a proprietary vocation: to cultivate, to tend, to bless, and to offer, rather than to dominate and consume (on the human being as priest of creation in Orthodox theology, a theme developed by, among others, the Ecumenical Patriarchate’s own environmental teaching; see [Care for Creation and the wider witness] below).

Amphilochios’s practice of assigning tree-planting as a penance fits this priestly vocation exactly. To plant and tend a tree is to exercise the human calling to cultivate and keep the earth; to do it as an act of repentance is to make that cultivation an offering — a turning from the self-centeredness of sin toward the self-giving care of creation. The penitent who plants a tree is being taught, without a word of theory, to be the priest of creation he was made to be (the Sisterhood of the Holy Monastery of the Annunciation, Patmos, biography of the elder, on the spiritual meaning of the tree-planting; see Whoever Plants a Tree).

Love Overflowing to All Creation

Within Amphilochios’s own thought, the care for creation is best understood as the outermost circle of the “religion of love” (see The Gospel of Love and Joy). The love that begins in God and reaches to every human neighbour does not stop at the boundary of the human: it overflows to all that God has made. This is the same movement found in the great saints of the Orthodox and wider Christian tradition who are remembered for their tenderness toward creatures — from the Desert Fathers who lived at peace with wild animals, to St. Isaac the Syrian’s famous “merciful heart” that burns for “all creation, for men, for birds, for beasts,” to St. Seraphim of Sarov and the bear. Amphilochios stands in that lineage, and his particular contribution was to give it a practical, reproducible form: not a private tenderness only, but a discipline he could assign to others — plant a tree, tend it, and so learn love (the Sisterhood of the Annunciation, biography; on the lineage of love for creation, cf. the tradition of St. Isaac the Syrian’s “merciful heart”).

A Forerunner of the Orthodox Ecological Witness

In the decades since Amphilochios’s death, the care of creation has become a signature theme of Orthodox witness — above all through the Ecumenical Patriarchate. Patriarch Dimitrios established 1 September, the beginning of the Church’s liturgical year, as a day of prayer for the environment in 1989; his successor Patriarch Bartholomew has made ecological concern so central to his ministry that he became widely known as the “Green Patriarch,” convening symposia and teaching that the abuse of creation is a sin against God (on the Ecumenical Patriarchate’s environmental initiatives from 1989 onward under Patriarchs Dimitrios and Bartholomew). Amphilochios, who died in 1970, anticipated this witness by decades — quietly, on one small island, without program or publicity, simply by planting trees and teaching penitents to love them.

It is fitting, then, that the Church which has become the standard-bearer of Orthodox creation care — the Ecumenical Patriarchate — should have been the Church that glorified Amphilochios in 2018 (see Glorification 2018). In him the Patriarchate canonized not only a gentle confessor and a founder of convents but a genuine forerunner of its own ecological witness — a saint whose reverence for the trees of Patmos turns out to have been ahead of his time, and whose “commandment to love the trees” reads today less as an eccentricity than as prophecy (Ware, on Amphilochios as a forerunner of the Orthodox ecological witness, in his writings on the creation; see Legacy and Assessment).

References

Ware, Metropolitan Kallistos (of Diokleia). Writings on Orthodoxy and the creation, including “Through the Creation to the Creator” and his 2005 lecture on Orthodoxy and the environment. (Amphilochios’s theology of love for the trees; “whoever does not love trees does not love Christ”; his witness as a forerunner.)
The Sisterhood of the Holy Monastery of the Annunciation (Evangelismos), Patmos. Biography and counsels of the Elder Amphilochios Makris. Patmos: Holy Monastery of the Annunciation. (The spiritual meaning of the tree-planting.)
The Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople. Environmental encyclicals and initiatives from 1989 onward under Patriarchs Dimitrios (the day of prayer for creation, 1 September) and Bartholomew (the “Green Patriarch”). (The wider Orthodox ecological witness Amphilochios anticipated.)
Scripture: Genesis 1:31 (creation “very good”); Genesis 2:15 (to till and to keep the earth); John 1:3 (all things made through the Word). Patristic reference: St. Isaac the Syrian, on the “merciful heart” that burns for all creation (Ascetical Homilies).