Big History and the New Story

Abstract

Father Thomas Berry was born in North Carolina in 1914, the third of thirteen children. He joined the Passionist Order in 1933, after his first year of college, and he earned a PhD from Catholic University in 1948, focusing on Giambattista Vico. Berry studied in China in 1948-1949. He developed a lifelong interest in Asian religions, later writing Buddhism (1967) and Religions of India: Hinduism, Yoga, Buddhism (1971). In the United States, Berry taught at a variety of Roman Catholic universities. At Fordham (1966-1981), he helped to create a distinctive religious studies program, teaching courses in world religion and cosmic Christianity. In 1970, Berry founded the Riverdale Center of Religious Research on the Hudson River just north of Manhattan. The center promoted human spiritual transformation and reflection on the mysteries of reality. Berry directed the center from 1970 to 1995. From 1975 to 1987, he was president of the American Teilhard Association and editor of Teilhard Studies. Berry retired to Greensboro, North Carolina in 1995, living in an apartment above a former stable owned by his brother Joe and sister-in-law Jean. He suffered several strokes and moved to a care facility in 2008, dying in 2009. More than a scholar and a priest, Berry was a “shaman.” As a priest and a scholar, he was trained in theology and in history, culture, ideas, and religion. He described himself variously, using terms like “cosmologist,” “geologian,” and “Earth scholar.” In the context of Big History, he might best be described as an “ecotheologian” in the spirit of Teilhard de Chardin. Berry promoted ecumenical and interfaith dialogue over his long life and career, notably with a deep interest in indigenous spirituality. More famously still, he promoted the “New Story,” a spiritually inflected creation account, epic of evolution, or Big History. “The story of the universe is the story of the emergence of a galactic system in which each new level of expression emerges through the urgency of self-transcendence,” Berry argued in “The New Story” in 1978. His “gospel” message was that the “human emerges not only as an earthling, but also as a worlding. We bear the universe in our beings as the universe bears us in its being. The two have a total presence to each other and to that deeper mystery out of which both the universe and ourselves have emerged.” Berry retold this “New Story” in many forms, notably in Dream of the Earth (1988), The Great Work: Our Way into the Future (1999), and with cosmologist Brian Thomas Swimme in The Universe Story (1992). Swimme and Mary Evelyn Tucker, in turn, retold it in a book and documentary film entitled Journey of the Universe (2011). Berry’s goal was for people not just to learn about indigenous cultures, religious traditions, and modern science, but to learn from them how to live. This same goal animates Tucker, Grim, and Angyal’s biography of Berry. Readers will learn much about Berry, but the biography also is written to encourage readers to learn from Berry’s life and work. It is not a hagiography. Neither is it a work of neutral or critical scholarship. Rather, it is an engaging appreciation of Berry by scholars who were his students and colleagues. This point should not be read as negative. It is to honor the spirit of the book—that readers not just learn about Berry but learn from him about how to understand and live well in the modern world. Berry defined his calling as closer to that of a shaman than a scholar or a priest—“one who entered deeply into the powers of the universe and Earth and brought back an integrative vision for the community,” in Tucker, Grim, and Angyal’s words. “It was the shamanic dimension of my own psychic structure that required that I go into some manner of inner experience with the natural world,” Berry explained near the end of his life. “This was not simply to enter into some form of the spiritual life but to take on a social role.” That role came in promoting the New Story and the activism it called forth. Tucker, Grim, and Angyal tell Berry’s life as an arc from an old story to the New Story. “From his beginnings as a cultural and intellectual historian”—and his upbringing as a traditional Roman Catholic—“Berry became a historian of the Earth.” He “witnessed in his own lifetime the emergence of a multicultural planetary Big History and the New Story