University of London
Aili Winstanley Channer is an MA student at the University of London, taking an interdisciplinary approach to the environmental humanities by studying Cultural and Intellectual History at the Warburg Institute alongside Anthropology of Sustainability at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). She specialises in the relationship between science and religion in global intellectual history, with a focus on comparative cosmologies and their implications for environmental thought. Her undergraduate dissertation on ecological epistemology in medieval Welsh poetry was awarded the Violet Vaughan Morgan Prize for best dissertation in her cohort at the University of Oxford in 2023. She has also worked as a researcher on faith-based environmental movements for Al Jazeera’s earthrise programme. She loves mountains, rivers, poetry, and sacred places.
This paper argues that the analogy of the microcosm and macrocosm can provide a theological basis for re-emphasising the animacy of the earth and the ‘radical intimacy’ of human beings with the rest of creation. The idea that the human being is a ‘little world’ in which the diversity of the ‘great world’, the cosmos, is brought together or mirrored, exists in many philosophical and sacred traditions. In some, the four elements are contained within the human body, or the body has an affinity with seven or more substances found in the physical world, from flowers to minerals. In other versions, the analogy is based on the human being’s place at the centre of creation as the only creature that shares a likeness with stones, plants, animals, and angels all at once. The Neoplatonist version of microcosmism derived from Plato’s Timaeuswas influential both in Christianity and Islam. It became central to the anthropology of the Catholic Church, endorsed by Doctors of the Church through the ages including Gregory the Great, Hildegard of Bingen, and Thomas Aquinas, as well Eastern Christian thinkers such as Maximus the Confessor. In the Islamic world, it was put forward by the Sunni polymath Al-Ghazali and the Sufi philosopher Ibn al-ʿArabi, among many others, although not accepted by all Islamic theologians. In this paper I explore the representation and significance of the microcosm in primary texts from both the Christian and Islamic traditions and consider its implications for contemporary eco-theology. I investigate how microcosmism can elucidate the teachings on anthropocentrism and stewardship in the 2015 papal encyclical Laudato Siand the 2024 Islamic covenant for the Earth Al-Mizan, and then consider its resonances and tensions with secular environmental philosophies and how it could offer an opportunity for interfaith dialogue on environmental ethics.