In classical theology, the “image and likeness of God” in man is identified with the rational soul—the spiritual dimension that sets the human race apart from all else that exists in material creation. The soul is where certain particularly human faculties exist—namely, human intellect and will. The intellect is given so that the human person may seek the truth.
In other words, God sets up a relationship between the human mind and what is objectively real according to the way he made the world. “For the human intellect is measured by things since an opinion is true or false according as it answers to reality,” says St. Thomas. “But the divine intellect is the measure of things: since each thing has so far truth in it, as it represents the divine intellect” (ST-I-II, Q. 93, a. 1 ad. 3). God gave the will so that mankind may seek the good, enabling the human person to freely choose what is objectively right.
The image of God in man expresses itself in the fact that the human being, endowed with rational thought and will, like God, has a kingship in relation to the world of nature. Unlike the degraded status of a slave, forced to tend the world fashioned from the body of a defeated goddess, humans are masters of the world they inhabit. Since humans are made in the image and likeness of God, Genesis 1 can declare boldly, “Let them have dominion.”
We must have a proper understanding of this term, dominion. God creates the world as a gift, a world imbued with meaning according to the eternal law of the divine mind. The gift character of the earth is expressed in Genesis 1:29-30: “God also said, ‘See, I give you every seed-bearing plant over all the earth and every tree that has seed-bearing fruit on it to be your food’” (1:29-30). The word give has the sense of a gratuitous donation to which there should be a proper response. Mankind should first recognize the Giver by treating his gift with respect; thus, the earth should not be abused or destroyed by human action.
Dominion thus means that the human person, who possesses intellect and will, can, like God, know what a thing is for and guide it to its perfection. The world indeed can be altered, as Genesis 2:15 teaches. Humanity has the honorable duty to “cultivate” the earth—to make something of it, to advance it toward its fulfillment. Like God, human beings can, with intellect and will, determine their environment. But that is not all; the human being is also called to “care for it.”
Dominion, then, does not mean that the earth is at the mere disposal of the human race, as if it were ours to dispose of according to our whim. To abuse the planet for human profit is a perversion of the biblical meaning of “dominion,” and indeed the human race stands accused of exploiting the earth and ruining God’s good creation. A false idea exists that, since the human person is, according to Scripture, superior to the rest of creation, the planet is simply at mankind’s disposal. This is not the true biblical meaning of dominion. If the world as a suitable place for man to inhabit is a gift, then that gift must be honored and respected.
The Catholic Church cautions against what it refers to as a “reductionist” view of nature in which nature
appears as an instrument in the hands of man, a reality that he must constantly manipulate, especially by means of technology. . . . The reductionist conception views the natural world in mechanistic terms and sees development in terms of consumerism. Primacy is given to doing and having rather than to being and this causes serious forms of human alienation (Sollicitudo Rei Socialis 28).
Exploitation of the earth is no more a Christian view than the idea that the world is so sacred that it should not be cultivated. It takes God’s gift and hoards it greedily, rejecting the purpose for which it was given (see Centissimus Annus 37).
This movement in our world today denies that the human being is special in any spiritual sense and accuses those who believe this of speciesism—the social, political, and cultural sin of seeing a hierarchy of value in the animal world—with the human being occupying the position of highest rank—daring to believe that the human being is separate from the rest of living species and of more value. It is a movement that seeks to equalize all of nature, in the process eliminating man’s special dignity. It may be summed up by the slogan, “This we know, the earth does not belong to man—man belongs to the earth.”
The radical environmentalists who identify with this expression have wishfully attributed it to Chief Seattle, the Native American leader who was influential in the settling of what is now the state of Washington. It comes, however, not from a native chief with deep innate wisdom about nature, but from a Hollywood screenwriter named Ted Perry, for a 1972 ecology film. Nonetheless, the statement is a very good articulation of a worldview opposite that of Genesis.
Genesis doesn’t teach that the earth is man’s own possession. God created the earth to be a gift to the human race; thus, as Genesis 2 states, human beings must “cultivate and care for it.” Nonetheless, man does not belong to the earth.
The human race lives in the world of nature. As corporeal creatures, humans are even intimately bound to the world of nature, since what is physical is constitutive of man’s very being. Yet the human person is not merely another part of the world. Like God, a human being cannot simply be collapsed into nature, as if the earth itself took priority over humanity. Genesis teaches that man, made in God’s image, is set apart: different, unique, special and like God, the human person may properly exercise certain prerogatives in relation to the world: shape it, alter it, perfect it. The earth is not to dominate humanity any more than the world is to dominate God.
The modern contradiction of the dominion laid out in Genesis, placing nature on equal footing with man, is a kind of reversion back to the pagan notion that the earth has a certain quasi-divine status. Therefore, humanity has no right to interfere with nature; to change it, probe it, manipulate it as if we were superior to it. We must simply leave it alone, coexisting as its equal—and in a sense be submerged into it as “the earth does not belong to man, but man belongs to the earth.” Some fringe elements of the modern anti-natalist movement even advocate that, for the sake of saving the planet, the human race should cease procreating even to the point of its own extinction!
Scripture affirms that God wills the cultivation of the earth and that such proper alteration of the environment is actually a sign of his union with humanity—a sign of the covenant. The prophet Isaiah speaks of a cultivated vineyard planted on a fertile hillside, and the vineyard owner is described as a friend—God himself, who “spaded it, cleared it of stones, and planted the choicest vines. Within it he built a watchtower, and hewed out a winepress.” However, when the vineyard owner looked for his crop of grapes, all that was yielded were “wild grapes” (Isa. 5:1-2). God laments, “Why when I looked for the crop of grapes, did it bring forth wild grapes?” (v. 4).
Here we have an allegory: the vineyard is Israel, cultivated tenderly by God, yet his people, brought into a covenant with him, did not live up to that covenant, as Israel failed to produce fruit that should have come from such attentive care. The cultivated land, the land deliberately altered to produce fruit, stands for human unity and cooperation with God. Whereas land that is left to the wild, producing only wild fruits, is the opposite of human unity with God. Such land and such fruits are the consequence of failure to live within God’s covenant—it is a neglected land that returns to the wild, the reversal of the cultivated land, a land that stands for a people who are now cast out (see Isa. 5:5-7).
Allowing nature to return to the wild is a sign of God’s disfavor, whereas making something of the earth is a sign of divine blessing—but a blessing that rests on the human being acting in justice. Far from being something human beings should be ashamed of, dominion over creation is a way human beings imitate God—and it is an essential characteristic of human dignity.