The melting of the glaciers, torrential rain and floods, extreme heat waves and uncontrollable wildfires, the mass extinction of animals: these are scenes of Biblical proportions. No wonder then that people repeatably reach out to the apocalypse as a metaphor for what is taking place. But the secularised version of end of the world scenarios seems to miss what is most important to the Christian apocalypse: the revelation of a deep truth. If the extreme natural phenomena we are observing are telling us anything it isn’t that the world is ending – it’s that we’ve been relating to nature in the wrong way for too long. Instead of thinking up new technological and scientific solutions to the problems our technological and scientific approach to nature have produced, we should approach nature in different ways, through poetry and religion, writes John Milbank.

To many it seems as if we are now approaching the real ‘apocalypse’ when at last nature will truly erupt with fury, the seas turn to blood and the stars fall upon our heads, as foretold by St John the Divine. This eventuality is regarded as a secular phenomenon to which we require a secular and scientific solution. But if it is precisely our secular, scientific, utilitarian and market-oriented way of life, commodifying and calculating the whole of life that has brought us to the bink of disaster, do we really need just more of the same?

SUGGESTED READING The power of utopia By Mathias Thaler The secular apocalypse can be more accurately diagnosed as a religious one, as a kind of transcendental disclosure of ignored and buried truth. Nature is not telling us to control her more effectively at an alien distance, according to her own blueprint for survival, but to rediscover our unity with her in terms of a shared expressive creativity. We will only save the planet when we recover the sense that if we belong to nature, then nature also belongs to the realm of the spiritual.

Apocalypse: then and today