This [unsustainable lifestyle] happens when traditional principles and practices are abandoned – and with them, all sense of reverence for the Earth which is an inseparable element in an integrated and spiritually grounded tradition like Islam – just as it was once firmly embedded in the philosophical heritage of Western thought. The Stoics of Ancient Greece, for instance, held that “right knowledge,” as they called it, is gained by living in agreement with Nature, where there is a correspondence or a sympathy between the truth of things, thought and action. They saw it as our duty to achieve an attunement between human nature and the greater scheme of the Cosmos.With all due respect to Prince Charles, I have two comments. First, regarding the title "the Son of Man," the word Adamah means "earth" or "ground," not "the one hewn from the Earth." The term/name Adam, "man" or "human being," would indeed probably have brought to mind an echo of Adamah as a folk etymology. But if Jesus used the phrase "the Son of Man" (and I think it's likely he did, although it's less clear he meant himself), he would have been speaking in Aramaic. The Aramaic phrase is bar (a)nasha, (the second word is "man," "human being" from another root, related to the biblical name Enosh). The phrase has no connection with the Hebrew word adamah and would not have brought it to mind.
This incidentally is also the teaching of Judaism. The Book of Genesis says that God placed Mankind in the garden “to tend it and take care of it,” to serve and conserve it for the sake of future generations. “Adamah” in Hebrew means “the one hewn from the Earth,” so Adam is a child of the Earth. In my own tradition of Christianity, the immanence of God is made explicit by the incarnation of Christ. But let us also not forget that throughout the Christian New Testament, Christ often refers to Himself as “the Son of Man” which, in Hebrew, is “Ben Adam.” He, too, is a “son of the Earth,” surely making the same explicit connection between human nature and the whole of Nature.
Even the apocryphal Gnostic texts are imbued with the same principle. The fragments of one of the oldest, ascribed to Mary Magdalene, instructs us that “Attachment to matter gives rise to passion against Nature. Thus, trouble arises in the whole body; this is why I tell you; be in harmony.” In all cases the message is clear. Our specific purpose is to “earth” Heaven. So, to separate ourselves within an inner darkness, leads to what the Irish poet, WB Yeats, warned of at the start of the Twentieth Century. “The falcon cannot hear the falconer,” he wrote, “things fall apart and the centre cannot hold.”
Second, regarding the Gospel of Mary, I have serious reservations about using a Gnostic scripture to support modern environmentalism. Gnosticism taught esoteric knowledge that was supposed to help the soul escape from the irredeemably corrupt material world into the spiritual, heavenly Fullness or Pleroma. This is not a philosophy that had any sympathy or concern for the natural world.
