Dante uses Medusa to convey the terrible truth that when we reify false theories, we turn our minds into stone.Frozen thus in a pathological vision, we confuse evil with good.In that degraded condition, a human has scant hope of finding a way to align with the cosmological order of things.Dante’s insight is that certainty is a dangerous state.Our view of the world might be correct, but there is no method that can determine this.That sort of proof is not given to humanity.We have to work out our understanding of things always in the humble awareness that final knowledge is not an option for us.On the other hand, we can determine when our behavior is out of alignment.That’s the human condition.We can’t know when we are right, but we can determine when we are wrong.How is that? I asked.Charles Sanders Peirce provides the test.If our actions bring about the opposite of what we intend, there is a very good chance we are the unfortunate victims of a reified falsehood.What would be an example?Industrial society sees the universe as a collection of objects.That view has frozen modern consciousness.We have brought about a mass extinction of life.No sane person desires this.No sane person wakes up with the intention of destroying all life.And yet here we are, doing just that.If Peirce were here, he would point out that the results of our actions are the opposite of our intentions.Because of our habitual forgetting of the universe as a whole, we do not have the intellectual capacity necessary to understand what it means to extinguish a species.The major philosophers in the classical civilizations were equally incapable.Plato, Confucius, and Shankara all understood that an organism could die, but none of them imagined that birth itself could die.Extinction did not fit their cosmologies.Even thinkers of the magnitude of Ralph Waldo Emerson argued extinction was an impossibility because nature, so he believed, was too robust to be destroyed at the species level.But while the philosophers argued over whether or not a single species of life had ever gone extinct, our industrial way of life was destroying thousands of species each year.Perhaps millions will disappear because of us.Even though Aquinas knew nothing of the organic evolution of life, his theology takes a first step into understanding the magnitude of what is taking place.Why did the divine give birth to so many forms of life?Why not one form of life?After all, birds give birth to baby birds.Elephants give birth to baby elephants.His answer is that creation in all of its diversity is necessary to provide a full revelation of divine reality.No one form of life by itself is enough to convey the richness.In Aquinas’s theology, then, to eliminate a species is to eliminate divine presence.To devastate a beauty that required billions of years to emerge is an act of what we can call biocide.I sat in silence, stunned by the revelation that we were causing the first mass extinction in millions of years.How did I not know this?What other gigantic truths was I ignorant of?I felt horribly confused.What could be more ludicrous than someone telling the story of the universe without mentioning the unraveling of Earth’s life?We sat in uneasy silence.I tried to come up with something to dispel the pall.I could think of nothing.I felt only deadness.When I was in grad school, Oregon farmers, as a way of replenishing the soil, burned the stubble in their fields, filling the skies for days with billowing black clouds.When weather conditions were unfavorable, as when the winds were blowing in the wrong direction, soot settled down as a light gray ash.All the colors of the houses, trees, and lawns were replaced with uniform gray soot.That was me, sitting there as this horrible news descended on me.I wanted only to go home and tell Denise what I had learned and talk it out with her.But there was no way of contacting Lennie while he was driving from Chicago through New York and on to Maine.He strode in and glanced about, rakish good looks, five o’clock shadow.When he spotted me he bowed with mock grandeur.An actor and playwright, he had studied at Ringling Brothers to become a professional clown, following in the footsteps of Ken Feit.In order to work with Feit, Lennie had applied to Mundelein College where Feit was to teach.Death had destroyed that dream.Though the terrible facts from Thomas Berry suffused me entirely, I could not begin to express any of it for Lennie.I could not get distance from it enough to speak of it, especially with the strange thought that in my ignorance I was part of the cause.Would Lennie benefit if I told him?Halfway into our meal, Lennie remembered a favorite Ken Feit playlet.He made this creation dance about for a moment or two then plunged it into the candle’s flame where it caught fire.Feit’s happy face transformed into a mask of horror as the delicate animal burned to a black crisp.After cradling this in the palms of his hands, Feit, with a huge exhalation of breath, blasted the remains into tiny fragments.Did you ever hear what Robert Bly thought of this? Lennie asked.They were doing a gig together in Chicago.Right after the unicorn bit, Bly yelled out, ‘Feit, you’re in love with death.’ Lennie shrugged his shoulders.Maybe he was.Death was coming at me from every direction.I hated hearing that Bly had publicly criticized Feit like this.So what if Feit was in love with death?And it was happening now.I had nothing to say about it.