“Be fruitful and increase in number…!”
“Be fruitful and increase in number…!”

An Orthodox perspective on overpopulation

Summary/Abstract: Many voices adhered to the vision of the Anglican pastor Thomas Malthus (1766 – 1834), the author of An essay on the principle of population (1798), trying to draw attention on some presumed risks, more or less apocalyptic, generated by the accelerated growth of the population of Earth. In the vision of Thomas Malthus, the growth of the population is possible to throw the humanity in chaos through the lack of equilibrium between the geometric mean of population growth and the arithmetic mean of the natural resources – the available material resources as food, water air and energy and mineral resources are limited in time. The demographic boom - observed during the 19th century under the dark perspective of a predictable self-destruction through hunger, social chaos, wars and the destruction of the environment manifested acuter in the 20th century, - the humanity was in front of some radical options/decisions, demanding to choose between the control and the limitation of the births, through modern family planning. Our study is related to this choice and to the contemporary relation of the Christian family with the presumed logical reasoning and Malthusian social relevance.

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