Moral Traditions series

A Catholic Theological Framework for Animal Ethics

Christopher Steck

• Publisher: Georgetown University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781626167162
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations

The book is the first of its kind to draw together in conversation the views of the early Church, contemporary biblical and theological scholarship, and post-conciliar teachings. Steck develops a comprehensive, Catholic theology of animals based on an in-depth exploration of Catholicism's fundamental doctrines—trinitarian theology, Christology, pneumatology, eschatology, and soteriology. All God's Animals makes two central claims. First, we can hope that God will include animals of the present age in the kingdom inaugurated by Christ. Second, because of this inclusion, our responses to animals should be guided by the values of the kingdom.As Christians await the final liberation of all creation, they are to be witnesses to God's kingdom by embodying its ideals in their relations with animal life.Because the kingdom's fullness is yet to come and because our world remains marked by the wounds of sin, however, Christian treatment of animals will at times require acts that are at odds with the kingdom's ideals (for example, those causing suffering and death). Steck examines each of these ideas and explores all of their complexities.

CHAPTER 1

TRADITION

Learning to See Animals

Indeed, an objective of our prayer is to change the way we perceive the world in order to change the way we relate to the world.

—Joint Statement of Pope Francis and Patriarch Bartholomew

EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGY has shown us how many and varied are the organic connections that bind humans to the animal kingdom—common physiological structures, ecosystem codependencies, and shared primitive passions. Theology has become increasingly committed to its own set of disciplinary beliefs regarding the interconnections between humans and animals; we are all creatures fashioned with care by the same Creator, joined together in praising God, and drawn to the same eschatological end—that is, to be summed up in Christ. Animals are part of our human world because we are both part of God’s world. Theology and science tell us these things, but what is it that we see when we look at animals?

I suggest in this chapter that many of our culture’s instincts about creation and the animals within it are not dependable guides for the Christian. At this important juncture in environmental history, the Christian community needs to disengage from these instincts and explore anew the question of God’s plan for creation. The evangelical imperative demands not only our action but also the prior and more fundamental task of calibrating our moral imagination so that we render faithfully, for each generation, the world as illuminated by the Gospel. We only choose within a world that we allow ourselves to see; seeing the world of animals well, gaining an authentic vision of them, is itself a moral achievement.¹

The endeavor to cultivate an authentic perception is hindered by a number of factors. In addition to the inertial drag of past assumptions about animals that continues to afflict contemporary culture, Catholic Christianity faces its own peculiar challenge: the legacy of its teaching about the immortality of the human soul and the lack thereof in animals. Historically, animals were assumed to be excluded from the life to come, not so much because of a divine decision but because their souls were inadequate to support a transition beyond death. Thus, when a comment by Pope Francis was misinterpreted by the media as offering support for the resurrection of pets, the ensuing debate in the Catholic blogosphere centered on the question of animal souls’ mortality.² Similarly, when the Catholic bishops of England and Wales received a proposal for liturgical prayers for animals, they rejected it because “animals may well have souls, but they are not immortal souls.”³ These reactions reflect the singular rhetorical role that the distinction between animal and human souls has had in the Catholic world’s understanding of animals. These beliefs feed each other—immortally ensouled and divinely valued humanity, ephemerally ensouled and thus instrumentally valued animals—leading to a vicious cycle of human privilege and animal disregard. The result has been a distorted understanding of how God values animals and, correspondingly, how we are to value them.

AQUINAS AND THE IMMORTAL SOUL

Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274) provided Christian thought with a comprehensive theological system that gained for him a rightly deserved standing as the preeminent theologian of the Catholic tradition. His ethical theory is grounded in profound and fundamental insights into the human condition and has fittingly retained its influence even today, over seven centuries after his death. His theological judgments have been cited with an authority second only to Scripture and magisterial teachings; his Summa Theologica even joined Scripture and the decrees of the popes upon the altar at the Council of Trent, so as to provide “counsel, reason, and inspiration” for the council fathers.⁴

The influence of Aquinas on Catholic thought about animals is likewise significant, though a bit more complex than sometimes perceived. Stripped of all nuance, Aquinas does suggest, in line with what is popularly assumed to be Catholic belief, that animals will not participate in the eschaton because their souls are not immortal. However, his view of animals depends on a constellation of philosophical and scientific beliefs to make it cohere with the rest of his theology—for example, the temporal (not eternal) goodness of creaturely diversity, the role of the heavenly bodies in governing animal activities, the cognitive capacities of animals, and Aristotelian metaphysics. Many of these theories now face questions and doubts, and a few of them outright dismissals, creating the opportunity and need for reconsidering his conclusions.

Aquinas’s writings were pivotal in introducing Aristotle’s hylomorphic theory of the body–soul composite into mainstream Catholic thought. In De Anima, Aristotle argued that the soul is an essential element of every creature’s embodied existence—a vegetative soul for plants, a sensitive soul for animals, and a rational soul for humans. The soul and body together compose the one human person, with the soul as its formal principle. In contrast to the body/soul dualism of Plato’s theory, the soul for Aristotle is incomplete apart from the body. Aquinas incorporates Aristotle’s theory but allows more explicitly than Aristotle for the soul to subsist on its own, even though it is incomplete by itself.⁵ His reasoning for the soul’s subsistence follows arguments found in Platonic thought and in Augustine’s The Immortality of the Soul. The soul is the “principle of intellectual operation,”⁶ and because the intellect has the ability to know something according to its nature—that is, not as a concrete object but as the universal nature expressed in that particular object—the operation of the soul is not, entirely at least, dependent on our bodily operations. Simply put, we can know abstract universals, and such knowledge exists apart from sensory activities like sight, hearing, and smell. Thus, “the intellectual principle which we call the mind or the intellect has an operation per se apart from the body,” and can, therefore, subsist apart from the body.⁷

The fact that the soul is subsistent and immaterial is not sufficient for proving its immortality. Aquinas adds another argument: The soul is incorruptible. His argument here is a bit difficult to follow for those not familiar with Aristotelian metaphysics. He argues that “no thing is corrupted [i.e., destroyed] with respect to that wherein its perfection consists.” In other words, that which brings us to our perfection cannot be the same thing that destroys us. However, “the soul [which Aquinas has already defined as an ‘intellectual substance’] is perfected by knowledge,” all the more so as “it considers immaterial things.” The soul is not “corrupted by being separated from the body,” because “in leaving the body, [it] is perfected operationally”; that is, its perfection is not lost because it consists in knowledge of immaterial things that do not depend on the body per se.⁸ It is not, of course, better that the soul be separated from the body. Aquinas’s claim is only that the perfection of the soul’s intellectual operation does not depend on the body and thus survives its demise.

Another version of the argument based on the nature of the soul appears in the Summa Theologica. Aquinas first argues that the soul cannot be corrupted “accidentally,” that is, by something external to it. Although other substances are composites—unions of form and matter in which each depends on the other and cannot subsist apart from it—the soul, as Aquinas has shown, can subsist without the body and thus is not affected by the body’s corruption. The soul, being subsistent, has “existence per se” and thus can only be corrupted per se. However, this

is impossible, not only as regards the human soul, but also as regards anything subsistent that is a form alone. For it is clear that what belongs to a thing by virtue of itself is inseparable from it; but existence belongs to a form, which is an act, by virtue of itself. . . . It is impossible for a form to be separated from itself; and therefore it is impossible for a subsistent form to cease to exist.⁹

Aquinas’s argument here depends on the idea that the subsistent form has “being” in virtue of what it is, not as an accident to it. It can thus be corrupted only through its own operation, but that is incoherent because it is the essence of the form to exist. Nonetheless, though the human soul may be immortal, the person is not. Abraham’s soul, Aquinas tells us, “is not Abraham himself, but a part of him. . . . Hence life in Abraham’s soul does not suffice to make Abraham a living being, or to make the God of Abraham the God of a living man.”¹⁰ The integral human person does not gain immortality except through a divine gift, namely, the resurrection of the body, because immortality is not an innate capacity of the composite human person.

The overall logical flow of Aquinas’s argument for the soul’s immortality depends on its starting point: The human person has a capacity for abstract, incorporeal reasoning. From there, his argument moves to the claim that the human soul is immaterial and subsistent form, and then to the argument that the soul is incorruptible based on the peculiarity of the soul as subsistent form. Correlatively, the argument against the immortality of animal souls, and thus animals themselves, is based on the contrary position: They lack the capacity to perform such intellectual activities, and thus their souls are not subsistent and cannot survive the decay of bodily life. As evidence of this intellectual deficiency (“they neither understand nor reason”), Aquinas observes “that all animals of the same species operate in the same way,”¹¹ and, like plants, they do not act by reason but rather are “moved, as it were by another, by a kind of natural impulse....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Animals as Fellow Creatures of the Covenant
• 1. Tradition: Learning to See Animals
• 2. Creation: The Imago Dei and a Covenantal Anthropocentrism
• 3. Redemption: The Divine Magis and Animals
• 4. Sanctification: The Spirit’s Cosmic Embrace
• 5. Ethics: Ministers of the Eschatological Covenant
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author