Soteriology for Brutes?

Vito Caiati writes,

I have gone back and read your post “Are the Souls of Brute Animals Subsistent? Considerations Anent the Unity of Consciousness” many times since it first appeared in December of 2009.  In conclusion to the post, you write:

 

Thomas wants to say that men, but no brutes, have subsistent souls. This is because men, but no brutes, understand. But sensing is a form of consciousness, and consciousness cannot be understood in materialist terms. Sensing is not a mere collision of atoms in the void. Sensory consciousness, besides displaying unity across its several modalities, reveals qualia. And qualia are a well-known stumbling block to materialism. It is difficult to see why, if understanding supports the possibility of disembodied existence, sensing should not also support this possibility. There is after all only one soul which both senses and understands. The phrases “sensitive soul” and “intellective soul” are not to be taken to refer to distinct souls.

 

Assuming that you are correct, and I believe that you are, does it not follow that a broader Christian soteriology than that proffered by Aquinas and other scholastics should be open to discussion? For if the souls of animals are subsistent, might they too not survive death and be worthy of salvation of some kind, especially since they are free from the stain of sin?

 

I raise these questions as someone who has been profoundly troubled for many years by animal suffering from earliest times. I have always carried a sense that there is something rather too narrow in a doctrine of salvation that is restricted to mankind. I do not for a moment wish to conflate the ontological status of humans and animals, but is rationality a sufficient reason to exclude so many living, non-rational beings—especially the higher mammals--that have so often suffered terribly and died violently or in great pain to mere extinction?

 

RESPONSE

 

These are important questions about which I have little say at the moment.  But my friend Ed Feser weighs in in David Bentley Hart Jumps the Shark: Why Dogs Don't Go to Heaven.  It is delightfully polemical in the inimitable Feserian style as he takes on David Bentley Hart whose very name suggests a certain pomposity waiting to be punctured.   Now why does Feser think that cats and dogs do not survive their bodily deaths?

The reason is that non-human animals are entirely corporeal creatures, all matter and no spirit. To be sure, the matter of which they are composed is not the bloodlessly mechanical, mathematical Cartesian kind. Non-human animals are not machines; they really are conscious, really do feel pain and pleasure, really do show affection and anger. But these conscious states are nevertheless entirely dependent on bodily organs, as is everything else non-human animals do. Hence, when their bodies die, there is nothing left that might carry on into an afterlife. Fido’s death is thus the end of Fido.

If human beings were entirely corporeal creatures, the same would be true of us. But, the Thomist argues, human beings are not entirely corporeal. We are largely corporeal—as with Fido, our ability to take in nutrients, to grow and reproduce, to see, hear, imagine, and move about, depends on our having bodily organs. But our distinctively intellectual activities—our capacity to grasp abstract concepts, to reason logically, and so forth—are different. They could not be entirely corporeal.

[. . .]

If human beings do have, in addition to their bodily or corporeal activities, an activity that is essentially incorporeal—namely, intellectual activity or thought in the strict sense—then when the corporeal side of human nature is destroyed, it doesn’t follow that the human being as a whole is destroyed. There is an aspect to our nature—the intellect—that can carry on beyond the death of the body, precisely because even before death it was never entirely dependent on the body. This is why there is such a thing as an afterlife for human beings, as there is not for non-human animals.

Hart, like so many people these days, seems to have an excessively sentimental attachment to non-human animals. Perhaps he simply can’t imagine Heaven being a very happy place without a resurrected Fido to share it with.

Consider this. Christ tells us that there will not be marriage in Heaven, and the clear implication is that there will not be romance or sexual intercourse, either. Young people find it difficult to understand how we could fail to miss all of this, and anyone with an amorous disposition can sympathize. But, in fact, we will not miss it. That’s the thing about the beatific vision: it rather leaves everything else in its dust. And I submit that if you won’t miss sex when you’re in Heaven, it’s a safe bet that you’re not going to give much thought to Fido either.

Feser's answer in a nutshell is that non-human animals are all matter and no spirit; we, however, are matter and spirit. We are spiritual beings in virtue of our capacity for such intellectual activities as grasping concepts, forming judgments, and reasoning from the judgments formed.  Despite being wholly corporeal, non-human animals enjoy and suffer sentience: they are the subjects of conscious states, contra Descartes. Among these conscious states are non-intentional states such as pleasure and pain, but also, Feser seems to admit, intentional (object-directed) states such as affection and anger.  I have observed a cat expressing anger at another cat's behavior at the food bowl.  The one cat was not merely angry, but angry at something, the second cat's howling and 'acting up.'  So the first cat, a big maternal tabby bopped the little noisy cat on the head with her paw.  What we have in this example, I think, is intentionality together with a primitive conceptualization of the second cat's behavior as 'offensive' or 'inappropriate'  and not just 'kitty kat kwalia.'

 

Does this prove that cats are in some measure 'intellectual' and thus not wholly corporeal? Of course not. But it gives us a reason to doubt the hard-and-fast Thomist distinction between non-human and human animals. Vito Caiati quoted me as saying, "It is difficult to see why, if understanding supports the possibility of disembodied existence, sensing should not also support this possibility." I did not properly expand upon this thought at the time, so I will add something now. Suppose the sensing is not just a qualitative state but an intentional state, a sensing that, a sensing that the cat treats in the bowl are stale, for example.  The cat cannot articulate the content of his sensing in an explicit judgment either in thought or in language, but it seems reasonable to ascribe a proto-propositional content to the cat's consciousness.

 

There are also considerations anent the unity of consciousness that tend to blur the distinction between non-human and human animal minds.  After a cat has defecated, he sees where the scat is which he then 'decides' to bury or not, and then smells whether he has buried it sufficiently, a smelling which involves intentionality and something like judgment.  It is something like what I do when I smell a shirt to see if it is too stinky to wear in public. At the same time the cat is listening to the circumambient noise. If it is normal, he continues his job; if not he breaks it off, and jumps out of the box.   What we have here is a unity of consciousness in the synthesis of a manifold of representations, to employ some Kantian jargon: a unity of seeing, smelling, and hearing.  This unity is arguably of a spiritual, non-corporeal, nature since it cannot be located in any part of the cat's body or brain.

 

My interim conclusion is that Feser is not obviously right as against Hart, and that the question remains open.  It has not been definitively shown that such critters as cats cannot survive their bodily deaths.  If they do, and there is a sort of salvation for them, then this would amount to a sort of redemption of the horror of animal existence in a fallen world in which nature is red in tooth and claw and animals eat each other alive.

 

Feser makes a good point, however, when he says that the Beatific Vision will so entrance those of us who get to enjoy it that we will give no thought to our sublunary animal companions. But this is consistent both with their survival and with their non-survival of their bodily deaths. Perhaps my cats will go to cat heaven where they will be compensated for their suffering here below, and I will be so swept up into the Visio Beata as to give them no thought at all, any more than I will give any thought to that Gibson ES 335 that I never should have sold.

Comments

[Vlastimil]

Trent Dougherty on why, plausibly, some brutes go to heaven:

https://trinities.org/blog/podcast-89-dr-trent-dougherty-on-the-problem-of-animal-pain/

https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/the-problem-of-animal-pain-a-theodicy-for-all-creatures-great-and-small/

Really good.

[David Gudeman]

For a bit of interesting speculation on the salvation of animals, I'd like to recommend a short story, "The Parliament of Beasts and Birds" by John C. Wright.

I'm not familiar with the philosophical background so this may sound ignorant or trivial, but my religious upbringing emphasized that the essential difference between man and beast was not intellectual, but moral. Unlike animals, man has a conscience as well as duties and rights, while an animal does not. An animal cannot be guilty of a crime as a man can, nor can an animal rise above his animal nature to do something selfless and good as a man can (Since it is the moral status of man that makes him unique rather than his intellect, there are no problems about the relative worth of a very stupid man vs. a very intelligent chimp).

It is at least plausible that the moral status of man, being above (and often opposed to) nature must be embedded in an aspect of man that is itself outside of nature, and therefore not subject to death.

[BV]

>>the essential difference between man and beast was not intellectual, but moral. <<

Actually, both.