On Caring About Other Animals: A Theological Reflection

Every day my one-year-old daughter is surrounded by a variety of animals, including a dog, cat, bear, sheep, cheetah, elephant, platypus, tortoise, and a sloth, to name but a few of them. None of these animals are real, of course. They are a combination of teddies and toys whose species names and distinctive calls I am constantly trying to teach her and (when possible) mimic. As for real animals, we have none. Our current abode is a small apartment in Berlin, and so the range of animals that my daughter can see on a normal day is limited to birds, dogs, cats, ducks, a few chickens kept in a coop nearby, insects, and, if we are lucky, squirrels and foxes. At some point soon she will no doubt grow tired of my overexcited gesturing toward any actual animal that happens to cross paths with us.

Even though I grew up in South Africa, a country famous for its “wildlife,” my childhood was not much different. I lived in the vicinity of a wider range of wild animals, but they were never a part of our daily lives. They were always elsewhere and out of harm’s way in the game reserves. When I did encounter them, it was not as a fellow inhabitant of a shared land but as a visitor gazing from the safety of a car.

For now at least, the closest that my daughter will come to an encounter with a “wild” animal is in the zoo, a context in which the animal is reduced to a spectacle and its wildness both repressed and hidden. As John Berger puts the matter so well: “The zoo to which people go to meet animals, to observe them, to see them, is, in fact, a monument to the impossibility of such encounters. Modern zoos are epitaphs to a relationship which was as old as man.”[1]

As mediated by protective barriers, the zoo encounter is artificial and often misleading. What for many of us may, for instance, look like a beluga playing with children at a zoo turns out to be something entirely different when viewed by someone well acquainted with beluga behavior (e.g., aggressive behavior most likely aimed at stopping the children from making excessive noise).[2] The raw panic that ensues after the escape of an animal from its enclosure unveils the façade of the zoo encounter.

These are, however, at least encounters with live animals. The vast majority of my daughter’s encounters with animals will, in the end, come through images, whether in books or on screens and, in the latter case, most likely overlaid by a musical score and the unmistakable Oxford-English voice of David Attenborough. I am often genuinely moved by scenes in animal documentaries. By granting us access to dimensions of non-human animal worlds that are available for the most part only to the scientist or to those who happen to share a habitat with them, they serve an important pedagogical function. Yet the music and the voiceovers function to enchant the viewer. The feelings they engender are manufactured and tend toward the sentimental.

The proliferation of animal toys and animal images and the emergence of zoos are all correlates of the slow disappearance of the vast majority of animals from our everyday lives. They are surrogates. When viewed cross culturally and within the wider scope of human history, most of “us” (i.e., those who will be reading this kind of essay) live in a habitat of immensely impoverished creaturely diversity. A far cry from the image of Adam naming all the animals.

Perhaps this impoverishment is not as unique a situation as I am making it out to be. After all, certain peoples have inhabited, and still do inhabit, places that are quite inhospitable to most forms of life. There is nonetheless an important difference between such communities and our own: they still lived alongside wild animals who were often deeply incorporated into their social and religious systems of beliefs and practices. Most of us inhabit a world almost (but not totally) void of wild animals, especially those that could do us genuine harm. When predators do kill a human, we experience it as a horror and an affront. Human beings are many things, but being prey is not meant to be one of them.

Since becoming a father, I have found my thoughts regularly drifting toward this last point, particularly in connection to our ancestors whose struggle with predators would have been a daily and deadly occurrence. Many of them—the thought fills me with absolute horror—no doubt lost children to predators. Given our stunning power as a species over other species, it is easy for us to forget that the various species in our genus homo were constantly preyed upon. A primary evolutionary pressure that helped generate our unique creativity, intensely social mode of existence, and tool-making abilities was no doubt the need to defend ourselves from predators. I marvel from time to time at predators depicted in animal documentaries. Yet actually inhabiting a shared place with these animals is simply inconceivable to me. Truth be told, I want nothing to do with them on a day-to-day basis.

Here is where I feel myself caught in a bit of bind. As a Christian theologian interested in other animals, I find intolerable the destructive relation to, and indifference toward, many other animals and their habitats that is at this point institutionalized in our current social-economic system. Yet my everyday life is practically void of relations and encounters with other animals. Were the vast majority of species in fact to disappear without it somehow leading to ecological catastrophe, it would make no concrete practical difference in my life at all. Were it not for my daughter, I would be too absorbed in the day-to-day struggles of making ends meet to have any time or energy for attending to the other living beings with whom I cohabit Berlin and about whom I know next to nothing.

This brings me to my central question: why care about other living beings? By “care about” I mean something more than simply holding a certain pro-animal and pro-environment ethical position that stands for the protection of other animals from wanton pain and death and that is against the destruction of their habitats and the current human-led mass extinction. Like myself, someone might adhere to this ethical stance yet have next to nothing actually to do with other animals. Moreover, adhering to it often leads to a way of viewing the world that casts other living beings in the role of passive victims of human power and ourselves as villains and potential saviors.

There are, however, ways of “caring about” that go beyond this ethical stance. What I have in mind here is something more like taking an interest in other living beings and their habitats with a kind of loving attention. It is more contemplative in orientation and is motivated less so by a desire to save them and their habitats (as crucial as this is) than it is by a sense of wonder and a desire to become acquainted.

Caring about other living beings in the above sense is, of course, practiced by many scientists. However, given the increasing entrepreneurial and monetary pressures on the sciences as well as the reductive tendencies within certain scientific modes of knowing, it is not guaranteed to be present in the practice of contemporary science. Among the sciences, we perhaps find it embodied most clearly in ethology, a discipline founded on the conviction that a proper understanding of other animals will be achieved only through careful attention to them in their natural habitats rather than through experiments in artificial lab settings. This way of caring about is, however, not limited to the natural scientist. Nature writing, for instance, is filled with examples of it that, while informed by the natural sciences, are not strictly speaking scientific as we tend to understand the latter term.

So why care about other living beings in this more contemplative sense? It seems to me that we need an argument in favor of it precisely because so few of us in fact either do so or feel any need to do so.

I want to begin with an idea that, at least within contemporary animal and ecological ethics, has become intensely unpopular—namely, that other animals are teleologically ordered toward human beings. In other words, they are here “for us.” The reasons for the hostility toward this belief are multiple, but the most influential is the argument that it functions as the ultimate ideological justification for the mistreatment of other animals and the concomitant ecological crisis. Christian theology has long upheld that the animal kingdom is structured hierarchically with humans perched at the top and that humans have been given “dominion” (Genesis 1:28) over other living beings. This—so the argument goes—reduces everything non-human to an instrumental status such that it can be disposed of as we like.

The argument is no doubt correct to a certain extent, but to leave the matter there is too simplistic. As a species we have always related to other animals in an instrumental manner, i.e., for food, clothing, and so forth. What marks our era and culture is not this relation but a particular social-economic instantiation of it as well as the gradual loss of other symbolic and religious roles and values that other living beings have long played in human cultures. Explaining this shift is, however, hardly a matter of Judeo-Christian theology alone, even if the latter is implicated in one way or another.

It seems to me that the problem is not so much this teleological ordering itself as it is an impoverished understanding of it. Instead of discarding a belief in it, I want to suggest that we should enrich our understanding of what exactly this “for us” encompasses. Other living beings as created are here “for us” in multiple ways, not all of which reduce them to mere instrumental means to be disposed of as we please. And it is this status of being “for us” that can, in turn, motivate the practice of caring about other living beings.

Although there are no doubt more, I sketch below four ways in which other living beings are “for us.”

1. Living beings are “for us” insofar as they witness to the existence of God and the classic divine attributes of wisdom, goodness, power, and love. This conviction is ubiquitous in the Christian tradition. According to Aquinas, “since his [God’s] goodness cannot be adequately represented by any one creature, He produced many diverse creatures, so that what was lacking in one’s representation of the divine goodness might be supplied by another” (ST 1, q.47, a.1). Despite his somewhat grim view of reality after the fall, John Calvin characterizes the created world as the “theater of God’s glory,” a “living image of God,” and, drawing from Psalm 104:1-2, a “beautiful garment of God.”[3]

What these visions share in common is the conviction that other living beings witness to God’s existence and character. God is, so to speak, on display in the natural world. Other animals are here “for us” insofar as they witness in this sense. If we take some of the Psalms at their word, their witness is a kind of praise (Psalm 148). Full human flourishing in this life is not achieved through the domination of the earth and the enjoyment of the world that this can grant us. Rather, it is found in the contemplation of God through the created world and a participation in the praise of creation. This is, of course, not to say that this witnessing is plain for all to see. It ultimately requires a way of seeing brought about through conversion. To borrow from Calvin’s view on the matter, followers of Christ contemplate the world with the eyes of faith and through the “spectacles” of the Word of God.

As animals continue their (by now) centuries-long withdrawal from our daily lives and other species continue to go extinct, we dwell ever deeper in a world of our own making. But this is a world that does not immediately point beyond itself. It points back to us, to the history of human creativity and technological “triumph” over nature. This is not the case with other living beings: they immediately point beyond themselves. In so doing, they remain the most powerful provocation of a genuine sense of mystery and wonder that, while not a proof of God’s existence, does at least constantly raise the question of God’s existence.

2. This brings me to my second point—namely, that other living beings are here “for us” as an avenue into a deeper understanding of the mystery of creation. There is a temptation to think that other living beings witness when we engage in some form of natural theology whose aim is to prove God’s existence and attributes from certain features of the natural order. Such proofs come in numerous forms. In their more classical formulations, we move from, say, the teleological nature of all living beings or the nature of motion to something like a final cause that moves all things. In their more modern iterations, such proofs begin with certain design-like features of living beings. As William Paley famously argued, if we can show that living beings, like watches, are constituted by complex part-whole relations, then there must be a “divine watch-maker,” i.e., God. It is a form of argument that the “Intelligent Design” movement more recently revived. According to the latter’s proponents, living beings are “irreducibly complex” (like machines), and the best explanation for irreducible complexity is the existence of a designer God.

For the Paley-like natural theologian, there is no creature that does not witness to its creator. All living beings are therefore deserving of our loving attention. In the heyday of what has come to be called “physico-theology” in the eighteenth century, it was possible to write about topics that, by our own contemporary standards of what counts as respectable theology, would be laughable—namely, “Insect Theology.” As the author of the 1799 Insecto-Theology, M. Lesser notes, “the vilest insect is a work of omnipotence, worthy of the highest admiration. . . . It is our duty therefore . . . to contemplate his [God’s] perfections, even in the smallest of works.”[4]

For the most part, natural theology and arguments from design are no longer taken seriously by academics. It is widely assumed that such arguments are God-of-the-Gaps arguments. I grant this, but I nonetheless find the detailed attention to other living beings exhibited in these forms of natural theology to be something desirable as a Christian practice. Outside of the by now much maligned intelligent design movement, it is, however, unclear to me whether contemporary Christian theology has any real place or need for this kind of detailed attention to other living beings. It belongs to the scientist, not the theologian.

Perhaps what I am calling “caring about” other creatures could, then, be framed as a practice in natural theology, albeit understood in a manner that is less concerned with proving God’s existence to non-believers via arguments from design than it is with growing into a deeper understanding of the mystery that is creation? What might this mean?

Natural theology is not limited to the task of proving God’s existence via Paley-like arguments from design. Broadly understood and based upon the conviction that the world is created by a good God, natural theology is a practice in attending to a multiplicity of features of other living beings in all their diffuse and wild forms. This is not to deny that design arguments have their place, even if they do not succeed in their aims to prove philosophically God’s existence. No friend of the traditional arguments for God’s existence, Immanuel Kant nevertheless maintained that arguments for God’s existence that begin with the world’s design-features (“physicotheological proofs”) deserve respect. They may not succeed as philosophical arguments, but they remain useful insofar as they enliven the “study of nature” and even increase the belief in a “highest author to the point where it becomes an irresistible conviction.”[5]

For those who already believe in a creator, Kant’s sentiment here is surely correct. I nonetheless harbor certain concerns about design arguments that go beyond whether or not they succeed as philosophical arguments. First, we live in a post-Darwin age and have a robust scientific explanation of such “design features” that was not available to the likes of Kant and Paley. At least when they begin with the world of living beings, arguments from design tend now to focus on design-like aspects (or “irreducible complexity”) of living beings that natural selection alone is supposedly incapable of explaining. But what about the other dimensions of living beings that do not exhibit clear design-like features? Are they of any theological significance? Second and relatedly, the vision of God promoted by such arguments tends to be deist in orientation, while the vision of creation tends to be mechanistic. It is most often the machine-like features of living beings that point to a designer God.

God, however, is not an engineer, and creation is not a machine but an unfathomable mystery of contingency, freedom, beauty, and however hard it is to see, love. This is the point made brilliantly by Annie Dillard in her Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, an exemplary text of nature writing that exhibits precisely the kind of caring about other living beings that I am advocating for here. What we see when we attend closely to other living beings is not the logic of an engineer but a kind of extravagance and excess that continuously resists our attempts to comprehend by means of any neat and tidy explanatory framework. In Dillard’s words: “even on the perfectly ordinary and clearly visible level, creation carries on with an intricacy unfathomable and apparently uncalled for.”[6]

The point of all of this uncalled for intricacy is, as she goes on to note, “not that it all fits together like clockwork . . . but that it all flows so freely wild, like the creek, that it all surges in such a free, fringed tangle.”[7] Rewind the tape of the evolutionary process (to borrow Stephen J. Gould’s image) and the trajectory of life on earth would no doubt be different.[8] Life’s evolution has not been a machine-like march down a set path but something more like a creative exploration of open possibilities.

Attending more carefully to what Dillard calls the “fringe and network of detail”[9] does not offer material for a traditional design argument. In fact, much that we see there will often baffle, unnerve, and even repulse us at times. Those who engage in such close attending are therefore drawn into mystery, something that has the potential to undo habitual categorizations and assumptions and thereby to transform them. Within an increasingly technocratic age, mystery and the wonder that accompanies it feel unwelcome. At best, they point toward something that is yet to be understood and mastered by the sciences and technology. At worst, they are covert justifications of obfuscation and ignorance. Mystery so understood is not a positive characteristic of finite being as such but something transitory that, like its accompanying sense of wonder, ought to be overcome and replaced by knowledge and control.

This is an error. The sciences have indeed given us genuine knowledge about living beings, but the apophatic and cataphatic are not at odds with each other. The highest knowledge about God is that we do not really know what we mean when we utter the word “God” or affirm God’s existence. Analogously, it is possible to gain and increase our scientific knowledge of living beings while still maintaining that every living being always exceeds our capacity to understand precisely because it is created, i.e., comes from an infinite source (God) that is utter darkness for the human intellect. As Aquinas tells us: “our manner of knowing is so weak that no philosopher could perfectly investigate the nature of even one little fly.”[10]

3. Thirdly and as already hinted at above, other living beings are “for us” insofar as they are a source for both spiritual transformation and emotional healing. There is a curious detail in the second creation story in Genesis 2 that does not always receive the attention it deserves. As a response to Adam’s loneliness, God does not immediately create another human being but instead creates the animals. Other living beings are, then, first and foremost given to Adam as “helpers” to solve his loneliness and restlessness. They may in the end fail in this task, but it is nonetheless intriguing (to say the least) that they are initially “given” to Adam for that purpose, not for food, clothing, labor, and so forth.

God’s speech at the end of the book of Job is interesting on this point. God does not speak about the myriad ways in which God cares for Job or human beings in particular. Instead, the speech goes on at length about the cosmos and other animals, including lions, ravens, mountain goats, deer, wild donkeys, oxen, ostriches, horses, hawks, storks, bears, eagles, and the enigmatic behemoth and leviathan. What is notable about this list is that the majority of these animals are non-domesticated animals who are of no immediate use at all for humans. Some of them are outright threats.

That the text concentrates on these animals is not accidental. God’s tactic appears to be to lead Job into a less self-centered and less anthropocentric form of love of God. Caring about other animals, even those that are of no immediate use to us, is part of a process of spiritual transformation toward achieving a more disinterested love of God that the Satan figure deems impossible at the beginning of the text.

God’s response to Job has long been found wanting as an answer to the injustice and suffering that Job has undergone. Doesn’t God simply bully Job into defeated silence by the end of the speech? In fact, God’s speech reads like an exercise in a kind of theological anti-humanism. What significance are Job’s sufferings in light of the cosmos as a whole?

Perhaps we are making the mistake of reading this silence as the consequence of an argument rather than the conclusion of a process of actually attending to what God is drawing Job’s attention to? Human companionship is often least effective and even least desirable in our periods of most intense grief and despair. As the text of Job so powerfully demonstrates, what is most distinctive about us (i.e., language and reason) fails so miserably in such moments. Our words of wisdom become platitudinous, sometimes offensively so. It is not just a misanthropic distraction to turn to other language-less animals in these periods. They have been given to us by God precisely as helpers, even if ultimately they can never replace human companionship.

4. Finally, animals are here “for us” as a source for reflection and self-understanding. As indicated earlier, other animals have long functioned for human beings as symbols and metaphors. Indeed, they awaken language in Adam. The biblical texts are filled with animal imagery that witness to an imagination for which animals still functioned symbolically and metaphorically. For this reason, Augustine argues in his De Doctrina Christiana that theologians should learn about certain animals so that they can better understand the scriptures:

Just as a knowledge of the habits of the snake clarifies the many analogies involving this animal regularly given in scripture, so too an ignorance of the numerous animals mentioned no less frequently in an analogy is a great hindrance to understanding.[11]

The book of nature and the scriptures are mutually interpreting.

Earlier Christians saw the world as a text that instructed the faithful. Accordingly and following Jesus’ example (Matt 6:26-27), they had no problem drawing spiritual and ethical lessons from the ways of other animals. In his homilies on the hexameron (to reference but one example of this practice), Basil of Caesarea both describes the ways of other animals in detail and, in some cases at least, exhorts his hearers to imitate them. The bees, for instance, are moral exemplars insofar as they construct their honeycomb “without injuring anyone or destroying another’s fruit.”[12] We are to imitate the cetaceans who always “remain within their own boundaries and do not injure the islands or the seaboard cities.”[13]

The pedagogical practice exhibited here no doubt strikes many of us as a naïve projection and an unwarranted attempt to deduce an “ought” from an “is.” But this need not be the case. It is not as if Basil believes that everyone will draw the same ethical lessons from what they see. Nor is he deducing ethical norms directly from nature. Nature is a “book” which cannot be read without some background interpretive framework. If we are, however, already living out a Christian life and already believe that the natural world is a book written by God, then why should other living beings not serve as ethical examples and exemplars? In fact, I have found myself doing something like this spontaneously with my own daughter.

Attending closely to other animals also offers us an opportunity to deepen our understanding of human nature. We may be a species uniquely open to deification, but we are nonetheless of the “dust” like all other animals and to dust we shall all return. Our being destined for the beatific vision does not preclude our sharing in the animality and the fate (death) of all fleshly beings. Genesis does indeed promote human exceptionalism, but this is set against the background of a profound sense of solidarity between all living beings. Noah’s family is not alone on the ark.

There is a tendency for us either to overestimate or to misplace the differences between ourselves and other animals. Many findings in ethology over the past century have posed significant challenges to our usual assumptions regarding human distinctiveness. This is to be welcomed, not because it threatens human distinctiveness but because it challenges us to nuance our understanding of ourselves. Knowing what we share and how we do so brings into sharper relief what we do not share.

There will always remain something antagonistic in our relations with other living beings. None of what I have suggested here intends to suggest otherwise. To imagine that we can overcome this antagonism is a flight from reality. A drive to work or a stroll in the park will most likely involve the death of some creature, whether we notice it or not. I dread the moment when my daughter will learn that the chickens we see on our daily walk are what I sometimes try to feed her. Will she look at me with disgust? Eating meat is, after all, God’s concession to a humanity gone violently rogue (Gen 9:1-3).

This conflict as well as the undeniably brutal dimensions of the natural world can tempt us to avert our eyes from it. Succumbing to it, however, strikes me as a betrayal of the belief in the world as created, as a text more original than the scriptures. Sin has marred the world as well as our ability to see it as creation, but it can never undo the primal goodness of things and the fact that they witness to their creator. Having a child is, in a way, an act of faith in this primal goodness. Raising a child can also awaken us to just how indifferent we worldly adults often grow to our fellow helpers and their witness. Learning to care about other living beings is no simple task given the pace and pressures of contemporary life. Yet, much like Lesser, I feel that it is a Christian duty.

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Tags: About Animals Caring Reflection Theological