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Seminar Summary God and the Animals
Professor Martin Henig is an archaeologist whose main expertise is in Roman art. A liberal Anglican with a deep interest in and sympathy for many religions, he approaches the issue of vivisection from a spiritual and moral direction. This paper is dedicated to the memory of the Late Roger Deakin with whom I shared my childhood wonder at the diversity and beauty of the Natural World, and an intimation of the Creator-God who made it all. I should introduce myself. I am neither a scientist nor a trained theologian but a student of Roman art. Art historians need to look at the world around them and sometimes, out of the corners of their eyes may see things that are not quite right. From such fleeting impressions come flashes of enlightenment which may change the focus of one’s life and work. I have shortened the title of this paper,[1] deliberately removing the word ‘Man’ because homo sapiens, and other now extinct hominids, are or were animals. It is true that until Darwin, this was not always understood but, in terms of attitude, Darwinism has not made all that much difference to the way people have treated other animals on this earth and in some significant respects the exploitation of animals has grown worse under the aegis of science, with the advent of factory farming and an increase in experimentation on animals. While VERO‘s remit is notionally confined to the latter, from the beginning I have realised that I am involved in this movement, to passionately oppose the mistreatment of animals everywhere and in every situation, and to question mankind’s dependence (certainly over-dependence) on other creatures for food and clothing (certainly so in the case of furs). For me, any such stand is related to my Christian witness though it draws upon ecumenical convictions embracing most of the world’s great Faiths as we will see. I woke up on the day I wrote these words (4 February) to find that 160 thousands of turkeys are being culled on a single Suffolk farm as a consequence of an outbreak of bird flu. This is a chilling statistic, but no more so than the fact that even if there had been no outbreak they ‘would have died hereafter’. Moreover there must be an enormous number of factory farms throughout the world where the cycle of death and life continues its merciless way, day by day, week by week. I have no idea how those who are responsible for these hateful places of death, perpetrators of monstrous crimes, can live with themselves. But then their customers in Oxford and everywhere else are accessories to the evil. In addition we do not have to go back very far to remember the mass culling of livestock following the Foot and Mouth outbreak in 2001, again exposing quite horrendous exploitation of animals. I thoroughly endorse the words of Rabbi David Rosen, former Chief Rabbi of Ireland, who has remarked (see Seidenberg in Taylor and Kaplan 2006,66) : ‘The current treatment of animals in the livestock trade definitely renders the consumption of meat halakhically unacceptable as the product of illegitimate means’. Where was/is God in all this abuse? Where is He in the midst of all this human greed for cheap meat and cheap profit, in all this treating of divinely-created life as mere commodity? We are not asked here, immediately at least, to consider a man living in what is left of the Arctic tundra where there is little or no vegetable food to be had. This is factory production where the turkey, chicken or piglet is no more regarded for itself than a can of baked beans. As a Christian, I have to turn to the God who made the turkey as well as me, and if the (mis)use of animals for food has to be subjected to divine judgement so too must animal experimentation.[2] Religion aims to provide a comprehensive view of the universe normally (but not always) predicated on the relationship between the creator and the created/creatures. All religions, as far as we know, have been made by or mediated through homo sapiens and in them he invariably assumes paramount importance. This is not surprising and it is ironically rather amusing that, for atheists, (who often misname themselves ‘humanists’) too, their own species is likewise the dominant one; indeed the tendency can be more pronounced among them than among religious people as all too often ‘reason’, science unrestrained, can become a substitute for god. Scriptures use the term mankind generically but, as a matter of fact, when male and female are differentiated, it is the former which is assigned the dominant role, explicitly so in the Genesis creation myth where Eve is made by God out of Adam’s ‘spare rib’. This is even more pronounced in feeble translations of the sacred texts over the centuries. It is hard to escape the conclusion that all too often religion has been employed to establish abusive relationships of power over others, in which the strong find divine sanction for the domination of the weak. Thus some so-called ‘religious’ people have been far more exercised in suppressing religious minorities, women or people who happen to be gay than nurturing the disadvantaged, people as well as animals. One only needs to follow the debate which has raged over the past few years within the Anglican church first over women and then over homosexuality to be aware of that, and for me there is continuity between advancing feminism and lesbian and gay rights and standing up for animals. I believe passionately that the spiritual perspective still has a great deal to teach us. I write from the standpoint of liberal Anglicanism which draws on scripture, and especially on the Gospels, tradition and reason, and incorporates a profound respect for, and desire to learn from, other faiths whether sharers in the same basic tradition like the Judaism [which nurtured me and which, in this subject, has much to say to reinvigorate its daughter faith] or the more distinct, even distant, but equally impressive religions and traditions of the Indian sub-continent. Our point of departure has to be the Natural Order, in most faiths the Creation (though some religious systems like Jainism suppose there to be a continuum). In Judaism (and Christianity) we begin, indeed, with Genesis and in chapters 1 and 2 we see Adam as being at the apex of life on earth and as naming the creatures.
However it must be recalled that this prelapsarian relationship was not a license to plunder the world for its resources, at the expense of other animals. On the contrary, as the note in RSV to Genesis 1,29-30 says, ‘[Man’s] dominion is limited, as shown by the vegetarian requirements, which were only modified in Noah’s time (Genesis 9,2-3); it is to be benevolent and peaceful.’ We are to regard Adam as the steward of the creation and as such a servant of God. Animals, like man, stand in relation to God and the covenant made by God after the Flood is with Noah, his descendants ‘and with every living creature that is with you, the birds, the cattle, and every beast of the earth with you, as many as came out of the ark’ (Genesis 9,8). Isaiah writes about a return to the mythic golden age when:
From this we find a constantly evolving Hebraic/Jewish tradition in which animals have a moral status and should never be gratuitously harmed. As they stand in relation to God rather than in relation to man, they have an intrinsic value and are regarded as possessing souls (see Seidenberg 2005). Animals were supposed to rest upon the Sabbath, and the list of virtuous acts by God-fearing humans include being compassionate to other living creatures. In practice certain animals were, as we know, killed as sacrificial victims and for food. It was believed that the soul resided in the blood of the animal and hence in a way what for a pastoral society was regarded as necessary for life could be made acceptable and even expressed as being for the deity himself. Indeed, as for Greeks, Romans and most other ancient peoples, for the Hebrews the divine power expected sacrifice; and just as the scientific researcher today will tell us that experimenting on animals is vital to human happiness, so would the ancient Hebrews have believed that what God wanted most of all as a reward in order to show favour to man was an animal sacrifice. Such sacrifices continued down to the destruction of Herod’s Temple in AD 70, but long before that we find Isaiah’s forceful criticism of sacrifice, or at least sacrifice without good works, which dates as early as the 8th or 7th century BC.
Christianity emerged in the last few decades before the destruction of the Temple. Its founder, Jesus of Nazareth, can be seen to stand in the questioning prophetic tradition of Isaiah, but we have to view him through the lens of the Gospels, especially the Synoptic Gospels, in order to glean what can reasonably be surmised about him and his attitude to Nature. He would seem to have visited the temple as did his parents who sacrificed a pair of turtledoves or two young pigeons (Luke 2,24) for him. Later, probably towards the end of his ministry there is his prophetic rage at the abuse of sacred space by those who sold doves and exchanged money (Matthew 21,12) if not of the sacrificial worship of the temple as such.[3] He certainly ate fish, as did his disciples several of whom were Galilean fishermen; indeed one of his first displays of power was the ‘Miraculous draught of fishes’ on the Sea of Galilee (see Luke 5), which however I like to see (with the evangelist) in symbolic terms as concerned with bringing men into the fold of his Love . Other direct references to living creatures in connection with Jesus are rather few but significant, in that they (not surprisingly) suggest an acceptance of the traditional Jewish view of contract between God and all his creatures:
I will return at the end to what I think is the most important Gospel implication to our debate, though unfortunately it does not seem to have struck the nascent Church struggling with a brutal Roman ascendency where cruelty was inflicted so widely on man and beast. Christian theology, by shifting the focus of faith from the long-established Jewish one, centred on the Creator and Creation, to a new Christian one looking towards the Redeemer and Redemption, may have unintentionally widened the gap between man and the animals. St Augustine and especially in the high Middle Ages St Thomas Aquinas (influenced by their reading of Aristotle) denied that animals had use except to serve human needs. St Francis of Asissi, who did stress the Creation, is something of a shining exception to this rather negative approach to animals in that he regarded birds and beasts as his brothers and sisters. He realised that we owe a particular care to our fellow creatures because they are also made by God. In I fioretti del glorioso messere Santo Francesco e de’ suoi Fratri we read, for instance, of the saint rescuing some doves from a boy who had caught them:
But, even so, we can see in this story about doves, and in others about him preaching to nature a symbolic agenda. The tradition of living in harmony with nature is found not infrequently in stories about the Desert Fathers, Celtic saints and sometimes others who lived in harmony with animals (Jerome with his lion, Cuthbert with his otter, Giles with his deer, etc) although these relationships were largely also of theological significance. Indian religions provide some of the most attractive and rationally compassionate thought regarding man, animals and nature. The gulf between man and other animals was always, in any case, far less wide in the Hindu system with its deities who often had animal avatars or close associates, for instance Krishna with cows and Rama with monkeys. The friendly elephantine Ganesh is a universal harbinger of prosperity to the home while there can be no more beautiful bovine than Siva’s bull-mount Nandi. While some Hindus have indulged in animal sacrifice and the eating of meat, others do not and vegetarianism is widespread for moral reasons. Even so, in practice, anthropocentric attitudes predominated because, after all, the religion was revealed to men, and animal sacrifice has of course been practiced in some cults. Classical Buddhism, too, tended towards taking a compassionate attitude to all life, as can be seen famously in the rock and pillar edicts of the great 3rd century BC Mauryan Emperor Asoka. He decreed a ban on animal sacrifice and the eating of animals in his palaces and more widely (though this was never total and peacocks, and sometimes deer, continued to be eaten). The ideal was certainly not to kill animals. Here, for instance, is the Shahbazgarhi Rock Edict:
Even more uncompromising was and is the Jain ideal. For instance we read:
Returning to Christianity, what about the beliefs of the founder? Jesus was born at a particular time and within a specific society, which moulded his attitudes. In provincial Galilee, partly dependant on Lake Tiberias for its food, he was unlikely to have been a practising vegetarian, but nor was he a massive eater of meat as he would have had to be if he had been an Inuit or a Mongolian. The whole tenor of his teaching and healing ministry was to succour the outcast, people despised by their fellows because they were women, gay, foreigners, tax-collectors or otherwise impure through being diseased. It is quite clear that he was very much exercised by the way the rich and powerful, the civil and ecclesiastical authorities dominated his world. He lived as a servant to others and was prepared to die for his beliefs and, we believe, he deliberately underwent this sacrifice as our Redeemer. His parable about the steward abusing his trust (Luke 16) recalls us to the authority placed in Adam, and the implication is that his descendants cannot serve two masters, God and their own desires. The implications of Jesus’s life are laid out in the prologue to St John’s Gospel which deliberately aims at recalling the beginning of Genesis:
Jesus saved mankind but also, I believe, the entire creation and we must aspire to follow Him and accept the implications of his costly sacrifice. So we see one human life containing within itself the eternal Logos, the Word or Wisdom of God which had been in existence from the beginning, a Wisdom which in Jewish thought was sometimes seen as female (the Shekinah) but which is in fact not to be specifically linked with our species at all, but has far wider resonance. Thus I believe we can think of Jesus not just as a 1st century Jewish male, but as a being who in some mystic way was (and is) both female and male and further embraced and embraces the whole of creation. What does Jesus, as an indivisible part of the Creator God, make of our attempts to play about with Creation? What would Jesus, the centrality of whose teaching was God’s Love, make of experiments on animals, or any sort of action which involved cruelty and, indeed, killing? There are always going to be moral and spiritual implications for us in VERO, whatever the reason for our foundation, far beyond the question of conducting experiments on animals, and for me the clear answer is that the Divine Wisdom would have us accord with the Jain prescription of total love and respect for and not harming living things.[4] Do Animals have rights? You may be surprised that I do not think they do….but remember I include human beings with the other animals. If one predicates existence on the Creator-God, none of us have rights in any meaningful sense. We are all subject to the divine will, which brought us into being and drawing our sustenance from God’s grace. At a purely mythical level we can envisage a time of stewardship/overlordship over the animals only in the beginning of the world, the equivalent of the Aboriginal dream time, when mankind’s relations with other creatures was benign, and restored once again at the end of all time when through the Logos which can be understood as the Knowledge, the Wisdom, of God, or the Shekinah / Sophia (female), or the Christ (male), all will be saved. For someone with my outlook, there can be no legitimate overlordship over nature based on brute force. As a result, in the first instance, of the destruction of the 3rd Temple in AD 70 but also through the radical changes taking place in Judaism, animal sacrifices went into permanent abeyance. In Christianity (as expounded in Hebrews) the doctrine of Christ’s atoning sacrifice took the place of actual sacrifice, though at a folkloristic level (the paschal lamb in the Greek Orthodox east) we can see it still being continued. Is it, though, appropriate to celebrate the Resurrection of the Lamb of God by killing a lamb? Jewish belief that life, the soul, resided in blood led eventually to some limitations (for instance on hunting); but in the majority faith of Europe, Christianity, as we have seen, the Aristotelian notion that animals do not have souls in the same way as men held sway, and animals were hunted, killed for food in vast numbers and otherwise misused. As we have seen there were a few Christian leaders who took some sort of stand against indifference to animal suffering. In the past two centuries in England (and elsewhere) many of the people dedicated to animal welfare have been Christians and have campaigned for a better deal for animals on grounds of faith. Typical of the humane, modern Christian response is what Richard Harries, until recently Bishop of Oxford, has written about animals and Creation (Harries 2002,ch.8). He does believe that Creation exists for its own sake and that vertebrates (but not invertebrates) ‘feel pain and probably fear as well’. However he continues:
This provides a very helpful starting point. But one has to remember that literally we do not know for certain what other human beings, external to ourselves, feel either! Furthermore autistic people who sadly lack the empathy which will allow them to make the emotional imaginative leap, of which the rest of us are capable, can find the emotional response to other human beings very difficult. Furthermore, women and men who have suffered severe brain injury or have dementia may be further away from our rational reach than a monkey or a dog. I believe firmly that we need to go further if we are truly to live up to the challenge of a religion (any religion) with a message of Love at its heart. At the moment I fear that on the whole, but with major exceptions, Christians have tended to fall far short of the real feeling of kinship with nature of some of the sages from Eastern faiths; we can learn from Buddhists, Hindus and Jains, but we can also revisit the principles enshrined in Gospel Christianity. Jesus calls on us to be aware of those beyond ourselves; and we can all observe animals in our daily lives. If we are lucky these can be wild animals, and it seems fairly clear to me that the seals I look at in the Hebrides have a complex social life. We all know about the great apes but also other primates, elephants, whales, the great cats and various canine species and have done so for many years, through film documentaries. But at close quarters our non-human friends are likely to include cats and/or dogs. With them one encounters so often behaviour and intelligence not so far from what one finds in a child and being a somewhat irresponsible person I admit to egging on both dogs and small children to commit minor mayhem. I could tell a large number of anecdotes at this point but so, I suspect, could most people in this audience. AND SO WHAT ARE WE DOING BETRAYING THE TRUST PLACED IN US BY MONKEYS, DOGS AND CATS, WHICH WE FIND IN OUR POWER, BY [AS A SOCIETY] CONDONING EXPERIMENTS ON THEM? Again, even as I write, a centre for experimenting on primates is being planned for Montreal, as though our patient advance towards realising our very close kinship with primates was being negated. I am staggered that Churches can be exercised at the moment about what any animal behaviourist worth her/his salt would regard as normal aspects of human / animal behaviour, like homosexuality, which actually cements the bonds of love between individuals without causing a population explosion and hence is a very good thing in itself; and at the same time Christians do not appear to be especially exercised by cruelty towards other beings in the Creation with whom we share this planet. Exploiting living creatures whether by hunting them for ‘sport’, in farming (more especially factory farming) and by performing cruel experiments on them seem to me to be almost by definition diabolical crimes against the Holy Ghost. Even if benefits to mankind could be proved to come from any of these actions, there is still the question of ‘by whose authority’ or ‘by what right?’ and the answer is returned, ‘because we have power!’ But when did God give mankind the right to rule through fear?’ It will be further objected, ‘what if some good comes from experimenting on animals, or by rearing them cheaply for food?’ I do not think questionable means can ever justify supposed ends. We in VERO are challenging the efficacy of animal experiments; others have pointed out that if we abandoned a carnivorous diet it would be easier to assuage world hunger in many instances. But I do not want to argue merely from a utilitarian standpoint which can never be morally satisfactory. Caiaphas said ‘that it was expedient that one man should die for the people’ (see St John 18,14).... Surely, expediency has never been a Christian virtue, and cannot become so without exonerating Caiaphas! Thus, if we are aiming at the highest good and trying to live up to the new Revelation of the ‘Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the World’, something much higher than mere expediency is going to be required of us. Should we really benefit from the suffering of other beings? And what is the cruelty involved going to do to the soul of the perpetrators. In an earlier lecture Richard Ryder provided us with some horrific evidence, and I have heard other stories which frankly cannot help reminding me of what happened in the Nazi death-camps, albeit in these experiments conducted on dogs, cats, monkeys and turkeys rather than on men, women and children. After all our relationship to other animals is a close one, as we have known from the time of Darwin and as was suggested even earlier, for instance by the physiogmatic theorist, Rev Johann Casper Lavater (1741-1801), who employed Christian van Mechel (1737-1817) to produce an aquatint to show how a frog might be transmuted into the Apollo Belvedere. The rabbis taught that animals observe the moral laws in accordance with Torah (see H.Tirosh-Samuelson in Gottlieb 2006,37) , which we can conceive as the Logos or, if we are Christians, as the Christ. In honouring the Creation, and especially the Creator of the Universe, we should realise that the best use of human reason is to discern the absolute necessity for a transcendent and self-sacrificing Love, and the need to avow a life of service to all God’s creatures (which I take to be Andrew Linzey’s position, see for instance Linzey in Gottlieb 2006). This has major implications in the way we live, as servants of God. Vegetarianism, as a renunciation both symbolic and practical, for instance is a ‘the first step towards the creation of a violence-free world’ which will mark a return to the Golden Age.[5] But it follows that experimenting on animals on grounds that it might help someone in the future, or hunting them on the grounds that some animals hunt other animals are totally illegitimate arguments from our point of view. The ideal laid down for us in the beatific vision of the suffering servant in Isaiah, of Christ’s self-sacrifice (or, if one prefers, the Buddha’s renunciation) is the opposite of the male-chauvinistic will to power and domination that has long disfigured human history, often in the process blasphemously invoking religion. The logic of the Judeo-Christian ethic requires us to eschew the predatory instinct and embrace all that binds us together, and reveals a premonition of a new Eden. The alternative is that we will sinfully destroy ourselves and the planet through our overbearing arrogance, greed, cruelty and disrespect to God and his creatures. I began by hinting that I was a classicist of sorts, and apart from the sublime dialogues of Plato, which lead us towards an ideal, I find great wisdom in the altogether darker critique of Euripides. In the Trojan Women, the unspeakable arrogance and cruelty of the Greeks seems to the unhappy victims to find no echo in the Heavens, but we, the privileged onlookers, have already seen in the prologue the pact between Athena and Poseidon which will shatter the Greek ships as a punishment for their hubris. Alive to the myths, we know how few of them will ever find a peaceful homecoming. The message for us is to live in harmony with nature, with the animals and with God, remembering the highest ideals of our faith, whatever that faith may be! Sources: For the Bible, it is advisable to employ only scholarly translations especially the annotated Revised or New Revised Standard Version. It has become customary to complain that not enough has been written on the theology of animals. As an outsider whose main fields of study are the arts of Roman Britain and ancient seal-stones, the amount that has been written appears daunting, especially when so many of the primary sources of religion deal with the Natural World. The following will hopefully be of interest. Richard Harries, God outside the box. Why spiritual people object to Christianity (SPCK,London 2002), chapter 8
There are many useful papers in Roger S.Gottlieb, The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Ecology (Oxford 2006) including:
And in:
Footnotes:
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