The lamb and the Lamb

theological reflections on suffering, with especial cognizance to the suffering of animals

Are not two sparrows sold for a small coin? Yet not one of them falls to the ground without your Father’s knowledge. -Mt. 10, 29

To understand suffering, is to understand life. A radical statement – perhaps the more so, inasmuch as suffering is a profound mystery. To claim fully to understand suffering would be practically self-refuting. Yet this mystery is common to, and deeply woven into, your life, my life, and the lives of every sentient being on Earth. These sufferings that bear down upon us all lead us naturally to engage with the problem of evil.

The problem of evil amounts to this: How can there be an all-good and all-powerful God, given that there is so much needless, meaningless suffering in the world? To address this question – above all for the Christian, whose faith flows forth from the Cross; among Christians, above all for Catholics, for whom the Crucifixion is (or should be) an eternally present living reality – means radically challenging the premises of the question: the claims of needlessness and meaninglessness no doubt, but perhaps even more the common presumptions about the nature of suffering and its relationship to evil.

Contemporary utilitarian philosophers define the good as “the maximization of pleasure and the minimization of suffering.” This seems a strange idea, given that suffering, while itself bad taken in isolation, is generally an effect following on a cause that is bad; as St. John Paul II wrote in Salvifici Doloris: “It can be said that man suffers whenever he experiences any kind of evil” (emphasis in original). For one who is injured or mourning, their pain and sorrow are consequent on the evil, on the damage of the injury or the loss of the good; while a palliative may sometimes be necessary, it seems obvious that prevention or reversal of the evil would be preferable to any palliative, and that in some cases (a hand resting on a hot stove, a tragic loss) the absence of pain or sorrow would be worse than the pain and sorrow themselves.

The unvarnished reality of suffering, isolated and taken apart from a primary engagement with its causes, taken apart from any understanding of experience as following upon being, is devastating. Consider the inevitability of suffering, and that even moderately intense suffering (like a toothache) tends to drown out pretty much any pleasure. Indeed, South African utilitarian philosopher David Benatar maintains that, even if life may be a net good for some of the living, death is without exception an evil for everyone, if perhaps a lesser evil for those for whom life is not a net good. Thus, for Benatar the real problem is being born, with all its certain consequence of suffering and death; being born is an evil for everyone. The individual’s best option is not to be born, and the universal best solution for the problem of suffering is for no one to be born. This is rather more than what St. Paul had in mind, when he asks that we may not grieve like the rest, who have no hope.

I freely admit that this is not the general view of utilitarian philosophers, although I cannot fully see why it is not; among those who have clearly and consequently rejected being, as opposed to experience, as the primary ground for judging the goodness of a life, I would suspect that virtually all would agree with Benatar. That he faces such strong headwinds with his argument stems not solely from pollyannaism, as he maintains, but also from our much-suppressed yet persistent human tendency to get outside of ourselves, at least now and then, and look for horizons broader than our own. Even the world’s most famous utilitarian, Peter Singer, bases his argument against Benatar on a postulated future in which life is better (i.e. pleasanter and less painful) than it is now. In this, Singer is either (1.) disregarding Benatar’s point on how missing out on possible future goods is irrelevant to persons who don’t exist; (2.) suggesting that our pleasure, as existing persons, in contemplating a happier future outweighs any imbalance of harms that may come in that future; or (3.) taking a non-utilitarian position on behalf of sentient being as in itself meaningful and worth preserving, if only as a seed of hope for the future. This last seems likeliest to me.

For our part, even were we not Christians, we clearly would not need so to long for a world devoid of suffering, as to wish the world devoid of life. As humans, we look to the wisdom of the best of us – the saints of every tradition. As Christians, however, we can look to our Redeemer. If we believe in the Cross, we believe that Christ’s Passion has shown us the way to life, and that the human nature He conjoined with His Divine Nature is our witness; it has empowered even the only begotten Son of God to do what He could not do in His Divine Nature alone, which is to suffer. Even the smallest child, the very infant, and those who through mental incapacity inborn or acquired cannot understand their sufferings, share the same human nature and have souls like our own – and who is to say what those souls are accomplishing, all unseen?

To understand this requires a clear sense of a theological concept: the rational soul. While contemporary materialists attribute all consciousness (including reason, to the degree that they accept reason as anything distinct from other consciousness or intelligence) to brain function, for the Catholic philosophical tradition the brain is an organ, like the eye. You see with your eyes, and cannot see without them, but it is you who see, by means of your healthy eyes; if your eyes are damaged, your capacity to see – your nature as a seeing being – is intact, but impaired in its execution. So also with your brain – your nature as a rational being is mediated into function through your brain; if your brain is damaged, diseased, or not fully developed, you are impeded in your function, but you are still a rational being – because you have a rational soul, infused by God. That soul, being rational, is capable of knowing God, of loving and serving Him, and of surviving bodily death and being restored to glorified bodily life at the Last Judgment – yes, the supernatural, revealed truths started coming on hard and fast, there. One consequence of this is that, although actual, functioning rationality is the natural, normal manifestation of the rational soul, it is perfectly possible for material conditions to impede this manifestation from ever being realized, even over the course of an entire lifetime. Such cases are tragic – infants who die before attaining the use of reason, or persons suffering with severe lifelong cognitive challenges – but we should nonetheless consider how much is likely occurring in a soul of a rational nature, prescinding from the material conditions which obstruct the enacting of lived rationality. We should not lightly dismiss the idea that there may be great saints hidden among us, in hospitals and sanitaria, and that the world may be looking with pity (or, worse, disgust) on some of those whom they, and we, should be regarding with awe. Nor should we infantilize such persons; given the power of the rational human soul, we should not assume that their sanctity consists in innocent suffering alone.

One question remains, though. What of animals? Their capacities as we know them belong to their nature; their (animal) souls bear only the seeds of reason, and do not possess the hidden depths in which infants or those with organic brain issues can practice contemplation or live in deep and invisible union with Christ. They suffer, and do not know or understand a transcendent meaning in their suffering; they have not the spiritual gravitas invisibly to live out sufferings hidden in Christ. Yet they are loved, and God sees them each as they are – not as generic, as species without individual reality or meaning, but as themselves and irreplaceably themselves – Lift up your eyes on high and see who created these: He leads out their army and numbers them, calling them all by name. By his great might and the strength of his power not one of them is missing! Moreover, in accord with their natures, they do not and cannot commit sin; they are invincibly innocent. Even the worst the animal kingdom has to offer turns us back on our own sins – above all that original sin by which, again to use terms of St. John Paul II, original man yields to historical man and to the entire history we see.

Original sin (a “certainly misleading and imprecise term,” according to Ratzinger) must best be seen here not as original (for as humankind came from the hand of God, it was innocence and not sin that was original) but as originary, the point of origination of the history we know. Attempts to historicize this originary point not only deny or distort the results of valid scientific observation, they grossly trivialize the sufferings of animals, affirming that an unfallen world could contain such unconsoled agonies as we see in the world we know. It is of paramount importance to understand and address the sufferings of animals, sufferings that long predated the advent of hominids on Earth, if we are to make anything of the meaning of sin and suffering and the ongoing work of God in the universe.

I considered – not as deeply as I would have liked – some contemporary Catholic philosophical and theological writing on the problem of evil and the sufferings of animals. In his book The Problem of Animal Pain: A Theodicy for All Creatures Great and Small, philosopher Trent Dougherty suggested, as an explanation, that God’s purpose in creation and the destiny for which all things are created, is holiness. This is a promising beginning, although some of his extrapolations thereafter (e.g. animal souls developing rationality after surviving death) seem almost more like Christian fantasy fiction than like traditional philosophy or theology. Jesuit Fr. Christopher Steck’s work, All God’s Animals: A Catholic Theological Framework for Animal Ethics (for which Fr. Steck offers a substantial precis online) rests on the stronger foundation of the continuity between the Kingdom of God in the eschaton and the Kingdom of God that is in our midst and on the covenant with all living creatures in the ninth chapter of Genesis.

Both Dougherty and Fr. Steck are explicitly concerned with whether animals that lived and died on Earth might be found in Heaven – and both, clearly, support this hope. As already intimated, Dougherty goes to remarkable (and, to me, implausible) extremes to support this position; Fr. Steck seeks, rather, to critique the suggestion, common throughout theology at least since Aquinas, that an immortal rational soul is the only possible explanation for any living being surviving death – that it is the rational character of the soul that detaches it from the laws that govern matter. In this Thomistic approach, the capacity of reason to know abstract entities, such as mathematical and logical formulae (and, more importantly, to know the existence and some of the properties of God, even prior to any knowledge of revelation), is at once cause and evidence for its survival of death. As animals have none of these gifts, they are confined to the life of the body; the death of the body takes away, along with all of the animal’s being and function, its very principle of individuation – recall that, as an Aristotelian, Aquinas would be inclined to hold that all of what distinguishes one dog from another is the matter which constitutes them, respectively.  

It is however, also worth recalling that, for Aquinas, the restoration to each human person of the selfsame, numerically identical body at the Final Judgment is a unique miracle. As far as I was able to understand, Fr. Steck seems to be focusing the issue of survival of death in Aquinas on rationality alone; it is here the rational nature of the soul taken together with divine omnipotence that realize in concert the resurrection of the body.

Paradoxically, this considerably strengthens Fr. Steck’s position. The very fact that Aquinas maintains that divine omnipotence is necessarily involved in generating a numerically identical body brings him halfway to his goal, still in accord with Aquinas. All that remains – and this is assuming that we persevere in a strictly Aristotelian-Thomistic framework – is to explain how the brute soul is to be preserved. This may seem to be (and to a degree is, per se) the same issue we had before; however, disengaging the question from an unalloyed reliance on the effects of human rationality within the natural order and introducing the divine omnipotence and the miraculous refocuses its meaning. Teasing apart where and how the seeds of rationality are beginning to sprout in the animal kingdom would be a long and subtle process; commending the issue to the all-encompassing mind and the infinite creative love of a God for whom not a sparrow falls unseen seems wiser, especially where he has already shown his willingness to act as only he can.

Yet this is more than what we see, and more than what we need. Imagine, if you will, the tiny fawn burnt in a forest fire, dying an agonizing death over days, so often cited in problem of evil arguments. How can a good God permit suffering so merciless and so pointless?

But the fawn’s suffering is not pointless. Suffering is cruciform; Jesus our Lord has etched His pattern of victory on the whole cosmos. This helpless and innocent animal is dying in union with the sufferings of every animal since the dawn of creation – and in union with Christ on the Cross.

How so? How is this not blasphemous?

The fawn is dying for our sins – not effectually, of course, or at least not so, taken apart from Christ, but dying for our sins no less. The sin we have brought into the world is the source of its suffering, and of the suffering of every innocent animal that has ever suffered on this planet – yes, original sin runs this deep, and permeates the whole of the historical time we know, from beginning to end. Indeed, taken thus, it is possible that all earthly suffering rises up onto the Cross with Christ – the only difference being that the animals are in fact sinless by their natures. This is not a merit – but it is a glory, endowed on them by God. In a distant, analogous way, far lesser than human sanctity in its nature and scope yet more perfect than human sanctity within its own small circle (for all have sinned, and fallen short of the Glory of God), this fawn is a type of Christ. Every lamb is a type of the Lamb.

Is the fawn to enjoy the Beatific Vision? Clearly not, unless there were wildly more to Dougherty’s speculations than I can see; trying to attribute the spiritual sight of the immortal, invisible, timeless and immaterial God to an irrational animal in Heaven, makes no more sense than offering it the vote on Earth. It cannot function so without violating its own nature. Is it to be resurrected? I cannot imagine – a non-glorious resurrection would be pointless, and a glorious resurrection would far overshoot even Dougherty’s Narnia-like imaginings.

But will it live again? I do not know – but I think it possible, even likely. If there is to be a New Earth as well as a New Heavens (a point that neither Dougherty nor Fr. Steck emphasize), it would not be a new earth without living organisms, and I see no reason why the God whom we worship cannot in His omnipotence and creative love hold within Himself that form which sustained the animal on Earth, and allow it once more to inform the matter of a body – now, however, in a realm eternally free from the corruption of sin and death. Indeed, on one level, to create animals ex nihilo for the New Earth seems far more peculiar than redeeming as much of the old creation for which the Son suffered and died as is capable of receiving the gift; after all, right here and now, the kingdom of God is among you, and the New Earth is the culmination of the Kingdom that is already in our midst. Recall, also, that the presence of God in the New Earth would be completely real and manifest in the glorified humanity of the selfsame Son, the Second Person of the Trinity. And again: He was among wild beasts, and the angels ministered to him.

This would not properly be a resurrection – in fact, I would be inclined to consider it a re-creation, a term which is legitimate insofar (and only insofar) as it takes place in the context of what is itself a new creation. It would nonetheless require two adjustments from the Aristotelian-Thomistic baseline. The first is that animals must be individuated by more than their matter – and here I would gladly accede to Fr. Steck’s covenantal vision and suggest that what is individuating non-human life is its relation to God. Recalling that animals give glory to God by being (a seemingly bland statement with powerful metaphysical implications), I suggest that their animal identities are individuated by the actus essendi, each by their own. This would be a far stretch, starting from the baseline that a dog is dogness instantiated in a particular constellation of matter – but that, in turn, is a far stretch for anyone who has ever known a dog.

The other adjustment, of no less importance, is a forthright rejection of the notion, found in Aquinas and handed down through the ages, that animals exist for us – that animals exist to serve humankind. There is no question, Scripturally speaking: God gave us as humans dominion over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, the tame animals, all the wild animals, and all the creatures that crawl on the earth. But that does not diminish that animals exist for God – just as do we, and just as does everything in creation. An earthly sovereign has rule over his subjects, but they do not exist for him; they exist for God. Though we have just rule over the animals (just rule, that is, in its origin, in its accord with the command of Genesis; by no means do we rule justly in our manner of execution, certainly not in our time of factory farming and laboratory testing of consumer products), they exist for God. And this is where Dougherty’s one key point returns: being exists for holiness. The suffering fawn in the problem of evil is a pure and innocent (albeit vicarious) participant in the economy of holiness.

I am posting this as liturgies begin for the Second Sunday of Lent, liturgies which present us with an image of glory. A focus on glory, rather than on seeking reward or justification, may open our eyes to new possibilities here. The fawn and its sufferings have their meaning and, yes, their small glory in their share in the Cross of Christ.

In addition to the works cited above, I found considerable guidance and clarification in Christina Van Dyke, “Human identity, immanent causal relations, and the principle of non-repeatability: Thomas Aquinas on the bodily resurrection,” Religious Studies, 43, 373-394, 2007.