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"Nothing is apt to mask the face of God so much as religion." ~ Martin Büber ~ |
It is in the first chapter of Genesis that God tells 'man' to be fruitful and multiply, subdue the Earth and have dominion over it. How the Church has interpreted this Biblical version of Creation has long been a contentious issue, but in recent years the controversy has grown in tandem with the world's multiplying ecological crises. While more conservative theologians continue to believe that humanity was given not only the right but the duty to exploit the natural environment in order to civilise the Earth according to God's specific wishes, more reform-minded academics are convinced that God merely intended human beings to be respectful guardians and stewards of the Earth rather than exclusive owners. More outspoken, secular critics on the other hand interpret even the idea of "dominion" as cultivating the notion of human supremacy and believe that the Judaeo-Christian tradition has played a fundamental, if inadvertent role in leading the world to ecological devastation. In this view, it was not so much the scriptures themselves, but the fathers of the early Christian Church who fostered the separation of humanity from nature. In terms of sheer expediency there was undoubtedly a dual benefit in embracing this concept. Not only was it used to justify the Church's war for influence against diverse pantheistic faiths which still believed in the sanctity and oneness of Mother Earth, but at the same time it also served to clear away inconvenient moral obstacles to the plundering of the Earth's natural wealth.
Moreover, the idea of separateness was bolstered by scriptural references to the unique Creation of 'man' in God's image, and ironically there can be little doubt that this notion appealed to the same human vanity which, in Genesis, results in Adam and Eve's expulsion from the Garden of Eden. Indeed, that expulsion can in itself be regarded as symbolic of humanity's self-imposed separation from nature. But whatever diverse conclusions individuals may draw from the scriptures, it is virtually undeniable that the destruction of nature, and perhaps the vast majority of society's woes, can be blamed on the disease of fragmentation. As we have already seen, at the root of this condition is the tendency to perceive the world either in implacable black and white extremes or in unrelated categories - not only an antithesis of ecology which is inherently holistic, but also the creed of oneness, regarded as sacred in numerous faiths and religions, including Christianity.
In the Hexaemeron Homily VIII of St. Basil for example we find the following: "Our God has created nothing unnecessarily and has omitted nothing that is necessary." And in Hinduism's Upanishads: "Even by the mind this truth is to be learned: there are not many but only One. Who sees variety and not the unity wanders from death to death." At the heart of this appreciation of oneness is the macrocosm-microcosm idea, also found in the contemporary concept of "deep ecology". Again in the Upanishads we find written: "The little space within the heart is as great as this vast universe. The heavens and the earth are there, and the sun, and the moon, and the stars; fire and lightning and winds are there; and all that now is and all that is not: for the whole universe is in Him and He dwells within our heart." Similar sentiments are expressed by Jesus in a papyrus scripture of the second century AD, discovered in Egypt early this century: "Ye ask - Who are they which draw us to the kingdom, if the kingdom is in heaven?. . . the fowls of the air, and all beasts that are under the earth or upon the earth, and the fishes of the sea, these are they that draw you, and the kingdom of heaven is within you."
The fundamentally ecological idea that inter-relating diversity also leads to harmonious oneness is also found in The Great Catechism: "In the sensible world itself, though there is considerable mutual opposition of its various elements, yet a certain harmony maintained in those opposites has been devised by the wisdom that rules the universe, and thus there is produced a concord of the whole Creation with itself, and the natural contrariety does not break the chain of agreement. . ."
Similar sentiments are expressed by the world's religions with respect to humanity's relationship with other living species. Although it is written that Allah created 'man' as His "vicegerent on earth", and animals to serve his needs - precepts which might have unintentionally encouraged some of the terrible cruelty inflicted upon animals in the Muslim world - the Qur'an also emphasises the equality between human and animal: "There is no beast on Earth, nor bird which flieth with its wings, but the same is a people like unto you." Furthermore, the scriptures of many religions specifically forbid the mistreatment of animals, whether or not those creatures have any economic usefulness to human beings. Islam's Mishkat al Masabih declares that "doing good to beasts is like the doing of good to human beings, a deed of charity; while cruelty to animals is forbidden just like cruelty to human beings." In Hinduism's Srimad-Bhagavatam we find the following: "One should treat animals such as deer, camels, asses, monkeys, mice, snakes, birds and flies exactly like one's own son. How little difference there actually is between children and these innocent animals." And in the words of the Buddha: "One thing only do I teach: suffering and the cease of suffering. Kindness to all living creatures is the true religion." Similarly, the Prophet-founder of the Baha'i faith, 'Abdu'l Baha, wrote some 150 years ago: "It is not only their fellow human beings that the beloved of God must treat with mercy and compassion, rather must they show forth the utmost loving kindness to every living creature. . . The feelings are one and the same, whether ye inflict pain on man or beast."
But as always, even amongst the most unanthropocentric religions, selective interpretation of the scriptures by influential theologians has often been used to justify virtually any abuse of nature that seems expedient to serve human needs or desires. It is quite possible, for example, that the early fathers of the Christian Church decreed that animals have no souls not only as a useful weapon against animism, but also to bolster the notion of 'man's' unique creation in the image of God. And yet this is a philosophy not to be found anywhere in the Bible. Indeed, we find in Job 12:7-10: "But ask now the beasts and they shall teach thee; and the fowls of the air, and they shall tell thee: Or speak to the earth, and it shall teach thee: and the fishes of the sea shall declare unto thee. Who knoweth not in all these that the hand of the Lord hath wrought this? In whose hand is the soul of every living thing, and the breath of all mankind."
Despite such references in the scriptures, for the fathers of the Church, nature became increasingly equated with the Devil in that pantheistic faiths which worshipped the Mother Earth and her spirits were viewed as evil and depraved. Yet the Church's obsession with dichotomy was not only confined to Good versus Evil. In direct opposition to pantheistic beliefs, spirit was to become divorced from matter, Earth separated from heaven, and God promoted aloft into purely metaphysical realms. The notion of separateness was part of a human intellectual weakness for reductionism, the peculiar conviction that any complex idea or system can be completely understood if it is simplified by breaking it down into separate component parts. Reductionism, later to become so evident in science, was the invasive tool, the scalpel and forceps, which would be used in understanding the world, for knowledge too was power - however transient, however illusory.
Living in the 13th century, Thomas Aquinas, a member of the Dominican order, was instrumental in encouraging the Church to embrace scientific rationalism - a legacy of Aristotle which emphasised the primacy of human intelligence. Despite its aversion to "paganism", the Church had actually been experiencing the influences of neoplatonic thought ever since St. Augustine embraced its creed of spiritual monism in the 5th century. But in its conversion to Christianity, the neoplatonic belief in universal oneness suffered such disfigurement that to later theologians - including Aquinas - it was misconstrued to mean that there was only one, homogeneous reality - their own. To some extent, this might explain the Church's medieval crusade against "heretical" beliefs and its rabid intolerance partly fathered by Aquinas.
In this period of European history, technical progress was already requiring men and women to move from agrarian to urban society, reinforcing human alienation from nature. In his publication The Status of Animals in the Christian Religion, C. W. Hume quotes historian Rosalind Hill as saying that there was "a tendency, in towns and along trade routes, to develop a much more urban, mercantile economy, so that people lived away from their animals and regarded them as expendable. It is rather interesting to find that the worst period of cruelty to human beings (practised because of fear) coincides with this - e.g. much more torture, burning of heretics, and witch-hunting, none of which had been very common in the Middle Ages. Right through this period and until the 18th century you had extremely brutal sports with animals, coinciding with public brutality to humans, and as far as the evidence goes the populace enjoyed both."
Still influenced by earlier Christian beliefs in the depravity of nature, including the inherent sinfulness of the naked human body, new generations of men and women, including clerics, were beginning to strive for mastery over the forces of nature. Rationalism was to become a prime mover in this new trend and Aquinas, canonised a saint in 1323, is still recognised by the Roman Catholic Church as its foremost Western philosopher and theologian. Although all Christian philosophers taught the distinction between matter and spirit, Aquinas believed in an intrinsic separation between the two. In this sense Aquinas also denounced the Christian tendency to sacralize the forces of nature and to connect nature to the miraculous or to the providence of God. This amounted to an antithesis of the beliefs of St. Francis, today often referred to as the patron saint of ecology. "Through our dear Mother Earth be praised, my Lord," runs St. Francis' Canticle of the Creatures. "She feeds us, guides us, gives us plants, bright flowers, And all her fruits." But to the Dominicans of Aquinas, such sentiments were contemptible in that they were both inimical to rationalistic thought and betrayed a similarity to the animistic beliefs which the Church had for so long struggled against. "If in Holy Scripture there are found some injunctions forbidding the infliction of some cruelty towards brute animals," wrote Aquinas, "this is either for removing a man's mind from exercising cruelty towards other men. . . or because the injury inflicted on animals turns to a temporal loss for some man. . ." It has been postulated that Aquinas founded this belief upon the jurisprudence of ancient Rome. "Only a person, that is, a being possessed of reason and self-control, can be the subject of rights and duties," declares the Catholic Encyclopaedia. The striking similarities between Roman and canon law in this respect are further elucidated by C. W. Hume: "In the jurisprudence of ancient Rome nobody could have rights unless he was legally a person, persona, and originally you could not be a person unless you were free (a slave was not a person), nor unless you were a citizen (foreigners were not persons), nor unless you were a paterfamilias (sons, daughters and wives were not persons, and had no rights; a father could put his son to death at pleasure). Gradually more and more new classes of human beings acquired personality and with it legal rights, but animals never did so." During medieval trials however, animals accused of crimes or misdeeds continued to be held accountable for their actions, the defendants having much the same rights as humans, being provided with legal counsel. Found guilty of committing capital crimes, animals such as dogs, horses and pigs were even sentenced to death by hanging. Today, such trials may well seem like a theatre of the absurd, yet the human attitudes which gave rise to them, reflecting the legacy of pantheism, also implicitly recognised the intelligence of animals, their individuality, and their free will. Writes Rosalind Hill, a specialist in medieval history, in her publication Both Small and Great Beasts: "In a society which accepted without question the fact that Balaam's ass showed a good deal more perception and good sense than Balaam himself, there was much less pitying condescension towards the animal world than there is today."
To Aquinas, animals were devoid of reason, free will and soul and in this respect his views bear a striking resemblance to those of the rationalist Rene Descartes, who, four centuries later, became the founding father of science's mechanistic view of creation. Not only the views of the Franciscans were being swept aside in this increasingly intolerant onslaught, but also much older Christian traditions, not least of all the belief in one common Creation. As St. Chrysostom wrote in the 4th century: "Surely we ought to show creatures great kindness and gentleness for many reasons, but, above all, because they are of the same origin as ourselves." But to dialectical rationalism, emotion too was to become regarded as inferior to impassive intellect. And as animals more obviously displayed similar emotions to homo sapiens rather than thoughts, this amounted to yet another convenient justification for the notion of separateness. To Aquinas and his followers, nature was hostile to the survival of humanity and could only be controlled through reason. The supernatural view of the world cast its shadow over human progress and inhibited 'man's' rightful supremacy over nature. Indeed, whether by accident or design, in regarding the natural world as soulless, inanimate matter devoid of any connection with its Creator, this removed the final moral obstacle to its exclusive ownership and exploitation by homo sapiens. Destined to conquer and prevail, this doctrine was to set the course for a brutal war against the supernatural. Under the increasingly powerful influence of the Dominicans, in 1484 Pope Innocent VIII gave the Church's formal assent to the Inquisition. The witch-hunts which were to follow served not only to wipe out both real and imaginary practitioners in the arts of the occult - whether black or white magic - but also, by sheer intimidation and mass hysteria, to discourage even the most innocent beliefs in the spirits of nature. Indeed, the witch-hunts were destined to destroy the last remnants of cultural pantheism in Europe. In the two centuries which followed, it is estimated that over nine million peasants were burnt or tortured to death after being accused of witchcraft, as well as countless animals which were suspected of being under their evil command as so-called "familiars". Cats, for example, reputed to be the witch's most preferred familiar, were killed in their tens of thousands, and even up until the last century, relates Swiss author Hans Ruesch in Slaughter of the Innocent, the Church still considered it quite normal to celebrate All Saints Day in Italy by burning barrels of live cats in the piazzas.
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"For a certain type of intellectual mediocrity characterised by enlightened rationalism, a scientific theory that simplifies matters is a very good means of defence because of the tremendous faith modern man has in anything which bears the label 'scientific'. Such a label sets your mind at rest immediately, almost as well as Roma locuta causa finita: Rome has spoken, the matter is settled." ~ C. G. Jung ~ |
The Dark Ages of Science
Several characteristics underlined the distinction between 'civilised man' and 'dumb brutes', not least of all the concepts of intelligence, thought and free will. The human being, ashamedly trying bury his own animalness, often under ludicrously-stilted social etiquette and fashion, nevertheless resorted to rather primitive ways to elevate his own self-esteem, the most obvious of which was to relegate his former relatives in the animal kingdom to the status of inferior beings possessing neither soul nor conscious thought. One need only recall the shock which greeted Darwin's theory of evolution in Victorian England - the preposterous idea that humanity, made in the image of God, could somehow be descended from the apes! Despite predictable outrage there was actually little reason for the Church to lead a song and dance over the Darwin affair since almost any controversial theory could be assimilated into already established ways of thinking. As the Church was soon to discover as it recovered from its knee-jerk denunciations of the Darwinian heresy, science harboured no perverse intentions to knock humanity off the throne of creation, but in fact merely wished to confirm with rationalism the biological preeminence of homo sapiens. Indeed, Darwin's theory, expediently reinterpreted as survival of the slickest, emphasising the competition rather than the cooperation between species, seemed to justify as entirely natural every kind of social injustice.
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"Until he extends the circle of his compassion to all living things, man will not himself find peace." ~ Albert Schweitzer ~ |
Perhaps the greatest separation between 'man and beast' that could be reinforced through science was intelligence. More than any other characteristic, thought is still regarded as the border between human and animal, and time and time again, the alleged inferiority of animals in consciousness is used to justify their commercial exploitation, whether that be in the circus, the factory farm or the laboratory.
Until very recently, evidence of animals displaying conscious thought was regarded by science as inadmissible. Although too numerous to catalogue, such reports were simply dismissed or filed away as unexplained phenomena. This was because the very idea of animal intelligence was incompatible with established theories which classified animals as virtual automatons, driven entirely by instinct. It was as though instinct and intuition was something primitive and inferior which the "civilised" human had outgrown. The 17th century French scientist and philosopher René Descartes was the founding father of this doctrine. Science was then in the process of becoming a powerful new religion, and had embarked on its own crusade to reconstruct the very foundations of human conceptions of creation: rather than being endowed with insubstantial, metaphysical spirit, life would instead be reduced to precise mathematical formulae, its mechanistic workings quantifiable and comfortingly predictable. So powerful was the influence of Rene Descartes in promoting this cannon law that even the suggestion of animal consciousness in scientific circles was regarded as anathema. There was little or no protest from religious circles since, within Christian dogma, animals were already regarded as soulless and Nature perverse. It was therefore only one step away for animals to be deprived of their minds as well, reduced to mere clockwork mechanisms. "I think therefore I am," declared the visionary Descartes, so perhaps it was logical to assume that because animals didn't think, they were not. Certainly, following the lead of ancient Rome and the bigotry of Aquinas they were not deemed worthy of rights, any more than the savages who, during the process of colonialism, faced the choice of either being converted or being killed. But given science's contempt for superstition, it is ironic indeed that its proud new ethic was also a legacy of age-old religious beliefs which had somehow conspired with human arrogance to put homo sapiens on the throne of creation, separated from all other life through the unique possession of soul and consciousness. And although science claimed as its highest principle, the search for truth, there can be little doubt that from its very inception, its view of creation was guided by sheer expedience. For without soul, without mind, nature and her animal offspring could be regarded as little more than exploitable matter, existing only to serve the needs of the human race.
It was thus that Descartes and his contemporaries unwittingly ushered in a litany of horrors in the name of their new religion. Laboratory research at the time bore more than a passing resemblance to the holy Inquisition that it supplanted, where animals - sometimes literally nailed to the operating table - were tortured for the information that their machine-bodies would reveal under the scalpel and forceps wielded by the white-robed priests of the laboratory. Wrote a contemporary of Descartes: "The scientists administered beatings to dogs with perfect indifference and made fun of those who pitied the creatures as if they felt pain. They said the animals were clocks; that the cries they emitted when struck were only the noise of a little spring that had been touched, but that the whole body was without feeling. They nailed the poor animals up on boards by their four paws to vivisect them, to see the circulation of blood which was a great subject of controversy." Descartes and his colleagues marvelled that these "mechanical robots," as they called them, "could give such a realistic illusion of agony." Indeed, because they were machines, incapable of suffering, to Descartes, the cries of the tortured animals amounted to no more than the creaking of a wheel. But then "why not whip the cart instead of the horse?" retorted Hans Ruesch in Slaughter of the Innocent. "Descartes never troubled to explain that."
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THE ROSE-TINTED MENAGERIE – World Copyright © 1990 William M. Johnson /
© 2007 Iridescent Publishing – All Rights Reserved
