“ANIMAL THEOLOGY” IN THE WRITINGS OF ST JOHN OF DAMASCUS
The title of the article calls to mind the following question and answer meme. What is philosophy? It is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat that is not there. And what is theology? The same, but he sometimes finds the cat.
Although the title mentions “animal theology”, there is in fact no significant mention of animals in the corpus of writings attributed to St John of Damascus. When he mentions animals at all, it is usually in other contexts, not for their own sake. Furthermore, he would probably not even have allowed for “animal theology” to exist in principle. For him, “Philosophy is divided into speculative and practical. The speculative in its turn is divided into theology, physiology and mathematics. The practical is divided into ethics, domestic economy and politics… where theology is the consideration of incorporeal and immaterial things, first of all, of God… and then of angels and souls… and Physiology… is the knowledge of material things, such as animals…”
The article, however, would still continue to use the term “animal theology”, for the following reason. In St John’s world all of philosophy, be it physiology, ethics or politics, took place within the Christian worldview paradigm. In modern times, this is not the case – even students of theology proper (the study of things to do with God) can be unbelievers. So in this day and age “animal theology” can mean simply “the study of animals within the Christian worldview paradigm”.
So, in order to justify the choice of St John of Damascus as a source of enlightenment on the subject of animal theology, a brief introduction is perhaps due. St John lived in the 7th and 8th centuries; he was a monk in the monastery of Mar Saba near Jerusalem; he was a priest, a hymnographer and a theologian, who is renowned for his defence of holy icons in the period of iconoclasm. St John is also known for writing the nearest thing to a summa theologica that the Christian East possesses. The best known Western summa is that of Thomas Aquinas, written in the 13th century. The Orthodox are not generally inclined to systematising our faith (the early fathers taught us to “fear a system as you would a lion”), but St John of Damascus did write a systematic exposition of the faith, several centuries before Thomas Aquinas. The work is entitled The Fount of Knowledge and consists of philosophical chapters, a section on heresies and an exposition of the Orthodox faith as such.
The reason St John’s work can be approached in search of animal theology is that it provides – not a series of easy prooftexts on animals, but a sophisticated and consistent conceptual apparatus which can be relied on in the discussion of a variety of theological issues, including issues to do with animals, as well as a solid framework of fundamental doctrines, a framework within which a multitude of specific questions can be explored. In the words of Plutarch, in educating his readers, St John of Damascus does not fill a vessel, but lights a fire.
Sophisticated terminology is not needed in animal theology straightaway, since the idea of being kind to animals is not theoretically complicated. “A righteous man regardeth the life of his beast” (Prov.12:10). St John of Damascus does actually incorporate this verse in his interpretation of the Sabbath: it was established, among other reasons, out of animal welfare concerns, so that “the ox should rest”.
More technical terminology becomes necessary when we consider precisely why we should be kind to animals. To answer the question, the terms of instrumental versus inherent value of animals are helpful. These terms are not employed by St John of Damascus, but by modern animal ethicists, most notably Tom Regan, who pose the question of whether we are kind to animals because they are useful to us economically, because we find them beautiful and/or interesting, because in being nice to them we are practicing good character (they are a sort of moral training ground for us and our children), or whether we treat them well simply because of who they are, our fellow citizens on this planet. In the Christian discourse it would also be pointed out that they are God’s creatures, same as us (not the same in identity, but the same in our characteristic of being created).
In turns out that Christian animal ethics often work with the instrumental model. There is a ancient rule in Orthodox practice, for instance, whereby animals who are not normally allowed into the church building, such as donkeys or horses, can come in if there is a bad storm outside. However, the justification for this is that their owner needs a means of getting home, an instrumental consideration. Another example is the criticism by Christian “influencers”, as we would say today, of horse-racing in Byzantium. It was a very brave stance, given the immense popularity of horse-racing in late antiquity, but the main reasons for the opposition were that horse-racing provoked sinful human passions, caused violence and ruined people financially through betting. Cruelty to animals was mentioned, but the priority seems to have been given to instrumental considerations.
An interesting feature of the application of the instrumental/inherent axis specifically in the Christian worldview paradigm is that we, the humans, also have instrumental value, and very considerable instrumental value, in relation to animals. From the dawn of Christian civilization church fathers pointed out that our human nature is compound, combining the material (visible, physical) and the immaterial (invisible, incorporeal), forming a bridge between the material and immaterial creation. As St John of Damascus writes, “…as a mark of greater wisdom and of his munificence toward created nature, it was also necessary that a combination of both substances should be made, as the inspired Gregory says, ‘as a sort of bond between the visible and the invisible natures’”. In this instance St John quotes St Gregory the Theologian, but the idea of the human as the bridge between the visible and the invisible is a widely attested patristic thought.
This arrangement is not just part of the overall harmony of the cosmos (the principle of gradual transition is found in pagan philosophy also), but, as St John of Damascus points out, it is “a mark of God’s munificence”, His generosity towards all created nature. Humans have a mission to the rest of creation: we are able to recapitulate the world, both physically in our very bodies and mentally in our rational idea of the world as a harmonious whole, and bring it to God, so that no part of creation is without its portion of the Divine fellowship, as St Gregory of Nyssa reminds us. This mission was, however lost in the Fall: having been created with the capacity for communion with God and a vocation to bind the rest of the world together and bring it to God, humans instead became rooted in the material world, lost their orientation towards God and thus, instead of bringing material creation up to perfection, sank down into it, into its passions, decay and death. And the creation, the ground, as the Book of Genesis puts it, was cursed for our sake, the bridge fell.
The only way out of this tragic predicament is through the incarnation, through God becoming a human being and performing the work that the human failed to do (hence Christ the new Adam), and the only way for us to fulfil our destiny and recover our mission is a life in Christ, a life of prayer and sacraments. Then the rest of creation, as St Paul tells us, “shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now.” (Rom. 8:21-22.)
This is certainly good news – the gospel, literally – for creation, and the holy apostles were instructed by Christ to preach the gospel precisely to every creature. Being liberated from corruption, i.e. death, seems to imply ontological permanence of presence, and a positive answer to a child’s simple question of “Will my hamster go to heaven?” Indeed, the prophet Isaiah’s vision of heaven involves animals, as well as an altered relationship between prey and predator. Isaiah 11:6 reads, “The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them.”
All of the above is largely uncontested. But then a stumbling block appears in the discussion, a strange wall of solid intellectual mist. When we talk about cosmic redemption and animals in heaven, do we mean individual animals? Are animals who died going to be part of the general resurrection, are animals who are going to be born in the future going to attain immortality? Or are animals simply going to continue to come into existence and pass out of it, as they appear to be doing so now?
This is an area that remains largely unexplored. At least this is what was publicly stated by Metropolitan Kallistos (Ware), of blessed memory. In the discussion of integrated theology he dwells extensively on various animal welfare issues, but on the subject of the immortality of individual animals he writes, “It is not clear whether these animals in the Age to come will be the same animals as we have known in this present life; yet that is at least a possibility. We certainly do not have good grounds for asserting that it could not conceivably be so. Let us leave the question open.” Following the logic of fools rushing in where angels fear to tread, the author of this article will try to delve into the issue of the immortality of individual animals.
Because of the novelty of the issue in theology, a stable conceptual framework, such as the one supplied by St John of Damascus, is vital. The pivotal terms are nature (ousia) and person (hypostasis). For most of us, familiarity with these words comes from Trinitarian debates in late antiquity, particularly in the 4th century. The formula that came out of those debates and is largely accepted by all Christians today is: one divine nature (ousia) and three persons (hypostases), the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Nature is what the three hypostases/persons have in common; in worship we attribute to it such common qualities as wisdom, goodness, omniscience, etc. Hypostases are unique, and, in the Trinity, are distinguished by the relations between them: the Father begets the Son, so the Father is unbegotten and the Son is begotten, the Spirit proceeds from the Father, that relationship is unique also. The reason the word hypostasis is often used in Orthodox theology in preference to the broadly synonymous term person is that the word hypostasis appears to carry more ontological weight, denoting, as it does, an underlying static, ever-present reality. From late antiquity onwards the term hypostases was also transferred to human beings: there is one common human nature, but many hypostases, Peter, Paul, etc.
The terms nature and hypostasis are completely relevant for animal theology because, in considering the question of animal immortality. we would like to see whether they will exist as immortal individuals, as hypostases, as the animals we knew and loved in this space and time continuum, or as a generic animal nature (there will be some sort of animal life in heaven, but not necessarily the same animals we knew here on earth).
There is a significant conceptual difficulty in the fact that the terms nature and hypostases, particularly hypostasis, are perceived as highly unstable throughout history. Many theologians have used them throughout the centuries, and continue to use them today, but it cannot be assumed that they all meant the same thing by them. The opposition between nature and hypostasis can mean simply the difference between the general and the particular. But sometimes, in a very unsettling manner, the fathers can use both terms almost interchangeably. Modern theologians, following Bishop John (Zizioulas), of blesses memory, emphasize the relational character of the term hypostasis and de-emphasize the importance of nature as such.
It is a situation which makes an appeal to St John of Damascus more or less vital. In order to stabilize the terms nature and hypostasis, a consistent and authoritative analysis is needed, and it seems logical to choose the analysis given by someone who is recognized as a saint, who thought it necessary to write a systematic exposition of our faith, who spoke not only out of his own, however brilliant, experience, but with the whole previous patristic tradition in mind, and who, furthermore, took great trouble to explicitly define his conceptual apparatus in the first section of his summa theologica – in the philosophical chapters of The Fount of Knowledge.
The first thing a reader would notice about the philosophical chapters is how close they are to Aristotle’s Categories. Which is an interesting point in itself: an authoritative church father demonstrates that toolkits of classical philosophy can be adapted for Christian needs, and that this process does not involve a compromise of our faith, since the terms themselves are world-view neutral. This can scandalize some people (“What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?”), but all of the most fundamental theology that we possess, Christology and Trinitarian theology, was formulated in terms of classical Greek philosophy. History of philosophy tell us that all philosophical schools in late antiquity started their instruction with Aristotle’s Organon, a collection of works of which the Categories was one, even if later on they argued with each other, and with Aristotle’s intellectual descendants the Peripatetics. They could argue fruitfully because they had a language in common. Christians used the same conceptual toolkit to describe, discuss and defend their own world-view. Which is what St John of Damascus does in The Fount of Knowledge; he does not plagiarize, nor does he does not reinvent the wheel. His goal is to destroy heresies and to summarise the Orthodox faith, and he starts the process by reaffirming a solid, and traditional, conceptual framework.
St John’s theological discourse is characterised by its extreme philosophical thoroughness. He starts with Aristotle’s 5 categories, genus, species, difference, property and accident, and analyses in great detail – as Aristotle himself did in The Categories – the various interactions of these five concepts, as well as their further division, or classification, such as genus appearing as 10 most general types of genera - quality, quantity, time, place, etc.
For all this complexity, it is not complexity for the sake of sophistry, the Philosophical Chapters is an entirely pragmatic work. The levels of generalisation, the analyses and syntheses, are entirely determined by the needs of a particular enquiry. Minor differences between concepts can be ignored, some concepts can be regarded as synonyms in some contexts, but not in others, making the philosophical enterprise a dynamic and flexible process. Thus, in the discussion of nature and hypostasis, St John explains that “the holy Fathers used the terms hypostasis and person and individual for the same thing”. (Obviously, these words can be distinguished philosophically if necessary, but the necessity is not always there). St John also tells us that the holy Fathers called “that which is common to and affirmed of several things: substance, nature and form”. Thus in theology there emerge two basic semantic clusters: hypostasis, individual and person on the one hand, and substance, nature and form on the other hand. The first semantic cluster corresponds to the particular and the second to the general: “the more particular they called hypostasis, and the more general, which contained the hypostasis, they called nature”. This point is so easy it is easy to overlook, the fact that the theologically loaded terms of hypostasis and nature basically correspond to the general and the particular.
St John of Damascus notes that the semantic cluster of nature, form, substance is used by the fathers in the sense of the most specific species (angel, human, horse, dog and the like). A clarification of the word species is perhaps due. Unlike the language of modern science, in philosophy the term species is a sort of sliding concept, as its level of generalization can be chosen, and changed, as necessary. For instance, it can be said that “the whole of creation” is a genus, and “material creation” and “immaterial creation” are species within it. Or it can be said that “material creation” is a genus, and “humans”, “animals”, “plants”, are species within it. Or it can be said that “animal” is a genus, and “horse”, “dog”, “cat”, are species within it. The most specific species (what the fathers called nature, form, substance) is the one which can only be divided into individuals, with no further division possible. For example, if “dog” is taken as the most specific species, it can be divided into individual dogs, but this is where the division stops, an individual dog cannot be divided into two or more dogs. It follows that the only thing that exists objectively, of itself, is the individual, in our example, the individual dog. Everything else, “animal”, “material creation”, would be true, but it would be predicated of the individual, it would have no independent existence. The individual is therefore the natural ontological building-block of creation. It is only the individual entity that exists objectively, “subsists of itself”, to use St John of Damascus terminology. (The line of argument calls to mind, very strongly, Aristotle’s primary substances. But one cannot expect St John to avoid a valid idea simply because a pagan philosopher formulated it first.)
Thus hypostasis is defined as the only thing that subsists of itself, “It is only the hypostases, the individuals, that is, that subsist in and of themselves, and in them are found both the substance and the essential differences, the species and the accidents”. Nature (dog nature, animal nature, human nature) exists of course, but not independently, only in individuals. There is no such thing as naked nature.
Because there is no naked nature, each hypostasis can be said to bear the fullness of its nature. In our example an individual dog will bear all the properties that make a dog a dog. Which explains why in some patristic texts, e.g. in St Cyril of Alexandria, the terms nature and hypostasis are synonymous. Nature only exists in hypostasised form, in that sense these two terms are synonymous.
With this in mind, answering the animal theology question of whether the animals in the Age to Come are going to be the individuals we know here, or whether they are going to be some sort of generic animals, becomes rather straightforward. There is in principle no such thing as generic animal nature, creation is always and exclusively particular, so that the answer that suggests itself is the individual.
Interestingly, there is a text in St John’s Fount of Knowledge that suggests that resurrection applies to animals, “If death is defined as a separation of soul from body, the resurrection is the perfect rejoining of soul and body, and the raising up again of the dissolved and fallen animal.” Without wishing to put too much weight on the text, because it is a one-ff in the boo, the author would nonetheless like to emphasis the word animal.
The above text may resurrect, if the reader forgives a flippant pun, the rather unhelpful discussion of animal souls, and whether animals have them. This discussion was pronounced a dead-end one, and a red herring, by, among others, Metropolitan Kallistos (Ware). Just in case an explanation is needed, it is simple: when people say that animals do not have a soul, what they mean is that they do not have a human soul. Which is not actually being disputed by anyone – animals do not have a human soul, they have an animal soul. Another unhelpful idea that is connected with the word soul is that humans have an immortal soul, implying that animals do not. This assertion either completely sinks into the heresy of the pre-existence of human souls, or overlooks the fact that no one except God is immortal by nature. Whoever turns out to be immortal in creation is immortal by grace. St John affirms this in the following text about angels, “The angel is immortal, not by nature, but by grace; for, naturally, everything that has a beginning has an end.” Whoever we are, angels, humans or animals, the only immortality we can hope for is by God’s grace. In this we are equal: we all had a beginning, and, logically, naturally, would all have an end, but for the action of God who is ever-existing and wills it.
As a somewhat unconventional conclusion, the author would like to suggest several major avenues of further enquiry. If creation is particular, how far down the hierarchy of creation does the hypostatic principle extend – plants, rocks? Why draw the line after animals, and not before or further down after? What about the texts where the words individual, person and hypostasis are not synonymous? What makes hypostasis hypostasis, what is the principle of individuation? There clearly is a great deal more to say on this subject, and author sincerely hopes that it is going to be accomplished.