Animals in the Hierarchy of Creation

The following article is extracted from Stratford Caldecott’s book The Radiance of Being (Angelico Press, 2013). It forms part of a chapter entitled Saving the Planet, in which the author explores “the relation of ecology to the Christian notion of redemption.” In this passage, the way he deals with humanity in relation to the animal kingdom shows the fruitfulness of the dialogue Caldecott was engaging in between metaphysical concerns and the issues raised by ecologists.

In the history of the Latin Church, it is, of course, not only the Franciscans who have contributed to the development of Christian ecological awareness. The Celtic saints and the Benedictines are often mentioned in this connection.[i] But Pope John Paul II made St. Francis, not St. Benedict or St. Columba, the patron saint of ecology in 1979, and he did so for understandable reasons. One might ask, however, why more saints and teachers of the Church have not been obvious candidates for this position. Deborah Jones, in her book The School of Compassion, points to the disconcerting indifference if not hostility towards the non-human creation on the part of many Christian teachers and authorities, for whom animals and the rest of nature were merely for man’s use and would have no part in any resurrection. This applies even to the great Franciscan theologian Bonaventure. In the Breviloquium, where he treats of the resurrection, he argues that the animal and vegetable creation will be saved only in man, who “has a likeness to every kind of creature.”

Such a conclusion can be seen as the legacy of a misunderstood or imperfectly assimilated Platonism, or even a kind of Gnosticism that values the spiritual at the expense of the corporeal. Rather than criticize the tradition along these lines, however, I prefer to remember that the Church is like “a householder who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old” (Matt. 13:52). Historical circumstances and the challenges that arise may provoke a development of doctrine.

In fact there are at least three areas where it is pretty obvious that Catholic teaching is currently undergoing development. One is the “theology of the body” (the term popularized by John Paul II in his series of Wednesday talks concerning gender, marriage, and sexuality); another is over the question of religious pluralism and the urgent dialogue between traditions of faith, and the third concerns nature and the environment. In my view all three are related, and they each require a “return to metaphysics”; that is, to a renewed appreciation of ontology and symbolism. But this time around, we must find a place for the rest of nature in our philosophy, in the spirit of St. Francis himself, whose instinct was to make special provision for the feeding of birds and cattle on Christmas Day.

The Revealing of the Sons of God

In Paul’s Letter to the Romans (8:18–23), the Apostle writes:

I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God. For the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of him who subjected it in hope; because the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and obtain the glorious liberty of the children of God.[ii] We know that the whole creation has been groaning in travail together until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies.

This passage is quite dense, and has been much commented upon. It seems to imply, first, that the “revealing of the sons of God” will liberate the natural creation as a whole from entropy, death, suffering, and decay, and, next, that this revelation of the sons of God is equivalent to our "adoption as sons” and with the “redemption of our bodies.” But what is the link between adoptive sonship and the redemption of our bodies, and how can a spiritual process like this affect the whole of creation? I don’t have time here to explore all the eschatological implications of the passage, or the intriguing questions raised by the notion of a “cosmic fall.” My emphasis will be on spiritual anthropology. I will interpret the “revealing of the sons of God” in terms of humanity’s role as microcosm and mediator.

This idea has a long history. Right up until the time of Francis and Bonaventure and indeed the age of industrialism, the world was viewed as an organic whole, ordered from within, possessing a sacred and spiritual value by virtue of its creation by God and the continued divine presence within it. The stars were thought to be angelic creatures, the movements of their dance helping to determine the pattern of events unfolding below. The physical elements themselves were imagined as conscious beings, participating in a cosmic intelligence. It is quite in keeping with this ancient tradition for the Bible in the Canticle of Daniel to call upon all of creation to bless the Lord, including the sun and moon, stars of the heavens, clouds of the sky, showers and rain.[iii] The animals, plants, and minerals, the stars and elements, can be said to “praise” their Maker, either simply by their very existence, or else through man, who gives them a voice they do not possess in themselves. (This is in fact the tradition to which Bonaventure appeals when he describes man as containing the essences of all other creatures.) In this view, the human being occupies a central place in the universe, but he does so as a microcosm containing all the elements of nature, and faculties or powers corresponding to both animals and angels. Adam’s role in the cosmos is a priestly and mediatory one, radically compromised by the Fall, but restored in Christ, who by assuming human nature assumed the whole of nature by taking on a body.[iv]

St. Francis is the “patron saint of the environment” partly because he spoke to the birds and was kind to animals, but also because he understood and lived this mediatory role. The particular originality of his approach was to address not only the animals but even the elements of nature as his brothers and sisters; a spirituality expressed in the Canticle of Brother Sun, and exemplified in the way he spoke to Brother Fire and the other elements on various occasions. This was no mere sentimental romanticism (though he was certainly extremely romantic). His espousal of poverty brought him into the closest contact with the physical elements, and made him intensely aware of his dependence on them, under divine providence. He was conscious both of the presence of God within and through them, and of their infinite difference from God as mere creatures.

This love of nature was different from pagan animism, as G.K. Chesterton writes in the second chapter of his biography of Francis. The Celtic saints and Desert Fathers, and the Benedictine monks, had prepared the ground, but St. Francis was the beginning of a new stage in our relationship with nature (one that, it might be argued, has not yet been totally fulfilled). Chesterton writes of a necessary “purge of paganism” in the early Church, until at last the flowers and stars could recover their first innocence, and fire and water “be worthy to be the brother and sister of a saint”:

For water itself has been washed. Fire itself has been purified as by fire. Water is no longer the water into which slaves were flung to feed the fishes. Fire is no longer that fire through which children were passed to Moloch. Flowers smell no more of the forgotten garlands gathered in the garden of Priapus; stars stand no more as signs of the far frigidity of gods as cold as those cold fires. They are like all new things newly made and awaiting new names, from one who shall come to name them. Neither the universe nor the earth have now any longer the old sinister significance of the world. They await a new reconciliation with man, but they are already capable of being reconciled. Man has stripped from his soul the last rag of nature worship, and can return to nature.[v]

What Chesterton leaves out of account here is the Eastern Church, which had become separated from the West, but preserved in its liturgical theology and in its iconographic tradition a cosmic vision that we must take into account. Our present historical age requires us to breathe with two lungs, if we are to have a hope of responding to the new post-Christian, post-religious mentality to which the West has given birth. And of the Eastern Fathers, St. Maximus the Confessor gave perhaps the most sophisticated theological expression to the view of man as mediator. Pope Benedict summarized the teaching of Maximus as follows:

God entrusted to man, created in his image and likeness, the mission of unifying the cosmos. And just as Christ unified the human being in himself, the Creator unified the cosmos in man. He showed us how to unify the cosmos in the communion of Christ and thus truly arrived at a redeemed world. Hans Urs von Balthasar,one of the greatest theologians of the 20th century, referred to this powerful saving vision when, “relaunching” Maximus—he defined his thought with the vivid expression Kosmische Liturgie, “cosmic liturgy.” Jesus, the one Savior of the world, is always at the center of this solemn “liturgy.” The efficacy of his saving action which definitively unified the cosmos is guaranteed by the fact that in spite of being God in all things, he is also integrally a man and has the “energy” and will of a man. . . . Jesus Christ is the reference point that gives light to all other values. This was the conclusion of the great Confessor’s witness. And it is in this way, ultimately, that Christ indicates that the cosmos must become a liturgy, the glory of God, and that worship is the beginning of true transformation, of the true renewal of the world.[vi]

Balthasar’s book on Maximus, to which the Pope refers, makes the point that the Confessor overcame the tendency in Christian thought to make the corporeal world of nature merely a ladder to heaven that will one day be kicked away, by positing an indestructible relationship between spirit and matter, an “apologia for finite, created being in the face of the overwhelming power of the world of ideas.”[vii] The unity of the many depends on the parts and their relationship to each other. And since God is completely transcendent, the world of intellect takes us, in a sense, no closer to him than does the world disclosed by the senses.[viii] This opens the way for a much deeper, less timorous, appreciation of the beauty and goodness of nature in general.

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