Animals do have immortal souls

[thistle]

Good Evening Thistle: I was curious about the references you made to material souls earlier on, and when I asked, you suggested that I read to the top of the post, which I did. I had asked because I thought you may have had an interesting line of thinking with regard to the nature of just exactly what a soul is, however, it seems that you are just following a Thomistic line of thinking, based on the content you had directed me to. I have never found that view to be very compelling though, but the level of assuredness you seem to have on the matter is even more intriguing for me at least because it suggests that you may have surmised something rooted in, yet going beyond Aquinas’ 13th century reasoning. I have always been interested in the nature of the soul, for instance, how individualized they might or might not be, and in what way do they find a connection with matter, such as a sentient body. Is it simply consciousness, and if it is, just what is consciousness and where does it reside? Is it epiphenomenal of matter as materialists suggest? Those are the sort of things I was hoping you might be able to elucidate on. For me, this subject is the primary existential question. Is there something novel here, or are we just repeating a Cartesian level of hubris with regard to humans v. other animals? I hope we (and anyone who cares to join) can have an interesting discussion, because I truly love new and expanded ideas. I would also like to something convincing with regards to the souls of other animals as compared to ours. I am not inclined to follow any particular faith tradition on the matter, but am open to any sound reasoning any of them may offer. To be clear at the outset, I am not inclined at this point in the discussion to believe that there’s is a difference between a human soul and the souls of other species, but I learn something new everyday.

The Church teaching:

CCC 367 Sometimes the soul is distinguished from the spirit: St. Paul for instance prays that God may sanctify his people “wholly”, with “spirit and soul and body” kept sound and blameless at the Lord’s coming. The Church teaches that this distinction does not introduce a duality into the soul. “Spirit” signifies that from creation man is ordered to a supernatural end and that his soul can gratuitously be raised beyond all it deserves to communion with God.

 

[Sedona]

Thank you Boomerang Too, those are some interesting points. I have to say that on at least a few occasions when I have been with someone at the moment of death, I have seen lights and other electrical appliances act up. For instance, I have seen the lights flicker intermittently for several minutes at a time over the course of an hour only in the room where the deceased had just passed, and once I had to cold start my smartphone because it acted up so badly at the moment someone died next to me. I would have to say that there would seem to some energetic component to the soul, but I also have wondered if energy (possibly electricity) simply has something to do with the binding process between soul and matter. I simply don’t know, but it’s an interesting idea.

 

[Sedona]

Hi Rouguish: I would of course have to agree that animals aren’t known to have the capacity to be religious, but they seem to have an abundant ability to exercise the state of being that religion aims to obtain. I also agree with you that self awareness is secondary to awareness or consciousness, however, I have often wondered if self-awareness is in fact the very agent that inhibits our ability to find that state of being that religion aims to connect us with. I am inclined to think that once we have a sense of our own individuality, we start losing our sense of connection with other living things, including other humans, and with the source of our own being, because the source of all being would naturally be transpersonal, yet hard to comprehend once we start being personal. Therefore, an animal’s ability to move into the presence of direct experience without a lot of heavy cognitive overhead could be the very reason animals need no capacity for religion or any other vehicle that attempts to reconnect beings with their source. Just some ideas. Thank you for the reply!

 

[Vouthon]

St. Thomas Aquinas’s understanding of ensoulement relies upon Aristotelian physics (assuming a tripartite division of souls as vegetable, animal and human) which contemporary science has long since abandoned.

Courtesy of studies made of the human genome, neuroscience, conciousness and so forth we now know that animals and humans share far more in common than the classical thinkers could possibly have known, not least on account of natural selection.

Yet, humans are still the only beings capable of abstract thought and language. Our brain capacity is greatly more advanced than any other species, even the higher mammals.

When all is said and done, those treating Aquinas like sacred scripture or the ecumenical councils must also reckon with the fact that his flawed Aristotelian metaphysics led him to support delayed hominization, by means of which the embryo lacks an immortal soul because it does not yet have a human body. It’s more like a vegetative soul in his understanding, such that aborting it is a much lesser sin than doing so to a fully formed foetus after it has quickened in the womb.

Do we support that speculative belief today?

Or his endorsement of executing heretics?

Or his disturbing opinion that the “happiness of the saints may be more delightful to them” because God will permit them to eternally “see perfectly the sufferings of the damned” in hell.

Of course not.

So why then should we endorse other aspects of his ensoulememt theory without deep consideration?

We need to understand this great man in the context of the intellectual milieu in which he lived and not treat him like a fifth evangelist or thirteenth apostle.

The truth is: animals cannot sin and are incapable of abstraction, which means that heaven/hell and the Beatific Vision hold no significance for them. However, they are still conscious, living creatures with awareness and so the old Aristotelian Thomistic notion of a material, animal soul is severely wanting as a consequence.

Scientists still have no idea how biochemical, physical processes in the brain - a lump of grey matter and tissue - can lead to the emergence of seemingly immaterial awareness or qualia. This applies to animal conciousness as well, even though they are not capable of reflective, analytical or abstract thought like we are.

Since all of creation is groaning for redemption, I believe that every conscious creature that has lived on earth will participate in the glorified earth at the end of time. In the intervening time, I do not discount that God could keep their souls animated in some way outside of heaven/hell/beatific vision in anticipation of the New Earth but I equally must admit that we just don’t know.

The sacred author of Ecclesiastes got it spot on. Who knows? There has been no revealed truth on the fate of animal life, such that everything concerning it consists of nothing more than pious or educated speculation at best.

If people hold doctrinaire beliefs about something like this, then they are either wedded to ancient, discredited science as if it were revealed truth or reliant upon speculative hope for their pets.

 

[Vouthon]

So to conclude my post, while we know that animals won’t be in heaven/hell (because they are not created to enjoy the Beatific Vision of knowing God as He is in Himself and do not sin), we simply don’t know whether or not their souls will continue on after death in some other state or if they will return with the new earth.

We’re free to speculate but please folks don’t treat speculation on either end of this debate (even educated speculation from past doctors of the church) as some kind of revealed truth or even a probable answer from private revelation. This question doesn’t concern our salvation as human beings, so it’s not dealt with.

If you like the Aristotelian concept of gestation and epigenesis underlying Thomistic ensoulement theory, that’s perfectly fine. Just remember it isn’t doctrinal and also that the conflicting theory of preformation is considered to be a proven fact in modern embryology and biology, whereby an organism begins with an inherited genetic code and thereby rejecting the whole vegetative/animal/human materialistic ensoulement idea.

If you like to think that your pet might continue to exist in some disembodied form post-mortem by the will of God and/or that he/she will participate in the New Earth, again fine. Just remember that we have no hard information in the deposit of faith to make us certain of this hope.

Let’s keep in mind what the only direct reference to this question in the entirety of the deposit of faith (both written word of God and sacred tradition) tells us:

Who knows if the spirit of man rises upward and the spirit of the animal descends into the earth? (Ecclesiastes 3:21)

And as for our different opinions on this, may we heed the sage advice of Pope St. John XXIII:

"…All men, then, should be joined in mutual and just regard for one another’s opinions…For discussion can lead to fuller and deeper understanding of religious truths; when one idea strikes against another, there may be a spark…

But the common saying, expressed in various ways and attributed to various authors, must be recalled with approval: in essentials, unity; in doubtful matters, liberty; in all things, charity…"

- Pope St. John XXIII, AD PETRI CATHEDRAM (On Truth, Unity and Peace), 1959

 

[BoomerangToo]

That, my friend, was a darned good post.

 

[Vouthon]

To the Thomists in our midst, I would also ask that you please respect your fellow Catholics who prefer alternative philosophies through which to understand the deposit of faith, and vice-versa.

St. Thomas was a genius who made an innumerable dearth of contributions to Catholic thought and his Aristotelian synthesis has proved highly influential. We all must be eternally grateful to the Angelic Doctor.

However, there is no need for a Catholic to interpret their faith through the lens of Aristotelianism, despite this being common as a result of Thomistic influence in the last few centuries (Thomism actually remained for quite a long time a doctrine held principally by Dominican theologians).

As Pope St. John Paul II once stated in an encyclical:

“The Church has no philosophy of her own nor does she canonize any one particular philosophy in preference to others.” -(Pope St. John Paul II. "Fides et ratio, 49)

See:

Jesus, Interpreted

In this sequel volume to his Dark Passages of the Bible (CUA Press, 2013), author Matthew Ramage turns his attention from the Old to the New Testament, now tackling truth claims bearing directly on the heart of the Christian faith cast into doubt by contemporary New Testament scholarship: Did...

books.google.co.uk

Fr. Ratzinger struggled to relate with the thought of Aquinas early in his career, but he found a like-minded partner in Bonaventure…It is likely that what Ratzinger describes as an “anti-Thomism” in St. Bonaventure exerted its influence upon him insofar as Bonaventure was wary of a theology that would rely too heavily upon the thought of Aristotle…

It’s not the only way. Sure, Thomism (and the scholastic movement) has in certain historical epochs been a very fruitful and productive vehicle for the flourishing of Latin theology but there are a whole range of equally orthodox alternatives.

I’ve noticed that lay Catholic apologetics in the English-speaking world has a tendency to be narrowly Neo-Scholastic/Neo-Thomist, to the exclusion of equally orthodox but competing perspectives. The present thread is reflective of this phenomenon.

While the Summa is a highly useful and influential synthesis of Catholic theology with Aristotelian philosophy, as well as being an equally formidable harmonization of various earlier authorities like the church fathers and the canonists, it’s not a Third Testament alongside the Old and New. You can’t just point to the Summa and say, “St. Thomas wrote xyz and so we must believe xyz”.

 

[Roguish]

@Sedona

I have often wondered if self-awareness is in fact the very agent that inhibits our ability to find that state of being that religion aims to connect us with.

It seems that way, doesn’t it? And it is certainly what most modern spirituality espouses: we are told we need to “get over (or undo) our sense of self” in order to return to a state in which are “at one” with everything. So is our sense of self a mistake then? I contemplated this question for years, and to my own surprise I was ultimately led to the insight that in truth, it isn’t so. Miraculously, it is the opposite: our self-consciousness (as distinct from plain awareness) is what saves us – if we cultivate it. It is the very thing that can restore our sense of connection, our immersion in life, and allow us to escape this particular world – but more about that a few paragraphs down.

I am inclined to think that once we have a sense of our own individuality, we start losing our sense of connection with other living things, including other humans, and with the source of our own being,

What makes us lose our sense of connection is our abuse of the mental faculty. Instead of using it for divinely-guided symbolic perception (a.k.a. revelation) – which is what it’s meant for – we use it to erect a constructed reality of objects and functions. We overlay nature (life) and super-nature (divine symbols) with a re-interpretation of it all as objects, functions, events, processes – what you called “a lot of heavy cognitive overhead” in your earlier post. Once this is habitual, we longer experience life and connectedness; we only experience “reality” except for occasional moments when our intuition fails to be suppressed and momentarily breaks through. We experience this as awe, conscience, love, romance, lyricism, heroism, etc.

because the source of all being would naturally be transpersonal, yet hard to comprehend once we start being personal.

The source of all being is transpersonal, but not impersonal. That is to say, it transcends personhood, but does not undo personhood or negate its validity. (I am going along here with your use of the term “personhood” as synonymous with “individuality”, which is not my preference but it’s workable.) And again, I’d like to point out that it’s not “being personal/individual” that makes comprehension of the source of our being hard – it’s our abuse of the mental faculty.

(Oops, 3,200 character limit. Continued in next post.)

 

[Roguish]

@Sedona Continued from previous post.

Therefore, an animal’s ability to move into the presence of direct experience without a lot of heavy cognitive overhead could be the very reason animals need no capacity for religion or any other vehicle that attempts to reconnect beings with their source.

True – they don’t need to be reconnected because they haven’t been disconnected. They are naturally immersed. But this comes at a price – animals aren’t capable of receiving revelation (what I called “divinely guided symbolic perception” earlier) and therefore cannot understand how evil this world is, or how to escape from it onto better worlds. They are therefore stuck – which in a way is worse than being miserable-with-the-hope-of-escape, as humans are. This is why we mustn’t put our hopes in regression into a more animal-like state. We’d be trapped again. Rather than abandoning our sense of individuality, we must cultivate it, i.e. attempt to remain in it consciously and continuously, so that it may transform our perception into the revelatory vision that we need to escape from the misery of this world.

How does our sense of individuality transform our perception? To this I have no answer, and I’m not looking for one. I just know (from experience) that it does this. It is God’s ultimate trick – the trick the Devil just can’t subvert – and as humans we can experience that it works without knowing why it works. This is enough – for it is the ultimate boon.

P.S. Perhaps it’s hard to follow what I’m trying to say. I don’t usually attempt to put my views on this particular matter (i.e. the role that our sense of individuality plays in religion) into writing. But you seemed to be getting at the heart of the matter, so I figured I’d give it a try

 

[Roguish]

I’ve noticed that lay Catholic apologetics in the English-speaking world has a tendency to be narrowly Neo-Scholastic/Neo-Thomist, to the exclusion of equally orthodox but competing perspectives. The present thread is reflective of this phenomenon.

While the Summa is a highly useful and influential synthesis of Catholic theology with Aristotelian philosophy, as well as being an equally formidable harmonization of various earlier authorities like the church fathers and the canonists, it’s not a Third Testament alongside the Old and New. You can’t just point to the Summa and say, “ St. Thomas wrote xyz and so we must believe xyz ”.

This very much needed to be said. Thank you, thank you!

 

[Greenfields]

I believe that we’ll see our animals in some fashion after we die; if nothing else, those animals existed in the mind of God and still do, and so already have a form of immortality in that alone. We also know that God doesn’t make throwaway junk.

I don’t exactly know how, but I do believe they’ll still be around, or at least, the “living idea” of them, present with us forever if we make our good choices.

Well I’ve mentioned this somewhere before I think…what about my animals that I’ve eaten?:thinking:I love my chookies,ducks and geese ,I raise them for eggs,to sell and for meat.I kinda hope I don’t meet them again…

 

[Sedona]

Hi Roguish - my apologies for the late reply. My time on personal matters like engaging in conversation that I enjoy such as this one is sometimes very limited. Anyway, I think your response makes a lot of sense to me, and I agree with much of what you have said. I do have two questions. One pertains to the term “divinely guided symbolic revelation.” that sounds very Jungian. Are you talking about archetypes? If not, can you delve a bit into what you see divinely guided symbolic revelation as being? The other question is with regard to how evil the world is. How do you reconcile the existential necessity of evil in order for good to exist? In other words, light is only known in relation to dark, good is only known in relation to bad, and the universe has to have a whole lot of nothing in order for there to be any “somethings.” Likewise, a fish doesn’t comprehend water until it experiences a place where there is none. I think Yeats said it well in his poem where Crazy Jane tells the Bishop “fair needs fowl” or something like that. It doesn’t seem to me that there can be a state of conscious being where there is only good. I have come to a point where I am curious as to whether or not the human race, along with all the other species are simply events in a process rather than objects. Interested in your thoughts on these matters when you get a chance.

All the best!

 

[anon10271182]

Cows and pigs in Heaven! Potatoes in Heaven!
(Please Note: This uploaded content is no longer available.)

 

[Sursum-Corda]

Animals do not have souls.
Only a rational being can have a soul.

Animals are not rational beings.