God and Animal Suffering | Fr. Gregory Pine & Fr. Bonaventure Chapman
July 18, 2024
Fr. Bonaventure: This is Father Bonaventure Chapman.
Fr. Gregory: And welcome to Godsplaining. Thanks to all those who support us. If you enjoy the show, please consider making a monthly donation on Patreon. Be sure to like and subscribe to Godsplaining wherever you listen to your podcasts. All right, so Father Bonaventure.
Fr. Bonaventure: Father Gregory.
Fr. Gregory: We’re going to talk about animals today.
Fr. Bonaventure: Great.
Fr. Gregory: And you have a vested interest in animals.
Fr. Bonaventure: I do have a vested interest in animals.
Fr. Gregory: At its high water mark, how many animals did you have in your possession as a youth?
Fr. Bonaventure: I think our house had 137, as the number I usually use, I think that was right. That sticks my mind. It’s like 153 fish in the big catch. So it’s got to be– Yeah. That number is specific. It’s got to be true. So 137, I think, animals.
Fr. Gregory: Okay.
Fr. Bonaventure: That’s fish, frogs, toads, salamanders…
Fr. Gregory: Lizards?
Fr. Bonaventure: Lizards, yep, birds, basically anything, yes, anything that wasn’t, yeah, no fur, basically.
Fr. Gregory: No fur.
Fr. Bonaventure: Because fur was, my mother was allergic to fur, dogs, and they didn’t have, probably still, they doesn’t have, they don’t have those hypoallergenic. I mean,
Fr. Gregory: Do hypoallergenic like, fur treatment’s work?
Fr. Bonaventure: I don’t know.
Fr. Gregory: ‘Cause my experience is usually I go to a person’s house and they say this animal is hypoallergenic. And I say, ah, it’s the difference between my eyes swelling shut in 27 minutes or 28 minutes.
Fr. Bonaventure: That’s probably right.
Fr. Gregory: Okay, yeah. So whilst in possession of these 137 animals, like what do you think was your goal? Was it like the custody, the stewardship of these animals? Was it just to hold them as much as possible?
Fr. Bonaventure: Which is tricky, because then why would you own fish or red lobsters?
Fr. Gregory: Right.
Fr. Bonaventure: But we did. So I mean, to delight in them, I suppose, to care for them, I think. Now, I mean, as of, you know, I’d say as a sixth grader or a seven year old, I was thinking too very clearly about the moral implications or ramifications of pets. I was thinking more about just petting them, which is what they’re for as far as I can tell.
Fr. Gregory: Well, that’s why they’re called pets, right?
Fr. Bonaventure: I think that’s why they’re called pets, right? I assume that’s why they’re called pets.
Fr. Gregory: Yeah, I don’t know that we’ve ever made this connection yet on the podcast, so it’s helpful. I remember when I made the connection between turtle necks and turtlenecks, when I was holding a turtle and it retracted its neck and it looked like a turtleneck. I said, that looks like a turtleneck, and you said, “Ohoho!”
Fr. Bonaventure: Flip analogy. Yeah, this happened the other, about a couple months ago, someone else did a similar thing, welcome to modernity.
Fr. Gregory: Yeah.
Fr. Bonaventure: But yeah, I mean, animals, as far as I can tell, the reason why God gave us hands is to hold animals. That seems right, but not too big, can’t hold a dog, just pet a dog. But like, you know, we’re talking lizards, large toads, this kind of thing, you know, I’m birds, maybe birds don’t like it as much. It seems like their wings point to them not being holdable, but they will.
Fr. Gregory: But then again…
Fr. Bonaventure: They’ll do it.
Fr. Gregory: Yeah. Yeah, God gave us two hands to hold animals and two knees to drive the car or to manage the steering wheel whilst holding two animals on the highway. Godsplaining does not endorse reckless driving for those of you who were in the dark as to the nature of that joke.
Fr. Bonaventure: But it does endorse holding animals.
Fr. Gregory: It does endorse holding animals. All right, so before we get into the subject matter, I thought, I don’t know if you’ve had the opportunity to tell the lobster parthenogenesis story.
Fr. Bonaventure: Oh, yeah.
Fr. Gregory: Could you take us through one of the more signal moments of your life, a formative moment for you and for the broader animal community?
Fr. Bonaventure: It’s one of those things where, you know, and we’ll relate to the question of suffering, I suppose, Theodicy. Oh, certainly. So I’ll tie that in. So I had, we had red lobsters. We had a red lobster and a blue lobster. Red lobster was obviously named Dictator. And in one point, the red lobster– and to be honest, red lobsters, we’re not talking about like big. We’re talking about like, it’s probably more of a crayfish or something. But it’s big.
Fr. Gregory: And for those of you still concerned/confused, when we say red lobster, we don’t mean the dining establishment. We mean an actual lobster.
Fr. Bonaventure: Sorry, I mean a lobster.
Fr. Gregory: That is red. Because again, that’s first-exptation, second-exptation.
Fr. Bonaventure: Oh, fascinating.
Fr. Gregory: People don’t think about lobsters as lobsters. They think about them as dining establishments. And by people I mean me.
Fr. Bonaventure: Cheesy garlic…muffin.
Fr. Gregory: Yeah, exactly.
Fr. Bonaventure: The banter on this, outrageous. Just people just jump in and write in, minute eight. (laughing) So we had this red lobster and, Dictator, and it wandered out one day. And one thing is when you have that many animals, there’s also animals on the loose. We never found one, there was a gecko, never found that green and old, never found that crickets are just always around. You know, that’s what happens. So anyway, red lobster gets out. Gone, can’t find it. Okay. So it’s out of the water. Now we thought, okay, gone. We’ll find out later somewhere. Usually they hide under the bed afterwards. More stories, leave them. So the red lobster’s gone for like a week and down in, go down one point and in my brother’s trombone case. It’s just a week later, my brother’s trombone case. We opened in one day, he opened his practice, and there it is! red lobster.
Fr. Gregory: Yep.
Fr. Bonaventure: And it’s like, well, how is it still alive? Oh my, it’s still alive. It crawled down the stairs and into the front of the house and this isn’t a mansion, but it’s not a small house either. So it’s in there for like many days, many days. So we put it back in the water, fine, like wow cool, the miracle. Yeah, then the miracle happens. So maybe a week or two later something I noticed there would be like little like balls under its tail curled up. I’m like that one is weird. Some sort of growth. Some sort of lobster goiter. But it wasn’t after a number of days longer, little things jumped out. Baby lobsters.
Fr. Gregory: Oh my gosh.
Fr. Bonaventure: And I immediately looked over the blue lobsters’ cage and said, what did you do? He scuttled into his hole. He wasn’t paying for that. So, so here’s the thing, right? Red lobster escapes from tank. Now we’d had this lobster for what? It’s not like, oh, you just got in the escape. It must have been in pregnant. No. I don’t think they do like parthenogenesis, or like, you know, single-psych, whatever.
Fr. Gregory: For those of you at home who are confused as to what this word means, we said it now three times, it means virgin conception/birth.
Fr. Bonaventure: Yeah, yeah, exactly. So Mary, yeah, Parthonogenesis.
Fr. Gregory: Yeah.
Fr. Bonaventure: For, yeah. For Jesus. This lobster is.
Fr. Gregory: Yeah.
Fr. Bonaventure: So these lobsters are born. So here’s side of the episode. You’re thinking, what are you gonna ask? Like if there’s one thing you want to know.
Fr. Gregory: You know, you might think it’s like Theodicy, the problem of suffering.
Fr. Bonaventure: When you say one thing you want to know, like when you die and you go before the throne of God.
Fr. Gregory: Yeah, one thing you want. It seems like might not be attainable in our atmosphere. –
Fr. Bonaventure: Yes.
Fr. Gregory: But might be attainable in Divine Vision, ideally. And like what is it like to be the Trinity? That’s just not. Might wanna know that, but you’re not gonna know it. But like Theodicy, like why suffering, why acts, why whatever? You might think, but actually, if He comes up and He says, you got one question, I’m like, ooh, tough.
Fr. Bonaventure: Yeah.
Fr. Gregory: You got Trinity, you got incarnation…
Fr. Bonaventure: I got Theodicy, problem of suffering, or like, hey, what was with that lobster?
Fr. Gregory: Yeah, exactly.
Fr. Bonaventure: I know He’s looking at me going, you want the lobster. And you’re like, it’s because you’re omniscient, He’s like, nope, I just know. So like, what happened here? Yeah, yeah.
Fr. Gregory: Yeah, so again, for those of you who have not yet fully appreciated the depth, the breadth, and win. Exactly. 14 minutes into the episode. It’s just crazy because lobsters, they’re mating habits, their gestation period, the fact that they escaped to trombone cases and then come back to the tank…pregnant. Yeah. It’s just these are wild things in the world, which really lead us seamlessly into the subject matter for this episode. Which is animal suffering and might you ask yourself at this stage of the game why I would I care about animal suffering well? Let’s motivate the question here briefly because when you talk about whether or not God exists, we typically don’t have this conversation in Catholic circles because we’re all… we have our eggs in the God exists basket and so we typically don’t reverse course and say, but let’s establish our firm footing when we’re already firmly footed. But there are other people who don’t believe in God. And for these people there are various arguments or various obstacles to their belief. And one of them is animal suffering. So like when St. Thomas Aquinas, for for instance writes his famous five ways to the existence of God, he says, listen, most people will say, or some people will say in the atheistic community, you just don’t need this because you’ve got sufficient explanation with like nature. But then the other big thing is evil. And with evil, okay, you got your moral evil, the type of evil that we introduce into the world. And then you got your physical evil, which seems to be the type of evil that’s just baked into the world. And animal suffering seems to fall within that latter category, which on the one hand, it’s like, okay, I guess. But then when you look at it, it’s like, I guess? So animal suffering, you know more about atheistic literature than I do. But they’re out there saying, what’s the problem with animal suffering?
Fr. Bonaventure: Well, I think you said a nice dialectically with the nicely with the natural evil versus moral evil because you might think, things that suffer or causes of suffering. One would be the natural tidal waves or whatever you might think, oh my gosh, earthquakes are so horrible people die because of earthquakes and they think, well, if you want a world’s conditional right, conditional suffering, you could say, if you want a world that has plants and whatever blah, blah, blah, blah, you’re going to plate tectonics, if you have plate tectonics, you’re going to have earthquakes. If you have people living on planets, on planets with earthquakes, people are going to dive earthquakes, no way to know them at a time yet, this sort of thing. So like, that just, it turns out you say, oh, I only wanted, I only wanted the planet with land and all this kind of stuff, but I didn’t want the geodesic stuff. It’s like, actually, no, you’ve got to have earthquakes. It’s committed. Or like, if you don’t like rain, for instance, you think I just don’t like getting wet. But if you like water, you’ve kind of committed yourself to the water cycle and the way of this planet. Okay. So those natural evils, although disappointing and frustrating and like death inducing, you know, thousands of tsunamis, all this kind of stuff, in some ways it’s conditional. If I want this, then this, there’s a sort of intelligibility to it, you know. On the other hand, there are moral evils which are not conditional in this way. Because there’s no necessity to moral evil in the sense of me shooting someone choosing moral evil by mean that we mean choosing to do something like sin a human act a moral evil that is it the result of a human act to say I ought to do this but I don’t, do this instead and there’s nothing baked in about that. We don’t want to be contients about this to realize the distinction between hypothetical and categoricals, but like hypothetical baked in, natural evils, but there’s the moral evils, they’re all free. And in some ways, you have data about that. You could say, why are those there if they’re not baked in? And you could say, have you ever been angry or thought something wrong? Or you’d be like, go, yeah, I guess. So you have an insight into that kind of cause of evil, you could say. You might think there’s too much of it, but it’s not hard to motivate yourself with large numbers and economies of scale and other things that it might not be that much. The thing with animals though is, they’re like us and not like us. They’re kind of in the middle point, as you say. It seems like they should be in the natural evil category. And yet, they do look a lot like us, not just, I mean, I mean, like facial structure, but in the way they behave. If you watch certain higher animals, or if you interact with dogs at home, for instance, and some lizards, they have almost a sort of emotional life. You might even think that they have an emotional life in some capacity. And that means that they can feel pain, and they seem to have then, might be a reason not to inflict pain on them. And yet, their pain is not always caused by humans. And it’s not just natural. So they seem to be this middle thing that be this middle thing that if it feels pain, should have an explanation for it, which we do for moral evils or natural evils. But for them it’s kind of weird, like why not just create them as machines so that they don’t feel any pain because that’s how most of the natural world is. Rocks and plants don’t particularly strike me as having pain experience, nor suffering. In the kind of sense we mean suffering. So they straddle that and the two options, which are neither are really appealing. I think this is the problem, is one to say, well, they’re just like the natural things, like rocks and plants and whatever. And therefore, it’s not a real, it’s baked in. It’s just another natural thing who cares, right? On the other hand you might think gosh, I don’t know, it seems like they kind of shouldn’t be, shouldn’t be, that’s moral terms, shouldn’t be suffering right now or be in pain. So I guess they’re like us they’re persons they have rights and they have the sort of thing and that and then it brings up all questions about like why does God create these things that have rights that aren’t being trusted to and they’re not affected by the fall blah blah blah. So you’re kind of – it’s a – I can – you can seem to motivate the problem that they’re kind of in between and therefore call for attempts to make sense of what’s going on there.
Fr. Gregory: Yeah, I think that’s often there’s a kind of vehemence or a kind of intensity to the phenomenon or the experience when you encounter animal pain or suffering. So like you’re watching Planet Earth and you see these little ants that when they consume this kind of spore it then sprouts in their head and then bursts out of their thorax and makes them into fossilized death sculptures and you’re like yah!
Fr. Bonaventure: Yeah
Fr. Gregory: Or you might look at these harbor seals off the cape of Good Hope just getting dominated by great white sharks and you might look at that and you might think yaah!
Fr. Bonaventure: Or be like, yeah!
Fr. Gregory: Or be like yeah, and there there are any number of things when you zoom in you’re like holy smokes This is kind of nasty…brutish…
Fr. Bonaventure: Nature is red and tooth and claw.
Fr. Gregory: Exactly, and then I think it’s at that point where you have this experience of might fit in the physical or the natural evil category, but it seems like there’s this moral evil dimension to it insofar as someone is responsible for setting this up. Someone is responsible for letting this go on. Someone is responsible. Like there has to be an intelligence at work in it, and it seems from my best judgment, like that intelligence is either twisted or falling down on the job or maybe malevolent. And I think that like the atheist comes before that experience and he says, the simplest explanation is that He doesn’t exist. And I think that that’s like we can feel the urgency of that claim, and it helps us to kind of enter into the conversation fruitfully. But I think that as Christians, we have to help our contemporaries zoom out. Because I think sometimes you get too close to an experience, and then all you can see is that experience. And in just seeing, you lose a feel for the context or the setting and where this fits with respect to others. So I think that that’s not to explain it away, but that is to help us gain a certain perspective. Okay, so then maybe we can think about like, what’s going on in creation… not that we’re gonna be able to like sound the depths of that question within the context of a 30 minute conversation, but nevertheless, like, you think about the Buddhist objection as if God were responsible for minimizing suffering or as if like the cosmic forces were responsible for minimizing pain and suffering, but it strikes me that God isn’t motivated by minimizing pain and suffering because if he were he wouldn’t have created there you go zero. I mean divide by zero… undefined number. Nevertheless, you got none at least in the aggregate but God created so at least He exposed creation and Himself to some modicum of pain and suffering but on account of what? Maybe we could talk about that.
Fr. Bonaventure: Yeah, I think that’s the goal of, yeah, we assume, well, it puts it this way. It’s very likely that we will project on our own kind of immediate initial intuitions and think that they’re correct on things as we generally do. We just, how we just function as quickly assume that our best guess, we’re immediately is the right thing and gets on the right track. I think it’s tricky in this case because we will project onto animals in the creative world, things that aren’t true because we don’t have any information about them. That’s not to say, now, about people say, “Aha, atheists might say, oh, you’re just gonna be, “Oh yeah, you can’t understand God, huh?” So whatever, though, therefore you can say who knows. But you’ve got to give some reasonability to rationality, it to why it’s okay to back off on a particular answer to everything. And that way like animal suffering is a matter of one, we don’t know all the reasons why God lets anything happen particularly. But the category of animal suffering, this kind of, oh, it’s so much and so absurd and so great. Like he creates whole animals in this way. Well, remember, he creates in particular ways. I mean, if we take the process of evolution, the way things develop accordingly, then it starts to look like certain paths have to be developed in certain ways if they want this end goal. Now, maybe there’s other paths, but it starts to look a lot more like the natural route of if you want water from the sky, then you’re going to have clouds and rain. If you want green grass and blah, blah, blah, you’re going to have, start to have plate tectonics, this kind of thing. It starts to move towards the hypothetical if you actually get more scientific about it. Now, why does God, He has all sorts of options? Why does He do that? One also is that He’s concerned about us, first and foremost, as far as I can tell. Now this is also very difficult for people to hear I think. And for me, I love animals. But animals are not equal to us. I think people think immediately that they have like rights and that they’re suffering some number of animals suffering…. It’s not as much as human suffering, for like a suffering baby, horrible. Suffering puppy, not nearly as good. But you can start to ramp up like what about a thousand puppies, like 10,000. You just keep on trucking this thing. And at some point it’s like, well, and then if we belong to the baby, it has these diseases and things. And if you ever get someone saying, if you find someone in the intuition of like, “Nah, that’s a lot of dogs.” And one one kind of not that this person is not that worth it, you say, “Aha ha, you have not made the right distinction about what is of ultimate value.” And you ought to as Catholics, we ought to say, at the end of the day, this may seem strange, but we really are a joint in nature and that our pain and suffering matters qualitatively in a different way than anything in the natural world ’cause we’re not entirely natural in that way.
Fr. Gregory: Yeah, so I think maybe just to summarize those two key insights, there’s matter and there’s hierarchy. So it seems like whenever you introduce material creation into the equation, that one thing is probably going to build itself up by the diminution of another. It seems like if you’re going to digest you have to eat and if you’re gonna eat you’re gonna eat something and if you’re gonna eat something that something is going to be, with respect to its own integrity, compromised. Yep, so it seems like matter means that there’s going to be this kind of give and take as it were push and pull. So then on the other hand, we’ve got hierarchy, the fact that not all things register in the same way or with the same importance. And that, ordinarily we’d say, the lower is for the higher. So the rocks are for the plants, the plants are for the animals, the animals are for the man. And that these things, and here we’re getting into a theology of creation, are for us, not like we’re industrialists who are just laying hold to all resources, but we’re stewards. We’re meant to conduct these things unto a certain fullness in us because we are made to the image and like this of God, we’re capable of an intelligent life and we can order these things in light of an end which we alone can interiorize and understand and effectuate freely. So we can bring it all into a kind of symphony as it were. And as a result of which, like you said, we’re not just comparing apples and oranges, we’re comparing apples and something that’s much less than an apple. [laughter]
Fr. Bonaventure: Apples and protons. Yeah, we’re comparing men to animals. No, I think that’s right. And just from also on the philosophical side of things, it’s important to make this distinction between the unity of sensations and a perception of unity, which means this, is that animals and we feel things, right? But there’s a difference between feeling this and then feeling this and feeling this, so one, two, three, four, as opposed to feeling them as a unity. And that’s what consciousness and self-consciousness, the identity of the immaterial soul, has a sense of organizing. We have an organizing and principle. We have an intelligent ability and unity to us, such that I have a story to tell. And my pain from 30 years ago, my suffering in trauma is still a part of that story, right? Whereas, I don’t know where exactly in the animal kingdom this breaks down, but lots of little things. Ants for instance, don’t have a personal story. They have the feelings of sensations, but they don’t have the unity of those feelings. There’s no single story of this life’s, unless the story we project on them. We say, “Oh, there’s that same ant again.” But he doesn’t have this sense… So where on the line, when we start to look at these animals suffer, especially with nature, those stories and things, if you remember, these are not like little persons that have extra arms on us. There’s no reason to think that philosophically. Before we get into the question of if they were, is it still in the hierarchy question? So I think it comes from a good place to sympathize with them, of course. But we want to be reasonable and realize that we do sometimes– we are elevated in their nature. And with pets and domestic animals, this is kind of part of dominion, is that we do provide them a sort of elevated existence in a way, but it’s not their natural existence, in the same way that ours is naturally to be elevated in this moral sense.
Fr. Gregory: Yeah, okay. In the time that we have remaining in the episode, let’s talk a little bit about sin and redemption. Obviously animals, they’re not endowed with intelligence and freedom in the way in which we are. So they’re not capable of sinning in the way that we are. But nevertheless, our sin reverberates through the whole cosmos.
Fr. Bonaventure: That’s what Paul says.
Fr. Gregory: And so like you think about the way that St. Thomas Aquinas talks about our original endowment or our first parents’ original endowment, original justice or rectitude, there was a kind of order or harmony between men and God within men themselves, but a harmony that radiated into material creation. And so you hear this in Genesis 3, after the fall in Genesis 3-5, there’s like a discovery, and then a pronouncement of punishments as it were, or like a kind of rebellion grows up in material creation. And so there’s a sense in which having lost this harmony now we experience a disharmony. And so I think it’s not insignificant to say that some of this may be attributed to the fact that we’ve sinned. And as a result of that, there’s a kind of something amiss, not to say that like, well, we totally transform the actual conditions of material nature. So there’s no way in which… animals still would have eaten antelope in the garden because they have the teeth, they have the nature which is built by meat and as a result we can judge that that’s probably baked in, that’s probably part and parcel of the creation. It seems like our sin has probably made this worse.
Fr. Bonaventure: This seems like a theological data point that somehow the creation is subject to frustration through sin, through… and it’s hard to like cash this out. Of course, in a sense of the atheist is going to hate this too, but you can’t really cash out theological doctrines and empirical sciences, right? But there is a sense that, that our sin, as it affects us, also affects the nature of the world. You don’t need to bring in demons necessarily, but of course, that’s a, we’d be silly to think they’re not involved in some fashion. It is the case, of course, that in the garden or in the local lake with sharks that they would have indeed eaten things with their teeth. C.S. Lewis at one point says, sharks, in Heaven, maybe they’ll do something different with their teeth and it’s like, “Nah, the great white shark is just kind of, that’s, he’s just kind of an eating machine. That’s what God designed to glorify Him by. But the idea that in somehow creation itself is not, is not a right. I think it’s hard to pin down exactly what’s going on there, but sometimes theological claims, and perhaps this is what the magistirium right now is talking about with creation. This is a good side we could take to environmental stuff. It’s thinking more seriously about that doctrine and what it means. And then the notion of its subject to sin by us and otherwise and to make sense of reality in that light. I don’t think that’s a silly request of the Magisterium’s work and it’s something I don’t spend a lot of time with. But there is this sense that the restoration is a reunification, a reordering rightly, not only in our own bodies, but around the creation. How that looks and pans out, of course, no idea. But because spirit and matter are related to each other in the creation, then we should expect some right ordering.
Fr. Gregory: Yeah, and I think too, like you’ve made mention of a theodicy. There’s another kind of approach to these questions called a defense. They try to do different things where they supply explanations in different ways. But I think something that’s super fruitful in these types of conversations is making sure that we know what we’re talking about. So like we’ve been using animal pain and animal suffering interchangeably. Some people in talking about evil, they’ll highlight the fact like evil’s a privation, right? It points to what ought to be there and isn’t there. So in a certain sense, it doesn’t require an explanation insofar as it’s not. And yet we experience it or the phenomenon itself kind of oppresses us quite acutely. And so we need to be able to tell a story or we need to be able to render a defense that what we hold in the face of this is that the very least not irrational, but might even have reasons to marshal in its defense or beautiful explanations whereby to account for what is. And I think here, like, you see certain animal pains and/or sufferings, and they seem so terrible, like terrible, that we’re also contending with our emotional experience in light of that fact, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that we should say that this is suffering because suffering is typically understood as an interior pain, right? Or a pain of one who can ponder the pain or who can experience the pain and all of its acuity. So I think too, it’s helpful just to talk about what types of distinctions or what types of clarifications help us to not like bracket our emotional experience, but contend with our emotional experience lest we import our emotional experience and say something that’s false. So, further thoughts on that?
Fr. Bonaventure: Well, and I suppose Kant is not different from Aquinas on this. He’s in the tradition, the Christian tradition, that our duties to animals and the material world, in a sense, are indirect duties to us in a way. So Kant says we don’t have a direct duty to animals, but we have an indirect duty to them, such that we ought not to have them cause them suffering on egregious, whatever we mean by that, and we ought to assist them in that, although he was…they’re meant to be eaten as well, for I mentioned, as you said, but nonetheless, we ought to be attentive to their suffering and their pain, even though it is not our suffering, not our pain, because it makes us worse if we don’t. I think as we live in a world that’s more and more siloed off from things, we can just focus narcissistically on ourselves and then have the two-fold error of either forgetting about everything else and not worrying about where we get our food and what animals are involved or anything like that. Or on the other hand, going the extreme of saying, well these things are just as good as us and we should sacrifice for them. No, no, I think it’s important to feel the temptations of the frustrations of creation, that they ought not to be this way, that a dog, whelping in pain, for instance, is not a good thing in itself, maybe in some fashion, hypothetically, it can work out, but that we should be, and for, that’s because it’s for us too. It makes us human. And there’s a sense in the humane society is not wrong, that it’s humane to treat animals in particular ways. However, we catch that out. But to hold on to that, and then think clearly without falling into one of the other extreme, and we’re probably more inclined to fall into one extreme than the other at this point. But I think that’s the reminders that we do have, in a sense, well, at least Kant says, indirect duties, and you could say, in the Christian sense, we have responsibilities of stewardship, as you say, which do matter, but they don’t matter as much as our responsibilities of love and charity with each other.
Fr. Gregory: Yeah, okay. Then that brings us to a final consideration. We were talking about like what motivates God. That’s already to speak as if there was something without that’s making Him within, which isn’t the case. I mean, God’s motivated by Himself. God is Himself, He is His understanding of Himself. He is His love of Himself. But on the pattern of Himself, God does stuff for creation. And it seems like what He’s motivated by, to speak improperly is, His glory and our salvation, not that His glory is increased by creation. But in the sense that we can partake of it, we can share in it. And it seems like everything that we experience in this world is part of that story. So even though it was not His original design that sin be introduced, sin is introduced, and He re-orchestrates the various instruments to speak here somewhat metaphorically, such that it redounds to a greater harmony or to a greater kind of symphonic praise. And so you can think about these creation stories and the magicians nephew or in the Silmarillion that it’s like it’s somehow a happy fault. Right? So that there’s something going on concerning the glory of God and the salvation of souls where evil of a moral sort certainly and maybe even of a physical sort, somehow redounds to God’s glory and to our salvation. And so like, what is it that we can consider in this mystery? Because it’s a kind of mystery, not quite the mystery of iniquity that we would describe human sin along the lines of, but it’s a kind of mystery, a mystery of obscurity. What, what engaging in that do we learn of God’s wisdom and then His purposes in creation?
Fr. Bonaventure: Well, I think it’s good to be attentive to His, His compassion and His desire for the lack of pain. I think it’s the sense of, I mean, revelation all tears will be dried up and not saying like, you know, wolf tears, but there’s a sense in which He wants things to be joyful. He wants things to be in the right order to be, to be living fully and actively, which everyone knows in the terms of Aristotelian framework, is living a flight of happiness and everything can live a life of happiness in the sense of what it is to flourish and pain and suffering is just as you say, it’s a deprivation or a privation, it’s a failure to flourish like there is nothing that that flourish is by being in pain, pain is always a mark of lack of flourishing and yet pain can lead to greater flourishing. This is true for just knowing truths about ourselves that are painful to hear, for instance, but lead to a greater thing. How that works on the creation, don’t know, but it does remind us that things are not right, that the world is not as it ought to be, and asks us what ought to be done about that, and who can do something about that, and ultimately, of course, that ends up being God and our relationship with him in that project.
Fr. Gregory: Yeah, I think that like what pain and suffering do for us or the purpose that they serve in our lives is more clear because we’re capable of reasoning upon them and we’re able to transcend the material conditions by attaining to a kind of immaterial…what would you call it? Like thought world? And so we’re able to–
Fr. Bonaventure: We can boost up off them. In a way an animal can’t.
Fr. Gregory: Yeah, we’re able to say, yeah, like this alerts me to my own weakness, or this guards me against worse things, or this can be united to the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, and it’s sublimated under the praise of His glory. Like those are all clear things that we’re capable of on account of the fact that one, we can suffer in the full sense of the term, but two, we can make sense of or offer up…
Fr. Bonaventure: Redemptive suffering.
Fr. Gregory: Yeah, where like an animal can’t, and so it does pose a real question as to like the point of this but again within the setting of matter and hierarchy, we can think about this as somehow for us like we’re meant to bring these questions to God, not necessarily to exhaust them or to make perfect sense of them, but to bring them with us into this upward surge whereby we rise in contemplation through prayer and study to a deeper appreciation of who God is, what we’re for, and how this all is supposed to make sense. All right, any final thoughts?
Fr. Bonaventure: Nope.
Fr. Gregory: Excellent. Well, in that spirit, we turn to our listeners to say: thanks for listening to this episode of Godsplaining. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, as long as it’s legal, like, subscribe, and leave a five-star review, all of which helps to get the word out so other people can get caught up in conversations about weird stuff like the Barbie movie and animal suffering and whatever else occurs to us immediately before we push record. You can follow the links in the description and/or show notes to one, support us on Patreon, two, check out sweet merchandise and three, follow up with some Godsplaining events. So you got the summer retreats at which we hope to meet you, greet you, and then you’ve got some of these days of recollection, cropping up here, there, everywhere, all those details are at godsplaining.org. So know of our prayers for you. Please pray for us, and we’ll look forward to chatting with you next time on Godsplaining.