More Early Christian Thinking

There are just one or two Christian figures, like John Chrysostom and Francis of Assisi, who are known to have shown compassion and concern for non-human creatures. On one occasion a disciple of Francis is said to have cut a trotter off a living pig in order to give it to a sick companion. According to the narrator, Francis rebuked the disciple, not for being cruel to the pig, but for damaging the property of the pig owner! It appears that Francis once begged the emperor to issue an edict prohibiting anyone from catching or imprisoning ‘my sisters the larks’. Legend also tells of how he preached to the birds. But it was not only living creatures that Francis addressed as his sisters: sun, moon, wind, and fire were all brothers and sisters to him, and he delighted in rocks, flowers and trees with a kind of ecstasy. What he doesn’t seem to have appreciated is what we might regard as the essential difference between sentient creatures and others. Neither did Francis’ love for birds lead him or his friars to give up eating them.

If any single writer may be taken as representative of Christian philosophy before the Reformation, and Catholic philosophy to this day, it is Thomas Aquinas. Commenting on Genesis, he wrote, ‘It is lawful both to take life from plants for the use of animals, and from animals for the use of men.’ But granted that man may kill other animals for food, are there perhaps other things that he may not do to them? Would it be wrong to make animals suffer, or at least make them suffer unnecessarily?

Aquinas is not able to answer such questions. He divides sins into those against God, those against oneself, and those against one’s neighbour, that is other human beings. There is simply no category of sins against non-humans. Nor even is it charitable to be kind to them, for charity does not extend to irrational creatures. It follows that we cannot lovingly give food to a turkey because it is hungry, but only if we think of it as someone’s Christmas dinner, so that by feeding it, we are being charitable to them. Aquinas, in his writings, allows only one good reason to condemn cruelty to animals, namely that it may lead to cruelty to human beings.

Aquinas’ influence has never waned, and as late as the 19^th century, Pope Pius IX refused to allow a society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals to be established in Rome, on the grounds that to grant permission would imply, wrongly, that human beings have duties to the lower creatures.