Barking Up the Wrong Tree

Jeff McLeod

First, let’s get the facts straight about the Holy Father’s comments in the Vatican, the so called “All Dogs go to Heaven” episode. Pope Francis did not console a boy about his dog — that was Pope Paul VI many years ago, and I have no idea how that ever made it past an editor. More importantly, just like Pope Paul VI before him, Pope Francis taught a perfectly orthodox lesson about the fate of our world in the afterlife from the apostle Paul. Pope Francis said, and I quote: “The Holy Scripture teaches us that the fulfillment of this wonderful design also affects everything around us.”

Radical stuff? See if you can spot the Biblical support for that comment in Paul’s letter to the Romans:

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. 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.

Romans 8:19-23

I recited this passage to my children every time we buried one of our deceased pet hamsters. I believe every word of it. Therefore, yes, it is with great joy that I propose that you could very well be reunited in some nontrivial sense with your pets in eternal life.

The latest kerfuffle involving Pope Francis was made more tedious than it had to be not just by the secular media but also the Catholic blogosphere. I think the Catholic defense in some cases went the wrong way. They “barked up the wrong tree,” the tree of the Aristotelian taxonomy of souls. This is fine, but there is a richer and theologically more satisfying answer to give to the question, “Do dogs go to heaven?”

Greek Metaphysical Immortality versus Dialogic Immortality

I will preface my comments by declaring that the distinction I am about to make is not my own, it is drawn from the work of Pope Benedict XVI, from a series of theological essays published in 2009 under the name Credo for Today: What Christians Believe.

In our Nicene Creed, we profess belief in the resurrection of the body and life everlasting. How are these things comprehensible?

Greek metaphysics. These things are comprehensible by considering that a substance, i.e., a “thing,” is a fusion of form and matter. The form of a thing is that which makes it what it is. The matter is the particularity of the thing. In the case of a human being, matter is the physical stuff woven together to make him three dimensionally manifest in the world, and the form is his soul.

We separate form and matter conceptually in both common and scientific language. When you see a tornado, you see the dust of a particular farm, the wood from the fence. These are particularities. The dynamic equations that make the tornado are separable from the actual stuff flying around at your latitude and longitude. The dynamic system that governs the tornado is not the whole tornado. It is the patterned set of rational laws that order that govern the tornado.

Similarly, the rational soul of a person is separate from a person’s particularity, the human body he manifests in the three dimensional world, his encounters with other people, and other creatures.

Applying this to the idea of immortality, we Catholics maintain that at the time of death, the soul separates from the body, while the body decays as all physical things do.

Now, on the question of dogs, many able apologists, once they read the secular media misquotes about Pope Francis immediately thought of the Greek model and seized on it. The answer they gave from within this framework is wholly legitimate, “Do dogs go to heaven?” The answer is “no” because dogs do not have an intellectual soul that separates from the body at death.

Why is it so important that only intellectual souls go to heaven? It is important because only a human intellect is capable of acquiring the Beatific Vision, which is the perfect happiness of an intelligent being: to know God, and to behold God face to face in eternity.

I have left a few hints in what I have said so far to suggest that the immortality of the intellectual soul is only part of the story. When we attend seriously to the resurrection of the body, we are talking about particularity, and a new dimension is added to our discussion. This resurrection from the dead is the awakening of the whole person, his concrete, historical existence on earth. Here I will turn to Pope Benedict XVI who talks about dialogic immortality as a complementary framework for thinking about the afterlife.

Dialogic immortality. This is an academic phrase if there ever was one, but it’s really not hard to understand. A dialog implies a relationship. We stand in relationship with God, we with our desire for happiness, and He in his desire to bring us to himself. Because the drama of our life is an interpersonal relationship between persons deeply in love, the resurrection of the body after death is described, often explicitly in the Old Testament, as a lover’s defiant refusal to allow his beloved to die.

All love wants eternity, and God’s love not only wants it but effects it and is it. In fact, the biblical idea of awakening grew directly out of this dialogical theme: he who prays knows in faith that God will restore the right. (Job 19:25ff; Ps 73:23ff); faith is convinced that those who have suffered in the interests of God will also receive a share in the redemption of the promise (2 Macc 7:9ff).

Pope Benedict XVI, Credo for Today, p. 97.

We are loved so deeply that every injustice in history, and in your particular life, must be answered, and will be answered, by the even more radical love of the God of Israel. This love reaches its peak in the resurrection of the body.

What this means for our case comes clearer when Pope Benedict explains that when using the phrase, “resurrection of the body,” the word “body” in the Creed means in effect “the world of man.” Not just the man in abstract, his intellectual soul, but the whole person. Our world in its concrete particularity is redeemed. He emphasizes that the immortality of the Bible is not a restatement of Greek metaphysics.

Immortality as conceived by the Bible proceeds, not from the intrinsic power of what is in itself indestructible [the immortal rational soul, ed.], but the man physically existing in the midst of history and gives him immortality, it must be called “awakening of the dead.”

Pope Benedict XVI, Credo for Today, p. 97, emphasis added.

Let me pull this all together, cautiously, by framing it this way. If the question is literally, do dogs go to heaven, as a place where they achieve the Beatific Vision, true knowledge of God, then the answer of course is “no” because the animal soul is not an intellectual soul.

However, if the question is, does eternal life exclude the possibility of retaining some aspects of our particular existence in our world? Including all we touched and saw and loved in this beautiful place? The answer is that from what we know of salvation history, eternal life seems to demand a recapitulation of the particulars of our lives. The eternity of the intellectual soul is certainly a given, and the Beatific Vision is attainable. But something more radically personal seems to be promised. Something that would be known only by a person who is madly in love with you. I think that’s a good way to look at it, and it is what I believe to be the case.

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15 thoughts on “Barking Up the Wrong Tree”

  1. Hi Dr. McLeod– Happy New Year!

    I have a question for you that’s probably best not discussed in an online forum. What’s the best way to get in touch with you?

    1. Hi WSquared – Happy New Year to you as well. You do an amazing job articulating the meaning of the liturgy. I always anticipate your comments in those threads because you know what you are talking about. You have quite a fan club on the Internet.

      The best way to get in touch with me is through my academic address, jmcleod@smumn.edu. I’d love to answer any question you have!

  2. I see no reason why animals should not go to Heaven.

    “For what happens to the children of man and what happens to the beasts is the same; as one dies, so dies the other. They all have the same breath, and man has *no advantage over the beasts, for all is vanity.”
    ~ Ecclesiastes 3:19

    Personally, I have to believe that creatures so innocent and so loving do have a special place in Heaven. And if we are to believe that ‘our’ Heaven is ‘our’ perfect individual happiness, why would any pet lover not expect them to be waiting for us.

    1. St. Francis preached to man and beast the universal ability and duty of all creatures to praise God. He believed it possible and so do I. Perhaps in a less preternatural way. Animals are spiritual in the way that they love and they mourn, in mates that caress during the mating ritual, in mates that mate for life, in mothers, but for rare exceptions (usually artificially induced) who are devoted and loving with their offspring, and some; elephants for example, take mourning to a whole new level by adhering to death and funeral rituals. And I believe that just by being so pure that they are prayer incarnate.

    2. In chapter 5 text 20 of the Bahagavad-gita the symptoms of the self-realized
      person are given: he is not illusioned by the false identification of the body
      with his true self. He knows perfectly well that he is not this body but is the fragmental portion of God’s energy. If we’re a little lower than the angels then animals are proportionally lower to us. The gist of the author’s post, I believe,
      is that God knows so well what we have experienced and loved here in this material world that every life force who shaped our hearts and minds could be given back as part of heaven’s experience: thus the “recapitulation”.

    3. Absolutely agree with that. The ‘every life force who shaped our hearts and minds’ being given back to us is such a beautiful and perfect description of the way I see animals at work in our lives and ours in theirs. The ultimate symbiosis.

    4. The only trouble with this concept is, if anyone who ever loved us or we loved
      is … missing (as in not saved) from this perfect re-experience, it should be noticed and … re-mourned ..? That’s why I cling to the idea that through every kind of trial by fire, all souls will eventually be released into a perfect state of
      being. What do you think ?

    5. I absolutely believe all souls are eventually released into a perfect state of being, except those who flat out deny Christ. A sinner is a *believer who transgresses. A lost soul is one who does not believe or denies and punishment awaits, not because of sin, but because of unbelief. If believers are to follow the word of God we must believe that Christ died for all of sins; past, present, and future. The crucifixion of Christ is unmatched throughout history for the severity of torment it brought. That was the incredible price He paid for our sins. At the moment on the cross when Christ cried out “My God, my God why have you forsaken me?” marks the moment when the sin of the world was focused on the heart of Christ and he felt the complete absence of God. Abandoned, alone, in terrible pain and far worse; the utter anguish of having His Father turn His back on Him is the point at which Christ felt the weight of all the world upon Himself. And he did so willingly. At the moment when he said “Father unto your hands I commend my spirit” is the moment when he willingly gave up his life for us. His gift of love for all those who believe in Him. This means we *must believe that all believers, as you stated, are “released into a perfect state of being”. That does not mean there is not atonement. Some of that happens on earth. Our guilt, our anguish, our trials and tribulations; or as you put it “trial by fire”, our sorrow, our humility through confession, our desire and our struggle to not sin as much as is possible, and our penance in the way of prayer and good deeds. Depending on the severity of sin, some atonement may continue to take place in, dare I say, ‘levels’ of Heaven until we are completely purified.

      As for lost souls, the unbelievers, the deniers, we can beseech God on their behalf through Act of Reparation. A prayer or devotion with the intent to repair the “sins of others”. I believe that through these prayers, our love, our forgiveness, our anguish, and our desire that they too be re-united with Christ on their behalf, has the power to save, or at least provide them the opportunity to be saved, in the ‘last moment’ so that they are “not missing from the perfect re-experience”.

    6. ” ….or at least provide them the opportunity to be saved,…”

      Although the Buddha did not suffer even a splinter of Jesus’ cross he did
      vow to reincarnate until everyone was liberated. In the Hindu concept
      having a lucky birth is being born into a pious family who will teach you
      religious precepts. Unless one gets these divine instructions down pat it
      is impossible to liberate ones soul to a non material plane. All in all, you
      and I are reading the same book even if not on the same page. Thanks.

  3. Dr. McLeod, I have a question: Is there a difference between “immaterial” and “intellectual” with regard to, say, the souls of higher animals (e.g. dogs, primates) and the soul of a human being? Would it “make sense” to say that human beings have a soul that is both immaterial and intellectual (as evidenced by the fact that, the intellect of human beings can deal with immaterial objects: concepts, like the square root of two), whereas the higher animals only have an immaterial soul? I am trying to understand the sometimes remarkable capabilities of trained animals and pets, and the phrase “material soul” (while possibly correct for animals) makes it hard for me to understand those capabilities (such as memory).

  4. I would like to see this reasoning extrapolated to the Theotokos (Sp?) Mother of God. For example, where my mother is mother of my body, and God created my soul, yet I do not separate the two by saying mother of my body and not my soul, it is Mom; it seems your reasoning touches on Mary Mother of God as Mother of Jesus body and soul; I can’t put my finger on it but it seems the connection you make is an explanation of Mother of God?

  5. Your very best yet, Jeff. Most beautiful. As a firm believer in the transmigration of souls, I think a higher dialogic integration in this realm of souls and resurrection is warranted – but for now, your take tops the charts on this particular subject

  6. Pingback: Who Am I To Judge: A Life in a Lifeless Parish - BigPulpit.com

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