Neither Man nor Beast

by Carol J Adams

  What Is Beastly Theology? The Patriarchal Christian Answer

  The tame animal is in the deepest sense the only natural animal. . . . Beasts are to be understood only in their relation to man and through man to God.

  —C. S. Lewis3

  C. S. Lewis accepts a hierarchy of value that determines where on the continuum God, men, and beasts fall. The vertical boundaries that divide human and animal are related to the boundaries that have been inscribed between maleness and femaleness, God and humans. This results in a patriarchal beastly theology that contradictorily knows that something invisible exists (God), while denying the sensory information available that indicates any sorts of relevant connections between humans and animals. Barbara Noske points to the contradictions of anthropocentric theory, and by implications, beastly theology: “I have always wondered how humans (Marxists and others) can be so sure about their own ability to judge animal inabilities. Humans pretend to know from within that they themselves possess certain faculties and to know from without that animals do not.”4 How do we explain beastly theologies that know from within that God exists, but similarly know from without that animals’ consciousness does not exist, or that it is not ethically relevant? Feminist theologian Paula Cooey offers one answer: it is “way too easy to project a God in our own image because it is simple to commit idolatry and way too difficult to project pain and pleasure on actual sentient nonhuman creatures. Thus we can project a conscious being and call it God because we perceive it as a linguistic being, but it is much harder to do this with animals because it is hard to attribute consciousness, pain, and suffering to a nonlinguistic being.”5

  Certainly the theological centrality of the Word in Christian thought militates against recognizing animals as subjects of their own lives. Whether used literally (in the sense of valuing spoken and written words over other forms of communication), or metaphorically (in the identification of Jesus Christ as God’s definitive “Word”), it has the effect of marginalizing and objectifying those who have no words. Although God speaks in other, nonverbal ways in Scripture—whirlwind, fire, political upheaval, military victory or defeat—God’s definitive communication is in the form of words: the Decalogue, the Law, Scripture, etc. Speaking thus becomes identified with holy power. Language provides us with both a sense of affinity with God and subject status, while simultaneously confirming the object status of those who have no speech.6

  But this focus on language may deflect our attention from the knowledge claims that are presupposed in patriarchal beastly theologies. Language may be one of the methods for acquiring knowledge, but to stake one’s knowledge claims solely on language becomes self-referential, as Cooey implies when she points to how easy it is to commit idolatry. Moreover, “the most eloquent signs of pain, human or animal, are non-linguistic.”7 Why, when projected God-ward, is one form of inner knowledge acceptable, but projected animal-ward, is this form of knowledge rendered unacceptable, and the external knowledge we can gain from animals eloquently expressing pain distrusted? Because anthropocen-tricity is inherently circular, arising from and referring to human beings. As Donald Griffin, a leading ethologist, remarks:

  I believe that with due caution it is reasonable to make some use of such analogies between human and animal behaviour and mental experience, for the simple reason that central nervous systems are so similar in all their basic attributes, as far as we know. Against the charge that such reasoning by analogy is mistakenly anthropomorphic, I have pointed out that such anthropomorphism is mistakenly only if there are indeed fundamental and absolute differences between human and non-human mental experiences. Since this is the question under discussion, it is prejudicial to assume, even by implication that one of the possible answers to the question is necessarily correct.8

  Anthropocentric theology is inherently circular too. When theology is modeled upon the traditional, self-referential conceptualizations of the God–human relationship, knowledge claims on behalf of the other animals are most likely to be excluded.

  Value Hierarchies and Dualisms

  Previous chapters have drawn on ecofeminist philosopher Karen J. Warren’s description of the components of an oppressive conceptual framework to place animals conceptually within feminist philosophy and theory. Here Warren’s work illuminates patriarchal beastly theologies.

  As we have seen, value-hierarchical thinking or “up-down thinking” places higher value, status, or prestige on what is up rather than what is down. In Christian theology, God has been up, animals have been down. And though humans are seen to be in between, both the notions of imago dei, that humans are in the image of God, and the idea that animals do not have souls place humans much closer to God than to the other animals.

  Warren also identifies value dualisms as part of an oppressive conceptual framework. We have seen how disjunctive pairs such as human/animal, male/female, adult/child, white/nonwhite, culture/nature, mind/body, subject/object, humans/nature are seen as oppositional rather than as complementary. Dualisms reduce diversity to two categories: A or Not A. They convey the impression that everything can then be appropriately categorized: either it is A or Not A. These dualisms represent dichotomy rather than continuity, enacting exclusion rather than inclusion. Feminist theologian Catherine Keller explains how the identification of the separative self is based on emphasizing differences: “It is this, not that.” 9 This phenomenon is especially true in the ontological assumptions concerning humans and the other animals. We structure this ontology by saying we are this, not that; humans, not animals. We are people, they are beasts. We go to heaven, they do not.

  Higher value is accorded the first item in each dyad. Moreover, the second part of the dualism is not only subordinate but in service to the first. Women serve men, nature serves culture, animals serve humans, people of color serve white people. Theologically, traditional conceptions of heaven and earth work in this oppositional, dualistic way that discourages earth consciousness. Restrictive dualisms uphold a logic of domination. Central to a logic of domination is language that normalizes this domination. The hierarchical nature of the traditional conception of the Godhead sacralizes a logic of domination in our relationships.

  Let us recall certain characteristics of the prevailing, fossilized “God-talk” that relies on hierarchical images: God is imaged as a human male (father, lord, king), and as a male with authority and power; human maleness is conceptualized as being higher up on the hierarchy than human femaleness. In my research on people’s attitudes to animals for The Sexual Politics of Meat, I discovered why animals of prey are called “she” no matter what their sex. Because, according to linquists, the word she connotes a “minor power.”10 Will “she” always be a “minor power” as long as resistance exists to seeing God—about as major a power as one can be—as anything but “He”?11 Will animals be a “minor power” and exploitable as long as the traditional conception of God ratifies hierarchy in our relationships?

  Yes, according to Catherine Keller:

  The association in this epoch between separatism and masculinity is so tight that as long as God is imagined in mainly masculine metaphors, there is simply no chance for conversion to a fundamentally relational spirituality. And the reverse holds equally true: as long as divinity is externalized by the traditional perfections of self-sufficiency, omnipotence, impassionability and immutability, “God”—even were she made in name and image a woman, an androgyne, or a neuter—will support the oppression of women. . . . As long as separation itself is deified, women of faith will end up in the doubly dependent role of subjugation to God and the male, who is himself subjugated to God.12

  Human authority over the other animals is modeled after the notion of divine authority over humans, and men’s authority over women. We recapitulate a hierarchy of control, playing God, lord, ruler, regent, dominator toward the other animals. This role is one of dispensing decisions rather than egalitarianism; it enforces rather than enhances; it highlights separation and difference
rather than relationship and similarity. Concepts of God as father and animals as beasts fall at either ends of this value-hierarchical continuum. Metaphors announce and reinforce this placement.

  Metaphors of Domination

  Metaphors are and are not true, depict and yet cannot depict reality. As Sallie McFague explains it: “Metaphor always has the character of ‘is’ and ‘is not.’ ”13 This is especially true with theological metaphors. When metaphors for God that offer models of relationship with God become instead definitions of God, they become frozen, inadequate, anachronistic. While the meta phor of “God the father” provides one way of thinking about our relationship with God based on relationships we know and understand, it is not a definition of God. God may be like a father in some ways, but God is not a father. When metaphor becomes definition, limits on relationships occur.

  Metaphors for God become frozen and outdated; so, too, do metaphors for animals. When metaphors like “beast,” “bestial,” “brutal,” “beastly,” “animal desires,” “animal-like” are used uncritically to provide contrast with and to glorify human behavior, we have allowed our ideas about animals to be frozen and outdated. Let us remember, as Keith Thomas points out, that “it was as a comment on human nature that the concept of ‘animality’ was devised.”14 What we consider to be their reality becomes our metaphor. We respond to animals as though these metaphors about our behavior are true for them. In the process, a distancing akin to the distancing accomplished by envisioning a separate, individualistic, regent in the sky is accomplished. Our metaphors seem to say that God is not us; we are not animals. But much feminist theology suggests that God is us, is in us, is revealed by us, is a part of our relationships. And animal defenders declare, we are animals. As philosopher Mary Midgley says emphatically: “They are the group to which people belong. We are not just rather like animals; we are animals.”15

  Maureen Duffy observes: “The truth is that we have always used animals not simply for practical purposes but as metaphors for our own emotional requirements, and it is this that we are unwilling to give up by considering them as creatures with rights and lives of their own. We refuse to recognise the sentience of other species in order that we may go on treating them as objects, projections and symbols.”16 Similarly, while it may have helped believers of previous centuries to say that God was like a lord, king, ruler, these metaphors are not helpful today as they uphold the idea of God being separate from creation. As Sallie McFague explains:

  We live in our imaginations and our feelings in a bygone world, one under the guidance of a benevolent but absolute deity, a world that is populated by independent individuals (mainly human beings) who relate to one another and to other forms of life in hierarchical patterns. But this is not our world, and to continue doing theology on its assumptions is hurtful, for it undermines our ability to accept the new sensibility of our time, one that is holistic and responsible, that is inclusive of all forms of life, and that acknowledges the interdependence of all life.17

  Metaphors of a triumphant, monarchical “God” are not true for our time. But they help to explain why we see animals as exploitable. A value hierarchy that is upheld by a logic of domination places animals so low on the hierarchy that their bodies can be viewed instrumentally. Moreover, as long as the main images in Western culture are of “God” as ruler, lord, king of creation, and this metaphor is derived from the experience of some (predominantly white male) human beings, then animals cannot be ruler, lord, kings of creation. By anthropomorphizing God, we exclude animals from the Godhead. In addition, the value dualisms of spirit over body, maleness above femaleness, heaven above earth become sacralized.

  If images of God as king and male are incomplete, partial, and inadequate, so too are animal metaphors.

  The “God” of the Man of Reason

  The very beginning of Genesis tells us that God created man in order to give him dominion over fish and fowl and all creatures. Of course, Genesis was written by a man, not a horse. There is no certainty that God actually did grant man dominion over other creatures. What seems more likely, in fact, is that man invented God to sanctify the dominion that he had usurped for himself over the cow and the horse. Yes, the right to kill a deer or a cow is the only thing all of mankind can agree upon, even during the bloodiest of wars.18

  —Milan Kundera

  As we have seen in earlier discussions, feminist philosophy challenges the notion of an atomistic subject, “the man of reason” who splits subject from object, and whose mode of being is marked by transcending the body. Just as animals are defined precisely as what humans are not, so, traditionally, “femaleness was symbolically associated with what Reason supposedly left behind.”19 Feminists have demonstrated that a knowing subject cannot transcend the social structures in which he or she lives, or become abstracted from one’s own history. However, the idea of the man of reason was that he could overcome body, history, social situations, and thereby gain knowledge of others he examined as objects. This idea of the man of reason was accompanied by the Western idea of a disembodied, ahistorical God the father. The Man of Reason and his God created categories for animals, categories that arise from knowledge claims about what we believe to know that animals are.

  Human male dominance may be having a parallel influence on both the assumption of who the knower is and the assumption of who an animal is. As feminist philosopher Alison Jaggar explains: “Several feminist theorists have argued that modern epistemology itself may be viewed as an expression of certain emotions alleged to be especially characteristic of [human] males in certain periods, such as separation anxiety and paranoia, or an obsession with control and fear of contamination.”20 According to this insight, modern epistemology and its suspicion of emotions, dualist ontologies, rationalist bias, and concern for achieving objectivity, may represent not some universal response, but a very specific one: the response to the experience of being an elite human male. Similarly, feminist theorist Barbara Noske points out that “it is really the straight Western male whose strongholds are threatened by human-animal continuity. Physical closeness, grooming, nurturance and companionship are so much part of the female and male primate behavioural pattern that the lack of these among heterosexual Western males is genuinely surprising.”21

  The patriarchal knower’s fear of his own body may account both for the enlightenment epistemology that objectifies others and the delineation of a complete and utter chasm b etween human and animal.

  In a vertically organized world, in which spatial hierarchies denote value or lack thereof (the traditional God-human-animals hierarchy) beastly theological categories are maintained. Pulsating out from the humanocentric view of the world, we both wish to make and resist making the Other in our image. The “Man of Reason” traditionally transcended both femaleness and beastliness, while viewing many female traits as linking women to other animals.22 Anxious about charges of expressing sentiments for animals if they were acknowledged to have forms of consciousness, sociality or other human-allied concepts, the man of reason deemed these emotions untrustworthy and invalid sources of knowledge. The positivistic scientific views of the other animals that arise from “men of reason,” i.e., traditional scientists, is one that Barbara Noske calls the “de-animalized animal.” Since it is equipped only to measure observable phenomena, and its explanatory apparatus of natural selection focuses on the individual organic level, this scientific view discounts animals’ culture. It strips the other animals of consciousness, inventiveness, and cultural context. What we have is “a de-animalized biological construct rather than a mirror of animal reality.”23 It becomes, however, the prevailing viewpoint. This illustrates an “objectifying epistemology,” as Josephine Donovan calls it, “which turns animals into ‘its.’ ”24 The positivist tradition simultaneously denies animals their context and the knowing subject her emotions.

  Many who experience a metaphysical shift toward animals, refusing to ontologize them as usable, discover a feeling of
abiding anger contrary to the reasonable standard of patriarchal culture. Anger is a frightening and much-misunderstood expression, an “outlaw emotion” in Alison Jaggar’s terms. According to Jaggar, outlaw emotions

  may enable us to perceive the world differently from its portrayal in conventional descriptions. They may provide the first indications that something is wrong with the way alleged facts have been constructed, with accepted understandings of how things are. . . . Only when we reflect on our initially puzzling irritability, revulsion, anger, or fear may we bring to consciousness our “gut-level” awareness that we are in a situation of coercion, cruelty, injustice, or danger.25

  While the knowledge claims arising from men of reason would disown such emotions, Jaggar points to the importance of such outlaw emotions for challenging dominant conceptions of the status quo. She perceives intertwined influences in which “appropriate emotions may contribute to the development of knowledge” and “the growth of knowledge may contribute to the development of appropriate emotions.”26 In light of Jaggar’s insights, we can see that anger may well be an appropriate response to the knowledge of monkeys in stereotaxic chairs, minipigs being developed for animal experimentation, debeaking so that hens do not commit cannibalism in their stressful and overcrowded cages, the capture and breeding of dolphins and whales for humans’ entertainment, the transporting of one-or two-day-old feeble male calves (awkwardly walking and still with wet umbilical cord) to slaughterhouses, the dragging of old, crippled dairy and beef cows by skid steer loaders or the scooping up of downers into buckets to get them to the slaughterhouse door, and any number of creatively cruel interactions that humans have with animals. These emotions are not only appropriate, but appropriate sources of knowledge. By occluding these acts we hide from the truth.