Do All Dogs Go to Heaven?
Great minds want to know
After
fifteen years of tongue-wagging jaunts around a bucolic New England
mountain, our family dog back home was laid to rest this week.
For a while now he’s been unable to run, see, or hear. He stopped
wagging his tail and running to greet us when we visited, but being the
loyal protector he was, he still kept watch in his favorite sun-soaked
spot in the yard. On his last day, he drifted off peacefully in that
same old spot, his face cradled by his loving owners.
Anyone
who has ever lost or put down a pet knows how hard it is to say goodbye
to an animal. They aren’t “just an animal.” No – you’re losing a family
member and friend. The family really and truly grieves. At the very
least, the loss of that pet symbolizes the passing of the years spanned
by their life. It’s a startling reminder that those days are gone.
Of course, the thought that we might see them again is a huge
consolation. But is it true? Do all dogs go to heaven? Dare we hope that
all dogs be “saved”?
In December, a story circulated far and
wide about Pope Francis declaring that we will see our dogs in heaven.
It turned out that the story wasn’t true
– in fact, even if it were, the Church has never formally declared on
the subject either way – but it was still enough to spark a national
debate among Christians.
In fact, two intellectual heavyweights recently went toe-to-toe over the question just this month. Writing in First Things, Orthodox thinker David Bentley Hart wrote about an exchange with “a young, ardently earnest Thomist” about the afterlife:
“The occasion of the exchange, incidentally, was a long and rather
tediously circular conversation concerning Christian eschatology. My
interlocutor was an adherent to a particularly colorless construal of
the beatific vision, one that allows for no real participation of animal
creation (except eminently, through us) in the final blessedness of the
Kingdom; I, by contrast, hope to see puppies in paradise, and persevere
in faith principally for that reason. On his side, all the arguments
were drawn from Thomas and his expositors; on mine, they were drawn from
Scripture; naturally, limited to the lesser source of authority, I was
at a disadvantage.”
The article – especially its less than favorable portrayal of Thomists as anthropocentric beatniks – caught the attention of Philosophy of Mind author Edward Feser. In an article at the Public Discourse, Feser goes after Hart’s distortions of Thomist thought and clarifies the metaphysical principles at play:
“Hart’s criticisms of Thomists are aimed at an outrageous straw man.
Hart insinuates that those who disagree with him “reject all evidence
of…affection in animals,” and endorse a “mechanistic” account in which
animal behavior reduces to “biomechanical stimulus and response.” But
while this is true of Descartes, it is most certainly not true of Thomists, who reject Descartes’s
mechanistic conception of material substances…Non-human animals are not
machines; they really are conscious, really do feel pain and pleasure,
really do show affection and anger. But these conscious states are
nevertheless entirely dependent on bodily organs, as is everything else
non-human animals do. Hence, when their bodies die, there is nothing
left that might carry on into an afterlife. Fido’s death is thus the end
of Fido.”
Animals have souls – in the Thomist tradition at
least, animals are not automata lacking consciousness, but sensitive
souls capable of suffering and worthy of kindness – but lacking reason,
they can’t abstract the forms of the world or make complex moral
decisions, which is the warp and woof of our immortality. Thus, the
argument goes: a) immortality belongs to the rational soul, and b) human
beings alone have rational souls, therefore c) dogs don’t go to heaven.
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