“Animals don’t have souls. Really? I think this teaching is just so cruel. I’ve known a few animals more inteligente than some people.”
I’ll preface this with …
- Not a “make or break” issue for me, although I struggled with this as a child.
- One of the great values of Swednborg’s work, and the New Church which follows his lead – freedom according to reason: you don’t need to agree with anything I have to say.
- Having said that, there’s some useful things to reflect upon here.
What do we mean by “soul”?
“… a soul symbolizes what is alive in us and so our life itself.” (Heavenly Secrets, paragraph 1436)
“… the soul … is nothing else than the actual person living in the body. That is, the soul is the person’s inner self acting in the world by means of the body and imparting life to the body.” (Heavenly Secrets, paragraph 6054)
There is only one life … which flows in, … according to the nature of a person’s life
“No man, spirit, or angel possesses any life that originates within himself. … There is only one life, the Lord’s. It flows into everyone but is received in varying ways, its reception being determined by the character a person has given his soul through the life he leads. …” (Heavenly Secrets, paragraph 5847)
Animals DO also have a soul … of a different kind. Natural and spiritual, as compared to purely natural …
… the souls of human beings exist on a higher level and in a more perfect state, and are such that they are able to look upwards, and so to heaven and the Lord. Consequently the Lord is able to join them to Himself and grant them eternal life. But the souls of animals are such that they cannot do other than look downwards, thus merely to earthly things, and so can be joined only to these. This is also why they perish together with the body. It is their ends in view that show what the life possessed by man is like and what that possessed by a beast is like. Man is able to have spiritual and celestial ends in view, and to see, acknowledge, and believe them, and to have an affection for them. But beasts can have none but natural ends in view. (Heavenly Secrets, paragraph 3646, section 2)
“… [animals] perish together with the body.” – this is the real issue!
Another way to express this … People also have a spiritual MIND.
“We have an earthly mind and a spiritual mind, the earthly mind below and the spiritual mind above. The earthly mind is our mind for this world and the spiritual mind is our mind for heaven. The earthly mind can be called the animal mind, while the spiritual mind can be called the human mind. We are differentiated from animals by our having a spiritual mind that makes it possible for us to be in heaven while we are in this world. It is also what makes it possible for us to live after death.” (Doctrine of Life, paragraph 86)
THREE reflections
1. Who is Swedenborg’s audience? He’s talking to us, for our sake … because we DO NOT live in the order in which we were created. Animals do.
“Because we humans, regarded in ourselves, are much lower than animals, we have no chance at survival unless we are intimately connected with the Lord through heaven and the world of spirits. Left on our own we would plunge headlong into destroying ourselves and everyone else, because the ruination of ourselves and everyone else is all we long for.
Our proper code of life is to love one another as we love ourselves, but what we actually do these days is to love ourselves more than others and thus hate everyone else. Now, with unreasoning animals the case is totally different. Their proper code is the one they live by, and so they live in thorough harmony with their destiny. We humans, though, live exactly opposite to the pattern ordained for us, so if the Lord did not take pity on us, if he did not bind us to him through angels, we could not possibly survive a single moment.
Of this fact humanity is unaware.” (Heavenly Secrets, 637, section 2)
“… no one but Jehovah is human. “Human being” in its true sense means the core reality from which humanness comes … [which] is divine, and consequently it is heavenly and spiritual. If we lack what is divinely heavenlike and spiritual, nothing in us is human; …” (Heavenly Secrets, 1894)
2. Our relationship to animals, and our tendency to anthropomorphize.
“The reason why most people do not know how to distinguish their own life from that of beasts is that the two are externally alike.” (Heavenly Secrets, paragraph 3646, section 3)
- My first attempts to understand you are intimately connected to my own experience (I put myself in your shoes), but we must realise at some point that I AM NOT you, and understand that our perceptions of the world, and reaction to it may be VERY different from one another.
- The same is true of our attempts to understand animals. We attribute HUMAN emotions, thinking processes, motivations to them, in a first attempt at understanding, but we get this VERY WRONG!
- We see this in those people who have gained uncommon insight into animal behaviours, and are therefore more able to understand and predict their behaviours. People who UNDERSTAND animals – who perceive them truly, rather than interpreting them through human traits – can deal with animals appropriately.
Shark behaviour – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYxf4FsylN8
3. Animals represent something within us, aspects of our character
- Do we confuse our dual natures? Attributing more to our lower natures than is necessary or wise?
- We understand Jesus’ statement in Matt 7:15 – “Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravenous wolves.”
- On Isaiah 11
Recorded on Thursday 15 February, for our service on Sunday 18 February 2024