Forums | Thinking Theology

19 October 2022, 19:58

Why Have We Become Isolated in the Cosmos?

Carl Gustav Jung wrote that modern man feels himself isolated in the cosmos. This is because he is no longer involved in nature. This is our contemporary dilemma. Humanity has degraded the environment. The natural world is stretched to breaking point. Why did we do it? And why do we keep on doing it? Do the concepts of mythos and logos help us better find our purpose in the world?

11 December 2022, 20:39

Jung said yes, sometimes. Stuart Manins isn’t convinced that my representation of Jung’s statement has proven the case. There is certainly a lot of evidence for Jung's claim.  Let's consider it closely.

The Piety of the non-Human Animals

Stuart quotes a dictionary definition of piety, as if to say the standard of proof has to match the dictionary definition. It reminds me of Lewis Carroll’s character Alice talking to Humpty Dumpty in Alice in Wonderland. She asks him, “Must a name mean something?” Humpty Dumpty replies, “When I use a word… it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.”

Yet, to get to the truth of a statement is obviously different from getting to a definition. As Carroll so rightly insisted, language and usage changes. Definitions are always the conventions of the day. Two examples. First, the word nice. Back in the early 14th century this French word imported into early English meant foolish and weak. Today it means attractive. Second, the word egregious. Today it means outstandingly bad. Originally it meant above the flock, i.e. outstandingly good.

I suspect what Jung meant by piety isn't what Stuart means by the same word.

Nevertheless, a dictionary is a helpful guide especially when considering the ancient origins of words. Piety derives from both ancient Greek and ancient Latin so we would do well to take into account its history. The small Oxford dictionary says, “the quality of being religious or reverent”. And most dictionaries will give the Latin origin of piety as the word pietas.

What did the ancients mean by the term piety? It was closely related to the ancient term “religious,” which meant a binding together of the elements of life. Piety was an undivided religiosity or devotion. Today it's one of those curious words used both positively and negatively.  Used perjoratively, piety means a somewhat pompous show of religion. Used positively, piety means exhibiting devotion or reverence.

Piety in the non-human animal kingdom?

At various times in the history of the Christian church, many thinkers have understood the non-human animal kingdom to exhibit both the positive and negative aspects of piety. From the time when many species were domesticated, the non-human animals engaged with the human animals with a great sense of awareness.

The human animal is self-aware but so too do the higher primates exhibit a latent self-awareness. It’s the human animal with its highly developed self-awareness which can diminish its natural piety or undivided awareness. It doesn’t always act in an undivided way.  

Is piety an act of conscious will? Or, is it something else, an impulse, an intuition which leads to devotion and reverence. The domesticated species can exhibit very strong devotion to humans.

Let's consider those who didn't attribute piety to animals? Descartes most famously didn't, of course, and bluntly stated animals didn't have souls, thereby unlocking a floodgate of cruelty most foul on animals other than human. But what about the other side of the coin? Who else felt animals were pious. Medieval saints, for example, usually had an associated animal.

I recently glanced at an abstract which said, "animals occupy a unique position in early-medieval Insular saints’ vitae as the verifiers of the divine source of saints’ power and as the companions of saints. In these texts in which animals are the peers of saints, they are capable of the full spectrum of spiritual states traditionally associated with human spiritual growth, allowing them to become active participants in the Christian cycle of sin and redemption. Within individual vitae the progression of the animal and saint’s relationship from basic interaction to complex communication mirrors the spiritual development of the saint. These interactions speak to a vision of the Christian world in which animals are the collaborators with and companions of saints as they assist each other toward spiritual growth."

Wesley's Sermon 60, "The Great Deliverance"

So while some might not want to attribute piety to other than the human animal, clearly some Christians did and continue so to do.

Another who did attribute piety to animals was John Wesley. I think I've mentioned this in the past. The devoted animal was assured a place in the life ever-lasting not because it could articulate its thoughts and feelings about its master in speech but, it could do so through its actions: it showed instincts of deeply rooted devotion. Wesley took as a starting point Romans 8:19-22 and developed it clearly and methodically.

What then is the barrier between men and brutes? The line which
they cannot pass? It was not reason. Set aside that ambiguous term:
Exchange it for the plain word, understanding: and who can deny that
brutes have this? We may as well deny that they have sight or hearing.
    But it is this: Man is capable of God; the inferior creatures are not.
We have no ground to believe that they are, in any degree, capable of
knowing, loving, or obeying God. This is the specific difference
between man and brute; the great gulf which they cannot pass over. And
as a loving obedience to God was the perfection of man, so a loving
obedience to man was the perfection of brutes. And as long as they
continued in this, they were happy after their kind; happy in the right
state and the right use of their respective faculties. Yea, and so long
they had some shadowy resemblance of even moral goodness. For they had
gratitude to man for benefits received, and a reverence for him. They
had likewise a kind of benevolence to each other, unmixed with any
contrary temper.

But let's think beyond Wesley to how the human animal exhibits piety.

What does Judaism mean by human piety?

The Jewish community is steeped in piety, and Buber reminds us that we should be whole-hearted in our devotion, as in the opening of the ten commandments, you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind strength. The Midrash has a phrase that this can happen only when you are undivided. 

I stay with the Jewish framework for what is meant in that religion by the word piety is not what is understood by using a narrow definition. A J Heschel is particularly cogent on this. Two quotations.

First. “Existence is a compliance, not a desire; an agreement not an impulse. In being we obey.” In being we obey. In the non-human animal, in its existence, in its being, it cannot but obey. What is meant by human piety in the Biblical sense cannot but be similar to the non-human animal expression of piety.

This has, I suspect, become an undergirding principle in what the contemporary philosophers of animal rights, notably the Australian Peter Singer regard as societal norms. Before Singer was Mary Midgley, also an outstanding philosopher, who advocated an animal rights based approach for humanity to be truly human.

Wikipedia, says of Midgley, that she “was a British philosopher. A senior lecturer in philosophy at Newcastle University, she was known for her work on science, ethics and animal rights. She wrote her first book, Beast and Man (1978), when she was in her late fifties, and went on to write over 15 more, including Animals and Why They Matter (1983), Wickedness (1984), The Ethical Primate (1994), Evolution as a Religion (1985), and Science as Salvation (1992). She was awarded honorary doctorates by Durham and Newcastle universities. Her autobiography, The Owl of Minerva, was published in 2005.”

She was a fierce opponent of Richard Dawkins and his brand of neo-Darwinism. Midgley stood firm on the ground of a principled, ethical approach to the kinship of the human and the non-human animal. Dawkins had more than met his match, thus he responded in sheer frustration that her comment was, “hard to match, in reputable journals, for its patronising condescension toward a fellow academic.” For those who know Dawkins works and his appalling comment upon those he considers intellectual inferiors that is simply unbelievable.

Midgley was no more a theist than Dawkins. Yet she arrived at the necessity for the human animal to act humanely to the non-human animal because of what we shared: a loving impulse which exhibits the characteristics of the enlarged, more ancient, definition of piety.

To return to Heschel, the second quotation is almost as powerful as the first in getting to the heart of piety. “Only those will apprehend religion who can probe in depth, who can combine intuition and love with the rigor of method, who are able to find categories that mix with the unalloyed and forge the imponderable into unique expression. It is not enough to describe the given content of religious consciousness. We have to press the religious consciousness with questions, compelling man to understand and unravel the meaning of what is taking place as it stands at the divine horizon. By penetrating the consciousness of the pious man we may conceive the reality behind it." Just so.

Also from Heschel, “What creed is in relation to faith, the Halacha is in relation to pity. As faith cannot exist without a creed, piety cannot subsist without a pattern of deeds; as intelligence cannot be separated from training, religion cannot be divorced from conduct. Judaism is lived in deeds not only in thoughts.”

"Piety cannot exist without a pattern of deeds."

The non-human animals, of course, exhibit their lives only in deeds so far as we can understand them. Their thoughts are hidden from us. But the deeds are the substantive thing as far as piety is concerned. Remember to apply Heschel, “In being we obey.”

All the way through the Old Testament and in snatches of the gospels, the animals and the human animal enjoy a kinship̶. Perhaps the most famous is the story of Noah's ark. The piety of the animal wasn't an assumption in those days, it was a given.

Simone Weil gets to the heart of the matter for the human animal. “The renunciation of the power to think in the first person is the abandonment of all worldly goods in order to follow the Christ.” But the non-human animal almost certainly doesn’t think in the first person, because rather it feels itself as if it were the first person

The Congregation of Pious Animals

Even outside the Christian realm, indeed long before it, are numerous clues. In Aesop's Fables we read the tale of The Congregation of Pious Animals. These creatures offered to Jove prayers of thanksgiving for various gifts which he had bestowed on them. Jove was moved by this act of piety but entreated them to remember he didn't need to be reminded as he had been the giver of the gift.

And, of course, Jung draws on these as well as many other instances, to remind us that we do well to remember we may be a thinking animal but we are also an animal.

Additionally what we observe as, for example, the devotion of the horse to the rider, so as we attempt to draw near to God, who is in the dark but is not the dark, who is in the human animal but is not the human animal, God observes in us our acts of piety much the same as he observes them in the sparrow which falls to ground. And I think of all those wonderrful seeing eye dogs, and hearing dogs for the deaf, and the chimps and gorillas who have been taught to speak in sign language, and I wonder how is it possible to not see piety at work?

Tyger Tyger, burning bright,

William Blake put the balance of piety in nature rather famously in

Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies,
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand, dare seize the fire?

And what shoulder, & what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat.
What dread hand? & what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain,
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp.
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears,
And water'd heaven with their tears:
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Tyger Tyger burning bright,
In the forests of the night:
What immortal hand or eye,
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

Emergence in nature as an emergence of piety

The scientist Ursula Goodenough, a former President of the American Society of Cell Biology, talks of something similar in The Sacred Depths of Nature. “The celebration of supernatural miracles has been central to traditional religions throughout the millennia. The religious naturalist is provisioned with tales of natural emergence that are, to my mind, far more magical than traditional miracles. Emergence is inherent in everything that is alive, allowing our yearning for supernatural miracles to be subsumed in our joy in the countless miracles which surround us.”

She then quotes the poet Walt Whitman:

I believe that a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars,
And the pismire is equally perfect.

The pismire is an ancient word for the ant and Whitman is alluding to the Biblical verse, the Hebrew Scriptures, Proverbs, 6b ff, 
“Go to the ant, you sluggard; consider its ways and be wise! 
It has no commander, no overseer or rule
yet it stores its provisions in summer and gathers its food at harvest.
How long will you lie there, you sluggard?”

Thus does the Christian Bible, in its Old Testament or Hebrew Scriptures, suggest the wisdom of the ant, compared and opposed to the impiety of the human animal. But how can piety emerge in nature? What, the neo-Darwinist might ask, is the mechanism? A large ant colony is an exquisite structure, but how it emerged with all its specialist knowledge, specific functions and blueprints of a society all of which are not carried by any one member of the colony, admits no easy explanation. Moreover, not all ant societies evolved to exhibit common characteristics. 

It is the way we use language which enables us to confidently claim similarities between human behaviours and ant behaviours as if there were common elements in their respective societies, e.g, division of labour. It is this use of embodied metaphor which makes it particularly apt to compare human and non-human animal piety. Our minds function through and with embodied metaphor. It is how we think. The emergence of piety is a result of emergence of life.

12 December 2022, 19:00

Hello everyone

Apologies about the formatting of the original post. I ran out of time, but today have corrected most of the errors and expanded it. Piety as a natural emergence across different species as an evolutionary advantage is the key, I think.

I hope to publish it, along with the original post in The Soul, a Biblical Alchemy, for the Auckland and Manukau Synod both in printed zine format as well as a separate web page in kiwiconnexion. 

Meantime you can view the edited post here without logging in.