Abstract
The Two Linzeys are undoubtedly the premier authorities on animal theology. In fact, the field was largely created by Andrew with Animal Theology (London: SCM Press, 1994). He founded the Ferrater Mora Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics and remains its director; his daughter, Clair, also an Oxford University professor, is its deputy director and has herself become a premier authority on animal theology and animal ethics more widely. A book on the topic edited by them and published by Oxford University Press promises to be a cornerstone of the field.
The book is divided into three parts and twenty-five thinkers, the majority of whom are Christians; only a few Jews, one Muslim and one Hindu are included in the book. However, a diverse set of denominations is represented, including Roman Catholic, Quaker, Methodist, Anglican, Unitarian, Congregationalist, Russian Orthodox, and Lutheran thinkers. Some of the individuals included aren’t conventionally thought of as theologians, even if they were Christians. For example, the first section on the pioneers of animal theology begins with the mathematician and astronomer Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655) before moving on to the legendary essayist Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592). Perhaps the first notable Christian figure in the book is the Methodist John Wesley (1703–1791), who believed that man must be compassionate in an attempt to mimic the prelapsarian nonviolent ideal. His greatest contribution to animal theology, according to the author of the chapter on him, ‘is his refusal to reconcile the notion of God willing animal suffering with God’s goodness’ (p. 91).
Many of the thinkers who can most comfortably be designated animal theologians are hardly known today, such as Humphry Primatt (1735–1777), described by the Two Linzeys as ‘one of the greatest animal theologians of the eighteenth century, if not of all time’ (p. 12). His argument was, in short, that to be Christian is to be merciful, and thus ‘cruelty is atheism’. While largely forgotten, his impact was significant: it was after reading his work that Arthur Broome (1779–1837) founded the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.
The second section turns to the ways in which the theoretical animal theology of earlier thinkers was rendered into more applied terms and led to social sensibility. It starts with several chapters on John Ruskin (1819–1900), Frances Power Cobbe (1822–1904), Frank Buckland (1826–1880), Henry Parry Liddon (1829–1890) and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (1844–1911) on animals in medical experimentation, particularly on vivisection. Compassion as an essentially Christian characteristic is brought to the fore again, with several Oxford Movement Tractarians opposing vivisection on the grounds that it constituted ‘torturing God’s creatures’. Something similar is true of the couple of chapters on Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) and the British Tolstoyan Josiah Oldfield (1863–1953), both of whom extended Christian nonviolence to animals.
The third section looks at early twentieth-century animal theologians. One of the key changes in this period was that the Christian principle of compassion for animals propounded by earlier thinkers was transformed from a kind of care for things into a more profound care for other persons. The section begins with Albert Schweitzer (1875–1965), whose principle of ‘reverence for life’ (Ehrfurcht vor dem Leben) was based upon the intrinsic inner worth of all creatures to their creator, God. Martin Buber (1878–1965) goes further towards the attribution of personhood to animals, describing in Between Man and Man (London: Routledge, 1947) an encounter with a horse in which he experienced ‘the immense otherness of the Other (ungeheure Anderheit des Anderen), which … placed itself elementally in the relation of Thou and Thou with me’ (pp. 26–27). As the chapter’s author argues, this opens the possibility of an ‘I–Thou’ rather than an ‘I–It’ relationship with animals. It was Charles Hartshorne (1897–2000), though, who provided one of the clearest statements in the early twentieth century that animals are persons too, arguing in process theological terms that anthropocentrism is essentially hubristic and that humans are not as dissimilar from other animals as we would like to think. In a similar spirit, C.S. Lewis (1898–1963) included animals in the classic problem of evil, thus contributing to the formulation of what has variously been called the problem of predation, the Darwinian problem of evil, or the problem of wild animal suffering which would be most famously developed by William Rowe (1931–2015) in the 1970s.
The book ends with a chapter on Andrew Linzey (1952–) himself—though it wasn’t written by him—which is useful for readers who don’t have the time to read his whole corpus of work which includes more than thirty books.
One of the book’s main projects is to show that the immorality of eating meat and concept of animal rights isn’t a recent invention and that there were not only animal ethicists, but animal theologians too that predate Andrew Linzey. It is commonly thought that veganism only began in the 1970s, around the publication of Animal Liberation (New York: HarperCollins, 1975) by Peter Singer, which is often considered the cornerstone of the modern animal rights movement. This is explicitly rejected by the two Linzeys in the introduction, as well as in Animal Rights: A Historical Anthology (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004) of which Andrew Linzey is an editor. In particular, Thomas Tryon (1634–1703), on whom a chapter features in the book’s first section, was one of the earliest to espouse a theologically based veganism—which he did in the language of rights.
More widely, the book aims to foreground theological thought on animals that has been overlooked, dwarfed by other areas of theological inquiry. However, the two Linzeys and the couple of dozen other contributors don’t write impartially, and this definitely shouldn’t be thought of as an ivory tower handbook like many of those in the Oxford Handbooks series (observe that his book isn’t in that series). Instead, the book has been written with an agenda; namely, to ‘reclaim lost voices within theological traditions that highlight concern for animals’ (p. 9, emphasis added). The message is that killing animals is wrong (or sinful) and, often, that vegetarianism is good or even morally and theologically obligatory. It is an activist work, reflecting the fact that animal theology is an activist field of study, just like feminist theology before it.
In the book’s introduction, the two Linzeys mention some of the opposition to animal theology, but they don’t really convey the sheer scale of the opposition and tend to paint their opponents as backward. They describe pro-animal theologies as ‘elementary and fundamental insights’ (p. 4), but theological attitudes towards animals are a lot more diverse and complicated than they are portrayed within the book (note how I don’t use the term ‘animal theology’ to distinguish other views from the activist field). Dan C. Shahar does a good job of explaining the challenge in the introduction to Why It’s OK to Eat Meat (Abingdon: Routledge, 2021). In particular, he points out that God is inconsistent with His guidance about eating animals: He originally tells Adam that ‘I have given you every plant yielding seed that is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food’ (Gen. 1.29); then tells Noah that ‘every moving thing that lives shall be food for you’ (Gen. 9.2-3); then restricts this again, forbidding the consumption of many animals, saying to Moses that ‘you must not eat their meat or touch their carcasses; they are unclean for you’ (Lev. 9.8).
What is particularly significant to note is that not a single Doctor of the Church features in the book, despite a number of them making theological comments about animals. That’s probably because what they say doesn’t fit the animal theological narrative very well. For example, St. Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) thought that ‘brute animals are intended for man’s use’ (SCG III.112). St. Augustine of Hippo (354–430) thought something similar (CG I.20). In the Catechism of the Catholic Church, it is said about animals that ‘men owe them kindness’ (para. 2416) and that ‘it is contrary to human dignity to cause animals to suffer or die needlessly’ (para. 2418), but that it is nevertheless permissible to domesticate them as pets, eat them, make clothes from them, and even use them in medical experimentation (para. 2417). The authors of the Westminster Catechisms didn’t bother saying anything at all about animals.
In contrast, the two Linzeys’ book is filled with scientists, writers, painters and activists, many of which have tenuous connections with Christianity and can scarcely be called thjeologians. The few exalted theologians that do feature in the book are appropriated to the cause of animal theology. For example, Paul Tillich (1886–1965) is described as being motivated by ‘purely humanocentric (sic) considerations’ (p. 355), but the chapter author nevertheless tries to bring him into the fold of animal theologians through a theoretical analysis of the potential implications of his systematic theology. The fact of the matter is that most major theologians haven’t been animal theologians, and the Church of England remains opposed to many of the principles for which animal theologians advocate. For instance, the archbishops of Canterbury and York quashed a motion before the General Synod of the Church of England to ban hunting on church land, leading Andrew Linzey to declare that he is ‘deeply ashamed to be a member of the Church of England’ (p. 8). Some of this controversy is mentioned in the book’s introduction, but it is not identified as an activist work. In my view, readers should be aware that a book on animal theology isn’t the same as a book on various theological views of animals. That doesn’t mean that its contents are wrong: readers should make up their own minds and, to do so, they ought to be aware of what the book’s authors stand for.