The Least of These
Excerpt from a new book by Brenda Ueland, Strength To Your Sword Arm, available fall, 1992
The Christian church — I mean the institution, not the religion — has never been very good to animals. There have been exceptions in individuals, like St. Francis and St. Columba, and St. Hugh. But they have no influence at all on the official position. Lecky, the historian, wrote 80 years ago: “The animal world being altogether external to the scheme of redemption, was regarded as beyond the range of duty, and the belief that we have any kind of obligation to its members has never been inculcated — has never, I believe, been even admitted — by Catholic theologians.”
This statement is borne out by the words of the Catholic Dictionary which says of the animals: “They are not created by God. They have no rights. The brutes are made for man... who has the same right over them as he has over plants and stones. He may kill them for his food; and if it is lawful to destroy them for food, and this without strict necessity, it must also be lawful to put them to death, or to inflict pain on them for any good and reasonable end, such as the promotion of man’s knowledge, health, etc., or even for the purpose of recreation.”
I have found, to my dismay and astonishment, this very same opinion among devout Protestants. But Mohammed had some humane legislation on behalf of the animals. In the record of his life it says: “His humanity extended itself to the lower creation. He forbade the employment of towing birds as targets for marksmen.” (I think of the turkey-shoots we have, the hundreds of turkeys pinned in boxes, their long necks straining out, and the hundreds of idiotic Minnesota men and boys shooting them from close at hand on a happy Sunday morning.) “When some of Mohammed’s followers had set fire to an anthill, he compelled them to extinguish it. Foolish acts of cruelty which were connected with old superstitions or were merely customary, were swept away by him. He said again and again, “Truly there are rewards for our doing good to dumb animals.’ ”
And Buddha had his great commandment: “One should not destroy life.” And the first of his Ten Precepts was: “I take the vow not to destroy life.” This was part of his doctrine that all life is one and inter-related, and it resembles Jesus’ idea that what we do to anyone — "the least of these” (I think he meant even pheasants and fish and wild elephants and laboratory rats) — we do it to ourselves and to Christ, too.
And involved in this is the idea that there is an ineffable Justice in Eternity that none of us can duck, so that whatever cruelty we inflict, either consciously or unwittingly, we ourselves will suffer in the same degree whether in this life or some other one.
I believe it. It will not be a matter of vengeance or punishment exactly but in order to make us understand what the fright and suffering are that we have inflicted. This is the only way we can widen our compassion and enlarge our insect souls. My dear and wonderful teacher and friend, Laurits Rusten, was a theosophist and believed, like Pythagoras and Plato, in the transmigration of souls. He thought there was a possibility that the Nazis with their hideous, obsessed cruelty might once have been animal souls suffering dreadfully and voicelessly from men.
In the middle ages there were many beautiful stories about the stag. When hunting, St. Hubert is said to have been confronted by a milk-white stag which bore a crucifix between its horns. The vision made it clear to him that in hunting the stag, he was adding to the sufferings of Christ and he accordingly abandoned the chase once and for all. (Do you remember how year before last, up North, a snaggle-toothed, potato-nosed man with a bad complexion shot and killed a beautiful, mysterious white stag? Everybody was mighty proud about it, and so was he, and his picture was in all the newspapers.)
St. Francis is said to have persuaded the wolf near Gubbio not to eat sheep. He also used to say: “If I could only be presented to the Emperor, I would pray him for the love of God and for me, to issue an edict prohibiting anyone from catching my sisters, the larks.” Leonardo da Vinci used to buy and free the birds that the Italian boys tied to strings and played with. Pythagoras sometimes purchased from fishermen all the fish in the net that he might set them free. (My dear old friend, Tom Dillon, used to say he could not bear fishing — “Here you invite the fish to lunch with you and then pull him up and eat him!”)
Then, in the last century, came Darwin and his theory of Evolution. It horrified and angered and upset Christians dreadfully. Yet Darwin's Evolution — seeming to show that we are closely related to all the animals and even descended from them — did more to start up ideas of mercy and gentleness to animals than all our earlier, anthropomorphic Christian conceitedness; i.e., that we, humans, are God’s very special pets and dears and that he doesn’t care a button about anything else.
The notion that all life is one — that the suffering and blocking and cold violence to a rat’s soul is a suffering and blocking and cold violence to All Creation — is expressed in William Blake’s beautiful couplets:
The wild Deer wandering here and there
Free the Human Heart from care.
The Beggar's Dog, the Widow's Cat —
Feed them and you shall grow fat.
The wanton Boy who kills the Fly
Shall feel the Spider’s Enmity.
A Skylark wounded on the Wing,
A Cherubim doth cease to sing.
— April, 1962 —