Do animals have souls?

This question is quite easily answered using the writings of the Church Fathers. A soul is the life that exists in all things that participate in the life-giving energy of God. Plants, animals and humans have souls, but these souls are different as St. Maximus the Confessor explains: 
Lower creatures such as plants have life and their souls have the power of nourishment and growth. The souls of animals also have the power of imagination and instinct. The souls of men have all these powers as well as the powers of intelligence and thought.
Animals, therefore, have souls but their souls are different to ours. The human soul is rational and immortal whereas those of animals are irrational and mortal. What exactly do we mean by this?

In Orthodox terminology, the word ‘irrational’ in this context doesn’t mean that animals are incapable of making decisions, but that they cannot be held responsible for them. Animals cannot commit evil because they always act according to nature. Some animals can distinguish between 'right' and 'wrong' with training, but this is something that we have to define for them. The soul of the animal is irrational in the sense that animals cannot weigh up the rights and wrongs of their actions and come to a decision based on their understanding of good and evil.

Animals tend to act on instinct, but animals also show imagination and emotion which are attributes of the soul. Obviously, more complex animals have more complex souls. Higher mammals such as elephants and chimpanzees are well known for expressing their emotions as we can see in this video.

Animals can express love and anger often in ways that seem contrary to the animalistic nature that they should be expressing. The story of Christian the Lion video is a modern example. There are also many examples of animals reverencing the holiness of the saints. Saint Seraphim of Sarov was befriended by a wild bear that he named Misha. Saint Gerasimus had a pet lion called Jordan.

Animals have souls, but unlike our souls these souls are mortal. When an animal dies, it ceases to be in both body and soul. Our souls, on the other hand, have a beginning even though they are immortal. The Church does not accept the idea of human souls floating around waiting for a body to be attached to them because, as St. Anastasius of Sinai says, ‘neither does the body exist before the soul, nor does the soul exist before the body.’ This is one of the reasons why we reject the pagan idea of re-incarnation.

We have mentioned that life-giving aspect of the soul. When we breathe and when our heart beats it is the soul that gives the power of life, but in humans there are two types of life: biological life and spiritual life. In Orthodox Christianity, when we talk about the soul we are generally not referring to its power of giving biological life, but to that spiritual part of us that we call the inner man. When we eat or drink we are feeding the outer man. When we fast, pray and receive Holy Communion we are purifying and feeding the inner man: our soul.

Our souls are immortal, but they are not immortal by nature, they are only immortal because God has made them that way. The soul is not contained in the body in the same way as water is held in a glass, but acts through our whole body. This is why the Orthodox Church doesn’t teach that Christ rose from the dead to save souls, but that He rose to save mankind. The person that we refer to as 'I' is one person, but made up of body and soul. In a mystery beyond our comprehension, we believe that our body and soul are completely united, but remain separated.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Animals in Orthodox Icons

Image
Animals are often depicted together with saints in Orthodox iconography. These animals are either mentioned in the saint's life or, as in the case of St. George, refer to miraculous appearances of the saint. Saint Gerasimus ( right ) is often painted together with his lion ‘Jordan’, and St. Seraphim of Sarov, more rarely, with his bear ‘Misha’.  Below, Metropolitan Peter of Krutitsk is depicted next to a bear illustrating an actual event in his life. St. Peter was imprisoned and then exiled by the atheistic Communists for his refusal to compromise the Orthodox faith by submitting to the new ‘Soviet’ Church. He died in December 1936 after ten years of  persecution.   In the case of martyred soldier saints, animals often illustrate rank rather than a particular incident in the saint’s life. Saints Sergius and Bacchus, for example, are often depicted on horseback as a representation of their status in the army. All these representations of animals occur in tra...
Read more

What is a woman?

Answering the simple question ‘what is a woman?’ has proved difficult for some senior politicians in the UK. The scientific answer is clear. A woman is an adult human female. This answer is also completely Orthodox. It’s impossible for anyone to change sex. Every diploid cell in the human body has either ‘male' or ‘female' genetically stamped on it. Males have the XY sex chromosomes whilst females have XX chromosomes. (Some children are born with an intersex condition in which the external genitals do not match up with the internal reproductive organs or the sex chromosomes. When treating these rare conditions by surgery, doctors are not changing the sex of the child; instead, they are trying to conform the outward genitalia to the internal reproductive system.) Senior politicians who cannot answer this basic biology question say that sex is a different concept from gender. In other words, children are assigned male and female at birth, but they can later choose to reject this ...
Read more

How to make a prostration

The approach of Great Lent is a good time to make sure that we know how to make a full prostration properly. On most Sundays we make the Sign of the Cross and touch the ground – this is known as a 'small prostration'. A full prostration involves lowering our whole body to the ground so that our head almost touches the floor as demonstrated in the video below: We make full prostrations (both in church and in our private prayers) when the Prayer of Saint Ephraim is read during Great Lent; we also make them on the Sunday of the Cross (the Third Sunday of Great Lent). Making a full prostration is not physically that hard, but often people make it more difficult than it needs to be. There is no need to 'take a knee' when making a prostration. Going down in two stages by kneeling on one knee followed by the other actually makes a prostration more difficult. Those of us who wear long garments in church need to push our bottom up quickly when rising from the pr...
Read more