Do All Dogs Go to Heaven? An Eastern Patristic Perspective on Animal Mortality and Eschatological Hope

Theological Letters

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Do all dogs go to heaven? It might sound like a joke, but it is a rather interesting question because it asks whether or not irrational animals are the sort of beings who are made to just come into existence, live, and then die and cease to be, or whether they, like man, have some sort of hope of immortality.

The biblical text is somewhat ambiguous on this topic. If we look at Ecclesiastes, for example, it asks who is to say whether the breath or the soul of a beast goes up or whether it goes back down into the earth (Eccl 3:21). The Bible does not offer a clear answer. The Eastern Church fathers, that is the fathers of the Christian East, are also somewhat ambiguous on this question. However, if we pay careful attention to their thought, we start to approach what might be an answer.

Before addressing animal immortality, let us talk about our main term: death, and animal death in particular. If we follow the writings of the Eastern fathers and examine the ways in which they talk about death, we see that the word “death” has at least four possible uses or definitions. The first one is simple decomposition. That is, if you are talking about an organic body which is complex and has parts, it is composed. Those parts can separate, and it can decompose. Decomposition is one possible meaning of death.¹

A second possible meaning is that a soul departs from a body. A body which is animated suddenly ceases to be animated because the life force within it leaves. That is the second possible definition.

The third definition is what we might call corruption. Here, the focus is on some sort of divergence from the order of nature. Consider the eye, for example. It is a seeing organ, a bodily organ made to see. If something happens to it—if it gets scratched, for example—and it now has trouble seeing, that is a corruption. It is a distortion of nature, a divergence from proper formation. That is your third possible definition.

The fourth is closely related. In the example of the eye, the subject is a bodily organ and bodily formation. When speaking of spiritual and moral beings, beings like humans or angels, you are talking about beings who are created in order to become virtuous. That is their proper formation. When such a being freely chooses to become wicked or to sin, this produces a moral or a spiritual corruption, a divergence from proper formation. That moral or spiritual corruption is our fourth definition of death.

These are the four possible uses of the word death: decomposition, separation of a soul from a body, corruption, and moral or spiritual corruption.² When talking about animal death, for example, we need to ask a basic question: Are all forms of death unnatural?

The reason this is an important question from a Christian perspective is that Christianity has always held that death is something that enters the world through sin. This is unique relative to other pagan philosophies. The pagan philosophies tended to explain evil through two principles, what is called some type of metaphysical dualism. This could be the idea that you have some sort of good principle like spirituality or—if you are Plato (c. 428–348 BC)—the Forms, and then you have a second pesky principle that ends up distorting and dragging things down. That was typically matter. Alternatively, you could have two gods or two principles. If you are Empedocles (c. 494–434 BC), for example, you believe that there is one deity called Love and another called Strife, and they are at perpetual war with each other. Love ends up bringing things into harmony, and then Strife sets in and disorders the order of nature, resulting in all sorts of distortions and corruptions. Amongst the pagans, there was a tendency to see the cosmic order as consisting of two principles, one which is good and one which is evil, existing in perpetual conflict. That conflict is how we explain the fact that the world consists of both good things and bad things, things that are properly formed and things that are malformed.

In Christianity, however, there is the unique doctrine of the fall. This is the idea that the world is originally created good and properly formed. There is no corruption within the world. But free beings, man and angels, introduce into the cosmos some sort of distortion or corruption that then proliferates from them to the rest of the world. That is unique. The question we have to ask when it comes to death is whether all forms of death are part of that proliferation of corruption. Are they all unnatural? We can then return to the question of whether animal death in particular is unnatural, whether that is a corruption.

If we look at the biblical text, we see hints that at least two forms of death were natural and permissible prior to the fall of man. Within the Eden narrative, Adam and Eve are told that they can eat from any seedbearing plant in the garden (Gen 1:29). This little detail might seem rather mundane, but what it tells us is that two forms of death were present and permitted within Eden. In other words, they were natural before the fall. What are they? The first is decomposition. As I said, this is the first definition of death. Inevitably, if you are going to eat something, this involves the breaking down of an organic body. Decomposition, at least of plants, was permitted within Eden.

The second, probably less obvious point is that the second definition of death is also present in this permission given by God. That is the separation of a soul from a body. Many today tend to think of the soul as the mind, and that is largely a product of modernity. People like René Descartes (1596–1650) tended to think of the soul as the thinking part of you, producing this notion of two types of substances: thinking substance, which is mind or soul, and extended substance, which is body. But within the ancient world, the soul was the life force of a body.³ Any body that is alive has a soul, and the Eastern Church fathers share this view. We can find within them—for example, John of Damascus (c. 675–749 AD)—references to the phytikon soul, that is, the vegetative soul.⁴ A plant, being a living body, is actually an ensouled body. It is something that has a soul. This does not mean that it is rational, sentient, or a thinking being, but it does mean it is a living being. When it is killed and broken apart, like it would be when it is eaten, you are separating the life of that body from that body.

Within Eden, we find two forms of permissible death: decomposition and the separation of a soul from a body. In this case, these permissible or natural forms of death apply to plants. The question we face here is what of animals? Is it possible that animal death too may have been permitted prior to the fall? Could it be that the death of animals is actually perfectly natural?

Privation, Negation, and Animal Mortality

Another way of framing the question would be to borrow a pair of terms from the medieval scholastics in the Latin West. The terms I am about to use are from the Latin West, but conceptually you can find them in the Christian East, and this is the distinction between privatio and negatio, or privation and negation.⁵ What is this distinction? I used the injury of an eye as an example of corruption. An eye, which is a seeing organ, suddenly has trouble seeing. That would be a privation, some sort of distortion of the order of nature. In other words, seeing is a good that an eye should have. If we have damaged it such that it is deprived of that, that is a privation.⁶ Let us contrast this with your ear. Your ear also lacks sight, but that is not actually a privation. Why? Because the ear is a hearing organ, not a seeing organ. It is not actually made to see things. This would just be a negation. Yes, sight is a good that it lacks, but it is not supposed to have it in the first place.

This concept is useful. Essentially, we have established that yes, plants lack immortality. They are naturally mortal. But that is not a privation. That is a negation. Plants are not supposed to be immortal. There is nothing distorted about the idea that they die. The natural question we face then is whether or not animal death is a privation, some sort of distortion of nature that sets in with the fall, or whether it is a negation and animals are not supposed to be immortal.

Several points within the Eastern Church fathers point in the direction that perhaps animals are not created to be immortal, or at least not naturally immortal. We see this in at least two areas. The first appears in the comments by Irenaeus (c. 130–202 AD), an early Christian Church father who talks about the doctrine of resurrection. When talking about the doctrine of resurrection, drawing specifically on St. Paul and his comments in 1 Corinthians 15, Irenaeus points out that the animal body of man needs to be transfigured or transformed by communion with the divine nature in order to be capable of immortality.⁷ In other words, what Irenaeus says in this passage is that organic animal bodies are actually not naturally suited to immortality. That is why some sort of transformation of man in the resurrection from the dead, which St. Paul talks about, is necessary for us to attain immortality. That very fact, even though Irenaeus is talking about the resurrection, is a concession that animal bodies are not naturally suited to immortality,⁸ that they are naturally mortal.

There is a second area where we can see hints of this within the Eastern Church fathers. Within the book of Genesis, if you are familiar with the narrative, man is made when God reaches down from heaven and takes from the dust of the earth, and then he breathes into that dust from heaven, and we get this hybrid of heaven and earth which is called man, as man becomes a living soul (Gen 2:7). Within the Genesis creation account, earthly things are associated with mortal things. That is why death is always referred to as returning to the earth. It refers to the things that come from the earth and return to it. That is the mortal realm. The heavenly realm, conversely, tended to be associated with celestial beings and immortality.

Part of the question that emerges—and this question actually emerges prior to Christianity in Alexandrian Judaism and is then echoed very early on by the Eastern Christians—is this: When you take something from the realm of the mortals and you merge it with something from the celestial or the immortal realm, what do you have? Is that something mortal or is it immortal? The very fact that this question is asked by people like Philo of Alexandria (c. 20 BC–50 AD) and then echoed by Eastern Church fathers like Theophilus of Antioch (c. 120–190 AD) or Nemesius of Emesa (fl. c. 390 AD) tells you that these Eastern writers think of things that are from the earth, like the beasts, as naturally mortal.

The answer to this question is equally interesting. The consensus that we find in Philo⁹ also echoes in Theophilus¹⁰ and in Nemesius of Emesa.¹¹ The answer is that man was created neither. Rather, man was created potentially mortal and potentially immortal with his free will functioning like the fulcrum of a balance scale,¹² deciding whether he is going to live and die like the beasts or live the life of angels. This not only confirms the fact that these Eastern writers tend to think of the animal realm as naturally mortal, but it also tells you this: If man is not naturally immortal, then to say that the beasts are naturally immortal is actually to elevate them above Adam, which of course the Eastern fathers would never do.

All of this points in the direction of the conclusion that animal death is perfectly natural. Put otherwise, the fact that animals are not naturally immortal is a negation, not a privation. It is perfectly suitable that they lack immortality because they are not actually made to be immortal. Is that then our conclusion? Is the answer to our question just that animals are naturally mortal and they are made to come into being, to live, and to die, and that is the end of them? Not quite.

The Microcosm and the Eighth Day of Creation

However, several other doctrines in the Eastern Church fathers are worth considering when looking at this topic.