At the time of his treaty with the European settlers in 1854, Chief Seattle of the Suquamish tribe along the North Pacific coast is reported to have said that when the last animals will have perished “humans would die of loneliness.”1 This was an insight that might never have occurred to a European settler. Yet this need for more-than-human companionship has a significance and an urgency that we begin to appreciate in more recent times. To understand this primordial need that humans have for the natural world and its animal inhabitants we need only reflect on the needs of our children, the two-, three-, and four-year-olds especially. We can hardly communicate with them in any meaningful way except through pictures and stories of humans and animals and fields and trees, of flowers, birds and butterflies, of sea and sky. These present to the child a world of wonder and beauty and intimacy, a world sufficiently enticing to enable the child to overcome the sorrows that they necessarily experience from their earliest years. This is the world in which we all grow up, in, to some extent in reality, to some extent through pictures and stories.
The child experiences the “friendship relation” that exists among all things throughout the universe, the universe spoken of by Thomas Aquinas in his commentary on the writings of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, the mystical Christian neoplatonist of the fifth or sixth century. Indeed we cannot be truly ourselves in any adequate manner without all our companion beings throughout the earth. This larger community constitutes our greater self. Even beyond the earth we have an intimate presence to the universe in its comprehensive reality. The scientists’ quest for their greater selves is what evokes their relentless drive toward an ever greater understanding of the world around them.
Our intimacy with the universe demands an intimate presence to the smallest particles as well as to the vast range of the stars splashed across the skies in every direction. More immediately present to our consciousness here on Earth are the landscapes; the sky above, the earth below; the grasses, the flowers, the forests and fauna that present themselves to our opening senses. Each in its own distinctive perfection fills our mind, our imagination, our emotional attraction.
Of these diverse modes of being, the animals in the full range of their diversity belong within our conscious human world in a special manner. A few years ago Joanne Lausch wrote a book concerned with the smaller animals, the insects. The title, The Voice of the Infinite in the Small, indicates that even those living forms to which we are least attracted still have their own special role in the grand design of the universe. They speak to us and must not be slighted or treated with contempt. If we assault them with chemical sprays they will mutate and defeat us time after time.
As humans we come into being as an integral part of this million-fold diversity of life expression. Earlier peoples celebrated the whole of the universe in its integrity and in its every mode of expression. From the moment of awakening consciousness, the universe strikes wonder and fulfillment throughout our human mode of being. Humans and the universe were made for each other. Our experience of the universe finds festive expression in the great moments of seasonal transformation such as the dark of winter, the exuberance of springtime, the warmth and brightness of summer, the lush abundance of autumn. These are the ever-renewing moments of celebration of the universe, moments when the universe is in some depth of communion with itself in the intimacy of all its components.
Even with this comprehensive presence of the universe to itself and to its varied components, there is a challenging, even a threatening aspect experienced in every component. Each individual life form has its own historical appearance, a moment when it must assert its identity, fulfill its role, and then give way to other individuals in the processes of the phenomenal world. In our Western tradition, this passing of our own being is experienced as something to be avoided absolutely. Because we are so sensitive to any personal affliction, because we avoid any threats to our personal existence, we dedicate ourselves to individual survival above all else. In the process of extending the limits of our own lives, we imperil the entire community of life systems on the planet. This leads eventually to failure in fulfilling our own proper role within the larger purposes of the universe.
Rather than become integral with this larger celebration-sacrificial aspect of the universe, we have elected to assert our human well-being and survival as the supreme values. For us, here in the Western world, the human becomes the basic norm of reference for good and evil in the universe. All other modes of being become trivial in comparison. Their reality and their value are found in their use relationship to our own well-being. In this context we lose the intimacy that originally we had with the larger community of life. We are ourselves only to the extent of our unity with the universe to which we belong and in which alone we discover our fulfillment. Intimacy exists only in terms of wonder, admiration, and emotional sympathy when beings give themselves to each other in a single psychic embrace, an embrace in which each mode of being experiences its fulfillment.
Such observations as these are needed because our reduction of the entire universe to subservience to the human has led to our present situation. As Norman Myers observes, in terms of species extinction we are in the process of creating the greatest impasse to the development of life on earth since the beginning of life almost four billion years ago.2 Niles Eldredge suggests we are in the midst of the sixth great extinction period due to loss of species.3
Here we might observe an awakening to our present situation and the structuring of a new guiding vision for our Western civilization through an event that occurred in the early decades of this century. While hunting in Arizona, the forester Aldo Leopold shot a female wolf with a pup. He tells us that he reached the wolf in time to watch “a fierce green fire dying in her eyes.” “I realized then, and have known ever since that there was something new to me in those eyes–something known only to her and to the mountain.”4 From then on his perspective on human relations with the natural world was utterly changed.
Our own lives too were changed, for that event and the reflections born of it have provided a new ethic–one never known previously in any formal way to the European-American people, an ethic that Aldo Leopold designated as “a land ethic.”5 His basic statement is simply that “A land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it. It implies respect for his fellow-members, and also respect for the community as such.”6 This simple prosaic statement carries implications that challenge the entire range of Western civilization. It challenges all the governmental, educational, economic and religious institutions of our society as regards the ethical basis of what they are doing.
Another fascinating moment in human-animal intimacy is when, after a night’s sleep on a beach, Loren Eiseley awakened in the presence of a young fox who had wandered from its den. He tells us: Here was “a wide-eyed innocent fox inviting me to play, with the innate courtesy of its two forepaws placed appealingly together, along with a mock shake of the head. Gravely I arranged my forepaws while the puppy whimpered with ill-concealed excitement. I drew the breath of the fox’s den into my nostrils. … Round and round we tumbled for one ecstatic moment.”7
This sense of intimacy with the land has found comprehensive expression in the life of Henry David Thoreau when he became attracted to a field of special beauty in the region where he often walked. He even put down a deposit in anticipation of buying the field. Later Thoreau decided not to buy the land, realizing that he already possessed the region in its beauty and its spiritual integrity and did not really need to gain physical possession. Whoever owned it physically could not keep him from intimacy with this region in its wonder and its beauty.
In such discussion as this we might go to the world of literature, where the deeper interpretation of our human experiences is generally found. In the Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge we read of the mariner who got himself, the ship, and the entire crew into an agonizing experience by his revulsion at the sight of the slimy creatures of the sea. He received a healing from his deep sorrow of soul only when he learned to bless the sea-serpents and all living beings: “A spring of love gushed from my heart, / And I blessed them unaware.” The curse of the doldrums of the sea was lifted, the wind arose, the sailors came back to life: joy was theirs once again.
There are also the numerous passages in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. “Love the animals. God has given them the rudiments of thought and joy untroubled. Do not trouble them. Do not harm them, don’t deprive them of their happiness, don’t work against God’s intent.” Often Dostoevsky speaks of the innocence of the animals in contrast to the loss of innocence in humans. We need to be inspired by the birds especially: “My brother asked the birds to forgive him; that sounds senseless but it is right; for all is like an ocean, all is flowing and blending, touch in one place sets up movement at the other end of the earth. It may be senseless to beg forgiveness of the birds, but birds would be happier at your side–a little happier anyway–and children and all animals, if you yourself were nobler than you are now.”
Even with all our technological accomplishments and urban sophistication we consider ourselves blessed, healed in some manner, forgiven and for a moment transported into some other world, when we catch a passing glimpse of an animal in the wild: a deer in some woodland, a fox crossing a field, a butterfly in its dancing flight southward to its wintering region, a hawk soaring in the distant sky, a hummingbird come into our garden, fireflies signaling to each other in the evening. So we might describe the thousand-fold moments when we experience our meetings with the animals in their unrestrained and undomesticated status.
Such incidents as these remind us that “The universe is composed of subjects to be communed with, not of objects to be exploited.”8 For with all the other benefits that we receive from the world about us, none can replace these deeper moments that we experience somewhere within the depths of our being. These are the moments when we are truly ourselves, when we attain a rare self-realization in the truly human mode of our being.
To me it seems that the universe as a whole and in each of its individual components has an intangible inner form as well as a tangible physical structure. It is this deep form expressed in its physical manifestation that so entrances us in these moments. When Aldo Leopold looked into those “fierce green eyes” of the dying wolf, he saw something more than the physical light reflected there. The wolf and the human came to an intimacy with each other beyond description. That is the fascination, the mystery, the immeasurable depths of the universe into which we are plunged with each of our experiences of the world about us. Such are the experiences spoken of by Aldo Leopold, Loren Eiseley, Henry David Thoreau, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Fyodor Dostoevsky and more recently by Rachel Carson, Annie Dillard, and Terry Tempest Williams. What they experienced was something so significant in the course of human life that it would be difficult to imagine that human life would be truly satisfying in any other context.
Although this intimacy exists with the stars in the heavens and with the flowering forms of earth, this presence of humans with the other members of the animal world has a mutual responsiveness unknown to these other modes of being throughout the universe. Our relation with the animals finds its expression especially in the amazing variety of benefits they provide for us in their guidance, protection, and companionship. Beyond these modes of assistance, they provide a world of wonder and meaning for the mind–beauty for the imagination. Even beyond all these they provide an emotional intimacy so unique that it can come to us from no other source. The animals can do for us, in both the physical and the spiritual orders, what we cannot do for ourselves or for each other. These more precious gifts they provide through their presence and their responsiveness to our inner needs.
The difficulty in our relation with the animals comes from the sense of use as our primary relationship with the world about us. Hardly any other attitude so betrays ourselves and the entire universe in which we live. Every being exists in intimate relation with other beings and in a constant exchange of gifts to each other. But this relationship is something beyond pragmatic use. It is rather a mutual sharing of existence in the grand venture of the universe itself. By indigenous peoples, the universe is perceived as a single gorgeous celebration, a cosmic liturgy that humans enter through their ritual dances at those moments of daily and seasonal change, at dawn and sunset, at the equinox and solstice moments.
At such moments the human venture achieves its validation in the universe and the universe receives its validation in the human. The grand expression of wonder, beauty, and intimacy is achieved. As Henri Frankfurt, an archeologist of the Near East observed, the various modes of being of the universe were addressed as “thou” rather than “it.” “Natural phenomena were regularly conceived in terms of human experience and human experience was conceived in terms of cosmic events.”9 As humans we awaken to this wonder that stands there before us. We must discover our role in this grand spectacle.
Recovery of Western civilization from its present addiction to use, as our primary relation to each other and to the world about us, must begin with the discovery of the world within, the world of the psyche as designated by the Greeks, a word translated by the term anima in the Latin world, or by the term soul in the English world. The term anima is the word used to identify a living or animated or ensouled being from the earliest period in European thought. While the word soul has been abandoned by scientists lest it compromise the empirical foundations of their study, the reality of the thought expressed remains forever embedded in the very language that we use. The term animal will forever indicate an ensouled being. This interior world of the psyche, the anima, the soul, the spirit, or the mind provides the basis for that interior presence that we experience with each other throughout the world of the living. Simply in their physical dimensions things cannot occupy the same space while remaining their individual selves. This mutual indwelling in the same psychic space is a distinctive capacity of the trans-material dimension of any living being. Not only can two psychic forms be present to each other in the same psychic space, but an unlimited number of forms can be present. Indeed the entire universe can be present, for as Thomas Aquinas tells us: “The mind in a certain manner is all things.” Even so, this inner presence, while distinct from, is not separate from the outer experience. This capacity for indwelling each other, while remaining distinct from each other, is a capacity of soul or mind or the realm of the psyche. In this integration of both the inner and outer realms we discover our fulfillment.
To reduce any mode of being simply to that of a commodity as its primary status or relation within the community of existence is a betrayal. While the nonliving world does not have a living soul as a principle of life, each member of the nonliving world does have the equivalent as its inner principle of its being. This is an inner form that communicates a power, an enduring quality, and a majesty that even the living world cannot convey. In a more intimate way, the nonliving world provides the mysterious substance that transforms into life. Throughout this entire process a communion takes place that belongs to the realm of spirit. There is a spirit of the mountain, a spirit surely of the rivers and of the great blue sea. This spirit mode has been recognized by indigenous peoples everywhere, also in the classical civilizations of the past where such spirits were recognized as modes of personal presence.
Both to know and to be known are activities of the inner form, not of the outer structure of things. This inner form is a distinct dimension of, not a separate reality from, the visible world about us. To trivialize this inner form, to reduce it to a dualism, or to consider it a crude form of animism is as unacceptable as it would be to attribute the experience of sight to a refinement of the physical impression carried by the light that strikes the eye, or to reduce the communication made by a Mozart symphony to vibrations of the instruments on which it is played.
One of the most regrettable aspects of Western civilization is the manner in which this capacity for inner presence to other modes of being has diminished in these past few centuries. It would seem that the capacity for interior communion with the other-than-human modes of being has severely diminished in Western civilization. While the full expression of this diminished capacity has come in recent centuries, it is grounded in the deeper tendencies in our cultural traditions to emphasize the spiritual aspect of the human over against the so-called non-spiritual aspect of the other modes of being.
NOTES