Memento Mori, Redux:
Is There a Rainbow Bridge?*

Thanks for this post. I, too, have wondered if my patron, St. Thomas Aquinas, ever had a pet. But his intellectual discipline was such that, even if he had, I doubt it would have influenced his reasoning concerning the immortality of the human soul vs. other creatures.

Nevertheless…to me the most convincing argument in favor of hope to meet our animal friends again was advanced by Father Benedict Groeschel on his “Sunday Night Live” program on EWTN. In answer to a viewer’s query concerning Aquinas’ teaching, he said something very similar to the Billy Graham quote at the top of this post (and I paraphrase from imperfect memory): “We know from Jesus’ own words that Heaven is paradise. It makes sense, then, to believe that God, who created the universe from nothing, can and will re-create our beloved pets for us, to complete our happiness in Heaven. Why not?” It doesn’t really matter if the animals have immortal souls. God makes the rules and can make exceptions as He sees fit. Personally, the notion often advanced that “The Beatific Vision will be so awesome that you won’t want anything else” has never made sense to me. There HAS to be more to it than that. YMMV.

As sympathetic as I want to be to the notion of my dogs not slipping into the same oblivion as every other non-rational being, I don’t really see any way around it that doesn’t rely substantially upon sentiment or begin from an ad hoc assumption. When we consider the notion of particular dogs being “resurrected” or “being in heaven,” I think the tendency is to elide the ontological chasm between rational and non-rational souls. The notion that our dogs have “personality” is something we project upon them, partially because we name them, partially because their emotional nature has something in common with our animal nature such that we tend to identify with them on that level and it becomes easy to imagine a “who” inhabits a particular dog, when in reality to be a “who” is solely reserved for rational natures. Thus, when we think about a favorite dog being “in heaven,” there isn’t actually a “who” to continue existing or to be brought back into existence in the sense that we often project upon them.

We do in a sense “rub off” on them because they do have intelligence and emotions, and those aspects of their nature interact with the ways in which we behave around them and towards them such that they learn behaviors that engage with that interaction in ways that seem to in a sense reach beyond their animal nature (without actually doing so, however). But I don’t think that imparts any sort of lasting soul residue (so to speak) since their nature simply doesn’t have the capacity for that, and as such doesn’t have the capacity to survive beyond its particular instantiation. To reinstantiate that conjoining of essence and existence would not be equivalent to a resurrection, since the animal soul doesn’t have the qualities that rational souls do. God could certainly recreate a particular dog (or horse, or ant, or whatever), but since the essence and existence do not exist beyond death, you might have a dog identical in every substantial respect, but that instantiation would be a different existence, so it’s not like that dog would be Fido in the sense that God resurrecting a man is that same man. I find Lewis’ notion in That Hideous Strength of us elevating the animals to be interesting, but the ontological chasm between rational and non-rational is not bridgeable, at least by us. I see it more as us bringing out latent perfections in the animal nature that might not otherwise instantiate themselves, analogous to how we can bring plants to greater perfections than would naturally occur.

That being said, since our dogs have “personality” precisely because we (in a sense) provide them with it, it doesn’t seem impossible to me that the same could be true in the hereafter, in that one’s memories of a particular beast could be re-projected onto another instantiation of that animal, although that wouldn’t even be necessarily required in this scenario. But that certainly wouldn’t be the same as some sort of animal resurrection any more than our projecting personality upon dogs now somehow entails they have anything but an animal soul. At the end of the day it’s not something we can know, so to me it seems a more solid avenue of reasoning to assume that the souls of dogs go the way of all other non-rational beings. All that being said, I don’t have any problem with someone believing their dogs will be in heaven.

Lastly, while I won’t take Mr. Graham too hard to task, since it’s more of a sentimental statement than theology, I think the notion that our happiness in heaven might require X or Y is misguided. It seems to me that if God himself, who is the source of all goodness and perfection and happiness, is not enough to make one happy, then one might not actually want Heaven at all.

Will beloved pets be found in heaven, when they do not possess immortal souls?

Not impossible. As in, “ God has bound Himself to the sacraments, but He is not bound by the sacraments. ”

And I think Billy Graham is right.

@Jason – I won’t argue with you extensively on this (as I said at the start of my first post, it is God’s house, His choice). I will merely note that your logic and reasoning is perfectly sound.

However, by perfectly sound logic and reasoning, we would all be condemned and unable to go to Heaven ourselves. Yet it is by God’s mercy and miracle that we are able. So it is by mercy and miracle I pin my hopes.

@LCQ & @Don – I will argue like a lawyer on behalf of one of my cats who was a true noble soul. One from the wild who adopted us, she was as unlike any memes about cats as any I’ve seen. (For one, she would always come when called. Two, she bonded with our dog at the time.) I never saw her torture anything, but always made her kills quick and precise. I sometimes wonder if time in the wilderness taught her to always stay sharp and waste nothing. She was always grateful for your attention, but never demanding or imposing of it.

Though after her, I do remember the time the next set of cats we had were “raised” (in a manner) by our dog and I recall when one of them had caught a field rodent and broken its spine, rendering its back legs useless and was using it as a toy. When the cat played with said rodent in front of the dog, the dog watched it for a moment then swiftly bit the creature to finish it off. It was hard not to laugh at the image of “mama” telling her child to not play with his food.

I will reply only this to the naysayers: Fr. Groeschel’s logic is just as good as yours. Maybe better. Look at what he said again. And what Rev. Graham said. You can and probably would argue against it all day, but it’s possible and cannot be disproven. And no one ever said all creatures can go to heaven, only those with special relationships with human beings, who are promised eternal happiness if we die in a state of grace.
We will know the answer when (if) we get there. Until then it’s just fun to discuss.
God bless all here, as always.

You made me laugh, Donald!

Sorry this is not logical. Think about it: IF we make it to Heaven, it is extremely likely, almost certain, that one or more PEOPLE whom we loved and who loved us in this life, will end up in Hell. To argue against this leads to the heresy of universal salvation. BUT their absence from Heaven will not make us unhappy in the slightest! Being in the presence of God will give us supreme happiness, and both we and they will see that our respective fates are perfectly justified and we will have no desire to object to them.
A fortiori, we won’t need our pets or anything else from this life to make us happy in heaven. Yes we will have glorified resurrected bodies and there will be a new Earth as well as a new heaven, the former presumably inhabited by some animals. But we won’t need them and they certainly don’t need to be there.

That’s exactly my point, foxfier. God doesn’t put PEOPLE in heaven with us just because we loved them. It follows that he most definitely wouldn’t do so for animals, as they are so far below people in their nature.