Do Animals Go To Heaven?

Enough for a moment about politics. It is time to deal with something of real, lasting importance: do animals have souls?

The common Catholic answer is that, yes, they do. But animal souls are not immortal. Animals cease to be at death. Dogs do not go to heaven; and cats do not go to hell.

However, this is not definitive Catholic doctrine, and this is not from the Bible. This is from Aristotle, as taken up by Aquinas. It is backed by the latter's great prestige within the church; but Saint Thomas is not always right. He was wrong, for example, on the Immaculate Conception. We are, as Catholics and as Christians, free to have other opinions.

I hold the idea that some animals have immortal souls and do go to heaven. Here’s why.

A week or so ago, the story of Fox, a Pomeranian in Florida, was in the news. His owners let him out to relieve himself. They later found his battered body on their back porch with a note attached: "We beat it 2 death lol HAHAHA!"

Had Fox been human, he could expect to be compensated for this suffering in heaven; and had he been human, he might have deserved it for his sins. But if he died of the blows and ceased to be, this suffering was simply meaningless. Moreover, if Fox was, as Aquinas believed, not a moral agent, this was innocent suffering.

Ergo, this cannot be--unless I am missing something. A good, just, and merciful God cannot allow this sort of thing to happen. Fox, and all other animals who suffer in this life, must be compensated somehow in a way that makes any suffering worthwhile; and this implies an afterlife in some terribly pleasant place for dogs or squirrels or any other animal capable of suffering.

In any case, the idea that the soul dissolves when the body does is arbitrary and unprovable in all cases. Spiritual things, to the contrary, seem by their nature to be immortal. For example, when a pet dies, we still, forever, retain our distinct memory of that animal and its unique personality—the physical pet dies, but the memory lives on, being a spiritual and not a physical thing. Similarly, once we know something, we cannot unknow it. Yes, we do forget things as well, but even then, they are not gone. They can mysteriously reappear later in all their details, jogged into resurrection by the smell of a madeleine. So it is odd to suppose that animal souls die.

Third point: animals sometimes seem to be in contact with the spiritual world, therefore to have a spiritual existence. At the simplest level, we can see this when we hear our dog whimper and twitch its legs as if running while asleep. He is dreaming; he has a spiritual life beyond the mere stimulus-response of the physical sense.

There is a tortoiseshell cat named Oscar who lives in a Rhode Island nursing home. Over the years, the caregivers there have realized that Oscar almost always knows which patient is next going to die. He will slip into their room and curl up next to them on the bed.

The attempted scientific explanation is that he can somehow smell distinctive chemicals emitted by cells about to die. This seems improbable: when he curls up with a patient, they do not seem yet to be actually dying. And in any case, it does not explain why he wants to be with them. The simpler explanation is that this cat is in communication with the spiritual world; which is to say, with eternity.

Saint Francis and the wolf.

There are many tales as well of saints seemingly able to communicate directly with animals, most famously Saint Francis of Assisi. As the animals presumably cannot understand human language, this must involve an ability to communicate in the realm of pure thought—of the spirit. These examples put the lie, surely, to the Aquinian idea that animal souls are tied directly and completely to the physical senses.

Finally, while the Bible is not clear on animals having souls, it does actually say there will be animals in heaven. Isaiah prophesies, of the New Jerusalem:

“The wolf and the lamb will feed together,

and the lion will eat straw like the ox,

and dust will be the serpent’s food.

They will neither harm nor destroy

on all my holy mountain,” (Isaiah 65:25)

So animals, like humans, will dwell in heaven in a perfected state. They also appear in Revelations.

One can argue, and the Aquinians do argue, that these are not previously living animals who have survived death, but new creations. To which I respond that this is a direct violation of Occam's razor, postulating two beings when one would suffice to explain the evidence.

Hosea goes further, and states that God’s final covenant is with animals as well as humans:

In that day I will make a covenant for them
with the beasts of the field, the birds in the sky
and the creatures that move along the ground.
Bow and sword and battle
I will abolish from the land,
so that all may lie down in safety. (Hosea 2:18)

When Jesus was born, who, besides his parents, were the first to witness the incarnation?

First to witness, inevitably, were domestic animals, to whom he was presented just as he later was presented to humans. He was laid in their manger. As spiritual food.

This, perhaps, was the first Eucharist.