C.S. Lewis's theology of animals

Lewis's imagination concerning animals was concentrated on companion animals not, I think, in principle to the detriment of other species, but rather because he grasped the possibility that in their relations with humans, some animals could find their true (originally God-given) selves, with the corollary, though this is not explicitly acknowledged, that humans too become most authentically human when they reflect God's redeeming purposes for other creatures.

Thirdly, we consider human superiority. Lewis, consistent with Christian tradition, regards humans as superior to animals. But he utilises this argument not as is usually done to justify the morally inferior treatment of animals but rather the reverse. His discussion of vivisection is illustrative of his method.

The only rational line for the Christian vivisectionist to take is to say that the superiority of man over beast is a real objective fact, guaranteed by Revelation, and that the propriety of sacrificing beast to man is a logical consequence. We are "worth more than many sparrows", and in saying this we are not merely expressing a natural preference for our own species simply because it is our own but conforming to a hierarchial order created by God and really present in the universe whether any one acknowledges it or not.

Given his sense of the Satanic distortion of the universe and the potentially redeeming role of humanity in creation, it is not surprising that Lewis finds such an argument unconvincing:

We may fail to see how a benevolent Deity could wish us to draw such conclusions from the hierarchical order He has created. We may find it difficult to formulate a human right of tormenting beasts in terms which would not equally imply an angelic right of tormenting men. And we may feel that though objective superiority is rightly claimed for man, yet that very superiority ought partly to consist in not behaving like a vivisector: that we ought to prove ourselves better than the beasts precisely by the fact of acknowledging duties to them which they do not acknowledge to us.17

This neat reversal of the traditional argument from superiority may owe something to repeated exchanges with his colleagues at Magdalen College, Oxford, who were exasperated by his thoroughgoing anti-vivisectionism. In fact they form an integral part of Lewis's worldview. Notice specifically how his conception of the cosmological hierarchy rules out 'might' constituting 'right'; instead moral `greatness warrants noblesse oblige.18

Fourthly, the subject of human cruelty. Unsurprisingly Lewis is convinced that the infliction of cruelty on animals is a significant moral evil. If the existence of `natural evil' is bad enough, it is much worse that humans use their free will to imitate Satanic corruption by themselves becoming tormentors. In this conviction, Lewis will brook no theological opposition. He is dismissive, for example, of the idea that we can be cruel to animals because of the supposition that they have `no souls'-indicating, once again, how the logic of the argument works as much the other way. `The absence of "soul" . . . makes the infliction of pain upon them not easier but harder to justify.' He continues: `For it means that animals cannot deserve pain, nor profit morally by the discipline of pain, nor be recompensed by happiness in another life for suffering in this. Thus all those factors which render pain more tolerable or make it less totally evil in the case of human beings will be lacking in the beasts.'19