Most of us will have seen, if only in reproductions, Matthias Grunewald’s terrible (I say that circumspectly) painting of the crucifixion that is commonly known now as the Isenbeim Altarpiece. It is as much as one can do to look at it at all. Benedict XVI calls it “perhaps the most moving painting of the crucifixion to be found in all Christendom,” and goes on to speak of Our Lord “who, by his suffering, had become one with all the suffering of history.”
The following is a line of thought that could very quickly sink into bathos. Nevertheless, it does follow from what the Church believes about the mystery of that suffering: that no suffering was excluded from His suffering, even the suffering of animals.
I have brisk Christian friends who stiffen when this sort of thing is mooted, their idea being that sentimentalism will very soon swamp all efforts to carry the topic forward with any clarity. Certainly we all have some sympathy with such misgivings, since animals, and most notably their sufferings, do call forth affections that can indeed swamp us all. I speak as one who drops shameless tears as we bury our dogs and cats, and can scarcely visit zoos, worrying about the bars. On the other hand, I do not beleaguer the people who wear fur coats, nor march in behalf of snail darters and sloths.
But what about the suffering of animals in connection with the suffering of Christ? Does it not threaten to trivialize this great mystery if we veer off into this byway?
I do not think so, and I think the Church might agree. We are admittedly in the region of speculation, and hence at least two rules preside over any discussion here: First, we cannot wax dogmatic; and second, we cannot linger, nor allow our considerations to distract us for very long from the one thing that must occupy us above all else, namely charity.
Having acknowledged this, what can we say? For one thing, we know that “the whole creation groans and travails” because of our sin. The sun hid its face, and the rocks split at Golgotha. Milton was surely onto something when he said that “earth felt the wound” in Eden when we mortals sinned. The very time went out of joint, to bring Hamlet into it. It is most certainly not the animals’ fault that they suffer.
Once in a film I saw a dying hippopotamus, with drying froth at her mouth, stagger across endless baked clay in a drought. No water. Or, at a zoo, a golden eagle sitting, alert, looking sharply about, in an outdoor cage just wide enough for her body. No wingspread at all. Or, in my own neighborhood, in the house of some people I know, a Dalmatian whom they disliked, chained in a cellar, unfed, in the dark. I tried to intervene, and got my fingers burned.
Does the most marble-hearted of us suppose, for one instant, that the God who made these noble creatures will say to a single one of them at the Last Day, “Oh. Yes. That was a pity, to be sure. But that was just your bad luck. It had nothing to do with Redemption.” (I know: There’s no resurrection for animals. No. Certainly not. Certainly not . . .) I am on tricky (and very nonmagisterial) ground here, and I will not contest the point with anyone. I can only appeal to what we do know of God, not to what we don’t know.
Ecce, Agnus Dei qui tollis peccata mun di. What vast toll of suffering did He take on with that? Are we sure what He did not take on? St. Paul says that the whole creation groans waiting for the redemption. It is worth pondering. The next time you hear the Kyrie at the hands of Victoria, Tallis, Palestrina, Bach, Mozart, or Gorecki, as you pray it for yourself and for us all, you might say one prayer for the animals. It won’t hurt.