Animals are in the news these days. As so often, the world of the image and the soundbite encourages muddle, and we need to take a step back if we are to sort and integrate our conflicting ideas and emotions Let me begin with a popular caricature of the animal-lover: he, or more probably she, keeps a garden full of goats and chickens; she takes a break at weekends to liberate the odd rat from its laboratory; and she spends the little spare time she has left in campaigning to save the rainforests. The caricature, however, soon begins to reveal its contradictions when we are faced with a concrete problem. Take, for example, the release of mink into the countryside by members of the Animal Liberation Front In this case, the people most affected, and most angered, by this action were those directly involved in the welfare of animals: farmers, conservationists and pet-owners. The problem with the ‘liberation’ of mink is, precisely, that it is bad for other animals; and it clearly reveals that concern for the welfare of animals is a complex business. Our lack of clarity about this complexity is the main reason why debate about issues such as fox-hunting has proved so confused and inconclusive.

In this article I shall describe three types of animal-lover, whom I shall nickname, for reasons that will become obvious, Libbie, Connie and Aggie. In exploring how, in their different ways, these three care for animals, I examine different possible ways of understanding the Christian claim that creatures are good.

In memory of Conrad Pepler OP (1908-1993)

Sixty years ago, Conrad Pepler wrote “The Spirituality of William Langland,” a short study of the fourteenth-century poem, Piers Plowman (Blackfriars 20 (1939): 846-854). This book-length medieval religious poem, by a Londoner usually called William Langland, narrates the life story of a commoner, Will, in a series of ten dream-visions which give him insight into life, the community, evil and sin, and the search for God. In this poem, Father Pepler found “a truly English and liturgical type of spirituality that must have been characteristic of the devout members of the Church, both ecclesiastical and lay” ("Spirituality” 846). In his Blackfriars essay and in a chapter of his 1958 book, The English Religious Heritage, Father Pepler saw Piers Plowman as “delineating the beginning and growth of the spiritual life in the common man” {ERH 56). He defined the spirituality of Piers Plowman as “objective,” reflecting “the restrained, austere and majestic treatment of the liturgy” in sharp contrast to the subjective, “realistic and emotional devotion to the humanity of Christ, so typical of fourteenth century piety” ("Spirituality” 853). He noted the centrality in the poem of the idea of relationship: “from the very fact of the Incarnation all mankind has become related to God in common brotherhood, even those outside the Church” (ERH 56; cf. “Spirituality” 850).

Father Pepler's article was written at a time of great scholarly interest in Piers Plowman as a religious work. It was preceded by the work of such giants as R. W. Chambers (1924, 1939) who compared Piers to the Divine Comedy.

Feminist religious-language reformers wish to eliminate or make substitutions for such masculine-loaded words as “lord,” “king,” “master,” and “father.” One substitute word, “mother,” is of particular interest because it is sometimes used to replace “father,” and sometimes it serves as a counterweight to “father.” The appropriateness of these terms as encountered in Christian liturgical prayers, Scripture, the Creeds, and the Trinitarian formula “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” is often discussed nowadays. My first contention is that mother/father stand in linguistic opposition to each other, preventing interchangeable or parallel use. My second contention is that the Trinity represents an hypemymy blocking the use of feminine hyponyms.

The terms opposition, contrast, and antonymy are sometimes used without careful distinction, for they all illustrate at bottom a linguistic and philosophical fact: to establish the meaning of any word it is necessary to set up oppositional considerations. This hardly profound observation is matched by other, similar assertions by any number of structural semanticists. Trier even goes so far as to attach some psychological association of opposites in the mind of speaker or hearer upon each utterance (Der deutsche Wortschatz im Sinnbezirk des Verstandes, J. Trier, Heidelberg: Winter, 1931) even though perhaps most linguists would consider psychology to be more a part of a theory of language behaviour than structural analysis.

Everywhere we look in the universe we see opposites: forces of attraction and repulsion, left and right crystals, concave and convex, rest and movement—the list is very long. In his important little book, Opposition, C. K. Ogden reminds us that Aristotle, in his Metaphysics, discusses the oppositions of unity and multiplicity and being and not-being, and that other philosophers make reference to hot and cold, odd and even, good and evil, and so forth.

In Henry and Cato Iris Murdoch describes what it might be like for a priest to lose his belief in God - God understood ‘in the traditional sense of that term; and the traditional sense is perhaps the only sense’. In two later novels Murdoch returns to the theme of a priest’s loss of belief in God and, as was the case in Henry and Cato, she makes the priest’s acknowledgement of that loss central to her portrayal of his integrity as a man; in one case she also hints at the almost unbearable grief the priest suffers as he drifts into the darkness of atheism. In The Book and the Brotherhood, however, Murdoch takes a different path: she describes how a priest, who lost his faith in God ‘in the traditional sense’ long before, nonetheless uses ‘Christ’ to help a young woman recover from despair.

The young woman, Tamar Hemshaw, takes the advice of another character (who suggests that ‘Abortion is nothing, it’s a method of birth control’) to have her pregnancy terminated. Resolving not to ‘think about babies thrown away with the surgical refuse, dying like fishes snatched out of their water, dying like little fishes on a white slab’, Tamar enters the clinic ‘as one in a dream’ and leaves it ‘all raw anguished tormented consciousness’. Murdoch does not spare the details of Tamar’s self-torture: