Abstract
Although a conventional environmentalism focuses on the health of ecological systems, Pope Francis’s 2015 environmental encyclical Laudato Sí invokes St. Francis of Assisi to emphasize God’s love for the individual organism, no matter how small. Decrying the tendency to regard other creatures as mere objects to be controlled and used, Pope Francis urges our enactment of a ‘universal communion’ governed by love. I suggest, however, that Laudato Sí’s animal ethic, as focused on ordering human and animal need, is inadequate to its overarching vision of cross-species communion. This vision requires the sort of cross-species relational bridge implicit in Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s view of agency as an irreducibly ‘animate’ expression of choice and afforded further definition in Kenneth J. Shapiro’s conception of a ‘kinesthetic empathy.’ As the phenomenological epistemology underlying both discourses makes possible a rough correspondence, I put these in conversation to demonstrate that a Merleau-Pontyan and reciprocal agency is a constitutive aspect of the fullest sort of cross-species relation, such that recognition of this agency can both deepen our understanding of ‘universal communion’ and foster engagement in its practice.
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Notes
We find the first mention of a ‘more-than-human world’ in Abram (1996).
Laudato Sí also mentions God’s love for each being in Nos. 11, 42, 66, 69, 76, 80, 96, 140, 221, and 246.
Merleau-Ponty does not explain this process. Referencing Edmund Husserl’s focus on the “essence” (form or structure) revealed by a given object, in the sense of its constellation of essential features, he states only that it involves a “spontaneous arrangement” of those features (2002).
As Merleau-Ponty (2002) explains, taken in itself, a gesture doesn’t offer up a meaning, but its sense can be ‘recaptured by an act on the spectator’s part.’
Dillard-Wright here references Merleau-Ponty’s The Structure of Behavior (1963).
Shapiro understands the application of kinesthetic empathy to the human-animal relation to rely on a foreunderstanding of two hermeneutical texts, including the relevant construction of a species and traditional natural scientific findings regarding a given animal individual.
On this account, it is in a given sense organ that material and immaterial overlap. As Barad describes: ‘The effect produced in the eye when an object impinges on it is neither completely material nor completely immaterial. The effect is material insofar as the change produced is in a material organ. And it is immaterial insofar as it is an abstraction or withdrawal of form from matter’ (1995).
Vacek here references Teilhard de Chardin (1968).
Although Ralph R. Acampora (2006) eschews the sort of integral personhood which remains central to Catholic social thought, I am indebted to his developed account of a ‘corporal compassion,’ including his use of a ‘residential’—in the sense of a Merleau-Pontyan ‘world-flesh as a carnal earth-home’—hermeneutic.
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This paper was originally drafted for the Pacific Coast Theological Society Meeting in Berkeley, CA, on April 2, 2016. It is presented here with minor modifications.
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Ashley, M.A. In Communion with God’s Sparrow: Incorporating Animal Agency into the Environmental Vision of Laudato Sí. SOPHIA 57, 103–118 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-017-0630-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-017-0630-9