The Problem of Pain - By C. S. Lewis Page 0,48

seems 'almost human' that is because a good shepherd has made it so. I have already noted the mysterious force of the word 'in'. I do not take all the senses of it in the New Testament to be identical, so that man is in Christ and Christ in God and the Holy Spirit in the Church and also in the individual believer in exactly the same sense. They may be senses that rhyme or correspond rather than a single sense. I am now going to suggest - though with great readiness to be set right by real theologians - that there may be a sense, corresponding, though not identical, with these, in which those beasts that attain a real self are in their masters. That is to say, you must not think of a beast by it'self, and call that a personality and then inquire whether God will raise and bless that. You must take the whole context in which the beast acquires it's selfhood - namely 'The-goodman-and-the-goodwife-ruling-their-children-and-their-beasts-in-the-good-homestead'. That whole context may be regarded as a 'body' in the Pauline (or a closely sub-Pauline) sense; and how much of that 'body' may be raised along with the goodman and the goodwife, who can predict? So much, presumably, as is necessary not only for the glory of God and the beatitude of the human pair, but for that particular glory and that particular beatitude which is eternally coloured by that particular terrestrial experience. And in this way it seems to me possible that certain animals may have an immortality, not in themselves, but in the immortality of their masters. And the difficulty about personal identity in a creature barely personal disappears when the creature is thus kept in it's proper context. If you ask, concerning an animal thus raised as a member of the whole Body of the homestead, where it's personal identity resides, I answer 'Where it's identity always did reside even in the earthly life - in it's relation to the Body and, specially, to the master who is the head of that Body.' In other words, the man will know his dog: the dog will know it's master and, in knowing him, will be it'self. To ask that it should, in any other way, know it'self, is probably to ask for what has no meaning. Animals aren't like that, and don't want to be.

My picture of the good sheepdog in the good homestead does not, of course, cover wild animals nor (a matter even more urgent) ill-treated domestic animals. But it is intended only as an illustration drawn from one privileged instance - which is, also, in my view the only normal and unperverted instance - of the general principles to be observed in framing a theory of animal resurrection. I think Christians may justly hesitate to suppose any beasts immortal, for two reasons. Firstly because they fear, by attributing to beasts a 'soul' in the full sense, to obscure that difference between beast and man which is as sharp in the spiritual dimension as it is hazy and problematical in the biological. And secondly, a future happiness connected with the beast's present life simply as a compensation for suffering - so many millenniums in the happy pastures paid down as 'damages' for so many years of pulling carts - seems a clumsy assertion of Divine goodness. We, because we are fallible, often hurt a child or an animal unintentionally, and then the best we can do is to 'make up for it' by some caress or tid-bit. But it is hardly pious to imagine omniscience acting in that way - as though God trod on the animals' tails in the dark and then did the best He could about it! In such a botched adjustment I cannot recognise the master-touch; whatever the answer is, it must be something better than that. The theory I am suggesting tries to avoid both objections. It makes God the centre of the universe and man the subordinate centre of terrestrial nature: the beasts are not co-ordinate with man, but subordinate to him, and their destiny is through and through related to his. And the derivative immortality suggested for them is not a mere amende or compensation: it is part and parcel of the new heaven and new earth, organically related to the whole suffering process of the world's fall and redemption.

Supposing, as I do, that the personality of the tame animals is largely the gift of man - that their