St Silouan gave careful thought to our relationship as humans with the animals. This is only to be expected. He had grown up in an agricultural community. The Holy Mountain which then became his monastic home abounds in living creatures, in birds, butterflies, snakes and jackals, and also (at any rate in the days of the Starets) in wolves and wild boar, not to mention the domestic animals, the horses and mules, that the monasteries used to keep in great numbers before the advent of the tractor and the jeep. Animals were his constant companions.
His attitude towards them is marked by two characteristics: by loving compassion and by realism. He displays both gentleness and detachment. Loving compassion inspires him to write:
Once I needlessly killed a fly. The poor thing crawled on the ground, hurt and mangled, and for three whole days I wept over my cruelty to a living creature, and to this day the incident remains in my memory….
One day, going from the Monastery to Old Russikon-on-the- Hill, I saw a dead snake on my path which had been chopped in pieces, and each piece writhed convulsively, and I was filled with pity for every living creature, every suffering thing in creation, and I wept bitterly before God.
At the same time the Starets urges us not to grow unduly attached to animals, and not to bestow on them the love that we ought rather to give to God and to our fellow-humans:
Feed animals and cattle, and do not beat them – in this consists man’s duty of kindness towards them; but to become attached, to love, caress and talk to them – that is folly for the soul.
‘I left that passage out from the first English edition,’ Fr Sophrony once said to me. ‘I knew the English would never be able to understand that.’
Incidentally, St Silouan nowhere suggests that there is anything intrinsically sinful in eating animal flesh. As an Athonite monk he would not have eaten meat, but there are many days in the year when the monastic rule permits fish. There was even a time, so he tells us, when he had to struggle against an almost obsessive desire to consume fish. If the monk abstains from meat, this is for ascetic and disciplinary reasons, not because meat-eating is in itself wrong. Indeed, the Orthodox Church had never advocated vegetarianism as a general principle.
St Silouan’s compassion for the suffering of animals did not make him lose sight of the truth that God has given this world to us humans for our use. Man, as he puts it, is the ‘supreme creation’. In Fr Sophrony’s words, ‘The world itself was created for man.’ Of course this does not in any way justify a cruel and selfish exploitation of our natural environment. On the contrary, in our enjoyment of the world, we are to show the utmost humbleness and sensitivity. God has indeed given us ‘dominion’ over the animals (Genesis 1:28), but dominion does not signify tyranny.
~Adapted from Metropolitan Kallistos (Ware) of Diokleia, We Must Pray for All: The Salvation of the World According to St Silouan (http://www.bogoslov.ru/en/text/2314168.html).
