The Question of the Animal and Religion: Theoretical Stakes, Practical Implications by Aaron S. Gross (review)

What is religion? Aaron S. Gross’s audacious book The Question of the Animal and Religion: Theoretical Stakes, Practical Implications dares to revisit this fundamental question. “I hypothesize,” Gross writes, “that religion is a dimension of reality that might be seen, for example, not only in relations among members of the species homo sapiens, but in relationships homo sapiens have with nonhuman (and non-divine) beings, and in relations among nonhuman species themselves” (97).

What would religious experience be like in animals? Gross doesn’t spend time fleshing out this very provocative notion. And yet, in the wake of Gross’s book, scholars might be emboldened to explore it. The ways in which humans disfigure animal environments, jarring animals like apes or elephants or whales into modes of dissociation, repetition compulsion, or sublime terror that resemble religious phenomena, might be worth considering.

But leaving such avenues aside, Gross probes our fundamental discomfort with the notion that religion could incorporate relationships with and among non-human animals. Beginning in his meaty chapter “The Absent Presence,” Gross returns to the early twentieth-century roots of the academic, “non-theological” “ontology” of religion, showing how animals were omitted from a European scholarly understanding of the religious or the sacred as such.

In readings of Emile Durkheim and Mircea Eliade, Gross shows how religious reverence for animals was chalked up to a primitive and unreasoning stage of humanity. He further shows that the academic distinction between primitive and modern society is intimately connected to the theoretical belief in a transformative leap between animality and mankind. One of Gross’s most provocative claims is that this imagined leap to humanity is mobilized as the theoretical basis for the sacred itself at the very moment where Durkheim and others are founding a new, “non-theological” sociology of religion. This scientific project fails to the extent that the human is merely made to absorb the transcendent qualities previously projected onto God. Any science of religion that discounts engagements with animals, and fails to interrogate the “old line of humanistic thinking,” in essence remains divine (82).

Religion, and the field of study surrounding it, are at some level produced by the human-animal, nature-culture divides. For Eliade, “To be human is to be ‘an animal plus’—plus the sacred, plus consciousness, plus meaning and so on” (75). In contrast, Eliade’s contemporary, Ernst Cassirer, articulated a more nuanced view of humanization, wherein the emergence of human symbolic thought remains “embedded in a material substrate—in our organic, biological bodies as they have evolved through natural selection” (67). Turning to contemporary scholarship, Gross sees scholars finally confronting the paradox of treating religion as a purely human phenomenon in cultures in which the man-animal binary simply does not exist. He cites J. Z. Smith’s two essays “I Am a Parrot (Red),” and (my italics) “The Bare Facts of Ritual,” as engaging humans and animals in a new way: “toward the local and the historically specific,” and “in the direction of ‘actual’ animals” (90). But Gross himself wants nothing less than a total posthumanist reconfiguration of the field of religion inquiry writ large. He points to Giorgio Agamben’s paradoxical writings on the “anthropological machine” as evidence of how necessarily grueling this reconfiguration will be. Much like Derrida in The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow), Gross is laboring to dismantle a daunting Eurocentric edifice that we (“we”?) continue to find ourselves inside.

However, Gross’s study goes beyond academic discourse, as the mention of “practical implications” in his subtitle implies. An historian of religions at the University of San Diego, Dr. Gross is also the founder of Farm Forward, a group whose mission it is to end factory farms. As his bio on the Farm Forward website states, he also serves on the Faith Advisory Council of the Humane Society and is Vice President of the Society for Jewish Ethics. This...