In the Problem of Pain (one of my all time favorite books), C.S. Lewis addresses how the Bible often uses the analogies of various relationships between man & beast to help us make sense of the relationship between God & man. Reading the quotation below, I can’t help but smirk as I picture the dynamic between my dogs and myself. I quickly recognize that because of my love for them and my far greater understanding, they don’t realize what is really going on most of the time. They can’t quite grasp that I’m trying to train them (to be something they don’t want to be) for their own good & because that is my will – and I’m their boss-man.
Another type is the love of a man for a beast – a relation constantly used in Scripture to symbolize the relation between God and men; “we are his people and the sheep of his pasture”. This is in some ways a better analogy …because the inferior party is sentient, and yet unmistakably inferior: but it is less good in so far as man has not made the beast and does not fully understand it. Its great merit lies in the fact that the association of (say) man and dog is primarily for the man’s sake: he tames the dog primarily that he may love it, not that it may love him, and that it may serve him, not that he may serve it. Yet at the same time, the dog’s interests are not sacrificed to the man’s. The one end (that he may love it) cannot be fully attained unless it also, in its fashion, serves it. Now just because the dog is by human standards one of the best” of irrational creatures, and a proper object for a man to love – of course, with that degree and kind of love which is proper to such an object, and not with silly anthropomorphic exaggerations – man interferes with the dog and makes it more lovable than it was in mere nature. In its state of nature it has a smell, and habits, which frustrate man’s love: he washes it, house-trains it, teaches it not to steal, and is so enabled to love it completely. (more…)
