Coetzee and moral principles

What she means is that she does not want to act in a way that would damage her self by creating regret and self-accusation. Such elements in our mental life fragment who we are because we are a war with ourselves. We lose our peace. We all know what soul damage is. We discover it when all of our excuses and explanations fall apart and we are confronted by a view of ourselves that we would rather do without. We are all defended against this view and this cripples us as human beings.

To save ones soul is to avoid acts that one will later regret and to act in ways that give a semblance of being truly human as Christ was truly human.

Veterans from armed conflict know what having a damaged soul is like. They are forced into situations in which they have to kill strangers. The medicalization of these phenomena as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder hides the fact that killing a human being damages ones soul. Traditionally, such people sought a priest or curate, to cure their souls through the rite of confession and absolution.

Elizabeth Costello will not eat meat because she has come to believe that the wholesale slaughter of animals is a crime against them. As such she has become a stranger and an alien even within her own family and especially in the scholastic community that would claim her as its own.

She likens the slaughterhouses that surround any town or city to the highly efficient Nazi death camps located in various parts of Germany and Poland. She patiently argues against Aquinas and Descartes who state that animals do not have souls and that their deaths are insignificant.

You can see that she is on dangerous ground here and not only in the groves of academe. She brings into question whole industries and ways of living. For example, she argues that we can only kill animals for meat because we have failed to realise the fullness of the lives they live. We can only kill them by reducing them to unfeeling machines.

For example, what do we do to the jaguar when we capture it and place it in a cage in the zoo? How much of the jaguar do we have when we have eliminated what is so essential and beautiful in the animal: its ability to hunt, to move seamlessly through bush and to reach great speeds in an instant?

All animals live complex lives that are largely hidden from us. Neuroscientists and animal learning specialists have not the slightest clue where animal behaviour comes from apart from some Darwinian hand waving. While animals may not have consciousness of their own death they must have consciousness of a kind that enables them to interact in complex ways with each other and their environment that we have no way of investigating.

Elizabeth arrives at these conclusions by rejecting abstract, supposedly rational, thought. In doing so she opposes the central concern of the Enlightenment in which reason is the pinnacle of Being. Instead, she ops for a way of knowing for which embodiment is central. Instead of reducing the lives of animals to insignificance she observes the richness in them, the joy they portray.

In the last chapter At the Gate she finds herself in a netherworld in which she has to apply to enter a gate, obviously the gate to paradise. To enter this gate she has to apply to a panel of judges who insist that she write an account of what she believes. She protests that as a writer and thus "a secretary to the invisible" she is bound to report on revelation. She insists that belief would be an obstacle to her vocation and she has none. The judges find this inadequate and it appears that she is suspended, not being able to go forward through the gate or backwards to her life.

This reminds me very much of Christian embodiment in which we are not so much invited to believe in certain things, to be able to say the creed without crossing our fingers behind our back, but to be part of the body of Christ, the Church. Thus, like Elizabeth, Christians do not have principles, they are not expected to be motivated by deep convictions. They too are secretaries of the invisible for which belief gets in the way. While reciting the creeds in Church has its point, they are rather a guide to the boundaries of faith rather than faith itself.

We do not necessarily have to be as concerned with killing animals as Elizabeth is but what must concern us all is the blindness to the wonder of the world that reason, in its habit of reduction, ushers in. This is the kind of blindness that afflicted those who lived near the Nazis camps. They thought that their senses were deceiving them. They made excuses for not seeing. Elizabeth points to the slaughter yards dotted all around our country and insists that we see what is done in our name to animals who have real lives.