Animal

Welcome to Vespers, where we take up the last hour of your day. Tonight: the animal.

A reminder: this is a survey of great ideas, not necessarily an endorsement of any one contribution.

We are walking, this season, through the great ideas one at a time, following the map that Mortimer Adler drew when he indexed the whole Western canon under a hundred and two headings. Last week the map opened at Angel. Tonight it turns the page to the creature just below the angels and just above the dust — the animal. The beasts of the field and the fowl of the air; the lion in his den and the cat on the hearth; the horse that laughs among the trumpets and the ant that lays up its grain against the winter. What are they? What do they know? And what are we, that we should be set among them and yet told we are not merely one of them?

We begin where the creatures begin, in the first chapter of Genesis. And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven. And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good.

The sixth day brings the beasts of the earth. And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so. And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind: and God saw that it was good.

Notice the phrase that keeps returning, like a bell: after his kind. The creation is not a blur; it is a kind of ordered choir, each voice singing its own part. And the beasts are made on the same day as man, and the herb of the field is given to them for meat as it is given to us. So the animal is our fellow creature and our elder by a few hours of that first week — and, we will find, our teacher. But first, God has a catechism to put to a suffering man, and every question in it is an animal.

From the book of Job. Out of the whirlwind, the LORD answers Job — not with a theodicy, not with an argument, but with a menagerie. He points at the wild things one by one and asks: did you make this? Do you understand it? Can you command it?

The wild ass, that emblem of a liberty no man conferred: Who hath sent out the wild ass free? or who hath loosed the bands of the wild ass? Whose house I have made the wilderness, and the barren land his dwellings. He scorneth the multitude of the city, neither regardeth he the crying of the driver.

Then the ostrich, that strange, foolish, magnificent bird, who leaves her eggs in the dust and forgets them, and yet, when she lifteth up herself on high, she scorneth the horse and his rider. And that brings the war-horse, perhaps the most vivid animal in all of Scripture: Hast thou given the horse strength? hast thou clothed his neck with thunder? He paweth in the valley, and rejoiceth in his strength: he goeth on to meet the armed men. He mocketh at fear, and is not affrighted; neither turneth he back from the sword. He saith among the trumpets, Ha, ha; and he smelleth the battle afar off, the thunder of the captains, and the shouting.

He saith among the trumpets, Ha, ha. There is a joy in the beast that man did not put there and cannot fully understand. And last, the eagle on her crag: Doth the eagle mount up at thy command, and make her nest on high? She dwelleth and abideth on the rock, upon the crag of the rock, and the strong place. From thence she seeketh the prey, and her eyes behold afar off.

The whole speech is a single argument, and the argument is made entirely of animals: the world is wider than your understanding, Job; it is full of lives you did not design, cannot tame, and were never asked to approve — and it is very good.

If Job shows us the animals as the boundary of our knowledge, the hundred-and-fourth Psalm shows us the animals as the household of God — every creature fed from one open hand. From the Psalms: Thou makest darkness, and it is night: wherein all the beasts of the forest do creep forth. The young lions roar after their prey, and seek their meat from God. The sun ariseth, they gather themselves together, and lay them down in their dens. Man goeth forth unto his work and to his labour until the evening.

The lions roar after their prey — and their roaring is a kind of prayer; they seek their meat from God. There is one table, and it is very wide: O LORD, how manifold are thy works! in wisdom hast thou made them all: the earth is full of thy riches. So is this great and wide sea, wherein are things creeping innumerable, both small and great beasts. There is that leviathan, whom thou hast made to play therein.

Whom thou hast made to play. The great sea-beast is not a monster to be feared here but a plaything of God, made for the sheer joy of the making. And then the tenderest turn of all: Thou openest thine hand, they are filled with good. Thou hidest thy face, they are troubled: thou takest away their breath, they die, and return to their dust. Thou sendest forth thy spirit, they are created: and thou renewest the face of the earth.

Thou openest thine hand, they are filled with good. That is the animal in Scripture: a life on loan, held open-handed, breathing a borrowed breath. Now let us cross from Jerusalem to Athens.

No one looked at animals harder than Aristotle. He dissected them, classified them, watched them breed and hunt and sleep; he is the father of zoology. And in the first book of his treatise On the Parts of Animals, he pauses to answer the person who thinks the study of lowly creatures is beneath a serious mind. From Aristotle: We must not recoil with childish aversion from the examination of the humbler animals. Every realm of nature is marvellous: and as Heraclitus, when the strangers who came to visit him found him warming himself at the furnace in the kitchen and hesitated to go in, is reported to have bidden them not to be afraid to enter, as even in that kitchen divinities were present; so we should venture on the study of every kind of animal without distaste; for each and all will reveal to us something natural and something beautiful.

Even in that kitchen divinities were present. It is a startling thing for a pagan to say and a truer thing than he knew: that there is no creature so mean that the divine is not somehow near it. And he will not let us despise the body of the beast, either — for to despise it is to despise our own: if any person thinks the examination of the rest of the animal kingdom an unworthy task, he must hold in like disesteem the study of man.

Three centuries into the Christian era, a bishop on the Black Sea coast takes that same patient attention and preaches it. Basil the Great preached a series of homilies on the six days of creation — the Hexaemeron — and the ninth is given to the making of the land animals. From Basil: The ox is steady, the ass is lazy, the horse has strong passions, the wolf cannot be tamed, the fox is deceitful, the stag timid, the ant industrious, the dog grateful and faithful in his friendships.

And these creatures, Basil says, are our schoolmasters. His most famous animal is the hunting dog, in whom he sees not mere instinct but something very like a syllogism: When the dog is on the track of game, if he sees it divide in different directions, he examines these different paths. The creature is gone here or there or in another direction. It is neither here nor there; it is therefore in the third direction. And thus, neglecting the false tracks, he discovers the true one.

And yet Basil will not let man forget his own station: Cattle are terrestrial and bent towards the earth. Your head, O man, is turned towards heaven; your eyes look up. Raise your soul above the earth; draw from its natural conformation the rule of your conduct; fix your conversation in heaven.

Thomas Aquinas tries to say, with the most precision, exactly what an animal is and is not. He grants the animals a real soul; a beast is no mere stone. But he draws a careful line. From Aquinas: The sensitive soul has no operation of its own apart from the body, and every operation of the sensitive soul belongs to the composite. Wherefore we conclude that as the souls of brute animals have no operations of their own, they are not subsistent.

So Aquinas places the animal truly alive, truly ensouled — but bound to its body as the eye is bound to the light, unable to stand alone. A thousand years on, a French essayist picks the mirror up and turns it around. Michel de Montaigne, in the Apology for Raymond Sebond, in the old translation of Charles Cotton: When I play with my cat, who knows whether I do not make her more sport than she makes me? We mutually divert one another with our play. If I have my hour to begin or to refuse, she also has hers.

The gulf we imagine between our minds and theirs may be a gulf of our own ignorance. He knocks the swagger out of us, and reminds us that the creature curled in our lap is a genuine other, with an inner life we glimpse but do not own.

The very next voice will slam the door Montaigne left open. René Descartes, in the fifth part of his Discourse on Method, offers the coldest theory of the animal in this whole survey: a beast is an intricate automaton, wonderfully made, but with no mind behind the eyes. From Descartes, in the translation of John Veitch: There are no men so dull and stupid as to be incapable of joining together different words, and thereby constructing a declaration by which to make their thoughts understood; and there is no other animal, however perfect, which can do the like. Magpies and parrots can utter words like ourselves, and are yet unable to speak as we do; in place of which men born deaf and dumb are in the habit of spontaneously inventing certain signs by which they discover their thoughts.

It rather proves that they are destitute of reason, and that it is nature which acts in them according to the disposition of their organs: thus a clock composed only of wheels and weights can number the hours more exactly than we with all our skill. It is a chilling doctrine, and anyone who has watched a dog dream, or grieve, feels the objection in the bone.

Our last prose voice will change the terms of the quarrel forever, by telling us that man and the animals are, quite literally, one family. Charles Darwin, at the close of On the Origin of Species: When we look at the plants and bushes clothing an entangled bank, we are tempted to attribute their proportional numbers and kinds to what we call chance. But how false a view is this! What a struggle between insect and insect, between insects, snails, and other animals with birds and beasts of prey, all striving to increase, and all feeding on each other.

And then the famous last sentence, the one line of scientific prose that reaches for the register of a psalm: There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

Endless forms most beautiful. It is the same wonder Aristotle found in his kitchen and the psalmist found in his wide and teeming sea — arrived at now by a different road, but arriving, in spite of itself, at praise.

And through it all one small creature has kept padding across our path — the cat. And so we close tonight with a cat, and with the strangest, tenderest poem an animal ever fathered. Christopher Smart wrote it in a madhouse in the seventeen-sixties, with no company but his cat.

For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry. For he is the servant of the Living God duly and daily serving him. For at the first glance of the glory of God in the East he worships in his way. For this is done by wreathing his body seven times round with elegant quickness. For he keeps the Lord's watch in the night against the adversary. For he counteracts the powers of darkness by his electrical skin and glaring eyes. For he is of the tribe of Tiger. For he has the subtlety and hissing of a serpent, which in goodness he suppresses. For he will not do destruction, if he is well-fed, neither will he spit without provocation. For he purrs in thankfulness, when God tells him he's a good Cat. For he is an instrument for the children to learn benevolence upon. For every house is incomplete without him and a blessing is lacking in the spirit. For he is a mixture of gravity and waggery. For he knows that God is his Saviour. For there is nothing sweeter than his peace when at rest, and nothing brisker than his life when in motion. For by stroking of him I have found out electricity. For I perceived God's light about him both wax and fire. For, though he cannot fly, he is an excellent clamberer. For he can swim for life. For he can creep.

Good night.