Animal

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

Tonight: the second of the great ideas — 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 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 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. From 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 an ordered choir, each voice singing its own part. And the beasts are made on the same day as man, and the green herb is given to them for meat as it is given to us. So the animal is our fellow creature, our elder by a few hours of that first week, and — we will find — our teacher.

Now hear the making of man, and listen for one verb, because we are going to need it much later tonight. From Genesis: And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.

Breathed. Hold that word somewhere safe. We will hear it again, from a very unexpected mouth, before the evening is out.

And the first work given to the first man is not farming, and not building. It is naming the animals. From Genesis: And out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof. And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field.

To see what he would call them. There is something almost playful in it — the Maker bringing his creatures up one at a time, like a father emptying his pockets, waiting to hear what the boy will say. Every zoology since is a footnote to that afternoon. And every one of us who has ever named a dog has done the same small priestly work.

That office is set down formally in the eighth Psalm, and notice how it begins — not with our greatness, but with our smallness. From the Psalms: When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained; what is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him? For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, and hast crowned him with glory and honour. Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of thy hands; thou hast put all things under his feet: all sheep and oxen, yea, and the beasts of the field; the fowl of the air, and the fish of the sea, and whatsoever passeth through the paths of the seas.

A little lower than the angels, and set over the sheep and the oxen. That is the exact station the whole night is about — beneath one order of creature and above another, and belonging entirely to neither.

But naming is not comprehending, and 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. 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? Canst thou make him afraid as a grasshopper? the glory of his nostrils is terrible. 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 swalloweth the ground with fierceness and rage. 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: He appointed the moon for seasons: the sun knoweth his going down. 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 young 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: These wait all upon thee; that thou mayest give them their meat in due season. That thou givest them they gather: 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.

And because they take their breath from his hand and know it, the beasts become a reproach to us. From Isaiah, in the opening indictment of the whole book: The ox knoweth his owner, and the ass his master's crib: but Israel doth not know, my people doth not consider.

The ox knows who feeds him. That is the whole of the ox's theology, and it is more than we manage. The Scriptures also require the traffic to run the other way — that a man's mercy reach down as well as up. From the Proverbs: A righteous man regardeth the life of his beast: but the tender mercies of the wicked are cruel.

And God's own mercy runs further down the ladder than ours does. The book of Jonah ends — the whole book, the last line — with the LORD explaining to a sulking prophet why he spared a city, and the final clause of the argument is livestock. From Jonah: And should not I spare Nineveh, that great city, wherein are more than sixscore thousand persons that cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand; and also much cattle?

And also much cattle. The last four words of a prophetic book, and they are about the cows. He counted them. He is not embarrassed to say so.

Our Lord said the same thing in a smaller coin, about the cheapest bird in the market. From the Gospel: Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? and one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father. Fear ye not therefore, ye are of more value than many sparrows.

Ye are of more value — but the sparrow is not valueless, or the argument would not work. The whole comfort depends on the Father already attending to the bird.

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 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.

In the fourth century, a bishop in the Cappadocian highlands took that same patient attention and preached it. Basil the Great gave a series of homilies on the six days of creation, and the ninth of them 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.

He watches the bee build in hexagons and the swallow mortar her nest with mud, and he will not call any of it accident. The bee, he says, gathers her sweetness from the flowers without harming them, and lays down a store no chemist taught her to make; the swallow, having no hands, takes up mud on her wings and builds a house with it. If the creature has no reason of its own, then the reason on display in the work must be borrowed from somewhere, and Basil knows where. And yet he 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.

Eight centuries later, 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 and truly ensouled — but bound to its body as the eye is bound to the light, unable to stand alone.

Three centuries on, a French essayist picks the mirror up and turns it around. Michel de Montaigne, in his defence of 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 slams 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.

And he presses it to the machine: 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.

Two centuries after Descartes, a naturalist changed the terms of the whole quarrel by proposing that man and the animals are, quite literally, one family. Charles Darwin. Here he is watching a bank of plants and bushes, and refusing to call what he sees an accident of numbers. From Darwin: 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 now the last sentence of his book — the one line of scientific prose that reaches for the register of a psalm. From Darwin: 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.

Breathed.

There it is again — the word we set aside at the beginning of the evening, when the LORD God breathed into the nostrils of a man made out of dust. Darwin is not quoting Genesis. But of all the verbs available to a man describing the arrival of life, he reached for that one, and he reached for it in the passive voice, and a passive voice has to have somebody standing behind it. Life was breathed. Breathed by whom? He does not say. He simply lays the word down at the end of six hundred pages and walks away from it.

And in the second edition, published the following January, he did not walk away. He added three words, so that the sentence read: having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one.

Now — honesty about that, because we are not here to score points off a dead man. Darwin later regretted the addition, and said so plainly: he had, in his own word, truckled to public opinion. So we cannot say he was persuaded of anything. What we can say is this. The three words he added under pressure, he later wished away. The word he never wished away, the word that stood in the first edition when nobody was watching and stood in every edition after, was breathed. He kept the verb. It was only the Person he tried to take back out.

And here is a preacher who watched all of this happen in his own lifetime, from a pulpit six thousand strong, and who said the thing that has to be said next. Charles Spurgeon, in his autobiography:

There are abundant evidences that one creature inclines towards another in certain respects, for all are bound together in a wondrous way which indicates that they are all the product of God's creative will; but what the advocates of evolution appear to forget is, that there is nowhere to be discovered an actual chain of growth from one creature to another — there are breaks here and there, and so many missing links that the chain cannot be made complete. There are, naturally enough, many resemblances between them, because they have all been wrought by the one great master-mind of God, yet each one has its own peculiarities. Even where one species very closely resembles another, there is a speciality about each which distinguishes it from all others.

Notice what he does not deny. He does not deny the resemblances; he grants them, freely, and then accounts for them: they have all been wrought by the one great master-mind of God. A single hand leaves a single style across everything it makes, and you would expect the shelf of creatures to look like a set. Which is Genesis's own word coming back around — after his kind. Each with its own speciality. Each with something about it that is nobody else's.

And Spurgeon will not let us take the animals as a merely scientific question, because for him they are first a moral one. He read the ox in Isaiah who knows his owner, and he turned it on his congregation. From Spurgeon:

Men are more brutish than the beasts that perish. The lower animals, as men contemptuously call them, acknowledge the hand that feeds them; but men receive the bounty of God through long years, and yet live as if there were no God at all, and feel no gratitude to him whatsoever.

Men are more brutish than the beasts. That is the sting of this whole evening. We have spent an hour establishing that we stand above them — reasoning, speaking, naming — and the preacher points out that the ox is better at the one thing that finally matters. The ox knows who fills the crib. We are fed every morning of our lives by a hand we never thank.

He goes further, and finds a mercy in the very thing we resent — that we have bodies at all, and that they are so obviously kin to theirs. From Spurgeon:

Our bodies humble us; and that is about the best thing they do for us. Oh, that we were duly lowly, because our bodies ally us with animals, and even link us with the dust!

Our bodies humble us, and that is about the best thing they do for us. Every ache is a reminder of the dust we were formed from. And Spurgeon noticed one more thing — that God teaches the beasts the way he teaches us, and by the same rough curriculum. From Spurgeon:

Animals are often taught through their food. When they could not be reached in any other way, they have been instructed by their hunger, and by their thirst, and by their feeding. And the Lord, who knew of what a coarse nature Israel was composed, also taught them by their hunger and by their thirst, by the supply of water from the rock, and by the manna which he rained from heaven.

Taught by their hunger. There is the wilderness, and there is every empty stomach and every dry season you have ever had — the same schoolmaster, working on a coarse nature by the only method it will feel.

So where does it end for them? Scripture does not leave the creatures out of the last chapter — and it did not leave them out of the covenant either. When the flood was over and the ark was emptied, God made his promise not only to the man who had built it. From Genesis: And I, behold, I establish my covenant with you, and with your seed after you; and with every living creature that is with you, of the fowl, of the cattle, and of every beast of the earth with you. And God said, This is the token of the covenant which I make between me and you and every living creature that is with you, for perpetual generations: I do set my bow in the cloud. And I will look upon it, that I may remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is upon the earth.

Between God and every living creature of all flesh. The rainbow is not ours alone. It was hung over the beasts as well, and they were named in the contract four times over, as if he wanted no mistake about it. From the letter to the Romans: For the earnest expectation of the creature waiteth for the manifestation of the sons of God. For the creature was made subject to vanity, not willingly, but by reason of him who hath subjected the same in hope, because the creature itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now.

The whole creation groaneth. Not willingly, Paul says — the beasts did not vote for this. They were pulled down with us, and they will be brought up with us, and the wild ass and the war-horse and the leviathan at his play are all leaning forward, waiting for something to happen to us. And the prophet had already seen the far side of it. From Isaiah: The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them. They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain: for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the LORD, as the waters cover the sea.

And through it all one small creature has kept padding across our path — the cat. Montaigne's cat, on the floor of a French tower, deciding whether she has time for him tonight. And so we close 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 counteracts the Devil, who is death, by brisking about the life. 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.

For he purrs in thankfulness, when God tells him he's a good Cat. Go and do likewise. The ox knows his owner. Good night.