30. This and subsequent quotations from the works of Pseudo-Dionysius are from Pseudo-Dionysius 1987. On this sixth-century Greek author, sometimes referred to as Denys or Dennis, and erroneously believed to have been the magistrate of the Athenian Areopagus converted by Saint Paul (Acts, 17, 34), see Rorem 1993.
31. To be precise it is the psalmist who says he is a worm in Psalm 22, 6, though it is possible that an allegorical interpretation might see the psalmist as a prefiguration of Christ.
32. Thomas will comment: “Ostendit quomodo Deo [pulchrum] attribuitur.… Dicit ergo primo quod in Causa prima, scilicet Deo, non sunt dividenda pulchrum et pulchritudo.… Deinde … ostendit qualiter attribuuntur creaturis; et dicit quod in existentibus, pulchrum et pulchritudo distinguuntur secundum participans et participatum, ita quod pulchrum dicitur hoc quod participat pulchritudinem; pulchritudo autem participatio primae Causae quae omnia pulchra facit: pulchritudo enim creaturae nihil est aliud quam similitudo divinae pulchritudinis in rebus participata” (In librum beati Dionysii De divinis nominibus expositio IV, 5: 335 and 337). “He demonstrates how beauty can be attributed to God.… He says first of all that in the First Cause, i.e., in God, the beautiful and beauty are not to be separated.… He then proceeds to demonstrate how they are attributed to creaures; and he says that in existing things the beautiful and beauty are distinguished with respect to participation and participants. Thus, we call something ‘beautiful’ because it is a participant in beauty. Beauty, however, is a participation in the First Cause, which makes all things beautiful. So that the beauty of creatures is simply a likeness of the divine beauty in which things participate” (Eco 1988, p. 27).
33. See, however, the observations of Lo Piparo (2000: 60–61) who criticizes current translations of the beginning of the Categories which define synonymy and homonymy as properties of things and not of names. Owens (1951) would reflect a post-Aristotelian theory of synonymy.
34. A convincing treatment of analogy in Aristotle can still be read in Lyttkens 1952.
35. For an examination of Thomas’s theories on analogy from the point of view of their evolution, see Marmo 1994: 305–320 (with more exhaustive references to the literature on the subject).
36. Which is after all the situation faced by Robinson Crusoe: he sees the footprints in the sand and knows they must have been made by a human being, but he as yet has no inkling that they were left by a particular “savage” whom he will call Friday.
4
The Dog That Barked (and Other Zoosemiotic Archaeologies)
By no means soft on Scholasticism, in his De dignitate et augmentis scientiarum (I, 24), Francis Bacon, after reminding us that Scylla had the face and bosom of a young and beautiful woman, points out that she subsequently revealed herself (according to Virgil’s Eclogue VI, 75) “candida succinctam latrantibus inguina monstris” (“with howling monsters girt about her white waist”).1 Whereupon Bacon goes on to comment that in the writings of the Scholastics one finds concepts appealing at first sight, but which, when you delve more deeply into their distinctions and divisions, rather than proving fertile and capable of generating benefits for human life, “in portentosas et latrantes quaestiones desinunt” (“end in monstrous altercations and barking questions”).2
The Scholastics could never have suspected that at the beginning of the seventeenth century their exquisite quaestiones would be rudely defined as “barking” (latrantes), particularly since, in a number of those quaestiones, they had devoted their respectful and benevolent attention to nothing less than the barking of the dog. What did they have to say on the subject? Did they have anything new to say or did they simply repeat traditional notions handed down from the ancient world?
4.1. Animals from Antiquity to the Middle Ages
4.1.1. The Soul, Rights, and Language of Beasts in Antiquity
In myths and fables animals never quit talking, and these anthropomorphic fantasies reveal how we human beings have always been fascinated by our inscrutable fellow travelers, always at the ready with promises of troubling and illuminating revelations.
As for the philosophers and encyclopedists, a comprehensive survey would take up too much space, and the relevant bibliography is extremely vast. We will therefore confine ourselves to a particular consideration of those arguments that, among the various animals, are concerned with the dog. The comparison between the philosopher and the dog recorded (albeit tongue in cheek) by Plato (Republic II, 375a–376b) is well known. Well-bred dogs are gentle toward their familiars and aggressive toward strangers, and this demonstrates a happy trait in their nature: “your dog is a true philosopher, I venture to say.” The dog can tell a friendly figure from a hostile one purely on the grounds that he is familiar with the one and not the other: How can we deny a certain learning ability to a creature who is able to distinguish friends and strangers simply on the basis of knowledge or ignorance?
The Latin Aristotle makes a distinction between mere sound (sonus) and voice (vox) or utterance, and in De anima (II, 429b) he says that a sound can be defined as a “voice” when it is emitted by an animated being and is significant (semantikos). In any case, animal sounds are not emitted according to convention (they are not symbols, but manifestations of something at a symptomatic level) and they are agrammatoi, that is, not articulate (see, for instance, De interpretatione [On Interpretation] 16a and Poetics 1456b).
We will return to these distinctions later, because they will become central in the medieval debate. Aristotle asserts in his Politics that man is the only animal to possess the faculty of language, but this tells us nothing yet about the animals, because, as we will see, ever since antiquity there have been three recurring problems that crop up in this regard: (i) whether animals have a soul, or at least some form of intelligence; (ii) whether they communicate in some way among themselves and with us; and (iii) whether we should respect their dignity by abstaining from killing them and eating their flesh.
The Aristotelian texts that discuss point (i) are the subject of widespread debate, because, though Aristotle, in defining the soul as “the first actuality of a natural body possessed of organs” (De anima [On the Soul] II, i, 412b), could not deny a soul to animals, it is often unclear what kind of intelligence he means to attribute to them, given that not only was he clear about the distinction between the sensitive and the rational souls, but he drew distinctions among the intellective qualities of different animal species, without reaching any definitive conclusions (De anima II, 413b–414a).
What is certain is that the Historia animalium (History of Animals) (VIII and IX), for example, claims that many animals exhibit traces of psychic qualities (though these may be merely analogous to those of humans), inasmuch as certain beasts display kindness and courage, timidity, fear, and cunning, and quite often something approaching sagacity—so that at times these virtues appear to differ from those possessed by human beings only in degree. Aristotle even seems to suggest an evolutionary progress (from plant to animal and from animal to man), in which it is not easy to draw lines of demarcation. Some animals do not confine themselves to procreating in a specific season, and, while many devote themselves to providing food for their offspring only to abandon them later, others are endowed with memory and live longer in the company of their young, establishing forms of social collaboration. Still others are capable of giving or receiving instructions, both in their intraspecies relationships as well as with humans, whose commands they appear to understand. The Metaphysics (A, 1) states that animals are naturally endowed with sensation, but the more intelligent ones are those in which sensation gives rise to memory, and it is they who are more apt to learn than those without the ability to remember (and this is where the dog comes in). All animals unable to hear sounds (the bee, for instance) may be intelligent, but they lack the ability to learn, while those that possess, in addition to memory, the sense of hearing (see also the Posterior Analytics II, 19) are able to learn. Finally, in the Nicomachean Ethics (VI, 7, 1141a), Aristotle declares that, since it can remember the past, the superior animal is capable of foreseeing its future needs.