4.1.2. The Transmigration of the Problem in the Middle Ages
Did the Middle Ages know of these texts? The Platonic texts no, but Aristotle’s Analytics will become known at least in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and in the same period the Metaphysics and the Nicomachean Ethics will also begin to circulate. Knowledge of the Politics and the Historia animalium will come a bit later.
But, in any case, the Middle Ages was familiar with Pliny and, through him, with a whole vast repertory of sources dealing with the animal world.12 It is to Pliny that the entire encyclopedist tradition in general refers: we need only cite Isidore of Seville, who reminds us that there is no creature more intelligent than the dog:
The Latin word “dog” (canis) seems to have a Greek etymology, for the animal is called kuon in Greek. Still, some people think it is named for the sound (canor) of barking because it is loud, whence also the word “sing” (canere). No animal is smarter than the dog, for they have more sense than the others. They alone recognize their own names; they love their masters; they defend their master’s home; they lay down their life for their master; they willingly run after game with their master; they do not leave the body of their master even when he has died. Finally, it is part of their nature not to be able to live apart from humans. There are two qualities found in dogs: strength and speed.13
What the sources are for the Middle Ages’ familiarity with Chrysippus’s dog is uncertain, but we have already seen that the argument of the dog as syllogist appears early on in patristic culture: for Saint Basil (Hexaemeron, Homily IX) this is the example used to demonstrate that the dog has a faculty similar to reason. After this Chrysippus’s dog makes its appearance in the bestiaries; for example in the twelfth-century De Bestiis sometimes attributed to Hugh of Fouilloy (and previously attributed to Hugh of Saint Victor, but more likely anonymous).14 Later it will be mentioned by Gregory of Rimini as evidence of the fact that animals too possess the “notitia complexa de sensibilibus” (Lectura super primum et secundum Sententiarum I, 3, 1, 1).
The Middle Ages did not enjoy direct access to Porphyry’s De abstinentia, first translated into Latin in the fifteenth century by Marsilio Ficino, but information regarding his arguments had been transmitted by Saint Jerome (Adversus Jovinianum) and, apropos of abstaining from animal meats, by Augustine (Civitas Dei I, 20, and Confessions III, 18, where the problem of abstinence is dismissed as a pagan prejudice).
In Scholastic circles too the question of the souls of animals was not explored to any significant extent because, although in the wake of the Aristotelian tradition the notion that animals had a soul had never been called into question, they were merely granted, in addition to the vegetative soul, a sensitive soul. A sensitive soul may have instincts but it clearly lacks rationality or the ability to exercise free choice, as Thomas Aquinas concludes, precisely apropos of Chrysippus’s argument, in Summa Theologiae, I–II, 13, 2.15
Furthermore, a sensitive soul, unlike a rational soul, could not be immortal. Indeed Thomas, who holds that the rational (and immortal) soul is introduced by God into the fetus only when the brain is fully formed several months after conception (Summa Theologiae I, 90), came to the conclusion that even human embryos, which possess only a sensitive soul, could not participate in the resurrection of the flesh (Supplementum 80, 4).
This allowed Thomas to justify the slaughtering of animals for alimentary purposes: the inferior forms of life are ordered toward the survival of the superior forms, and therefore vegetables serve as food for animals and animals for man.16 The themes of Porphyry’s De abstinentia were alien to the medieval mentality, and the problem of the suffering of animals did not occasion much distress, given that human beings were sufficiently prone to suffering themselves.17
The fact that Saint Francis of Assisi could not only profess brotherly love toward animals but was also able (at least according to the powers attributed to him in Franciscan circles) to convince a wolf by reasoning with him, was evidence of a mystically provocative attitude at odds with the opinions officially shared by the philosophical and theological culture of the time.
So the thinkers of the Middle Ages do not appear to have been tempted by what we have termed “proto-evolutionist” tendencies. Even if we read ontogenesis in terms of philogenesis, the development from the vegetative soul to the sensitive soul and eventually to the rational soul was not seen as a continuum, and (given the Thomistic notions cited above) the transition in the fetus from the vegetative soul to the rational soul was, so to speak, a “catastrophe” attributable to direct divine intervention. Still, Rosier-Catach (2006) points out, in a passage from Dante’s Convivio (III, 7, 6), the idea of a more or less continuous gradation from the souls of the angels to the souls of humans to the souls of the animals, a gradation that strikes her as definitely “contrary to the teachings of the Church”:
And since in the intellectual order of the universe the ascent and descent are almost by continuous gradations from the lowest form to the highest and from the highest to the lowest, as we see in the order of beings capable of sensation; and since between the angelic nature, which is intellectual being, and the human nature there is no gradation but rather the one is, as it were, continuous with the other by the order of gradation; and since between the human soul and the most perfect soul of the brute animals there is also no intermediary gradation, so it is that we see many men so vile and in such a state of baseness that they seem to be almost nothing but beasts. Consequently it must be stated and firmly believed that there are some so noble and so lofty in nature that they are almost nothing but angels, for otherwise the human species would not be continuous in both directions, which is impossible.18
These observations did not prevent Dante from affirming in the De vulgari eloquentiae (I, 2, 5) that animals are incapable of speech and have no need of it (just as angels are endowed with an ineffable intellectual capacity, so that each one understands the thoughts of each of the others, or rather all of them read the thoughts of all of the others in the mind of God). Because they do not have individual but only specific passions, knowing their own they also know those of their congeners, and they have no interest in knowing those of animals of a different species. Likewise demons have no need of discourse because they all know reciprocally the degree of their own perfidiousness. (And we cannot even attempt to transform Dante into an evolutionist ante litteram simply because he permitted himself the rhetorical hyperbole of addressing his lady as an angel!)
The Middle Ages was not insensitive to the presence of animals. Indeed it was almost obsessively concerned with them in its bestiaries. But, rather than speaking (as occurs in the tradition of the fable), those animals are themselves the signs of a divine language. They “say” many things, but without being aware of it. This is because what they are or what they do become figures of something else. The lion signifies the Redemption by canceling its tracks, the elephant by attempting to lift its fallen companion, the serpent by sloughing off its old skin. Characters in a book written digito Dei (“with the finger of God”), the animals do not produce language, instead they themselves are words in a symbolic language. They are not observed in their actual behaviors, but in those attributed to them. They do not do what they do but what the bestiaries would have them do, so that they can express through their behavior something of which they are totally incognizant.