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.
This is not all. As mere signs they are completely polyvocal; they serve to communicate different things according to the circumstances and properties highlighted. To confine ourselves to the dog, Rabanus Maurus (IX century) explains why and by virtue of what contradictory properties the dog may represent either the devil, the Jews, or the Gentiles,19 while in the anonymous eleventh-century Libro della natura degli animali or in the De Bestiis attributed to Hugh of Fouilloy the fact that it swallows its own vomit allows the dog to be chosen as a symbol of the repentant sinner, and in the Bestiario moralizzato di Gubbio (thirteenth–fourteenth century) the dog that dies defending its master becomes a symbol of Christ who died for our salvation.
Things are not so very different in the case of the Renaissance emblem books, which are far more dependent on the medieval bestiaries than is commonly thought. Some historians have seen this as a development of the theme of canine intelligence (see, for example, Höltgen 1998), given that, in the best-known source for the emblem books, Horapollon’s fifth-century Hieroglyphica (I, 39), the dog is singled out to represent a sacred scribe or a prophet or an embalmer or the spleen or the sense of smell or laughter or a sneeze (or a magistrate or a judge). But from this abundance of references it is evident that the dog (or any other animal for that matter) lends itself to many interpretations. In the texts that develop the theme in the Renaissance and Baroque periods, such as, for example, Picinelli’s Mondo simbolico (1653) or the various versions of Valeriano’s Hieroglyphica (between 1556 and 1626), the dog is represented as a symbol of magnanimity, generosity, courage, obedience, love of sacred literature, remembrance of things past, and memory of benefits received, while, at the same time, it is an emblem of sacrilege, stupidity, adulation, buffoonery, and impudence. In Alciati’s one hundred and sixty-fifth emblem “Inanis impetus” (“Antagonism that achieves nothing”), a dog gazes up at the moon as if in a mirror convinced there is another dog up there, and he bays, but the moon continues on its course, and the dog’s bay is carried away vainly on the wind. And in emblem 175 “Alius peccat, alius plectitur” (“One sins and another is punished”), the dog who bites the stone that has been thrown at him is incapable of harming his aggressor. Finally, in an allegory of Logic that appears in the various editions of Gregor Reisch’s Margarita philosophica we find two hunting dogs symbolizing the pursuit of knowledge, but one represents truth and the other falsehood—which does not offer much of a guarantee of canine sagacity.
Still, there is an area of discourse, for the most part indifferent to the universe of symbols, in which we encounter references to animal behavior based on nonfanciful observations, and this occurs in the discussions of language on the part of grammarians, to say nothing of philosophers and theologians, where we encounter canonical references, not merely to articulated language, but also to various forms of interjection or vocal emission, such as the moaning of the sick, the lowing of oxen, the chirping of chickens, the pseudo-language of magpies and parrots, and especially and most frequently the barking of the dog.
Encountering these references so frequently, we get the obvious impression that each author is borrowing from predecessors a well-worn topos, and is therefore simply repeating concepts handed down by tradition. The dog’s bark is a victim of the inertia of the auctoritates, while the examples migrate automatically from text to text.20
And yet it pays to proceed
