X The Hebrew Conception of Animals
I
... “About them frisking played
All beasts of the earth, since wild, and of all chase
In wood or wilderness, forest or den;
Sporting the lion ramped, and in his paw
Dandled the kid; bears, tigers, ounces, pards,
Gambolled before them; the unwieldy elephant,
To make them mirth, used all his might, and wreathed
His lithe proboscis.”
Paradise Lost, Book IV.
The idea of a condition of existence in which all creatures are happy and at peace implies a protest against the most patent fact of life as we see it. Western civilisation inherited from the Roman Empire the hardness of heart towards animals of which the popularity of beast-fights in the Arena was the characteristic sign. It was, however, a Roman poet who first pointed out in philosophical language that the sufferings of animals stand written in the great indictment against Nature no less than the sufferings of men. Not only man is born to sorrow, said Lucretius; look at the cow whose calf bleeds before some lovely temple, while she wanders disconsolate over all the fields, lowing piteously, uncomforted by the image of other calves, because her own is not.
Eighteen hundred years later Schopenhauer said that by taking a very high standard it was possible to justify the sufferings of man but not those of animals. Darwin arrived at the same conclusion. “It has been imagined,” he remarks, “that the sufferings of man tend to his moral improvement, but the number of men in the world is nothing compared with the number of other sentient beings which suffer greatly without moral improvement.” To him, the man of the religious mind whom men lightly charged with irreligion, it was “an intolerable thought” that after long ages of toil all these sentient beings were doomed to complete annihilation.
Yes, and to the young conscience of mankind this was also an intolerable thought. And since it was intolerable the human conscience in the strength of its youth shook it off, cast it aside, awoke from it as we awake from a nightmare. Religion has been regarded too exclusively as a submission to Nature. At times it is a revolt against Nature, a repudiation of what our senses report to us, an assertion that things seen are illusions, and that things unseen are real. Religion is born of Doubt. The incredibility of the Known forced man to seek refuge in the Unknown. From that far region he brought back solutions good or bad, sublime or trivial, to the manifold problems which beset man’s soul.
A poet, doomed to early death, who looked into Nature on a summer’s day and could discern nothing but “an eternal fierce destruction,” wrote, in his despair—
“Things cannot to the will
Be settled, but they tease us out of thought.
... It is a flaw
In happiness to see beyond our bourn;
It forces us in summer skies to mourn,
It spoils the singing of the nightingale.”
But when the world was young things could be settled to the will. We are, of course, constantly regulating our impressions of phenomena by a standard of higher probability. If we see a ship upside down, we say, “This is not a ship, it is a mirage.” When the primitive man found himself face to face with seeming natural laws which offended his sense of inherent probability, he rejected the hypothesis that they were actual or permanent, and supposed them to be either untrustworthy appearances or deviations from a larger plan.
Every basic religion gave a large share of thought to animals. The merit, from a humane point of view, of the explanation of the mystery offered by the religious systems of India has been praised even to excess. In contrast to this, it was often repeated that the Hebrew religion ignored the claims of animals altogether. I wish to show that even if this charge were not open to other disproof, no people can be called indifferent to those claims which believes in a Nature Peace.
Traces of such a belief spread from the Mediterranean to the Pacific, from the Equator to the Pole. But the Peace is not always complete; there are reservations. In the glowing prediction of a Peace in Nature in the Atharva-Veda, vultures and jackals are excluded. Mazdeans would exclude the “bad” animals. The Hebrew Scriptures, on the other hand, declare that all species are good in the sight of their Maker. Every beast enjoyed perfect content according to the original scheme of the Creator. But man fell, and all creation was involved in the consequences of his fall.
I remember seeing at the Hague an impressive painting by a little-known Italian artist6 which represents Adam about to take the apple from Eve while at their feet a tiger tenderly licks the wool of a lamb. Adam’s face shows that he is yielding—yielding for no better reason than that he cannot say “No”—to the beautiful woman at his side; and there, unconscious and happy, lie the innocent victims of his act: love to be turned to wrath, peace to war. The Nature Peace has been painted a hundred times, but never with such tragic significance.
The Miltonic Adam sees in the mute signs of Nature the forerunners of further change:—
“The bird of Jove, stooped from his airy tour,
Two birds of gayest plume before him drove;
Down from a hill the beast that reigns in woods,
First hunter then, pursued a gentle brace,
Goodliest of all the forest, hart and hind.”
In an uncanonical version of Genesis which was translated from an Armenian manuscript preserved at Venice, by my dear and sadly missed friend, Padre Giacomo Issaverdens, a still more dramatic description is given of the manner in which the Peace ended. When Adam and Eve were driven from the Garden of Eden they met a lion, which attacked Adam. “Why,” asked Adam, “do you attack me when God ordered you and all the animals to obey me?” “You disobeyed God,” replied the lion, “and we are no longer bound to obey you.” Saying which, the noble beast walked away without harming Adam. But war was declared.
War was declared, and yet the scheme of the Creator could not be for ever defeated. Man who had erred might hope—and how much more must there be hope for those creatures that had done no harm.
When the Prophets spoke of a Peace in Nature in connexion with that readjustment of the eternal scales which was meant by the coming of the Messiah, it cannot be doubted that they spoke of what was already a widely accepted tradition. But without their help we should have known nothing of it and we are grateful to them. Of all the radiant dreams with which man has comforted his heart, aching with realities, is there one to be compared with this? It is of the earth earthly, and that is the beauty of it. “The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion together; and a little child shall lead them; the cow and the bear shall feed; and their young ones lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.”
“For behold I create new heavens and a new earth. They shall not hurt nor destroy in all My holy mountain, saith the Lord.”
Is not this the best of promised lands, the kindest of Elysiums, which leaves none out in the cold of cruelty and hatred? The importunate questioner may inquire, How can this primal and ultimate happiness compensate for the intervening ages of pain? About this, it may be observed that in religious matters people ought not to want to know too much. This is true of the faithful and even of the unfaithful. Scientific researches in the great storehouse which contains the religions of the world are more aided by a certain reserve, a certain reverence, than by the insatiable curiosity of the scalpel. Religions sow abroad idées mères; they tell some things, others they leave untold. They take us up into an Alpine height whence we see the broad configuration of the country and lose sight of the woods and the tortuous ravines among which we so often missed the track. Now, from the Alpine height of faith, the idea of an original and final Nature Peace makes the intervening discord seem of no account—a false note between two harmonies.
The Nature Peace as the emblem of perfect moral beauty became nearly the first Christian idea carried out in art. I remarked a rude but striking instance of it on one of the funereal monuments which have been found lately at Carthage, belonging to a date when Christian and pagan commemorated their dead in the same manner, the former generally only adding some slight symbolical indication of his faith. In this stele Christ, carrying the lamb across His shoulders, is attended by a panther and a lion. All such primitive attempts to represent a Nature Peace are chiefly interesting (and from this point of view their interest is great) from the fact that in child-like, stammering efforts they reveal the intrinsic idiosyncrasy of Christian thought after the Church had parted from the realities of proximity with its Founder, and had not reached the realities of a body corporate striving for supremacy. Christ the Divine Effluence was the faith which made men willing to face the lions.
Doubtless many of those martyrs clung to the sublime conception of a final Peace, the complement of the first. That this was accepted as no allegory by the later spiritualised Jews, and especially by the Pharisees, seems to be a well-established fact. It is difficult to interpret in any other way the solemn statement of St. Paul, that the “whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now,” waiting for redemption; or the beatific vision of Josephus: “The whole Creation also will lift up a perpetual hymn... and shall praise Him that made them together with the angels and spirits and men, now freed from all bondage.” Homines et jumenta salvabis Domine.
II
What was the view taken of animals by the Jewish people, apart from the fundamental ideas implied by a primordial Peace in Nature?
It was the habit of Hebrew writers to leave a good deal to the imagination; in general, they only cared to throw as much light on hidden subjects as was needful to regulate conduct. They gave precepts rather than speculations. There remain obscure points in their conception of animals, but we know how they did not conceive them: they did not look upon them as “things”; they did not feel towards them as towards automata.
After the Deluge, there was established “the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is upon the earth.” Evidently, you cannot make a covenant with “things.”
That the Jews supposed the intelligence of animals to be not extremely different from the intelligence of man is to be deduced from the story of Balaam, for it is said that God opened the mouth—not the mind—of the ass. The same story illustrates the ancient belief that animals see apparitions which are concealed from the eyes of man. The great interest to us, however, of the Scriptural narrative is its significance as a lesson in humanity. When the Lord opened the mouth of the ass, what did the ass say? She asks her master why he had smitten her three times? Balaam answers, with a frankness which, at least, does him credit, because he was enraged with the ass for turning aside and not minding him, and he adds (still enraged, and, strange to say, nowise surprised at the animal’s power of speech) that he only wishes he had a sword in his hand, as he would then kill her outright. How like this is to the voice of modern brutality! The ass, continuing the conversation, rejoins in words which it would be a shame to disfigure by putting them into the idiom of the twentieth century: “Am I not thine ass upon which thou hast ridden ever since I was thine unto this day? Was I ever wont to do so unto thee?” Balaam, who has the merit, as I have noticed, of being candid, replies, “No, you never were.” Then, for the first time, the Prophet sees the angel standing in the path with a drawn sword in his hand—an awe-inspiring vision! And what are the angel’s first words to the terrified prophet who lies prostrate on his face? They are a reproof for his inhumanity. “Wherefore hast thou smitten thine ass these three times?” Then the angel tells how the poor beast he has used thus has saved her master from certain death, for had she not turned from him, he would have slain Balaam and saved her alive. “And Balaam said unto the angel of the Lord, I have sinned.”
Balaam was not a Jew; but the nationality of the personages in the Bible and the origin or authorship of its several parts are not questions which affect the present inquiry. The point of importance is, that the Jews believed these Scriptures to contain Divine truth.
With regard to animals having the gift of language, it appears from a remark made by Josephus that the Jews thought that all animals spoke before the Fall. In Christian folk-lore there is a superstition that animals can speak during the Christmas night: an obvious reference to their return to an unfallen state.
Solomon declares that the righteous man “regardeth the life of his beast”; a saying which is often misquoted, “merciful” being substituted for “righteous,” by which the proverb loses half its force. The Hebrew Scriptures contain two definite injunctions of humanity to animals. One is the command not to plough with the ox and the ass yoked together—in Palestine I have seen even the ass and the camel yoked together; their unequal steps cause inconvenience to both yoke-fellows and especially to the weakest. The other is the prohibition to muzzle the ox which treads out the corn: a simple humanitarian rule which it is truly surprising how any one, even after an early education in casuistry, could have interpreted as a metaphor. There are three other commands of great interest because they show how important it was thought to preserve even the mind of man from growing callous. One is the order not to kill a cow or she-goat or ewe and her young both on the same day. The second is the analogous order not to seethe the kid in its mother’s milk. The third refers to bird-nesting: if by chance you find a bird’s nest on a tree or on the ground and the mother bird is sitting on the eggs or on the fledglings, you are on no account to capture her when you take the eggs or the young birds (one would like bird-nesting to have been forbidden altogether, but I fear that the human boy in Syria had too much of the old Adam in him for any such law to have proved effectual!). Let the mother go, says the sacred writer, and if you must take something, take only the young ones. This command concludes in a very solemn way, for it ends with the promise (for what may seem a little act of unimportant sentiment) of the blessing promised to man for honouring his own father and mother—that it will be well with him and that his days will be long in the land.
In the law relative to the observance of the Seventh Day, not only is no point insisted on more strongly than the repose of the animals of labour, but in one of the oldest versions of the fourth commandment the repose of animals is spoken of as if it were the chief object of the Sabbath: “Six days shalt thou do thy work, and on the seventh day thou shalt rest: that thine ox and thine ass may rest” (Exodus xxiii. 12). Moreover, it is expressly stated of the Sabbath of the Lord, the seventh year when no work was to be done, that all which the land produces of itself is to be left to the enjoyment of the beasts that are in the land. The dominant idea was to give animals a chance—to leave something for them—to afford them some shelter, as in the creation of bird-sanctuaries in the temples.
In promises of love and protection to man, to the Chosen People, animals are almost always included. “The heavens shall tremble: the sun and moon shall be dark, and the stars shall withdraw their shining” (Joel ii. 10). “Be not afraid, ye beasts of the field: for the pastures of the wilderness do spring, for the tree beareth her fruit, the fig-tree and the vine do yield their strength. Be glad, ye children of Zion, and rejoice in the Lord your God” (Joel ii. 22, 23).
The wisdom of animals is continually praised. “Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways and be wise: which having no guide, overseer, or ruler, provideth her meat in the summer, and gathereth her food in the harvest.” So said the wisest of the Jews. I am tempted to quote here a passage from the writings of Giordano Bruno: “With what understanding the ant gnaws her grain of wheat lest it should sprout in her underground habitation. The fool says this is instinct, but we say it is a species of understanding.” If Solomon did not make the same reflection, it was only because that wonderful word “instinct” had not yet been invented.
We have seen that the Jews supposed animals to be given to men for use not for abuse, and the whole of Scripture tends to the conclusion that the Creator—who had called good all the creatures of His hand—regarded none as unworthy of His providence. This view is plainly endorsed by the saying of Christ that not a sparrow falls to the ground without the will of the Father (or “not one of them is forgotten in the sight of God”), and by the saying of Mohammed, who likewise believed himself the continuer of Jewish tradition: “There is no beast that walks upon the earth but its provision is from God.”
But there is something more. Every one knows that the Jews were allowed to kill and eat animals. The Jewish religion makes studiously few demands on human nature. “The ways of the Lord were pleasant ways.” Since men craved for meat or, in Biblical language, since they lusted after flesh, they were at liberty to eat those animals which, in an Eastern climate, could be eaten without danger to health. But on one condition: the body they might devour—what was the body? It was earth. The soul they might not touch. The mysterious thing called life must be rendered up to the Giver of it—to God. The man who did not do this, when he killed a lamb, was a murderer. “The blood shall be imputed to him; he hath shed blood, and that man shall be cut off from among his people.”
The inclination must be resisted to dispose of this mysterious ordinance as a mere sanitary measure. It was a sanitary measure, but it was much besides. The Jews believed that every animal had a soul, a spirit, which was beyond human jurisdiction, with which they had no right to tamper. When we ask, however, what this soul, this spirit, was, we find ourselves groping in the dark. Was it material, as the soul was thought to be by the Egyptians and by the earliest doctors of the Christian Church? Was it an immaterial, impersonal, Divine essence? Was its identity permanent, or temporary? We can give no decisive answer; but we may assume with considerable certainty that life, spirit, whatever it was, appeared at least to the majority of the Jews to possess one nature, whether in men or in animals. When a Jew denied the immortality of the soul, he denied it both for man and for beast. “I said in my heart,” wrote the author of Ecclesiastes, “concerning the estate of the sons of men that God might manifest them, and that they might see that they themselves are beasts. For that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts; even one thing befalleth them; as the one dieth so the other dieth; yea, they have all one breath; so that a man hath no pre-eminence above a beast.”
The mist which surrounds the Hebrew idea of the soul may proceed from the fact that they did not know themselves what they meant by it, or from the fact that they once knew what they meant by it so well as to render elucidation superfluous. If the teraphim represented the Lares or family dead, then the archaic Jewish idea of the soul was simple and definite. It is possible that in all later times two diametrically opposed opinions existed contemporaneously, as was the case with the Pharisees and Sadducees. The Jewish people did not feel the pressing need to dogmatise about the soul that other peoples have felt; they had one living soul which was immortal, and its name was Israel!
Still, through all ages, from the earliest times till now, the Jews have continued to hold sacred “the blood which is the life.”
In Hindu religious books, where similar ordinances are enforced, there are hints of a suspicion which, as I have said elsewhere, could not have been absent from the minds of Hebrew legislators—the haunting suspicion of a possible mixing-up of personality. Here we tread on the skirts of magic: a subject which belongs to starless nights.
We come back into the light of day when we glance at the relations which, according to Jewish tradition, existed between animals and their Creator. We see a beautiful interchange of gratitude on the one side and watchful care on the other. As the ass of Balaam recognised the angel, so do all animals—except man—at all times recognise their God. “But ask now the beasts and they shall teach thee; and the fowls of the air, and they shall tell thee.... Who knoweth not of all these that the hand of the Lord hath wrought this? In whose hand is the soul of every living thing, and the breath of all mankind.”
I will only add to these words of Job a few verses taken here and there from the Psalms, which form a true anthem of our fellow-creatures of the earth and air:—
“Beasts and all cattle, creeping things and flying fowl, let them praise the name of the Lord.
He giveth to the beast his food and to the young ravens which cry.
He sendeth the springs into the valleys which run among the hills;
They give drink to every beast of the field, the wild asses quench their thirst.
By them shall the fowls of heaven have their habitation which sing among the branches:
The trees of the Lord are full of sap, the cedars of Lebanon which He hath planted,
Where the birds make their nests; as for the stork, the fir-trees are her house.
The great hills are a refuge for the wild goats and the rocks for the conies.
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.
... Yea, the sparrow hath found an house, and the swallow a nest for herself where she may lay her young.
Even thine altars, O Lord of Hosts, my King and my God!”
Notes
6. Cignani. A singular sixteenth-century “Nature War” may be observed in a graffito on the pavement of the Chapel of St. Catherine in the church of St. Domenico, at Siena. A nude youth, resembling Orpheus, sits on a rock in a leafy grove, in the midst of various animals; with a disturbed air he looks into a mirror at the back of which is an eye, a leopard shows his teeth at him, while a vulture screams at a monkey, and another bird snatches a surprised rabbit or squirrel; the other creatures, unicorn, wolf, eagle, display signs of uneasiness. Endeavours to read this fable have not proved satisfactory.