ANIMALE

ANIMAL. —

I. IN NON-CHRISTIAN RELIGIONS

In all natural religions, whether primitive or advanced, certain animal species or particular individuals of a species have been accorded worship. The origin of such veneration lies in the fact that the animal presents specific prerogatives of strength, skill, sure instinct, and keenness of the senses of sight, hearing, and smell, as well as infallible orientation: all of which manifest to the primitive mind the presence of a particular power or force (mana) that renders it worthy of veneration or inspires terror.

The animals to which man has rendered worship are those with which he has come into contact either through hunting or through domestic breeding. The species thus vary according to geographical regions or stages of civilization. Thus the bear, venerated and offered in sacrifice since prehistoric Quaternary times, still receives special demonstrations of respect from the populations of the polar or subpolar Asian circle; the ox has been pre-eminently sacred in ancient Persia and remains so in modern industrious India; ox, pig, and sheep, the animals dear to the farmer, have always been chosen by the Romans and Greeks as great sacrificial victims; the same may be said of the horse among the Indo-Germanic peoples, whether in Vedic India where it is the solemn victim of the animal sacrifice offered by the king, or in ancient Northern Europe, among the Slavs and Germans, where it also had divinatory functions.

The divinatory function revealing special sacred prerogatives is attributed in a special way to birds in the religion of the Umbrians (Iguvine Tables) and in the Roman college of augurs. The woodpecker and the raven are birds par excellence of divination.

It is hardly necessary to recall the extent to which the cult of animals (crocodile, jackal, hippopotamus, ibis, cat, the bull Apis) flourished in ancient Egypt.

The cult of animals is either directed toward a single animal, which is considered the protector of a given individual (v. NAGUALISM); or it refers to an entire species regarded as the mythical ancestor and protector of a whole group, in which case it is a matter of totemism (v.).

With the evolution of cultural life, and thus of the religious conception of the group, the sacred animal ends up by declining to the status of a mere attribute of a god with which it is particularly associated: as the eagle with Jupiter, the dove with Venus, the serpent with Aesculapius; and it is chosen as the preferred animal for sacrifice: as the pig for Demeter, the fat lamb for the goddess Dia, the goat for Dionysus, etc.

The more primitive man is, the more inclined he is to project into the animal qualities and passions of man and to consider not absurd the transition from human form.

to that bestial and vice versa: this explains the enormous mass of myths whose protagonist or at least associate is an a. Some of these myths, in their mysterious frescoes, are many of salvation inasmuch as they bring the individual into relation with the divinity.

In the higher religions the a., now vanished from cult and myth, may remain as an ornamental motif or as a symbol of moral ideas or of sacred persons or things.
II. A. ACCORDING TO NATURAL AND REVEALED ETHICS

1. Animals cannot be subjects of any rights. A right, in fact, is the free will to perform or omit an act, to demand or forbid another’s act, without anyone being able to reasonably oppose II. Animals possess none of this, for they have neither the intelligence of the universal good nor the free will to strive toward it in various ways, but only a determined instinct toward such-and-such acts and no others. Animals may be likened to machines constructed by divine creation with their own fixed movements; yet, unlike material machines, they are capable of knowing the object toward which they tend and of tending toward it by an inborn impulse. “Brute animals have no rational life by which they may guide and move themselves, but are always impelled by another natural impulse; and this is a sign that they are naturally servants and made for the use of others” (Sum. theol., 2a-2ae, q. 64, a. 2, ad 2m).

Such, indeed, is the disposition established by the Creator. God Himself, from the beginning, assigned to Adam, and later to Noah, the herbs, the fruits, and the animals as sustenance for them and their descendants (Gen. 1:29–30; 2:2–3). Moreover, He gave man full and absolute dominion over nature: “O God, who hast created all things by Thy word, and by Thy wisdom hast formed man so that he may rule over the creatures Thou hast made...” (Wis. 9:1–2). “Thou hast made him a little less than the angels; Thou hast crowned him with glory and honour, and hast set him over the works of Thy hands. Thou hast subjected all things under his feet, all sheep and oxen, yea, and the beasts of the field, the birds of the air, and the fishes of the sea” (Ps. 8:6–9). Science, for its part, daily discovers the countless services that animals can render or instinctively render to humanity, and, joined to industry, supplies man’s innumerable needs.

2. But if animals cannot be said to possess rights with respect to man, one may yet speak of man’s obligations toward them. Man, that is, must use animals, as he uses every other creature, in accordance with the Creator’s intention in ordaining them to human service. This obligation does not bind him to the animal as a duty corresponding to a right of the brute, but binds him to Him Who is the sovereign Lord of all and disposes of all things with full right. Now the proper use of dominion over animals may be reduced to this simple formula: “It is lawful to use them according to their natural aptitude for human necessities and conveniences. Abuse therefore remains forbidden: for example, to destroy them or cause them suffering out of vain caprice, or to torture them for mere pleasure.” This is all the more so because animals are endowed with sensibility and therefore suffer pain; moreover, the act—and worse still, the habit—of inflicting harm on animals tends, by a psychological law easily transferred into practice, to corrupt the soul and extend its ill effects to one’s neighbor.

Therefore, we find in the Bible references to gentleness even toward animals. “You shall not muzzle an ox when it treads out the grain” (Deut. 25:4), so that, having food before its eyes, it may not suffer hunger twice over. “For six days you shall do your work, but on the seventh day you shall rest; that your ox and your ass may have rest” (Ex. 23:12). “A righteous man has regard for the life of his beast, but the mercy of the wicked is cruel” (Prov. 12:10).

3. Consequently, societies for the protection of animals are to be approved insofar as they aim to remove cruelty toward beasts; not insofar as they sometimes base their action on erroneous principles (attributing rights to them, or fostering toward them a mawkish and sentimental affection that is then easily denied to one’s neighbor, or positing a duty of charity that, in the Christian sense, cannot exist).

4. Likewise, vivisection (that is, performing painful experiments on living animals) is licit whenever it aims at scientific purposes: increasing the store of knowledge, discovering the laws and functions of organs, deriving useful methods and norms that may be applied in the treatment of men. It is likewise licit to inject into animals even deadly microbes in order to observe the course of disease and study remedies. Pain beyond what is necessary, however, must be avoided. All this is because animals are means given to man for his service.

5. It is sometimes alleged, in excuse of a certain morbid attachment to animals or of a veiled exaggeration in their protection, that certain saints provide examples, for instance, the compliments of St. Francis of Assisi to Brother Lamb and Brother Wolf; the compassion of St. Francis of Paola for beasts that were slain; the canaries to which St. Joseph Cottolengo gave, besides their usual feed, biscuits and lumps of sugar, so that they might sing the praises of the Madonna more often before whose image their cage hung. Even the example of the Lord is adduced, who glories in the young ravens and the beasts of the forest and “the lion’s whelp that seeks its food from God” (Ps. 103:21).

These last words, by which the Lord demonstrates His affectionate providence that extends to all His creatures, reveal only the constancy of the divine act of preserving them after having created them. Moreover, they serve to stimulate and maintain in men confidence in Him, who, as He is provident even toward beasts, will show Himself more provident, benign, and generous toward creatures made in His image (cf. the expressive words of Jesus in Mt. 6:24-34). The saints, then, with these and other examples of gentleness and amiability, demonstrated only how they saw in every creature a work of God, a symbol that recalled and elevated them to Him or reminded them of some particular virtue (the dove, the lamb, the pelican); yet one never finds that they exceeded into any exaggeration of sentimental love, nor neglected the sick, the poor, the outcast, reserving their affections and cares for the aforementioned; much less did they leave them as heirs to all or part of their goods, an extreme that would be reprehensible and unjust toward neighbor and society.

Ilma, G. Franco, *I diritti della n.* in *La Civiltà Cattolica*, 1 (1904), pp. 403-14; 682-95; O. Schilling, *Lehrbuch der Moraltheologie*, II. Munich 1928, pp. 21-22; G. Donat, *Ethica Generalis*, 8th ed., Innsbruck 1941, pp. 273-75; H. Davis, *Moral and Pastoral Theology*, II, London 1946, pp. 258-59. Celestino Testore.

II. A. IN CHRISTIAN SYMBOLISM. - As regards Christian art, it is above all the authority of Holy Scripture that determines the symbolic and allegorical value of individual animals. Thus, for example, the lamb could replace, as happened from the end of the 4th century in the apsidal mosaics of Paleo-Christian basilicas or in sarcophagi of late Roman age, the image of the Savior, pointed out by St. John the Baptist as “the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.” Thus the dove became, once and for all, the symbol of the Holy Spirit, which in the New Testament appears solely with that meaning; moreover, the doves, thanks to the simplicity attributed to them by the comparison used by the Savior (Mt. 10:16), at the time of the catacombs became symbols of Christian souls, as in the baptistery of Al

ANIMAL. - Sheep

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symbolic. Pulvino of a capital in the basilica of St. Vitalis (6th cent.) - Ravenna.

The symbolism of animals in Christian art and exegesis is rich and varied. In the early centuries, the lamb was the most common symbol of Christ, especially in the catacombs of Rome (e.g., in the catacomb of St. Callistus and later in St. Clement’s). Patristic exegesis of the Apocalypse (4:7) established the lion, the ox, and the eagle as symbols of the Evangelists. In other cases, Sacred Scripture itself confirms the inherent ambivalence of all “symbolic forms”: the same lion, which because of its strength and majestic beauty symbolizes Christ—called in Revelation 5:5 “the lion of the tribe of Judah”—is also used in the simile of the devil because of its dangerous ferocity (1 Pt. 5:8).

While the king of animals, in the sense of the first conception, appears in a miniature of the Bible of Charles the Bald and in a stained-glass window of St-Denis (12th cent.), the second meaning inspired, through illustrations of Psalm 27:22 (“Deliver me from the lion’s mouth”), numerous sculptures on the Romanesque portals of France, Germany, and Italy (Piacenza, Ferrara, Trent). Moreover, since the fantastic natural history of the Physiologus (2nd cent.) tells that the lion sleeps for three days and three nights and some medieval theologians add that after the third night it revives its cubs by roaring, its image (stained-glass windows of Lyon and Bourges, 13th cent.; Strasbourg frieze, 14th cent.) enters even into typology as a prefiguration of Christ’s resurrection.

A similar plurality of opposing meanings applies to the bear: depictions of a struggle between a man and a bear—described in Sacred Scripture as a fierce and ravenous beast and thus regarded as representing evil—signify our continual struggle against the snares of the devil (sculptures at Schöngrabern, Andlau, Toulouse, 13th cent.). On the other hand, the image of the she-bear shaping the forms of newborns with its tongue, found in the Physiologus, was included among the testimonies of the miraculous birth of Jesus collected by Francesco de Retz (d. 1421) in his Defensorium
ANIMAL – Peacocks on a pluteus of the iconostasis (11th century). Torcello, Cathedral.

43. – ENCYCLOPEDIA CATHOLICA. – I.