Animal

ANIMAL. - 1. IN NON-CHRISTIAN RELIGIONS. - In all natural religions, whether primitive or evolved, a cult has been paid to certain animal species or to particular individuals of a species. The origin of this veneration lies in the fact that the animal presents special prerogatives of strength, dexterity, sure instinct, acuity in the senses of sight, hearing, smell, and infallible orientation: all data that manifest in it, in the eyes of primitive man, the presence of a particular power or force (mana) that makes it worthy of veneration or that inspires terror.

The animals to which man has rendered a cult are those with which he has found himself in contact, whether for reasons of hunting or for reasons of domestic breeding. The species therefore vary according to geographical regions or stages of civilization. Thus the bear, venerated and offered in sacrifice since the prehistoric Quaternary era, still receives special demonstrations of respect from the populations of the Asiatic polar or subpolar circle; the ox was par excellence sacred in ancient Persia and is so in modern Hindu India; ox, pig and sheep, the animals dear to the farmer, have always been chosen among the Romans and Greeks as welcome sacrificial victims; the same may be said of the horse among the Indo-Germanic peoples, both in Vedic India where it is the solemn victim of the animal sacrifice offered by the king, and in ancient, Slavic and Germanic northern Europe, where it also had divinatory functions.

The divinatory function revealing special sacral prerogatives is attributed among the peoples of ancient Italy in a special way to birds in the religion of the Umbrians (Tablets of Gubbio) and in the Roman priestly college of the augurs. Birds par excellence divinatory are the woodpecker and the crow.

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

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

With the evolution of cultural life, and therefore of the religious ideation of the group, the sacred animal ends up declining to a simple attribute of a god with which it is particularly associated: like the eagle with Jupiter, the dove with Aphrodite, the serpent with Aesculapius; and it is chosen as the preferred animal for sacrifice: like the pig to Demeter, the fat ewe-lamb to the goddess Dia, the goat to Dionysus, etc.

Man, the more primitive he is, the more disposed he is to project human qualities and passions into the animal and to consider not absurd the passage from human form to the bestial form and vice versa: this explains the enormous mass of myths that have as protagonist or at least as associate an animal. Some of these myths in the mystery cults rise to myths of salvation insofar as through the sacrificed animal one believes one brings about the sacred union of the individual with the divinity.

In the higher religions the animal, having by now disappeared from worship and myth, can remain as an ornamental motif or as a symbol of moral ideas or of persons or sacred things.

Nicola Turchi
II. ANIMAL ACCORDING TO NATURAL AND REVEALED ETHICS.
- 1. Animals cannot be subjects of any right. A right, in fact, is the free will to perform or omit an act, to demand or forbid an act of another, without anyone being able reasonably to oppose it. Nothing of this is found in animals, which have neither the intelligence of the universal good nor the free will to aspire to it in various ways, but only instinct determined to such and such acts and no further. Animals can be compared to machines constructed by divine creation with their own determined movements; capable, however, unlike material machines, of knowing the object toward which they tend and of tending toward it by an intrinsic power. « Brute animals do not have rational life, by means of which to guide and move themselves; but they are always moved as 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 2ii).

Such is, in fact, the disposition of the Creator. God himself assigned from the beginning to Adam, and then later to Noah, the herbs, the fruits and the animals as sustenance for them and for their descendants (Gen. 1, 29-30; 9, 2-3). Not only that; but he gave man full and absolute dominion over nature: « God, who have created all things by your word and by your wisdom have formed man so that he may dominate over the creatures made by you... » (Wis. 9, 1-2). « You have placed (man) at the head of the works of your hands; you have put all things under his feet: sheep and oxen, and the beasts of the field as well, the birds of the sky and the fish of the sea » (Ps. 8, 7-9). Science, for its part, discovers every day very numerous services that animals can render or do render instinctively to humanity, and, joined to industry, provides man in his innumerable needs.

2. But if one cannot speak of a right of animals with respect to man, one can nevertheless speak of the obligations of man toward them. Man, that is, must make use of animals, as of every other creature, according to the intention of the Creator in destining them to human service; this obligation does not bind him to the animal as a duty corresponding to a relative right of the brute, but binds him to Him who is sovereign lord of all and disposes of everything with full right. Now the right use of dominion over animals can be reduced to this simple formula: it is lawful to make use of them according to their natural aptitude for human needs and conveniences. Abuse therefore remains forbidden: for example, to destroy them or make them suffer for vain caprice, to torture them for mere delight. All the more so since they are endowed with sensibility and therefore suffer pain, and furthermore the act and, worse still, the habit of raging against animals incline the soul, by a psychological law easy to pass into action, to rage also against one's neighbor.

Therefore we find in the Bible hints of gentleness even toward animals. « You shall not muzzle the ox that treads out your harvest on the threshing floor » (Deut. 25, 4), so that, having the food before its eyes, it may not suffer hunger doubly. « For six days you shall work and on the seventh day you shall not work, so that your ox and your donkey may rest » (Ex. 23, 12). « The just man has care for the life of his beasts: but the bowels of the wicked are cruel » (Prov. 12, 10).

3. Consequently Societies for the protection of animals are to be approved insofar as they aim at removing cruelty toward beasts; not insofar as they sometimes found their action on erroneous principles (attributing rights to them; or fostering toward them a mawkish and sentimental love, which is then easily denied to one's neighbor, or claiming a duty of charity, which in the Christian sense cannot exist).

4. Likewise lawful is vivisection (that is, the performing of painful experiments on live animals) whenever it aims at scientific purposes: to increase the patrimony of culture, to discover the laws and functions of organs, to derive methods and norms useful to be applied eventually in the care of men. As likewise it remains lawful to inject into animals microbes even deadly ones in order to test their course and study their remedies. One must, however, avoid inflicting more pain than is necessary. All this because animals are means given to man for his service.

5. One sometimes customarily adduces, in excuse of a certain morbidity in attachment to animals or of a veiled exaggeration in protecting them, the example of certain saints, for example the compliments of St. Francis of Assisi for brother lamb and brother wolf; the compassion of St. Francis of Paola for slain beasts; the canaries, to which St. Joseph Cottolengo gave, beyond the usual birdseed, little biscuits and sugar cubes etc., so that they might often sing the praises of the Madonna, before whose image the cage hung. One adduces even the example of the Lord, who glories in feeding the chicks of the raven and the beasts of the forest and « the young lion that roaring asks God for its food » (Ps. 103, 21).

The answer is: these last words, with which the Lord demonstrates his affectionate providence, which extends over all his creatures, reveal only the constancy of the divine act of preserving them, after having created them. And they serve furthermore to stimulate and maintain in men confidence toward him, who, provident as he is even with the beasts, will show himself more provident and benign and generous with the 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 them and raised them up to him or recalled some determined virtue (the dove, the lamb, the pelican); but one never finds that they overstepped into any exaggeration of sentimental love, nor that they neglected the sick, the poor, the abandoned, reserving their affections and attentions for animals; much less that they left them heirs of all or part of their goods, an extreme reprehensible and unjust toward one's neighbor and society.

BIBL. G. Franco, I diritti degli a., in La Civiltà Cattolica, 1 (1904), pp. 403-14; 682-65; 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

III. ANIMAL IN CHRISTIAN SYMBOLISM

As far as Christian art is concerned, it is first of all the authority of Sacred Scripture that determines the symbolic and allegorical value of individual animals. Thus, for example, the lamb was able to replace, as happened from the end of the 4th century in the apse mosaics of the early Christian basilicas or in sarcophagi of the late Roman period, 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, who in the New Testament appears solely with this meaning; moreover, doves, thanks to the simplicity attested to them by the comparison used by the Savior (Mt 10:16), in the age of the catacombs became symbols of Christian souls, as in the baptistery of Albenga and later in S. Clemente in Rome. The lion, the ox and the eagle as symbols of the Evangelists go back to the patristic exegesis of the Apocalypse (4:7). In other cases Sacred Scripture itself confirms the inherent ambivalence of all "symbolic forms": the same lion that because of its strength and majestic beauty symbolizes Christ, called (Rev. 5:5) "the lion of the tribe of Judah," lends itself by its dangerous ferocity to the similitude of the devil (1 Pt. 5:8). While the king of animals, in the sense of the first conception, was introduced into a miniature of the Bible of Charles the Bald and into a stained-glass window of St-Denis (12th century), the second meaning inspired, through the illustrations of verse 22 of Psalm 27 ("save me from the jaws of the lion"), not a few sculptures in French, German and Italian Romanesque portals (Piacenza, Ferrara, Trento). Moreover, since the fantastic natural history of the Physiologus (2nd century) recounts that the lion sleeps three days and three nights and certain medieval theologians add that after the third night it revives its cubs by roaring, its image (stained-glass windows of Lyon and Bourges, 13th century; frieze of Strasbourg, 14th century) enters as a prefiguration of the resurrection of Christ even into typology. A similar plurality of opposite meanings holds for the bear: the depictions of a struggle between man and bear, described in Sacred Scripture as a fierce and ravenous beast and therefore considered a representative of evil, signify our continual struggle against the snares of the devil (sculptures of Schöngrabern, Andlau, Toulouse, 13th century); on the other hand the image of the she-bear that in the Physiologus shapes the form of its newborn cubs with its tongue was included among the testimonies of the miraculous birth of Jesus, collected by Francesco di Retz (d. 1421) in the Defensorium inviolatae virginis Mariae. From all this it follows without doubt that the fabulous animals, only exceptionally named and described in Sacred Scripture, were particularly suited to enriching Christian iconography, which relies, in order to depict them, not so much on the Physiologus itself as on the medieval vernacularizations, the so-called bestiaries, widely exploited by theological treatises. Thus, for example, the illustrators of the Psalter represent the wicked in the image of the asp that stops its ear (Ps. 57:5-6), to which is linked the christological prophecy "super aspidem et basiliscum ambulabis, conculcabis leonem et draconem," already depicted in the early Christian era; but in order to enter monumental sculpture with this figuration, they needed the explicit allegorical interpretation of an Honorius Augustodunensis (statue of Amiens, 13th century). The phoenix, a fabulous bird that rose again from its ashes, enjoyed extraordinary popularity; from the 6th century onward it appears in the mosaics of the Roman basilicas as a symbol of the resurrection of Christ. With the same ease the pelican, which tears open its breast to feed its brood with its own blood, presented itself as a symbol of Jesus: perhaps Giotto was the first to place it together with the Crucifix. Among the subjects preferred by the allegorical painters there is finally the unicorn, untamable unless fascinated by the proximity of a virgin. Already in the Eastern myth a symbol of chastity, in the late German Gothic it gave occasion for numerous representations: a hunter (that is, the archangel Gabriel) with four dogs (Truth, Justice, Mercy and Peace) pursues the unicorn, which takes refuge near the Virgin, seated in the enclosed garden.

Kurt Rathe