The Wisdom of Animals: Creatureliness in Early Modern French Spirituality

Chapter One: Sixteenth-Century Animal Avatars in Montaigne and His Contemporaries

15 c h a p t e r o n e sIXteentH-CentURY AnIMAl AVAtARs In MontAIGne And HIs ConteMPoRARIes When I play with my cat, who can say whether she is playing with me, or whether I am playing with her? —Michel de Montaigne, “Apology for Raimond Sebond” No, no, my cat that looks at me in my bedroom or in the bathroom, this cat . . . does not appear here as representative, or ambassador, carrying the immense symbolic responsibility with which our culture has always charged the feline race. . . . If I say, “It is a real cat” that sees me naked, it is in order to mark its unsubstitutable singularity. . . . It comes to me as this irreplaceable living being that one day enters my space, enters this place where it can encounter me, see me, even see me naked. Nothing can ever take away from me the certainty that what we have here is an existence that refuses to be conceptualized. —Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am The Wisdom of Solomon and the “Science” of a Swallow: Montaigne on Animals Montaigne’s famous interaction with his cat provides the reader with a ludic spectacle, as well as giving Montaigne himself a philosophical framework from which to approach the nature of animality and the twinned questions of animal consciousness and language. The micronarrative relies on the sense of sight but also uses imagination coupled with logical deduction to interrogate the issue. Further , the notion of mirror image or specularity, the doubling of the cat’s curiosity about the man with the man’s question about the cat, underscores the relationship—even the equality—between the two. Creatureliness seems no impediment to this thoughtful feline. 16 t H e w I s d o M o F A n I M A l s Montaigne was willing to . . . take seriously the claims of ancient philosophers and natural historians that animals could talk. . . . According to Montaigne, animals . . . communicate with humans by their calls and gestures. They use sign language. . . . Their behavior displays complex reasoning; they weep, like humans. The most important emotions and feelings in humans and animals cannot be adequately expressed in words. . . . Montaigne’s phenomenology of speech includes all of these kinds of signifying . It is an activity shared by humans and animals: “Qu’est-ce que parler?” (Senior 1997, 67) But creatureliness seems to have posed an impediment to Montaigne, in that he avoids asking what the cat’s response might mean. At least he does not anthropomorphize. Yet he does not consider an alternative mode of interaction either, one that would “[risk] knowing something more about cats and how to look back.”1 Montaigne’s use of animals in the Essais, and particularly his use of them in the “Apologie pour Raimond Sebond,” sets the stage for the two differing strands of animal application and interpretation in the seventeenth century that are examined later in this book, both theological: the Protestant (epitomized by the Calvinist poet Guillaume Salluste Du Bartas) and the Catholic (represented by St. Fran- çois de Sales and the Jesuit Guillaume-Hyacinthe Bougeant). While Montaigne’s references are not always theological, some are, and these will be picked up and developed divergently by later writers who build on his philosophical insights in more specifically spiritual ways. Cranes and gnats, swallows and cats, migrating birds and swallows in a barnyard, horses, lapdogs and hunting dogs, bees and silkworms , maggots—animal life and insect species throng and swarm and entwine their forms around and through Montaigne’s Essais. Sometimes they feature in proverblike utterances, encapsulations of “received wisdom”; at other times they appear to embody Montaigne himself, or the workings of his intellect—how he pillages other authorities and scavenges them for quotations, for example. The word comme (like, as) predominates, as Montaigne draws equations of similarity and lines of difference between animals and humans; A n I M A l A V A t A R s I n M o n t A I G n e A n d H I s C o n t e M P o R A R I e s 17 comparison brings the animal kingdom into relation with the human world of knowing. In portraying animals, Montaigne invariably represents their instinctual ability to know, as contrasted with the ultimately flawed and inadequate human capacity to attain full understanding. Montaigne ’s self-chosen devise, the...