The Wisdom of Animals: Creatureliness in Early Modern French Spirituality

Chapter Two: Job’s Horse and Other Creatures

39 c h a p t e r T w o JoB’s HoRse And otHeR CReAtURes Animal Analogies in du Bartas’s Protestant Poetics Hast thou given the horse strength? Hast thou clothed its neck with thunder? He paweth in the valley and rejoiceth in his strength. He mocketh at fear, and is not affrighted. — Job 39:19–25 Subdue it. He [God] confirms what he had said before respecting dominion. Man had already been created with this condition, that he should subject the earth to himself; but now, at length, he is put in possession of his right, when he hears what has been given to him by the Lord. —John Calvin, First Commentaries on the Book of Moses Called Genesis “I Have You in My Eye” In the 1980s feature film The Madness of King George, a physician and former man of the cloth is able temporarily to arrest the slow and frightening descent into madness of England’s monarch by reassuring him that he holds him firmly in his gaze: “I have you in my eye, Sir; I have you in my eye.” This statement, somewhat menacingsounding but nonetheless effective in stabilizing the troubled monarch emotionally and spiritually, however briefly, not only makes good sense psychologically but also is a faithful rendering of Protestant theology . God is the all-knowing eye, a motif that was taken up in the Enlightenment in a disembodied ocular image conveying the sense of God’s—and, eventually, of humanity’s—reason as all-knowing. 40 t H e w I s d o M o F A n I M A l s For the Calvinist Guillaume Salluste Du Bartas, the ultimate referent of his encyclopedic poem La sepmaine is the human mind, stretching and exulting in the extent of his access to, and ability to acquire, knowledge, as well as his ability to embrace (and, conceivably , to use and abuse) the power that knowledge provides. Yet Du Bartas’s conclusion remains conservative: he exalts humanity at the expense of animals. The animals he describes are possessed and palmed like curios, turned over and scrutinized like treasures, relegated to the status of what is known, labeled, and thereby limited. The actor is man; animals passively receive the effect of his dominating gaze. The text does not allow them an autonomous existence (in contrast to the texts of St. François de Sales and le père Bougeant, explored in chapters 3 and 4). Recently animal rights theorists have turned their attention to the phenomenon of zoo keeping. Once the purview of monarchs, a showcase of exotica and a pleasure palace, later a popular form of amusement, zoos have been described by Ralph Acampora (2008, 502) as tantamount to a form of pornography. In desubjectivizing the animal, rendering it an object, erasing its wildness, its freedom, and its essence, zoos perform a form of abusive ocular domination, what Acampora has deemed “visive violence” (2008, 502), all for the purposes of humanity’s titillation or, at the very least, so that humanity may possess, catalogue, and contain all known forms of life. The gaze both glides over and glancingly grazes, placing the animal in visual subordination. It is striking how often another gaze, that of the eye of God, reappears in Du Bartas’s La sepmaine. And while I certainly would not want to equate that divine gaze with the gaze of pornography, it is hard not to see the similarity in terms of domination through the eye, a panoramic possessing and a scoping out of all creation held in visual thrall. Du Bartas himself admits that his subject sometimes threatens to escape him in its immensity and diversity. His encyclopedic goal is penal: to contain, to name, to label, and to confine. And his project is, as he himself acknowledges, dauntingly vast in scope: “Others think that I have industriously sought out various digressions and other distractions in order to make a vain show of my ability. But I am putting them on notice that henceforth I am J o B ’ s H o R s e A n d o t H e R C R e A t U R e s 41 entering into a great sea of stories that I cannot avoid, even if I try to confine my speech and hinder my style, making less than four really large books.”1 The “grande mer...