Aristotle’s Biology and Pastoral Ethics: John of Wales’s De Lingua and British Pastoral Writing on the Tongue

Lingua congruit in duo opera nature, in gustum scilicet et locucionem, sicut dicit philosophus libro 2 De anima, quorum quidem gustus neccesarium est ad esse, locucio autem est propter bene esse. Et sicut dicit philosophus libro 12 De animalibus, creatio lingue est ad gustandum et sermocinandum.¹

With these words John of Wales (d. 1285) launches his late thirteenth-century treatise on the tongue, De lingua, a massive collection of preaching materials extensively copied, even sometimes excerpted, in England for nearly two centuries.² The tongue, he continues, serves the body through taste and serves reason through speech, a corporeal instrument performing two officia; it both sustains life and makes teaching and learning possible, the end (finis) of speech in Augustinian semiotics.³ Therefore, the tongue serves both individual and communal life: taste exists for the sake of the self alone, John writes, speech for the sake of others.⁴ In these spheres of life the tongue, John insists, should operate normatively: his recurrent term officia conveys that the tongue not only has certain functions and performs certain services, but also has certain duties and obligations. These terse opening sentences, with their authoritative sententiae of Aristotle and Augustine, directly invite the questions that the first section of De lingua, and this essay, consider. How can observing the tongue itself, as a bodily organ, generate ethical principles governing both a sense (taste) and a mental act (speech), albeit a mental act embodied in sounds? How does its very physiology indicate its proper — that is, in John’s term, “natural” — functions and ends? Once humans arrive at this ethical knowledge, how can they enact it in their eating, drinking, and speaking in order both to live (for life itself can be at stake, as we shall see) and to live well, to flourish, as Aristotle observes that nature enables them to do? In this essay into British pastoral writing de lingua, considering these questions about this one bodily organ involves exploring, in a focused way, a larger question: In what ways do the functions of the body that humans share with other animals move them to reason ethically, to weigh how to use the body, and to discover how to hew to those uses instead of abusing their bodies?

As John’s references and language suggest, his ethics is rooted in Aristotelian science. Although he begins by referring to De anima, Aristotle’s treatise on perception, nutrition, and the other powers of the soul, he turns far more often throughout De lingua to the zoological works, the vast cataloging of the peculiarities and resemblances of different animal genera and species, right up to humans: the Historia animalium, De partibus animalium, De generatione animalium, De motu animalium, and De progressu animalium. The first three works were translated from Arabic into Latin around 1220 by Michael Scot, and they circulated under the comprehensive title De animalibus; all five were translated in 1260 by William of Moerbeke.⁵ Despite periodic ecclesiastical interdictions against the reading of Aristotle’s libri naturales at the University of Paris, De animalibus had been introduced into the programs of the Faculty of Arts there by 1255, as it was at Oxford by the fourteenth century.⁶ Aristotle wrote more about biology than about any other science. He labored to describe the parts of animals, their forms in matter, in order to classify animals and to explain their structural organization. Those parts, he observed, were driven by specific functions (tasting and speaking, in the case of the tongue). Ultimately, as R. J. Hankinson writes, Aristotle saw the relation of part to whole in animals’ structures as essentially teleological: “Animals have the parts they have in order to be able to perform the functions for which they are designed.”⁷ The processes that their parts carry out enable them to survive and to flourish.⁸

Theologians (and so pastoral writers) of the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries “had a strong interest in physiology,” as the science of vital functions in an animal...