The Wisdom of Animals: Creatureliness in Early Modern French Spirituality

Conclusion

125 ConClUsIon Faith in Fauna How do you know but ev’ry Bird that cuts the airy way Is an immense world of delight, clos’d by your senses five? —William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell The Naming of Cats is a difficult matter, It isn’t just one of your holiday games. —T. S. Eliot, “Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats” Every thing that lives is holy. —William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell Wise World Over a quarter century ago, the British historian Keith Thomas, acknowledged by many as the progenitor of work on animal rights, published Man and the Natural World: A History of the Modern Sensibility . This book documented the mentalité, from the late Middle Ages through the present day, that English men and women evinced toward animals, both wild and domestic. Drawing primarily on oral tradition, such as a wealth of proverbs and folk utterances having to do with the natural world, and also from literary works and religious treatises, Thomas showed that at least a suggestion of a more enlightened attitude had emerged over the centuries, one that considered animals to have rights to fair and considerate treatment equal to man’s own. These rights were predicated on a worldview initially arising in 126 t H e w I s d o M o F A n I M A l s the realm of more radical strains of religious belief that asserted the divinity of all creatures, human or not (Thomas 1983, 154). He cited, for example, the words of a bricklayer named Marshall, follower of the Familists, who asserted that it was “unlawful to kill any creature that had life, because it came from God” (Thomas 1983, 291). The Ranter Jacob Bauthumley maintained stoutly that “God is in all creatures, man and beast, fish and fowl, and every green thing” (Thomas 1983, 291). This sort of new understanding, predicated on a revision of theology , in turn led to the secular view that all aspects of the environment deserved protection and had inherent value (Thomas 1983, 301). Thomas acknowledged that his study bore a considerable indebtedness to continental thought, particularly to French philosophy and natural history and especially to the writings of Michel de Montaigne. However, Thomas admitted that a thorough exploration of those sources of thought lay beyond the scope of his endeavor (1983, 182). Such a full treatment had yet to be written at the time of the publication of Man and the Natural World. Admittedly, in many respects the changes in attitudes that Thomas hoped to discern have not always held up to critical investigation . As Donna Haraway has shown, given the extensive and usually unapologetically sadistic use of animals for biological experimentation , we may have regressed. And philosophers such as Jacques Derrida represent a puzzling and persistent failure to be fully attentive to animals in terms of a radical respect for their alterity. When Derrida’s cat gazes at him, Haraway suggests, Derrida could go beyond simply recognizing its alterity and actually respond to that gaze. He could practice a form of engagement with animals “that risked knowing something more about cats and how to look back” (1989, 20), as some ethologists have done, undertaking “the risky project of asking what this cat on this morning cared about, what these bodily postures and visual entanglements might mean and might invite, as well as reading what people who study cats have to say and delving into the developing knowledges of both cat-cat and cat-human semiotics” (1989, 22). It is, however, encouraging that recent perspectives in animal studies theory are deepening our understanding of biological continuism and undoing metaphysical separationism. C o n C l U s I o n 127 In this book I have framed the texts under examination as cultural productions demonstrating sensory experiences from the natural world, among them sight as theater or spectacle; play or ludic activity also as seen, perceived, and mirrored; and the performative visual aspect of body language, gestural speech, and even deaf-mute signing. The primary visual metaphor is that of “visive violence,” appropriate to the ideologies and theologies manifested in the texts’ discussion of species and interspecies relationships, as specere means “to look” or “to behold,” and “in logic ‘species’ refers to a mental impression or idea, strengthening the notion that “thinking and seeing are clones”—a mentality that at least some of...