I
... “About them frisking played
All beasts of the earth, since wild, and of all chase
In wood or wilderness, forest or den;
Sporting the lion ramped, and in his paw
Dandled the kid; bears, tigers, ounces, pards,
Gambolled before them; the unwieldy elephant,
To make them mirth, used all his might, and wreathed
His lithe proboscis.”
Paradise Lost, Book IV.
THE idea of a condition of existence in which all creatures are happy and at peace implies a protest against the most patent fact of life as we see it. Western civilisation inherited from the Roman Empire the hardness of heart towards animals of which the popularity of beast-fights in the Arena was the characteristic sign. It was, however, a Roman poet who first pointed out in philosophical language that the sufferings of animals stand written in the great indictment against Nature no less than the sufferings of men. Not only man is born to sorrow, said Lucretius; look at the cow whose calf bleeds before some lovely temple, while she wanders disconsolate over all the fields, lowing piteously, uncomforted by the image of other calves, because her own is not.
Eighteen hundred years later Schopenhauer said that by taking a very high standard it was possible to justify the sufferings of man but not those of animals. Darwin arrived at the same conclusion. “It has been imagined,” he remarks, “that the sufferings of man tend to his moral improvement, but the number of men in the world is nothing compared with the number of other sentient beings which suffer greatly without moral improvement.” To him, the man of the religious mind whom men lightly charged with irreligion, it was “an intolerable thought” that after long ages of toil all these sentient beings were doomed to complete annihilation.
Yes, and to the young conscience of mankind this was also an intolerable thought. And since it was intolerable the human conscience in the strength of its youth shook it off, cast it aside, awoke from it as we awake from a nightmare. Religion has been regarded too exclusively as a submission to Nature. At times it is a revolt against Nature, a repudiation of what our senses report to us, an assertion that things seen are illusions, and that things unseen are real. Religion is born of Doubt. The incredibility of the Known forced man to seek refuge in the Unknown. From that far region he brought back solutions good or bad, sublime or trivial, to the manifold problems which beset man’s soul.
A poet, doomed to early death, who looked into Nature on a summer’s day and could discern nothing but “an eternal fierce destruction,” wrote, in his despair—
“Things cannot to the will
Be settled, but they tease us out of thought.
... It is a flaw
In happiness to see beyond our bourn;
It forces us in summer skies to mourn,
It spoils the singing of the nightingale.”
But when the world was young things could be settled to the will. We are, of course, constantly regulating our impressions of phenomena by a standard of higher probability. If we see a ship upside down, we say, “This is not a ship, it is a mirage.” When the primitive man found himself face to face with seeming natural laws which offended his sense of inherent probability, he rejected the hypothesis that they were actual or permanent, and supposed them to be either untrustworthy appearances or deviations from a larger plan.
Every basic religion gave a large share of thought to animals. The merit, from a humane point of view, of the explanation of the mystery offered by the religious systems of India has been praised even to excess. In contrast to this, it was often repeated that the Hebrew religion ignored the claims of animals altogether. I wish to show that even if this charge were not open to other disproof, no people can be called indifferent to those claims which believes in a Nature Peace.
Traces of such a belief spread from the Mediterranean to the Pacific, from the Equator to the Pole. But the Peace is not always complete; there are reservations. In the glowing prediction of a Peace in Nature in the Atharva-Veda, vultures and jackals are excluded. Mazdeans would exclude the “bad” animals. The Hebrew Scriptures, on the other hand, declare that all species are good in the sight of their Maker. Every beast enjoyed perfect content according to the original scheme of the Creator. But man fell, and all creation was involved in the consequences of his fall.
I remember seeing at the Hague an impressive painting by a little-known Italian artist[[6]] which represents Adam about to take the apple from Eve while at their feet a tiger tenderly licks the wool of a lamb. Adam’s face shows that he is yielding—yielding for no better reason than that he cannot say “No”—to the beautiful woman at his side; and there, unconscious and happy, lie the innocent victims of his act: love to be turned to wrath, peace to war. The Nature Peace has been painted a hundred times, but never with such tragic significance.
[6]. Cignani. A singular sixteenth-century “Nature War” may be observed in a graffito on the pavement of the Chapel of St. Catherine in the church of St. Domenico, at Siena. A nude youth, resembling Orpheus, sits on a rock in a leafy grove, in the midst of various animals; with a disturbed air he looks into a mirror at the back of which is an eye, a leopard shows his teeth at him, while a vulture screams at a monkey, and another bird snatches a surprised rabbit or squirrel; the other creatures, unicorn, wolf, eagle, display signs of uneasiness. Endeavours to read this fable have not proved satisfactory.
Photo: Bruckmann.
THE GARDEN OF EDEN.
(By Rubens.)
Hague Gallery.
The Miltonic Adam sees in the mute signs of Nature the forerunners of further change:—
“The bird of Jove, stooped from his airy tour,
Two birds of gayest plume before him drove;
Down from a hill the beast that reigns in woods,
First hunter then, pursued a gentle brace,
Goodliest of all the forest, hart and hind.”
In an uncanonical version of Genesis which was translated from an Armenian manuscript preserved at Venice, by my dear and sadly missed friend, Padre Giacomo Issaverdens, a still more dramatic description is given of the manner in which the Peace ended. When Adam and Eve were driven from the Garden of Eden they met a lion, which attacked Adam. “Why,” asked Adam, “do you attack me when God ordered you and all the animals to obey me?” “You disobeyed God,” replied the lion, “and we are no longer bound to obey you.” Saying which, the noble beast walked away without harming Adam. But war was declared.
War was declared, and yet the scheme of the Creator could not be for ever defeated. Man who had erred might hope—and how much more must there be hope for those creatures that had done no harm.
When the Prophets spoke of a Peace in Nature in connexion with that readjustment of the eternal scales which was meant by the coming of the Messiah, it cannot be doubted that they spoke of what was already a widely accepted tradition. But without their help we should have known nothing of it and we are grateful to them. Of all the radiant dreams with which man has comforted his heart, aching with realities, is there one to be compared with this? It is of the earth earthly, and that is the beauty of it. “The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion together; and a little child shall lead them; the cow and the bear shall feed; and their young ones lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.”
“For behold I create new heavens and a new earth. They shall not hurt nor destroy in all My holy mountain, saith the Lord.”
Is not this the best of promised lands, the kindest of Elysiums, which leaves none out in the cold of cruelty and hatred? The importunate questioner may inquire, How can this primal and ultimate happiness compensate for the intervening ages of pain? About this, it may be observed that in religious matters people ought not to want to know too much. This is true of the faithful and even of the unfaithful. Scientific researches in the great storehouse which contains the religions of the world are more aided by a certain reserve, a certain reverence, than by the insatiable curiosity of the scalpel. Religions sow abroad idées mères; they tell some things, others they leave untold. They take us up into an Alpine height whence we see the broad configuration of the country and lose sight of the woods and the tortuous ravines among which we so often missed the track. Now, from the Alpine height of faith, the idea of an original and final Nature Peace makes the intervening discord seem of no account—a false note between two harmonies.
The Nature Peace as the emblem of perfect moral beauty became nearly the first Christian idea carried out in art. I remarked a rude but striking instance of it on one of the funereal monuments which have been found lately at Carthage, belonging to a date when Christian and pagan commemorated their dead in the same manner, the former generally only adding some slight symbolical indication of his faith. In this stele Christ, carrying the lamb across His shoulders, is attended by a panther and a lion. All such primitive attempts to represent a Nature Peace are chiefly interesting (and from this point of view their interest is great) from the fact that in child-like, stammering efforts they reveal the intrinsic idiosyncrasy of Christian thought after the Church had parted from the realities of proximity with its Founder, and had not reached the realities of a body corporate striving for supremacy. Christ the Divine Effluence was the faith which made men willing to face the lions.
Doubtless many of those martyrs clung to the sublime conception of a final Peace, the complement of the first. That this was accepted as no allegory by the later spiritualised Jews, and especially by the Pharisees, seems to be a well-established fact. It is difficult to interpret in any other way the solemn statement of St. Paul, that the “whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now,” waiting for redemption; or the beatific vision of Josephus: “The whole Creation also will lift up a perpetual hymn ... and shall praise Him that made them together with the angels and spirits and men, now freed from all bondage.” Homines et jumenta salvabis Domine.