Only by such an assumption, as our author proceeds to show, is it possible to justify the ways of man to the lower animals and to reconcile his cruel treatment of them with the goodness of an all-wise and all-powerful maker and ruler of the universe. For this reason, he goes on to explain, the Christian Church has never deemed it a duty to take the lower animals under its protection or to inculcate ordinary natural kindness towards them. Hence in countries, like Italy and Spain, where the influence of Catholicism has been supreme for centuries, not only are wild birds and beasts of chase relentlessly slaughtered and exterminated, but even useful domestic animals, asses, sumpter-mules and pack-horses, are subjected to a supererogation of suffering at the hands of ruthless man. As the pious Parsi conscientiously comes up to the help of Ahuramazda against the malevolent Angrô-mainyush by killing as many as possible of the creatures which the latter has made, so the good Catholic becomes an efficient co-worker with God by maltreating brutes and thus aiding the Almighty in punishing the devils, of which they are the visible and bruisable forms. Whatever pain is inflicted is felt, not by the physical organism, but by the animated spirit. It is the embodied demon that really suffers, howling in the beaten dog and squealing in the butchered pig.
There are doubtless many persons of tender susceptibilities, who cannot bear to think that the animals, whose daily companionship we enjoy, the parrot we feed with sugar, the pretty pug we caress and the noble horse, which ministers to our comfort and convenience, are nothing but devils predestined to everlasting torture. But these purely sentimental considerations are of no weight in the scale of reason. “What matters it,” replies the Jesuit Father, “whether it is a devil or another kind of creature that is in our service or contributes to our amusement? For my part, this idea pleases rather than repels me; and I recognize with gratitude the beneficence of the Creator in having provided me with so many little devils for my use and entertainment. If it be said that these poor creatures, which we have learned to love and so fondly cherish, are fore-ordained to eternal torments, I can only adore the decrees of God, but do not hold myself responsible for the terrible sentence; I leave the execution of the dread decision to the sovereign judge and continue to live with my little devils, as I live pleasantly with a multitude of persons, of whom, according to the teachings of our holy religion, the great majority will be damned.” The crafty disciple of Loyola, elusive of disagreeable deductions, is content to accept the poodle in its phenomenal form and to make the most of it, without troubling himself about “des Pudels Kern.”
This doctrine, he thinks, is amply illustrated and confirmed by an appeal to the consentient opinion of mankind or the argument from universal belief, which has been so often and so effectively urged in proof of the existence of God. If the maxim universitas non delinquit has the same validity in the province of philosophy as in that of law, then we are justified in assuming that the whole human race cannot go wrong even in purely metaphysical speculation and that unanimity in error is a psychological impossibility. The criterion of truth, quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus, by which the Roman hierarchy is willing to have its claims to ecclesiastical catholicity and doctrinal orthodoxy tested, is confined to Christendom in its application and does not consider the views of persons outside of the body of believers. In the question under discussion the argument is not subject to such limitations, but gathers testimony from all races and religions, showing that there is not a civilized nation or savage tribe on the face of the earth, which does not regard or has not regarded the lower animals as embodiments of evil spirits and sought to propitiate them. That “the devil is an ass” is a truth so palpable that it has passed into a proverb. Baal-zebub means fly-god; and the Christian Satan betrays his presence by the cloven foot of the goat or the solid hoof of the horse. In folk-lore, which is the débris of exploded mythologies adrift on the stream of popular tradition, cats, dogs, otters, apes, ravens, blackcocks, capercailzies, rabbits, hedgehogs, wolves, were-wolves, foxes, polecats, swine, serpents, toads, and countless varieties of insects, reptiles and vermin figure as incarnations and instruments of the devil; and Mephistopheles reveals himself to Faust as
“Der Herr der Ratten und der Mäuse,
Der Fliegen, Frösche, Wanzen, Läuse.”
“The Lord of rats and of the mice,
Of flies and frogs, bed-bugs and lice.”
The worship of animals originates in the belief that they are embodiments of devils, so that zoölatry, which holds such a prominent place in primitive religions, is only a specific form of demonolatry. The objection that a flea or a fly, a mite or a mosquito is too small a creature to furnish fit lodgment for a demon, Father Bougeant dismisses with an indulgent smile and disparaging shrug as implying a gross misconception of the nature and properties of spirit, which is without extension or dimension and therefore capable of animating the most diminutive particle of organized matter. Large and little are purely relative terms. God, he says, could have made man as small as the tiniest puceron without any decrease of his spiritual powers. “It is, therefore, no more difficult to believe that a devil may be incorporated in the delicate body of a gnat than in the huge bulk of an elephant.” The size of the physical habitation, in which spirits take up their temporary abode, is a thing of no consequence. In fact, devils in the forms of gnats and tiny insects were thought to be especially dangerous, since one might swallow them unawares and thus become diabolically possessed. The demon, liberated by the death and dissolution of the insect, was supposed to make a tenement of the unfortunate person’s stomach, producing gripes and playing ventriloquous tricks. Thus it is recorded in the Dies Caniculuares of Majolus (Meyer: Der Aberglaube des Mittelalters, p. 296-7) that a young maiden in the Erzgebirge near Joachimsthal, in 1559, swallowed a fly, while drinking beer. The evil spirit, incarnate in the fly, took possession of the maiden and began to speak out of her, thus attracting crowds of people, who put questions to the devil and tried to drive him out by prayers, in which the unhappy girl sometimes joined, greatly to her discomfort, since the devil waxed exceeding wroth and unruly and caused her much suffering, whenever she uttered the name of Christ. Finally the parish priest had her brought into the church, where he succeeded with considerable difficulty in exorcising her. The stubborn demon resisted for two years all efforts to cast him out; he even tried to compromise with the girl, promising to be content with a finger nail or a single hair of her head, but she declined all overtures, and he was at last expelled by means of a potent conjuration, which lasted from midnight till midday.
As the human soul is released by death, so the extinction of life in any animal sets its devil free, who, instead of entering upon a spiritual state of existence, goes into the egg or embryo of another animal and resumes his penal bondage to the flesh. “Thus a devil, after having been a cat or a goat, may pass, not by choice, but by constraint, into the embryo of a bird, a fish or a butterfly. Happy are those who make a lucky hit and become household pets, instead of beasts of burden or of slaughter. The lottery of destiny bars them the right of voluntary choosing.” The doctrine of transmigration, continues our author, “which Pythagoras taught of yore and some Indian sages hold to-day, is untenable in its application to men and contrary to religion, but it fits admirably into the system already set forth concerning the nature of beasts, and shocks neither our faith nor our reason.” Furthermore, it explains why “all species of animals produce many more eggs or embryos than are necessary to propagate their kind and to provide for a normal increase.” Of the millions of germs, of which “great creating nature” is so prolific, comparatively few ever develop into living creatures; only those which are vivified by a devil are evolved into complete organisms; the others perish. This seeming superfluity and waste can be most easily reconciled with the careful economy and wise frugality of nature by viewing it as a manifestation of the bountiful and beneficent providence of God in preventing “any lack of occupation or abode on the part of the devils,” which are being constantly disembodied and re-embodied. “This accounts for the prodigious clouds of locusts and countless hosts of caterpillars, which suddenly desolate our fields and gardens. The cause of these astonishing multiplications has been sought in cold, heat, rain and wind, but the real reason is that, at the time of their appearance, extraordinary quantities of animals have died or their embryos been destroyed, so that the devils that animated them were compelled to avail themselves at once of whatever species they found most ready to receive them, which would naturally be the superabundant eggs of insects.” The more profoundly this subject is investigated, he concludes, and the more light our observations and researches throw upon it from all sides, the more probable does the hypothesis here suggested in explanation of the puzzling phenomena of animal life and intelligence appear.
Father Bougeant calls his lucubration “a new system of philosophy”; but this is not strictly true. He has only given a fuller and more facetious exposition of a doctrine taught by many of the greatest lights of the Catholic Church, among others by Thomas Aquinas, whose authority as a thinker Pope Leo XIII. distinctly recognized and earnestly sought to restore to its former prestige. Bougeant’s ingenious dissertation has a vein of irony or at least a strain of jocundity in it, approaching at times so perilously near the fatal brink of persiflage, that one cannot help surmising an intention to render the whole thing ridiculous in a witty and underhand way eminently compatible with Jesuitical habits of mind; but whether serious or satirical, his treatise is an excellent example and illustration of the kind of dialectic hair-splitting and syllogistic rubbish, which passed for reasoning in the early and middle ages of the Christian era, and which the greatest scholars and acutest intellects of those days fondly indulged in and seem to have been fully satisfied with. Here, too, we come upon the metaphysical and theological groundwork, upon which was reared by a strictly logical process a vast superstructure of ecclesiastical excommunication and criminal prosecution against bugs and beasts. He protests with never-tiring and needless iteration his absolute devotion to the precepts of religion; indeed, like the lady in the play, he “protests too much, methinks.” In all humbleness and submission he bows to the authority of the Church, and would not touch the ark of the covenant even with the tip of his finger, but his easy acquiescence has an air of perfunctoriness, and in his assenting lips there lurks a secret, semi-sarcastic leer, which casts suspicion on his words and looks like poking fun at the principles he professes and turning them into raillery.
Indeed, such covert derision would have been a suitable way of ridiculing the gross popular superstition of his time, which saw a diabolical incarnation in every unfamiliar form of animal life. During the latter half of the sixteenth century a Swiss naturalist named Thurneysser, who held the position of physician in ordinary to the Elector Johann Georg von Brandenburg, kept some scorpions bottled in olive oil, which were feared by the common people as terrible devils endowed with magic power (fürchterliche Zauberteufel). Thurneysser presented also to Basel, his native city, a large elk, which had been given to him by Prince Radziwil; but the good Baselers looked upon the strange animal as a most dangerous demon, and a pious old woman finally rid the town of the dreaded beast by feeding it with an apple stuck full of broken needles.
A distinguished Spanish theologian of the sixteenth century, Martin Azpilcueta, commonly known as Dr. Navarre, refers, in his work on excommunication, to a case in which anathemas were fulminated against certain large sea-creatures called terones, which infested the waters of Sorrento and destroyed the nets of the fishermen. He speaks of them as “fish or cacodemons” (pisces seu cacodemones), and maintains that they are subject to anathematization, not as fish, but only as devils. In his Five Counsels and other tractates on this subject (Opera, Lyons, 1589; reprinted at Venice, 1601-2, and at Cologne, 1616) he often takes issue with Chassenée on minor points, but the French jurist and the Spanish divine agree on the main question.
In this connection it may be a matter of interest to add, that a German neuropathologist of our own day, Herr von Bodelschwingh, ascribes epilepsy to what he calls “demonic infection” due to the presence of the bacillus infernalis in the blood of those who are subject to this disease. The microbe, to which the jocose scientist has been pleased to give this name, differs from all other bacilli hitherto discovered in having two horns and a tail, although the most powerful lenses have not yet revealed any traces of a cloven foot. An additional indication of its infernal qualities is the fact that it liquefies the gelatine, with which it comes in contact, and turns it black, emitting at the same time a pestilential stench. Doubtless this discovery will be hailed by theologians as a striking confirmation of divine revelation by modern science, proving that our forefathers were right in attributing the falling-sickness to diabolical agencies. We know now that it was a legion of bacilli infernales which went out of the tomb-haunting man into the Gadarene swine and drove them tumultuously over a precipice into the sea. In fact, who can tell what microbes really are! Père Bougeant would certainly have regarded them as nothing less than microscopic devils.