Theios aner – the divine man In the Acts of the Apostles, there are two stories pertaining to new relations between animals, gods and humans. In Lystra, Paul healed a cripple and made him walk. When people saw what he had done, they shouted that gods had come down to them in the likeness of men (Acts 14:8–11). They “called Barnabas, Zeus; and Paul, Hermes, because he was the chief speaker. Then the priest of Jupiter, which was before their city, brought oxen and garlands unto the gates, and would have done sacrifice with the people” (Acts 14:12–13). However, Paul and Barnabas persuaded the people not to sacrifice to them but to turn to the living God (Acts 14:14–18). In the second narrative, Paul, who is on his way to Rome, has just suffered a shipwreck off the island of Malta. All aboard the ship saved them- selves by swimming to the shore, and the people of Malta helped the survivors by kindling a fire for them (Acts 28:1–2). When Paul had gath- ered a bundle of sticks for the fire, a venomous viper came out of the heat and fastened on his hand (28:3). The onlookers saw it as a sign that Paul was a murderer, since having escaped from the sea he was immediately attacked by the poisonous reptile (Acts 28:4). But Paul shook the beast off into the fire and felt no harm (Acts 28:5). This made a great impression on the onlookers: “They waited, expecting him to swell up or suddenly fall down dead; but when they had waited a long time and saw no misfortune come to him, they changed their minds and said that he was a god” (Acts 28:6). What do these stories illustrate? In both, traditional religious practices relating to animals are involved, and the Christian apostle Paul is regarded as divine. The first reflects the immediate connection between a religious event and the killing of a sacrificial victim, and the fact that high-profile communication with the divine presupposed the ritual slaughter of an animal. In Acts 14:8–11, this routine is not criticized as such – the objec- tions of Paul and Barnabas are to their being treated as gods. “The living God” is the only object worthy of worship. In the second case, the snake behaves in an odd way when its poisonous bite is combined with its refusing 245 12 WINGED HUMANS, SPEAKING ANIMALS to let go. It is clearly interpreted as a bad omen and seen as an incarnation of evil. When it is conquered by its superior, a clash of powers – divine and demonic – is involved. When the story ends with the people saying that Paul is a god, no modifications are made and there are no protests. In this case, and unlike Acts 14:8–11, the author apparently accepts that Paul was conceived of as divine. Common to these New Testament texts is their relation to the old insti- tutions of sacrifice and omens in which animals routinely played their part. At the same time, they introduce the new theme of human apotheosis, although in an ambiguous way when Paul and Barnabas are lent a sort of deputy divinity on behalf of Christ. The apotheosis of man, which was one of the main characteristics of the religious developments of the first Christian centuries, 1 had its parallel in the tendency to depict gods in human form. Roman influence on religious practice in the western empire was to be seen, for instance, in the way local deities were now depicted as humans (Rives 2000: 269). The apotheosis of humans of flesh and blood, which sometimes included worship of them, took several forms, from a divinization of the select few, as in the case of Jesus of Nazareth and Apollonius of Tyana, to a belief in a continued life after death. The last option implied that physical immortality, which in traditional religion had been a prerogative of the gods, was now in principle available to everyone. While immortality had been available only for those who led a philosophical life in the manner of Plato, and perhaps for those who were initiated into Orphic mysteries and other mystery religions, the possibility of a bodily resurrection available for all those who believed in Christ was new. Paul describes how people at the end of time would be lifted bodily into the sky (I Thessalonians 4:17). It was obviously no longer true that as the Preacher had said: “the fate of humans and the fate of animals is the same; as one dies, so dies the other. They all have the same breath, and humans have no advantage over animals” (Ecclesiastes 3:19). The cosmological boundaries were remade; some were new, and some traditional ones had been strengthened. In several of the religions and religio-philosophical systems, man’s place in the cosmos was rethought. Not only his relationship with animals was renegotiated but also his relations with gods, powers and demons. A general interest in the classification of the cosmos and its inhabitants is striking. Intricate cosmological systems were constructed by Neoplatonists, Stoics, Jews, Christians, and, not least, gnos- tics and Manichaeans (MacMullen 1981: 79ff), and ever since these cosmological systems have continued to challenge theologians and philoso- phers. It was characteristic of these systems that they were top-heavy, full of supernatural beings, such as angels and demons, but poorer at representing the diversity of the animal world. In this final chapter, some of the more peculiar problems that arose in the wake of man’s wish to escape from the natural world and animals will be WINGED HUMANS, SPEAKING ANIMALS 246 discussed. One problem concerned the trouble that birds created in the neat Christian universe. A different problem arose when animals broke out of the Christian hierarchy and became human. Birds are a nuisance The North African rhetorician Lactantius (240–320 CE), a pupil of Arnobius, in a treatise called On the Workmanship of God, praises the way the human body is equipped. Lactantius establishes the body’s transcendence by pointing to its erectness, its upward thrust, and at the gaze of the eyes, looking towards heaven. In a treatise on the anger of God, in which Lactantius makes anger an essential property of God, he returns to the subject of man’s erect posture and elevated countenance (On the Anger of God, 7). But he also allows that certain resemblances exist between the ways animals and humans are equipped. Lactantius’ examples are speech, the capacity to show joy, intelligence and reflection. In the end, he finds that religion is the only thing of which there is no trace in any animal. Because Lactantius reaches this conclusion, he can make an observation similar to the Gospel of Philip: those who do not worship God are far removed from the nature of man, and “will live the life of the brutes under the form of man” (On the Anger of God, 7). The enthusiasm for the way the human body is equipped is also found in other Christian authors, for instance Nemesius of Emesa (cf. Gregory of Nyssa, On the Making of Man, 7–9). Nemesius had a scientific, probably medical, training but “pursues scientific matters for their moral and theological bearing” (Wallace-Hadrill 1968: 36). He wrote a work, entitled On the Nature of Man (c. 400 CE), in which he states that man is the high point of creation – in life and after death – and that the world and its creatures were all made for him, and only for him. Nemesius uses a wide range of philosophical and Christian sources. He is dependent on the anthropology of Genesis, according to which the world and all its creatures are subject to man, (he uses Origen’s Commentary on Genesis), and he formulates his views in a triumphant praise of man, his abili- ties, and his bodily superiority, which surpasses all other creatures: Who, then, can fully express the pre-eminence of so singular a crea- ture? Man crosses the mighty deep, contemplates the range of the heavens, notes the motion, position, and size of the stars, and reaps a harvest both from land and sea, scorning the rage of wild beasts, and the might of the whales. He learns all kinds of knowledge, gains skill in arts, and pursues scientific enquiry. By writing, he addresses himself to whom he will, however far away, unhindered by bodily location. He foretells the future, rules everything, subdues every- thing, enjoys everything. He converses with angels and with God himself. He gives orders to creation. Devils are subject to him. He WINGED HUMANS, SPEAKING ANIMALS 247 explores the nature of every kind of being. He busies himself with the knowing of God, and is God’s house and temple. And all these privileges he is able to purchase at the cost of virtue and godliness. (On the Nature of Man, 2.10) Nemesius hastens to add that “we must not let ourselves appear to any to be writing, out of place, a panegyric about man instead of a straightforward description of his nature, as we proposed to do”. He stresses that man not only “has all the members, but has them perfect, and such that they could not be changed for the better” (ibid., 4.23). Nemesius also makes a point of the fact that not every kind of living creature possesses every kind of corpo- real member (ibid.). He mentions creatures without feet, such as fish and snakes, and creatures without heads, such as crabs and lobsters, but he says nothing about those that have no wings. It may well be that the human body is perfect, but its lack of wings – this traditional sign of bodily tran- scendence – is curious and could have been mentioned. From the time when the Syrio-Palestinian culture of the Bronze Age spread its winged creatures to Mesopotamia, Persia and the Greek world (Caubet 2002: 230), wings had been grafted on to sphinxes, griffins, bulls, horses and anthropomorphic deities to indicate that they represented divinity. Besides, the wise man who flees bodily desire by means of wings is a Platonic motif. 2 In Christianity, too, the divine is sometimes equipped with wings. When the Holy Spirit appeared in the Gospels, it was as a dove. In the Syriac Odes of Solomon (Second century CE), the stress is on the moth- erly wings of this creature: “As the wings of doves over their nestlings, and the mouths of their nestlings towards their mouths, so are the wings of the Spirit over my heart” (Odes of Solomon, 28:1–2). 3 Since wings were such obvious marks of transcendence, it might have bothered Nemesius that humans had not been equipped with them. The lack of wings had troubled Lactantius. In On the Workmanship of God, he shows “a striking preoccupation with birds,” as the Church historian Virginia Burrus has recently put it (Burrus 2000: 29). Birds take care in raising their young, have highly developed capacities for vocalization and, not least, have wings and are thus not earthbound. Consequently, they chal- lenge the position of humans as the most transcendent beings on earth. As Burrus shows, Lactantius solves the problem by ranking hands far above wings because of their power to act and control (ibid.: 29–30). Birds were a nuisance. Different authors chose different solutions to the “bird problem”. Ambrose, the Bishop of Milan (339–97 CE), chose the two- leggedness of man as the characteristic that showed his kinship to the two-legged birds. Like birds, man aims at what is high (Hexaëmeron, 6.9.74; in Grant 1999). In this way, Ambrose makes men bird-like, even if they have no wings. Basil of Caesarea (330–79 CE), a younger contemporary of Ambrose and Nemesius, solved the bird problem in his eighth Homily by WINGED HUMANS, SPEAKING ANIMALS 248 placing birds firmly at the bottom of the hierarchy of being. His solution was to make birds into pseudo-fish. According to Basil, fish swim through the water by means of their fins, while birds “swim” through the air by means of their wings. The exalted position of birds is thus not original: birds are not really creatures of the air but creatures of the water – in reality, a sort of flying fish (cf. Wallace-Hadrill 1968: 35; Grant 1999: 77, 90). And since, according to Plato, fish and water creatures are at the bottom of the hierarchy of being (Timaeus, 92a–92b), making birds into fish really put them in their place. 4 We may note in passing that Basil characterized aquatic animals not only as “mute, but savage and unteachable, incapable of sharing life with man” (8. Homily). In a similar wrestling with the problem of human pedestrian nature, Augustine (354–430 CE) compared birds and demons. Demons dwell in the air, and humans dwell on earth. Why then are demons not superior to men? Augustine points out that it could equally well have been said that birds were superior to humans because they too dwell in the air. But this would have been ridiculous, because birds lack a rational soul (The City of God, 8.15). In this way, Augustine breaks the traditional connection between tran- scendence and being airborne by pointing to rationality as a superior characteristic. Like Lactantius, Augustine does not regard wings as a relevant physiological sign. In relation to demons, Augustine points to men’s superior morals and blessed immortality as characteristics that make them better than demons. Man is not only better than birds and demons, he is “a rational being and therefore more excellent and outstanding than any other creature on earth” (The City of God, 22.24). Augustine goes on to praise the excellence of man and the ways in which he is endowed with all gifts. An alternative to all this harping upon real wings was to make wings into metaphors. In one of the Nag Hammadi texts, the Thomas the Contender,itis said: “Everyone who seek the truth from true wisdom will make himself wings so as to fly, fleeing the lust that scorches the spirits of men. And he will make himself wings to flee every visible spirit” (140:1–5). Outsiders were critical of the Christian desire for wings and of what they saw as absurd wishes to be airborne and bird-like. An example of this criticism is found in Apocriticus, a text most likely from the early fifth century but which, as has already been mentioned, probably mediates views originally presented by Porphyry. The critic comments on Paul’s statement in I Thessalonians 4:15–17, a statement that included comments about the salvation of those on earth: “Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air; and so shall we ever be with the Lord” (I Thessalonians 4:17). The critic calls this aspiration a lie and appeals to the common sense of the animals themselves when he makes his protest: If this is sung in a stage part to irrational creatures, they will bleat and croak with an enormous din when they hear of people in the WINGED HUMANS, SPEAKING ANIMALS 249 flesh flying like birds in the air, or carried on a cloud. For this boast is a mighty piece of quackery, that living things, pressed down by the burden of physical bulk, should receive the nature of winged birds, and cross the wide air like some sea, using the cloud as chariot. Even if such a thing is possible, it is monstrous, and against the sequence [of nature]. For nature which created all things from the beginning, appointed places befitting the things which were brought into being, and ordained that each should have its proper sphere, the sea for the water creatures, the land for those on dry ground, the air for winged creatures, and the ether for the heavenly bodies. If one of these were moved from its proper abode, it would be annihilated on arrival in a strange condition and abode. (Apocriticus, 4.2; in Cook 2000: 229) The bird theme, here associated with Paul, was obviously embarrassing for Christian authors in the late third and fourth centuries. It could be added that, seen from posterity, it was not made less embarrassing by these authors’ own comments. But even if the two-leggedness of humans compensated for their lack of wings in the eyes of Ambrosius, if wings were reduced to fins by Basil, or substituted for by hands and reason in Lactantius and Augustine, respectively, none of these solutions really managed to hide that it really would have been better if humans had been equipped with wings in the first place – or if birds had not existed. Because the human body was so important as a transcendental sign in the Christian project, its lack of wings continued to make trouble. The lasting solution to the Christian fantasizing about wings was finally found in the figure of the angel. Angels in early Christianity delineated an alternative Christian society, a perfect society directly relating to God. Devoted Christians already belonged to that society, and, at least in the world to come, they would join the company of the angels. Angels were beings who moved through the air. And although they were originally not equipped with wings, they grew them as time passed. 5 Not surprisingly, the main image of an angel in Christianity became precisely that of a winged human. Apocryphal acts of apostles and animals In Christianity, animals were part of creation but had no part in salvation. And even if nature and animals were conceived of as good, because they were God’s creation and creatures, they were also used, as we have seen, to symbolize evil. Man was made in God’s image (and vice versa) to the exclu- sion of all other creatures. Parallel to this divinization of man, there was a devaluation of animals and sometimes a demonization of them, which implied that animals and demons lent each other characteristics. But diffi- cult as it was to maintain that humans were completely different from WINGED HUMANS, SPEAKING ANIMALS 250 animals, it was just as difficult to claim that animals were totally different from humans. Animals resurfaced within the souls and bodies of men and made them bestial, while human faculties such as reasoning and power of speech appeared in animals. Consequently, animals were sometime trans- formed into human quadrupeds, a development that led to consternation among Church leaders and theologians. The most important Christian genre in which animals behaved like humans was the apocryphal Acts of the Apostles. The most peculiar of these Acts, when it comes to the subject of animals, is the Acts of Philip. 6 These are a mosaic of several texts, specimens of what must have been a flourishing tradition in antiquity. Some are represented by different manuscripts, while others have only a sole witness. 7 Within this corpus, Acts 8–15 form a literary unit with the same ensemble of characters throughout. The Acts of Philip and the “humanization” of animals In the fourth century, a strange party was thought to have once been travel- ling through the mountainous areas of Asia Minor. The company included the apostles Philip and Bartholomew (cf. Matthew 10:3), Mariamne dressed as a man, along with a leopard and a kid. The carnivore and the kid were both imitating humans as best they could, conversing in human voices, sometimes walking on their hind legs and often crying. Philip and his menagerie were on their way to Ophiorymos (“the promenade of the snakes”) – Heliopolis of Asia, probably today’s Pamukkale – where Philip had his mission. Here he reached the place of his martyrdom and was finally buried. What were these animals doing in this august company? The immediate answer is that they wanted to convert and be baptized. Act 8 is simply called “The conversion of the kid and the leopard in the desert”. Let us start with the beginning of Act 8, where we meet a troubled and doubtful Philip and his sister Mariamne. According to the text, Philip has a female mentality, while Mariamne has a brave and virile mentality. Therefore, Mariamne is to accompany Philip on his mission. But Jesus bids her to change her clothes and appearance, all the exterior traits that resemble a female. In this way, she will no longer be like Eve, the archetypal incarna- tion of the female form. Eve was no ideal. Since the serpent in Genesis had developed a “friendliness” (philia) towards her, and philia indicates an erotic friendship, it is suggested that there had been a sexual relationship between them, a motif that is also found in Jewish and Christian commentaries (Bovon et al. 1999: 244, note 15). The poison of the serpent had then been transmitted from Eve to Adam. While Augustine allowed hereditary sin to be transmitted by the male seed, according to Acts of Philip 8 it seems to be transferred by women because of Eve’s cohabiting with the serpent. Philip, Mariamne and Bartholomew set out towards the land of the Ophians – the worshippers of the serpent. As they are walking into the WINGED HUMANS, SPEAKING ANIMALS 251 wilderness (eremos), a huge leopard comes forth from the forest that covers the mountains. He throws himself down before the party, speaks in a human voice, refers to the only begotten son of God and begs to be given the ability to speak perfectly, which is granted him. And with a human voice, the cat tells how, in the night, he came upon a herd, caught a kid and took it away to eat. But the kid started to cry “like a little child” and rebuked the leopard for its fierce heart and bestial ways. Gradually, the leopard softened and abandoned its intention of eating its prey. At this moment, the leopard saw the apostles and turned to them. In addition to begging for the power of speech, he also asked if the two animals could be allowed to march with the apostles and to shed their animal nature. Philip and Bartholomew marvelled at the leopard that had stopped eating meat, and the leopard and the kid rose on their hind legs, lifted their forelegs and started to pray to God with human voices. Then the company, including the two animals, continued to the land of the Ophians. Act 10 is missing, while both Acts 9 and 11 tell of the Christian company meeting a dragon and serpents. In these acts, the antagonistic and evil forces are represented by the mother of the serpents, the viper, which had a cult in Asia Minor. 8 In Act 9, the dragon, the serpents and their offspring are blinded and destroyed by means of a divine fire (9.5). In Act 11, the Christian party encounters a group of demons hidden among stones. Philip prays to Jesus and conjures the demons to show themselves, and they appear as reptiles – fifty snakes – and among them a huge dragon, which is black, blazing, poisonous and terrible. The dragon is female (11.3). In fact, the reptile is the incarnation of a persistent evil in human history, first met in the paradise narrative, but from then on it has continued to do its evil work. Now it is forced on to the defensive, made to show its true nature and to promise to build a church. Miraculously and by demonic means the church is built in six days. Philip also bids the reptile to appear in human form, which it does, and it appears as black, “like an Ethiopian”. In the end, it admits to being conquered. In Act 12, the author exposes his views on salvation and the access of animals to communion. This act clearly presupposes the conversion of the animals. Here the human part of the company receives the Eucharist, while the animals are looking on, weeping. When they are asked why they weep, the leopard delivers a passionate plea for the animals’ participation in the eucharistic meal. The speech of the leopard (12:2–5), one of the most edifying in the Acts of Philip, raises the question of whether animals are worthy to receive the Eucharist or not. Rhetorically apt, the leopard argues on behalf of the kid and itself that they have already abandoned their animal nature and now want to quit their animal forms as well (14.12–14). Amsler discusses the theme of nature (physis) and form (morphe) in relation to the animals. Conversion implies change of nature, salvation change of form. In Act 8, 17:19, a human heart replaces a bestial one, and in several of WINGED HUMANS, SPEAKING ANIMALS 252 the preceding acts a change of bestial nature is repeatedly mentioned (Amsler 1999: 362). In Act 12, both nature and form are referred to in the speech of the leopard (4:8–14) when the leopard begs that he and the kid may quit their bestial bodies and animal form “so that our beast-like body may be changed by you and we might forsake the animal form”. Internal changes take place in Act 8 and external changes in Act 12. Amsler suggests that the logic behind this passage is that the material affects the material and the spiritual the spiritual. Accordingly, a concrete ritual will change the bodies of the animals. In a curious rite, Philip lifts the cup filled with water and sprays it on the leopard and the kid. When their bestial forms are changed, they rise up on their hind legs and glorify God because they have received a human body (12.8.1–6). In the last part of his answer, Philip mentions that God has included not only humans but also beasts and all animal species in his plan. It is unclear whether he means that God has provided for the animals on earth or if he is suggesting that God has included them in salvation as well (cf. Amsler 1999: 361). Finally, in Act 13, it is said that when the animals die they will be buried beneath the portico of the church. The leopard and the kid are strange bedfellows, but not without biblical prototypes. In Isaiah 11:6–9 there is a millenarian passage in which the leopard and the kid are a pair, and a Christian interpretation of this passage is part of the background of the Acts of Philip. Jews and Christians some- times shared the idea that animals had lost their capacity of speech when Adam sinned but would regain it at the end of time when all things were restored. Seen in this perspective, the kid and the leopard fulfil traditional millenarian expectations. 9 However, it is also possible to read these animals allegorically and inter- pret them as stand-ins for humans: wild animals that have been tamed represent repentant sinners and converted pagans (Amsler 1999: 302). In line with this interpretation, the animals not only represent the classes of wild and domesticated animals, respectively, they also represent pagans (the leopard) and Christians (the kid) who wanted to be converted to a special branch of early Christianity, namely encratism (Bovon 2002: 140–1). Christian encratites were groups that were marked out by their abstinence from animal food, their ascetic agenda (Slater 1999: 298–305) and their opposition to procreation and femininity. The apocryphal Acts clearly include such encratist ideas. 10 Whether the Acts of Philip should be interpreted literally or allegorically, the work belongs in both cases within a tradition where animals were regarded positively, at least under certain circumstances. But parallel to the optimistic view of animals reflected in the figures of the kid and the leopard, is the view that some animals are evil. The dragon and its entourage incarnate evil in these texts. 11 Three times when the dragon appears it is killed together with its serpents (Acts 9, 12.3, 13.3), and the fourth time it is WINGED HUMANS, SPEAKING ANIMALS 253 forced to build a church. Demons are wavering between invisibility and reptile form, and the dragon goes from reptile to human form as well. But all the same, even if the dualism between humans and animals is present in the Acts of Philip, and reptiles are incarnating evil, these conceptions are overruled by a more optimistic view of animals, and the conception of animals as evil is restricted to demonic and diabolic creatures in reptile form. An objection could be made to the dominant positive view of animals in these acts, that the leopard and the kid were expected to transform their bestial nature and become human before they were conceived of in a more flattering light. It means that animals as such were not necessarily regarded as positive, only animals that had become human. The leopard is the main animal speaker. Its walking on its hind legs and its human voice have already been mentioned, but its speeches are characterized by their rhetorical qualities and by the way in which both it and the kid spice up their speeches with weeping. Like speech and walking on two legs, weeping is a uniquely human act. The leopard also acts “unnaturally” by completely forsaking its feline nature and abstaining from killing the kid and from eating meat. The presupposition that animals should convert from being bestial and turn human, or at least become more human-like, has its structural parallel in the conception of women. Mariamne is one of the main actors in this text. According to the author, she has a male mentality (8.3). Mariamne wears male clothes, which the Saviour has presented to her as a means of counter- acting the influence of the diabolic serpent and minimizing her similarity to Eve. The masculinization of Mariamne will break the connection between Eve and the serpent. Precisely because she did not procreate, Mariamne was even more than Mary, the mother of Jesus, a heroine to the encratites. In the Acts of Philip, the dragon is associated with the serpent in Genesis and the Devil but is at the same time also regarded as feminine (9.7:11). In this way, there is an opposition between Mariamne, who has masculinized herself, and Eve/serpent/dragon, which are female creatures who partake in sex and procreation. The moral is that women should suppress their biology and imitate men (i.e. men who are not sexually active), while carnivores should stop eating meat (and the kid should stop being eaten) and deny their bestial nature. In this way, parallel stories are told about Mary and the leopard (and the kid): animals that behave like animals and women who behave like women are inferior to humanized animals and masculinized females. Whether the Acts of Philip is read literally or allegorically, the necessity for animals to change their nature is a key point in both interpretations. However, the positive conception of animals in this text is not limited to the converted leopard and the kid. The world of animals and nature is drawn in, too, and the transformed animals take part in a close dialogue with the wider living world. There is no doubt that the natural world is described positively in these texts. The Acts of Philip, for instance, has a beautiful image of God bestowing nourishment on all creatures (8.5; cf. 8.10) and it is WINGED HUMANS, SPEAKING ANIMALS 254 [...]... purer than the light in animals, and animals had a more sinister origin in the Land of Darkness, it was held as a greater crime to destroy animals than plants They were sentient beings and probably took part in a cycle of reincarnation Although the picture is blurred, it seems reasonable to conclude that Manichaeans saw humans and animals in a dualistic light and regarded the animal and the bestial form... fathers understand humans and behave in a pious and decent way These were animals that lived in the wilderness but were tamed by the example of the monks Like the apocryphal Acts of the Apostles, some of the stories about the desert fathers show animals in a positive light Like the animals in the apocryphal Acts, these animals forsake much of their wildness, appear as tame and often become human-like 257... understanding “even to the beasts” Like the apocryphal Acts, these stories also tell miraculous things about animals, but they usually do not cross the borderline between humans and animals by making the animals speak Nor were they allowed to become part of salvation Jerome, who wrote so eloquently about Paul’s lions, drew a firm line at baptized cats when he said that “therefore the Acts of Paul and. .. suffering, and virtually crucified in every tree, herb, fruit and 259 W I N G E D H U M A N S, S P E A K I N G A N I M A L S vegetable This so-called Cross of Light seems to have covered only the light in plants and did not include the animal world.19 Augustine calls this substance Jesus patibilis – the suffering Jesus Animals received light by eating plants (Heuser 1998: 43–4) The light in plants, animals and. .. animals and humans The followers – auditores – who served the Manichaean elite were not allowed to kill animals or to participate in blood sacrifices, but they were allowed to eat the flesh of animals that had been killed (Confessions, 3.10, 2.3, 4; On the Morals of the Manichaeans, 53) Similarly, the elect who ate vegetables and fruit were not allowed to pluck and pull them (ibid., 57) Plucking fruit and. .. Antony and began to lick his hands and feet” (16) Antony perceives that they wanted his blessing, which he gave them: “Lord, without whose command not a leaf drops from the tree, not a sparrow falls to the ground, grant them what thou knowest to be best” The lions apparently understand human language but do not themselves talk No breach of theological decorum takes place And their future fate is decided... third and fourth centuries If the conception of the human body as a transcendental sign created problems for humans, these problems were small in relation to the problems that this conception created for animals In its resurrection, the human body distanced itself for ever from the bestial body Consequently, animals were natural-born losers in the plan of salvation, and salvation was restricted to humans. .. irrationality and with their similarity to animals Here the opposite point is made Some animals are regarded as ideals in sexual and procreative matters simply because they very seldom take part in that type of activity,13 a point that had already been made by classical authors However, at the same time as animals are seen in a positive light, serpents and dragons incarnate all the evils that the apostle and. .. and the serpent of Genesis and its mutations In the pious Christian tradition, Paul’s encounter with the beasts of Ephesus (I Corinthians 15:32) and the reference to his having been “rescued from the mouth of the lion” (II Timothy 4.17) were combined and developed into a story about Paul’s encounter with a lion The New Testament expressions were most likely figures of speech and had nothing to do with... fourth century CE (cf Schneemelcher 1964: 317; Hennecke and Schneemelcher 1975: 178–88) So far, Manichaeans have only been mentioned in passing A few words need to be said about this religion and its conception of animals, because this conception is slightly different from those of other religions in the Mediterranean area Mani was born in Babylon and lived in the second part of the third century CE He . pertaining to new relations between animals, gods and humans. In Lystra, Paul healed a cripple and made him walk. When people saw what he had done, they shouted that gods had come down to them in the. Jews, Christians, and, not least, gnos- tics and Manichaeans (MacMullen 1981: 79ff), and ever since these cosmological systems have continued to challenge theologians and philoso- phers. It was. perspective, the kid and the leopard fulfil traditional millenarian expectations. 9 However, it is also possible to read these animals allegorically and inter- pret them as stand-ins for humans: wild