Woofing and weeping with animals in the last days

The medieval eschatological tradition of the ‘15 Signs of the Last Days’ pays special attention to the anguish of animals. This attention seems unnecessary, as animals will not be judged, or resurrected, but only destroyed. Their unnecessary cries might be heard as the cry of life for itself, now useless to God and humans, and also as a reminder to humans of the richness of the worlded selves they abandon in their fantasy of celestial life freed from the flux of worldly being. postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2010) 1, 187–193. doi:10.1057/pmed.2010.24 Lives are by definition precarious: they can be expunged at will or by accident; their persistence is in no sense guaranteed. In some sense, this is a feature of all life, and there is no thinking of life that is not precarious – except, of course, in fantasy. Judith Butler, Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? The medieval eschatological tradition of the ‘15 Signs of the Last Judgment’ was enormously popular; more than 180 Latin examples survive, as do versions in English, French, German, Armenian, Spanish, Hebrew and Old Frisian, among other vernaculars (Nölle, 1879; Heist, 1952; Giliberto, 2007). William Heist’s landmark study sorted the examples of the tradition into groups – the Damian, pseudo-Bede, Comestor, Anglo-Norman and Voragine – according to the sequence of the events they narrate, among other criteria, and traced them r 2010 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2040-5960 postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies Vol. 1, 1/2, 187–193 www.palgrave-journals.com/pmed/ to several wellsprings: Ezekiel 38:20, 2 Esdras and the Irish Saltair na Rann, which expands on the eschatological list of the Apocalypse of Thomas. Whatever the differences between the groups, all describe the woes occurring on each of the last 15 days prior to God’s destruction of the world and his final sorting of humans into the saved and the damned. In these days, all of creation dreads the end: ‘Tote rien serra en tristesce’ (‘everything will be in sadness’; l. 1102), as the French Le Mystère d’Adam has it (Aebischer, 1964). Stars fall from the sky and ‘run about the earth like lightning,’ stones do battle, humans panic, everyone dies, and then, on the last day, the humans resurrect. The tradition tends to pay particular attention to the reactions of fish and other animals, to how, in their frenzy, they fight each other, and especially to how they cry out to the heavens. In these representative passages from The Golden Legend, ‘the sea beasts will come out above the surface and will roar to the heavens,’ birds will congregate silently, trembling with fear of God’s arrival, and eventually all beasts will gather in the fields, ‘growling and grunting, not feeding, nor drinking’ (Jacobus de Voragine, 1993, I: 8). The system of the human in medieval Christianity granted animals no reason, no responsibility, and therefore no capacity for either sin or virtue (Steel, 2008, 14–15). Only humans will be judged in the last days, while animals, the detritus of a feeble world on the verge of destruction, mourn only because the world itself is dying. Understood in this way, the ‘15 Signs’ tradition, even in its attention to animals, is as typically anthropocentric as works like Honorious of Autun’s Elucidarium, which argues that animal suffering serves no purpose but to torment humans by reminding them of their own sinfulness and how it debilitated the world (Migne, 1844, 172: 1140B–C). So too in several examples of the ‘15 Days’: Ava, a twelfth-century German poet of sacred history, explains that ‘on the twelfth day, the beasts of the field help us lament’ (Ava, 2003, 217); the Middle English Saint Jeremie’s Fifteen Tokens before Doomsday likewise states, ‘Alle e fissches e rid day; abouen e water schull be,/& so reuly a cri iuen; at all men schullen have fere’ (Furnivall, 1878, 92); and another Middle English work (MS Cambridge University Ff.2.38), after first reasserting that animals exist only for human use (‘The fyscheys that ther in brede,/That now men take in ther nede’), explains that: Soche a forewarnyng my t us teche, Yf that we couth any skylle, To take the goode and leve the ylle. Lorde, on wysse us also That we nevyr for synne forgoo The mekyll blysse at ou haste hy t To all tho at levyn in ryght. (Varnhagen, 1880, ll. 163–74) Such nods towards animal grief present animal lives as meriting only indirect concern, as in Aquinas – or Kant, for that matter (Aquinas, 1947, Steel 188 r 2010 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2040-5960 postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies Vol. 1, 1/2, 187–193 ST 2a1a 102, 6, reply objection 8; Linzey and Clarke, 2004, 126–127): animal terror inspires humans to ponder their own rational, particularly human dread at the approach of their awesome Judge. Furthermore, mainstream medieval Christian resurrection doctrine implicitly held that only animals could really die; humans too would experience death and the humiliations of putrefaction, but would go on to experience hell or heaven. It is the very notion of ‘what follows death’ that distinguishes human from animal death: humans leap over death’s chasm to experience eternal terror or eventual felicity on the other side; only animals fall in. Since the ‘15 Signs’ tradition shows both the last days of the world and the resurrection of humans, the animal terror in the last days witnesses to human supremacy, for their terror, unlike that of humans, is truly the terror of death, of a life that will finally meet an end. Animal mourning in the last days can therefore function as yet another instance of ‘animal pedagogy’ (Oliver, 2009, 8), as yet another theater for human self-knowledge and self-congratulation. For all this co-opting of animal terror, a non-anthropocentric remainder persists, most evidently in the animals’ voices in the many examples of the tradition in which what the animals say is known only to God. The Welsh Airdena inna Cóic Lá nDéc ria mBráth states that ‘no one in the world, save the true, great, mighty God, knows what they say on that day’ (Heist, 1952, 81); the Middle English Castle of Love likewise explains that ‘wot no mon but God allone/What is the betokenyng/Of the loude cry and geiyng/Thet heo wolleth with loude stevyn/Gevyn and crye up to hevyn’ (Horstmann, 1892, 403); and John Lydgate’s Fiftene Toknys Aforn the Doom says: The thridde day herd on mount and pleyn, Foul, beeste and fyssh, shal tremble in certeyn, Compleynyng in ther hydous moone Vp the skyes; this noyse nat maad in veyn, For what they mene, God shal knowe alloone. (Lydgate, 1934, ll. 12–16) Lydgate’s characterization of the ‘this noyse’ as ‘nat maad in veyn’ seems disingenuous or incorrect, even within the immediate context of the poem itself. In the final stanza, Lydgate declares that ‘all bodyes shal that day aryse’ (l. 84); this is demonstrably untrue: only human bodies rise, and the rest God destroys. In what way could the animals have cried out ‘nat y in veyn,’ if Lydgate has excluded animals from those creatures possessing, to recall Judith Butler (2004, 18–49; 2009, 14–15), ‘grievable lives,’ or if God hears animal cries and still destroys them? But the animals will not have cried out in vain, if we attend to the incomprehensibility of animal speech, not as a lacuna in the tradition’s explanatory capability, but rather as a gap deliberately left open, a space that has not been stuffed with human meaning. These noisy animals appear in texts Woofing and weeping with animals in the last days 189 r 2010 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2040-5960 postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies Vol. 1, 1/2, 187–193 written by humans, for humans, in a genre about the end of the world that is primarily a genre about the preliminaries to a specifically human future. Nonetheless, the genre represents animals, and does so while simultaneously representing the inability of any human representation or understanding to represent animals completely. This deliberate representation of the ultimate unfathomability of animals to human understanding breaks sharply with the anthropocentrism of nearly all medieval engagements with animals, where they appear for humans almost always as interpretable signs: paradigmatically, in the bestiaries, or in Hexameral commentaries, encyclopedias, or heraldry. In this case, however, animals appear while simultaneously thwarting the signifying utility humans might seek to derive from them. Medieval linguistic theory considered animal voices to be meaningless: the human voice produces discrete sounds, but the animal produces only confused noise; while human language can be written down, animal noise cannot (Victorinus, 1967, 66). The woofing and braying of animal brutes conveys no meaning except as a reminder to humans of their unique possession of language (Steel, 2008, 15–16). The noise of animals in the Last Days contravenes these schema: it is incomprehensible to humans, unscriptable by any hand, but also, at the same time, linguistic, and comprehensible by God. It is not mere noise, then, but rather, at least for humans, a foreign language. Just before the termination of animal existence, just before humans escape from the world and their definitive reliance on animals, the animals themselves exclude humans by asserting their possession of meaningful selves wholly separate from humans. In part, the incomprehensibility of animals to humans testifies to the fundamental incomprehensibility of another’s suffering. Elaine Scarry remarks that ‘pain enters into our midst as at once something that cannot be denied and that cannot be confirmed. y To have pain is to have certainty; to hear about pain is to have doubt’ (Scarry, 1985, 13). The subjective core of one’s suffering can be observed or measured only incompletely by others; suffering can be felt and experienced in its fullest sense only by who – or what – feels it. Those outside the sufferer doubt it. This doubt may lead to one certainty, that of the Cartesian vivisectionist who comes to believe that a dog’s cries are only the cries of a broken machine, but it may lead to another, the realization that a subject’s suffering is accessible to others only through an act of imagination, and that therefore the subject ineluctably possesses something of itself that is unknowable to others. In the ‘15 Signs’ tradition, animals cry out, suffering, but no one can know fully what the animals feel but themselves and God: to quote Lydgate again, ‘what they mene, God shal knowe alloone’ (Lydgate, 1934, l. 16). By foregrounding the fundamental incompleteness of the human imaginative act of witnessing animal suffering, the ‘15 Signs’ tradition reserves something to the animal that is inaccessible to humans, namely, an animal consciousness belonging exclusively to the animal itself. Precisely because of its incompleteness, the record of the woeful cries of animals in the ‘15 Signs’ tradition thus Steel 190 r 2010 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2040-5960 postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies Vol. 1, 1/2, 187–193 acknowledges, to recall Tom Regan’s animal rights formulation, that animals can be subjects of their own lives, ‘the experiencing center of their lives, individuals who have lives that fare experientially better or worse for themselves, logically independently of whether they are valued by others’ (Regan, 2003, 93). But although God understands animals, they are not delivering their lives over to him. God hears them, understands them, and still destroys them. For better or worse, the animals are not bound to the economy of salvation. One Middle English example, in MS. British Library, Cotton Caligula A.II, f. 89, prays: I onke e, lord, of y good dede. For y wot, ou art rythwyse, Thow wolte not lese y marchandyse, But brynge me, lorde, unto at stede, The whych ou bow test me wyth y dede. (Varnhagen, 1880, ll. 59–54) Here, humans are aware of their own lives as commodities, purchased by divine suffering; their acts are elements in a transaction between the worldly and the divine. But animal deeds and desires are not calculable; nothing they do can increase or diminish divine punishment or reward in God’s economy, nor can they be the subject of ‘ryth’ (mercy), the divine power that infinitely exceeds all calculation. The incomprehensibility of animal voices and the inability of animals to be saved or punished at once renders animals completely vulnerable to destruction and protects the particularity of their lives from being assimilated to either human or divine needs. Animals’ lives, in this sense, are more their own than those of humans are, for in the last days animal life and deeds cannot be exchanged for anything. Non-substitutable, they can equal only themselves. Freed from servitude, discarded, animals cry out for the excess of their own life, for what cannot be assimilated to human needs or divine justice, for what is, in the best sense, useless, useless to humans because it is an end in and only for itself. In the animals’ cries humans can perceive zoē – mere life – demonstrating the presence of what anthropocentrism presumed it to lack: its own voice, its own sadness, rage and death, when it can no longer be sacrificed for either human or divine needs. It cries out in a voice that it should have been recognized as possessing all along. The rebuke from zoē must not be heard as mourning with humans. Ezekiel 38:19–20, although an influence on the ‘15 Signs’ tradition, differs from the tradition’s eschatology in one key respect: by prophesying ‘in that day there shall be a great commotion upon the land of Israel: so that the fishes of the sea, and the birds of the air, and the beasts of the field, and every creeping thing that creepeth upon the ground, and all men that are upon the face of the earth, shall be moved at my presence’ (Douay Rheims version), the passage describes Woofing and weeping with animals in the last days 191 r 2010 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 2040-5960 postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies Vol. 1, 1/2, 187–193 a commotion God directs at all life, human and animal alike. By contrast, in the ‘15 Signs’ tradition, as in the main lines of the Christian eschatological tradition, humans ultimately face judgment, while animals face death, their own death and the death of the world. The animals mourn along with the stars, the sea, the rocks, all that will be destroyed, all that will not be translated – or, to put it in modern language – uploaded into an eternity freed of the material limitations of worldly existence. In one representative instance, ‘E de toz les fluves parleront/E voiz d’ome parler averont’ (‘and all the rivers will speak and they will have the voices of men to speak’; Aebischer, 1964, l. 1150), and in another, ‘Every watyr shall crye an,/Speke and have steven of man’ (Varnhagen, 1880, 182). In its systematic attention to what makes up the world – to the stones, rivers, waters, trees, birds, beasts, and fish, each of which cries out and trembles in the last days – the ‘15 Signs’ tradition can be understood as recalling the world in all its plenitude at the very moment humans hope finally to realize secure identities by sealing themselves off from their own constitutive involvement in it. Against this hope, the tradition witnesses that what matters in the world is not only human, and that humans should understand that for any life, human or otherwise, to be life, it must be intermeshed inseparably and precariously in the world (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, 263; Haraway, 2008, 250). Understood this way, the voices of the ‘15 Signs’ tradition impart not scorn, but regret and longing for the rich, worldly life that humans imagine they can slough off for the empyrean sterility of the resurrection fantasy.