God Creating Animals Depicted on Ivory Plaque

This elephant ivory plaque from the Cathedral of Salerno dating to 1084 shows an image of God creating the animals. Early Medieval ideas about the place of animals in nature were shaped by Christianity. On the one hand, following Augustine (d 430) et al., who drew from the Genesis story, intellectuals thought that the animal kingdom was made for people to govern — in Genesis 1:28-30, for instance, God says to humans: “fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”

Early Medieval theologians were filled with wonder at the diversity of creation (our word “cosmos” meant “ornament”), and aware that life existed in an ecology of interdependence. These ideas chime well with modern environmentalism. But other notions are foreign to us. From the Aristotelian views shaped by the Ancient Greeks, Medieval thinkers imagined that all life forms existed in order to fulfill a specific purpose — this is a teleological approach. Furthermore, Christian intellectuals argued that there was a sharp gulf between humans and other animals — humans, after all, had souls (and were thus immortal), while animals, lacking rationality, also lacked souls.

One theologian came up with an interesting explanation of how non-human animals somehow were able to respond to their environments and act in ways that seemed suspiciously . . . reasonable. Basil of Caesarea argued that God had actually given a soul to every *species* of animal. So, all lions shared one soul (and that’s why they knew how to be courageous and terrifying), as did all bears (who were lazy and secretive), etc . . .

Many of these ideas about animals had an extremely long legacy in Western culture.