In the Eye of the Animal: Zoological Imagination in Ancient Christianity by Patricia Cox Miller

Abstract

Reviewed by: In the Eye of the Animal: Zoological Imagination in Ancient Christianity by Patricia Cox Miller Anna Lisa Taylor In the Eye of the Animal: Zoological Imagination in Ancient Christianity Patricia Cox Miller Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. Pp. 280. ISBN 978-0-81-225035-0 This is the fourth of Miller's books with "imagination" in the title, indicating a broader project of mapping the thought world of Late Antiquity. Earlier works [End Page 556] explored how writers interpreted dreams (Dreams in Late Antiquity: Studies in the Imagination of a Culture, 1997), thought about religion and language (The Poetry of Thought in Late Antiquity: Essays in Imagination and Religion, 2001), and understood the relation of holiness and materiality (The Corporeal Imagination: Signifying the Holy in Late Ancient Christianity, 2016). In her new work, which looks at Christian writers' use of nonhuman animals, she argues that authors who presented the prevailing "rhetoric of human superiority and domination" paradoxically also challenged the hierarchical human/animal binary. Through zoomorphism (representing humans like animals), anthropomorphism (representing animals like humans, especially in the possession of speech and reason), and stories of interspecies encounters, these sources collapsed the distance between human and animal. Miller positions this book in animality studies, which is distinguished from animal studies by its lack of overt political engagement in animal rights. Recuperating a Christian sympathy toward animals, and nature is, however, implicitly a political move. The book is widely interdisciplinary, drawing on philosophy, cognitive ethology, affect theory, new materialism, and—perhaps to show the enduring resonance of animals in the human imagination or to add color, light, and movement—twentieth-century poetry. Each of Miller's chapters examines a different way in whichh late antique Christian texts undermined the unstable human/animal binary and the devaluation of the latter. Chapter 1 looks at how birds function as metaphors for thought, spiritual ascent, and imagination. Chapters 2 and 3 consider examples of zoomorphism and anthropomorphism respectively in "animal-friendly" (68) exegetical texts including those by Augustine, Basil of Caesarea, and Gregory of Nyssa, and in the late-third-century Egyptian Physiologus. Following contemporary ethologists, Miller rehabilitates anthropomorphism from its "mawkish" reputation (80), seeing it as both unavoidable and as a tool for understanding other species. The "shared creatureliness" (50) of human and animal is the basis of what philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty calls a "strange kinship" that allows for radical cross-species sympathy and undermines the always fraught boundary between the human and the animal. Further, since exegetical readings treated them as signifiers to be read allegorically, rather than literal animals, "Scriptural animals were freed from animals' debased position" (56) to become role models and moral exemplars for humans. Only in the coda to Chapter 2 does she admit that Origen's zoomorphism is "mostly negative" and that he likens humans to animals to express "an interior menagerie that is violent and savage" (76). Chapter 4 reads the encounters between monks and wild animals in the fantastic stories of the desert ascetics. Occasionally a talking animal threatens the human monopoly on logos, but usually the compassionate cross-species engagement is expressed through a shared language of gesture and touch. Chapter 5 looks at the "vibrant materiality" of small creatures, to present a cosmos teeming with life, which writers approached with both disgust and "theological wonder." Miller enlivens and re-enchants an early Christian landscape that has often appeared devoid of sympathy with nature. By centering the animals, she reveals a hidden richness in Christian views of the material world. She provides an [End Page 557] important corrective to the "absurdly reductive" (51) equation of early Christianity with anthropocentrism, and proves the existence of a powerful "countercurrent" (4) of cross-species compassion. Like the texts she studies, Miller's book also circles a paradox: she centers animals, but there are no real animals here. This fantastic menagerie—featuring bodyguard crows, speaking lionesses, vegetarian lions, celibate widowed doves, monogamous elephants, serpenteating deer, "obedient bedbugs" (103), a crocodile who serves as a raft, and an incorruptible peacock cutlet—contains no trace of real animals. The stories are frequently at odds with biology (134). In her introduction, she quotes historian...