If a violent man and a robber burns with greed of other men’s possessions, you say he is like a wolf. Another fierce man is always working his restless tongue at lawsuits, and you will compare him to a hound. Does another delight to spring upon men from ambushes with hidden guile? He is as a fox. Does one man roar and not restrain his rage? He would be reckoned as having the heart of a lion. Does another flee and tremble in terror where there is no cause of fear? He would be held to be as a deer. If another is dull and lazy, does he not live the life of an ass? One whose aims are inconstant and ever changed at his whims, is in no wise different from the birds. If another is in a slough of foul and filthy lusts, he is kept down by the lusts of an unclean swine. Thus then a man who loses his goodness, ceases to be a man, and … turns into a beast.19
Wicked people repudiate their human essence, and acquire the essence of a nonhuman animal. To appreciate this, it helps to set aside your twenty-first-century ways of thinking, and feel your way into Boethius’s mind-set. If a thing’s essence defines what it is, then anything that loses its essence is no longer the thing that it was. In horror films, when people become vampires, they forfeit their humanity; they are transformed into a different sort of creature. Changes in a thing’s appearance have no such drastic effects. We are quite accustomed to things changing their appearance. People might become pale, or dye their hair, or lose ten pounds, but in each case, they remain the person that they were before. But suppose it were possible for them to lose their humanity—to literally cease being human (for instance, by becoming a vampire). If that could happen, it would be correct to say that the person ceased to exist, and was seamlessly replaced by something else: someone (or something) with the very same appearance but quite a different essence.
This is perhaps not quite as incredible as it might at first seem. Physics provides us with examples of things of one kind spontaneously morphing into things of another kind. This weird process happens in radioactive decay. Uranium (U238) is a naturally occurring radioactive metal, which becomes thorium (Th234)—an entirely different element, possessing a different chemical essence—by spontaneously emitting alpha particles (particles composed of two neutrons and two protons). When a uranium atom emits an alpha particle, it ceases being uranium. In fact, the decay of uranium into thorium is only the first step of a long “decay chain” consisting of thirteen more transformations before eventually finally becoming lead. Radioactive decay provides a nice analogy for Boethius’s theory of dehumanization. In becoming wicked, a person loses his human essence. This causes him to cease being what he was: a human being. The new entity is made from the same material as the former one (minus the part that was lost), but is nevertheless a being of a completely different kind: a subhuman being with a new, subhuman, essence.
To grasp this idea more fully, it’s necessary to wrap one’s mind around a concept that Boethius and his contemporaries took for granted (and that most of us, often in spite of ourselves, tacitly embrace today): the concept of the great chain of being.
THE GREAT CHAIN OF BEING
Since ancient times, people have conceived of the universe as a vast hierarchy with God, the supremely perfect being, sitting astride its apex, with inanimate matter lying at its base and everything else situated at one or another of the many levels arrayed in between. Although the details of the scheme vary from one culture to another and from one epoch to the next, all versions of it are broadly similar. Plants are near the bottom, not much higher than the soil from which they grow. Simple animals like worms and snails are more perfect than plants, so they occupy a slightly more elevated rung. Mammals are higher still, and we humans have a privileged rank just below the angels, and two steps beneath the Creator. This taxonomic system was called the great chain of being (or scala naturae, literally “ladder of nature”). Alexander Pope succinctly described its attributes in his 1733 Essay on Man.
Vast chain of being! Which from God began,
Natures aethereal, human, angel, man,
Beast, bird, fish, insect, what no eye can see,
No glass can reach; from Infinite to thee,
From thee to nothing.—On superior pow’rs
Were we to press, inferior might on ours;
Or in the full creation leave a void,
Where, one step broken, the great scale’s destroy’d;
From Nature’s chain whatever link you strike,
Tenth or ten thousandth, breaks the chain alike.20
Philosopher Arthur O. Lovejoy, who wrote the classic and still definitive study of the great chain of being, believed that the idea originated in the ideas of Plato and Aristotle as synthesized by the Egyptian philosopher Plotinus during the third century. However, Lovejoy overestimated the intellectual influence of Greek philosophy for, although the version of the great chain that proliferated in both Western and Islamic societies was strongly influenced by Greek philosophical ideas, its pedigree is much older and its prevalence more widespread. In the Book of Genesis, for instance, we are told that God (Elohim) made human beings in his own image, and destined them to have dominion over all other living things ( just as God has dominion over him) and we find a similar principle in Eastern ideas of the ascent of the soul from animal forms to the divine through cycles of birth, death, and reincarnation. In fact, the idea can be traced right back to the ancient Egyptian and Mesopotamian civilizations, before disappearing into the darkness of prehistory.21
In today’s secular world we segregate fact from value, and our scientific accounts of the structure of the universe are purely descriptive. This point of view would have been alien to Boethius and others who endorsed the idea of the great chain of being, for the scala naturae seamlessly melded fact with value. The position of anything on the hierarchy was an index of its intrinsic worth. It was also believed that each level of the chain contains its own hierarchy of sublevels and sub-sublevels. For instance, in the category of metals (itself a subcategory of inanimate substances), gold was considered the most noble and lead the most base, so the former belonged at the top of the hierarchy of metals, while the latter occupied a humble position at the bottom. The hierarchical notion of sublevels sparked a great deal of speculation about the relative superiority or inferiority of different types of human beings. The twelfth-century philosopher Albertus Magnus (Saint Albert the Great) claimed that there is a category of similitudiens hominis (creatures similar to man, in which he included apes and pygmies) lying in between humans and animals. But this didn’t stick. Later, scholars jettisoned Albert’s innovation, and divided humanity into a series of subtypes ranked from “highest” to “lowest.” Unsurprisingly, considering their origin, most of these schemes modestly placed Caucasians at the pinnacle of humanity and relegated Native Americans and sub-Saharan Africans to the bottom, only a hair’s breadth away from the apes (an idea that underpinned Thomas Jefferson’s infamous claim that male apes preferred African women as mates to members of their own species).22
The great chain of being represented the cosmos as static and unchangeable, complete and continuous. There was no room for novelty. How different this is from the Darwinian picture of constant flux, in which machinery of nature eternally generates “forms most beautiful and most wondrous” and consigns others to oblivion. Perhaps the most revolutionary aspect of Darwin’s work lay in his replacing the ancient, vertical model of biodiversity with a more egalitarian, horizontal one. He denied that life progresses toward a goal of perfection and asserted instead that it simply diversifies—branching outward in a ramifying network of taxa rather than climbing upward. Darwin resisted adopting the word evolution to characterize his theory precisely because of its connotation of progress towards a predetermined goal. But even now, in today’s post-Darwinian world, we find ourselves clinging to the more ancient vision of the cosmos. We still unblushingly speak of organism being “higher” or “lower” on an evolutionary scale, and the assumption that our species is more highly evolved than others continues, after all these centurie
s, to suffuse the zeitgeist. Even the scientific term primate, which refers to the order of animals that includes Homo sapiens, comes from the Latin primas, meaning “of the highest rank.”
Why is the human imagination so thoroughly captured by the metaphor of the great chain of being? Perhaps we cling to it because (status-obsessed primates that we are) we project the socially stratified character of human societies, with their hierarchies of wealth, class, and power, onto the cosmos. Or perhaps it’s inspired by the fear that moral values would evaporate if we denied that some beings have greater intrinsic worth than others. John Stuart Mill’s remark, that it is better to be a dissatisfied human being than a satisfied pig, is interesting in this connection, because it tacitly relies on the notion of a natural hierarchy to underwrite a moral theory. Mill wanted to base his ethical theory on pleasure. His utilitarian doctrine had it that what’s morally good is nothing more than whatever maximizes human pleasure. But Mill couldn’t bring himself to accept that all pleasures are created equal, so he illicitly invoked the idea of “higher” and “lower” pleasures, which undermined the whole idea that moral value could be analyzed in terms of pleasure by sneaking moral rectitude in through the back door. Mill associated higher and lower pleasures with higher and lower forms of life, hence his remark about humans and pigs. But why should a pig’s satisfaction be less worthy than a human’s dissatisfaction? Like so many of us, Mill couldn’t manage to liberate himself from the notion that pigs are beneath us in the cosmic order.
The great chain of being continues to cast a long shadow over our contemporary worldview. It’s also a prerequisite for the notion of dehumanization, for the very notion of subhumanity—of being less than human—depends on it.
Boethius pictured the world in ways that seem very strange from today’s perspective. Later thinkers would not countenance the idea that human beings literally become transformed into subhumans, no matter how depraved they are. Instead, they would look for psychological explanations of why we imagine that others are less than human. However, his emphasis on the idea that a person can lose his or her human essence captured something very important—indeed, essential—about the way that we think about dehumanization.
THE MIDDLE AGES: ISLAM, PICO, AND PARACELSUS
Reputation, reputation, reputation! Oh, I have lost my reputation. I have lost the immortal part of myself, and what remains is bestial.
—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, OTHELLO 23
Surely the vilest of animals in Allah’s sight are those who disbelieve.
—THE KORAN24
Boethius was a liminal figure, who can be seen as either one of the last great thinkers of classical antiquity, or one of the first of the Middle Ages. He lived during the twilight years of the Roman Empire, when the great cultural legacy of Greco-Roman civilization was taking its last few dying gasps. As the curtain fell, and Europe was plunged into the Dark Ages, a new religious movement was stirring in the Arabian Peninsula. Within a century of Muhammad’s death in 632, Islamic civilization had burst out of its birthplace and created a vast empire that stretched from Spain and southern France in the west, all the way to central Asia in the east.
From its inception, dehumanization had a place in the Muslim conception of the world. Medieval Muslims took it for granted that humans can become subhuman. It was underwritten by the authority of the Koran, as well as several hadith (sayings attributed to Muhammad). Unlike Aristotle and Boethius, the early Muslims viewed reversion to the subhuman state as a form of divine punishment.
Early Muslim references to dehumanization were overtly ethnocentric. Almost without exception, the people who are transformed into subhuman creatures—specifically, pigs, apes, and rats—are Jews.
There are three verses in the Koran that describe the transformation of Jews into nonhuman animals as punishment. They are punished not because they are Jews, but rather because they transgressed the injunction in the Torah to refrain from working on the Sabbath.
And well ye knew those amongst you who transgressed in the matter of the Sabbath: We said to them: “Be ye apes, despised and rejected.” (Sura 2: 66)25
Say: “Shall I point out to you something much worse than this, (as judged) by the treatment it received from Allah? Those who incurred the curse of Allah and His wrath, those of whom some He transformed into apes and swine, those who worshipped evil; these are (many times) worse in rank, and far more astray from the even path!” (Sura 5:60)
Unlike these verses from the Koran, references to dehumanization in the hadith compiled two or three centuries later have a distinctly anti-Jewish flavor. They describe how a group of Israelites were transformed into rats, how unbelievers are turned into monkeys and pigs, and how Abraham’s father was transformed into an animal and hurled into the raging fires of hell.26
Whereas both Boethius and Aristotle entertained the idea that one could be outwardly human but inwardly subhuman, there’s no trace of this idea in the Muslim texts dating from this period. The zoomorphic transformations described in the Koran and hadith were apparently assumed to be concrete, physical metamorphoses: a person’s body was transformed into that of an ape, a pig, or a rat. But when Aristotelian philosophy began to make serious inroads into Islamic thought during the ninth century, Muslim philosophers started to interpret these stories metaphorically, as references to the bestial degradation of the human soul. During this period they also began to speculate about the ranks occupied by different sorts of people on the great chain of being, just as their European counterparts would do centuries later. Some groups (in particular, sub-Saharan Africans) were singled out as verging on the subhuman. I will discuss this further in Chapter Four.27
Back in Europe, the Boethian theory persisted right up to the end of the Renaissance. The famous “Oration on the Dignity of Man” written in 1486 by the Renaissance scholar Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, begins with a discussion of our rank on the great chain of being, and goes on to talk about the human potential for reverting to a less than human condition.
What is this rank on the chain of being? God the Father, Supreme Architect of the Universe, built this home, this universe we see all around us, a venerable temple of his godhead, through the sublime laws of his ineffable Mind. The expanse above the heavens he decorated with Intelligences, the spheres of heaven with living, eternal souls. The scabrous and dirty lower worlds he filled with animals of every kind.
God created human beings because he desired “some creature to think on the plan of his great work, and love its infinite beauty, and stand in awe at its immenseness.” But He couldn’t find a prototype for their design because creation was already complete. One might imagine that an omnipotent deity could get around this problem by conjuring up a new level out of nothing and inserting it in an appropriate position on the chain, but Pico tells us that He dealt with it by creating humans with no fixed nature—that is, as beings capable of choosing their own nature.
[T]he Great Artisan … made man a creature of indeterminate and indifferent nature, and, placing him in the middle of the world, said to him “Adam, we give you no fixed place to live, no form that is peculiar to you, nor any function that is yours alone. According to your desires and judgment, you will have and possess whatever place to live, whatever form, and whatever functions you yourself choose. All other things have a limited and fixed nature prescribed and bounded by Our laws. You, with no limit or no bound, may choose for yourself the limits and bounds of your nature.…
Pico believed that we are free to choose our position on the great chain, and that the ability to determine one’s own destiny is a uniquely human attribute. Some people opt to ascend toward God, while others sink to the level of beasts. “To you is granted the power of degrading yourself into the lower forms of life, the beasts,” wrote Pico, “and to you is granted the power, contained in your intellect and judgment, to be reborn into the higher forms, the divine.”28
Pico’s near contemporary, the larger-than-life Swiss physician Philippus Aure
olus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim (or Paracelsus, as he is conveniently called) also wrote about dehumanization. Whereas Pico believed that human beings freely choose their essence, Paracelsus held that human and subhuman elements strive within our nature. The idea that the animal and divine essences wrestle for dominance in the human soul was fairly standard theological fare during the medieval period. We find it, for instance, in Saint Gregory the Great’s Homily of the Gospel, as well as in the writings of Irish theologian Johannes Scotus Eriugena, both of whom informed their readers that human beings are composed of every creature.”29 Paracelsus embraced a typically idiosyncratic version of the animal-in-man doctrine. In the words of historian of science William R. Newman:
Man has both a spiritual and an animal capacity and that when one calls a man a wolf or dog, this is not a matter of simile but of identity.… When someone acts in a bestial fashion, he therefore actualizes the beast within and literally becomes the animal whose behavior he imitates.30
This theory had obvious affinities with those expounded by Boethius and Pico, but its emphasis was slightly different. For Paracelsus, we become dehumanized by virtue of actualizing a subhuman potential, something that was in us all along, in a latent or suppressed state. By yielding to the beast within, we forego our humanity.
From the medieval perspective, dehumanization was viewed as an actual transformation from a human to a subhuman state, caused by sinful behavior. All this would change with the dawning of the Enlightenment.
Less Than Human Page 5