Medieval Nature Class 7 – Trees
Mel Chen’s 2012 Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect builds from the linguist Michael Silverstein’s pioneering study of what he termed “animacy hierarchies.” The languages he studied did not split things neatly into living and unliving. Instead, through varying and shifting modes of address, entities could be recognized as more or less alive, and, as a consequence, more or less valued. Chen runs with these foundational observations to track how animacy hierarchies help dominant human groups construe subordinated groups as less alive or less agential than the dominant group wants to believe itself to be. In the United States, Anti-Asian racism, for example, melded East Asian people with toxic substances during the 2007 “lead scare,” if you will, that concerned toys made in China. This panic was, as Chen observed, a kind of resurgence, as Chen observes, of old Western panics about Chinese and syphilis. Chen didn’t know it was coming of course, but the same conflation of person, place, and danger to health, with a similarly weaponized deployment of concepts of agency, was one horrific feature too, especially, during the first year of Covid-19.
Not all changes to animacy hierarchies are an awful as all this. As a queer theorist, Chen is interested in slippages, places where animacy hierarchies stumble. And so am I. I’m interested, too, in challenging Chen’s handful of references to “Western epistemologies” and “Western ontologies.” And I’m going to do that by briefly exploring the complexities of animacy hierarchies in medieval Christendom.
Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae, his thirteenth-century attempt to systematize all Christian belief, of course must treat the question of why fish can be legitimately eaten by Christians during a fast (1a1ae q. 72). He first draws on old material, Basil of Caesarea’s fourth-century Hexameron, his commentary on Genesis’ first six days’ of Creation, whose animacy hierarchy ranks plants the lowest, because their life “is very imperfect and difficult to discern.” In this framework, no ascetic or moral argument could ever possibly prevent us from eating plants of whatever sort. Fish require a more complex treatment, one of Aquinas’s own invention: as he argues, while some land animals, like ants, are more intelligent than fish, fish’s comparative indefinitiveness of limbs and “lower” mode of reproduction means that they not “living creatures,” but only “creeping creatures having life.” They may be more alive than plants, but being less alive than cattle and fowl, they are suitable for Lent and other fasting periods.
You’ll have noted that Aquinas does not bother to challenge Basil on the matter of plants. He may have had in mind Augustine’s point about plants in his City of God, written not long after Basil’s commentary. When Augustine challenged the pagan Romans on the virtue of noble suicide, he paused to comment on the Sixth Commandment, “thou shalt not kill.” It would be, he argued, an “errori insanissime,” a very foolish error to take this as applying to animals (I.20). Why not plants then? For him, the answer is obvious: plants can be killed because they “have no sensation,” while animals, because they do not ‘share the use of reason with us . . . both their life and death are subject to our needs.”
What’s notable to me, though, is that Augustine still recognizes that plants are alive. They can be killed, in both senses of the word “can”: it is allowable to kill them and they are capable of being killed. And if they have this capacity, then we and them have a mutual condition, that of being subject to death.
Here I must pause to offer an observation from Derrida’s The Animal that Therefore I am that has accompanied my work since I first met it, now more than 20 years ago. The great eighteenth-century utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Benthem argued, almost incidentally, that the chief question for animals is not whether they had language or could reason; it was whether they could suffer.
Can they suffer?’’ amounts to asking “Can they not be able?’’ And what of this inability [impouvoir]? What of the vulnerability felt on the basis of this inability? What is this nonpower at the heart of power? What is its quality or modality? How should one take it into account? What right should be accorded it? To what extent does it concern us? Being able to suffer is no longer a power; it is a possibility without power, a possibility of the impossible. Mortality resides there, as the most radical means of thinking the finitude that we share with animals. (27)
And, as I observed in my work on oysters, if we are thinking about the nonpower at the heart of power, why stop at suffering; why not stop at life itself, even in its most insentient modes? Augustine might not think much of the question, but we can.
And we can do that with the secondary reading for today in mind. Maurice Bloch’s “Why Trees, Too, Are Good to Think With: Towards an Anthropology of the Meaning of Life” gets cited often in tree scholarship, and that’s about it: it’s cited because it has a great title, but Bloch’s essay does not answer the question. Instead, it posits a cross-cultural capacity to recognize life, as innate to the human species as our capacity for language, which accounts for the universality of plant symbolism in human cultures. Perhaps!
More useful to me are the examples offered in Sarah Ritchey’s study of Franciscan tree imagery. I’m struck by a contrast between trees as fixed organizational schema and trees considered as flourishing, growing things. The former strike me as less alive than the latter.
Consider this image from Bartholomew of Pisa’s list of correspondences between the lives of Christ and Francis of Assisi:
The branches are a good way to illustrate the correspondences, but a tree may be a less apposite tool for illustration than, say, a building, because trees grow. By the time Bartholomew is writing, the worldly lives of Christ and Francis are over. It’s that very shared condition of being finished that allows the correspondences to be assembled confidently. Were Christ to do something new down here, or Francis, the balance might be thrown off. It’s easy enough, then, to say why the tree doesn’t quite work here. It’s harder perhaps to say why it does, as it does for a host of other medieval diagrams: of the sins, of the virtues, and so forth. Schemas want to stay put; but trees, being alive, do not.
More compellingly arboreal is Ubertino of Casale’s Tree of the Crucified Life of Jesus. I haven’t read it, but Ritchey’s quotation of Ubertino’s chapter summary (140) suggests Ubertino conceived of the work either as a trunk to flower portrait – a stable tree – or as a growing tree, in which the book extends itself upwards gradually and inevitably just as a tree does from its seed.
Finally, Adam Maher’s study of King Denis’s cantiga in which a forlorn woman offers her pleas to a pine forest and gets them back suggests a “pinemind” (856). I’m already at the end of my time, so I’m hoping we can unpack more in conversation.
For now, for one more consideration of a uncanny mingling of life and death, I’ll leave you with the set of martyrs, painted c. 1460, that I saw a few years ago in the Cathedral at Roskilde, Denmark. This is Saint Acacius, I believe, a male analog of Saint Ursula, impaled with 10,000 fellow martyrs on an acacia.
