¹ b. ^cAbod. Zar, 3b (Hebrew-English Edition of the Babylonian Talmud; trans. Mishcon, A.; ed. Epstein, I.; London: The Soncino Press, 1988)Google Scholar . A challenge to this by Rabbi Nahman ben Isaac goes unresolved; instead, Isa 42:14 becomes a proof text for God's refusal to laugh at any time after the destruction of the Temple: “I have long held my peace, I have been still, and refrained myself, now will I cry.” The upshot is that God now spends the fourth quarter of his day instructing small children (according to Rashi, those who have died very young), presum-ably in Torah. At night, as the rabbinical discussion yields, God either continues his daytime activities, or else rides on a cherub and floats in 18,000 worlds, or else sits and listens to the songs of the hayyot, the winged angelic beings who bear his throne.

² As Genesis emphatically tells us and Jon Levenson has illumined. See Levenson, Jon, Creation and the Persistence of Evil: The Jewish Drama of Divine Omnipotence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988) 53–54Google Scholar . Levenson observes, “the great aquatic beast is not merely captured and subjugated…but actually fashioned by YHWH from the start and only for the purpose of his personal diversion and amusement.…Leviathan in Psalm 104 is just another of the myriad things whose existence prompts the psalmist to an ecstatic proclamation of the wisdom that God manifested when he filled the world with creatures of his own design.” The term tannin elsewhere is used to refer to Leviathan, as in Job 41:1. Whereas Levenson's emphasis here is on the subordination of the oceanic monsters to God, as well as on their dependent origination, we should not overlook the joy that results from their creation: apparently, a mutual joy, flowing like a parabola between Creator and creature, infinite owner and oversized pet–a joy rolling like mighty intercontinental splashes between them during the fourth quarter of each day.

³ I am indebted to the theologian Thomas Berry for his often repeated observation that “the world is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects” (see, for example, his Prologue in A Communion of Subjects: Animals in Religion, Science, and Ethics, ed. Paul Waldau and Kimberley Patton [forthcoming]).

⁴ This methodological criterion was articulated most decisively by Wilfred Cantwell Smith in his essay, “Comparative Religion: Whither—and Why?,” in The History of Religions: Essay in Methodology, ed. Eliade, Mircea and Kitagawa, Joseph (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959) 31–58Google Scholar . Discussion within the comparative discipline in the subsequent decades has, to some extent, nuanced Smith's “litmus test” in less absolute terms; see, for example, the discussions of Diana Eck or William Paden on the special interpretive value of the etic or synthetic perspective that could not have risen from within the tradition but is nevertheless still recognizable to it in A Magic Still Dwells: Comparative Religion in the Postmodern Age, ed. Patton, Kimberley C. and Ray, Benjamin C. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000)Google Scholar.

⁵ Hubert, Henri H. and Mauss, Marcel, Sacrifice: Its Nature and Function, trans. Halls, W. D. (1898; reprinted Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964) 29–138Google Scholar . Outside the scope of this discussion are both the issue of vegetarianism and the special case of sacrifice, whereby the animal victim belongs to and represents the gods. However, it is worth noting that the monotheistic traditions mirror polytheistic ones in their view of the special consecrated status of the victim, whether animal or human, and whether the sacrifice is a blood-offering or has been sublimated, as in the case of the Eucharist. As Hubert and Mauss (Sacrifice, 79) note, “Sacrifice effects an exaltation of victims, which renders them directly divine.” This statement must be inflected for each tradition; in ancient Israelite sacrifice the victim is not so much “directly divine” as it is holy, set apart, consecrated; once vowed, it cannot be redeemed or returned to the pen (see Lev 27:9-13 and tractates Temura of the Mishnah and Tosefta).

⁶ Lévi-Strauss's famous statement came in the context of his Totemism, wherein he argued for a radical shift in the evaluation of the role of animals in the signification of kinship groups, that is, as emblems of structural opposition that are neither understood as “natural stimulus” nor reductively as “arbitrary pretext”: “The animals in totemism cease to be solely or principally creatures which are feared, admired, or envied: their perceptible reality permits the embodiment of ideas and relations conceived by speculative thought on the basis of empirical observations. We can understand, too, that natural species are chosen not because they are ‘good to eat’ but because they are ‘good to think.’” Levi-Strauss, Claude, Totemism, trans. Needham, Rodney (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963) 89Google Scholar.

⁷ A typical example of this approach is Klingender, Francis, Animals in Art and Thought to the End of the Middle Ages (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971)Google Scholar . In his chapter on “The Hunter's Art and Mythology,” Klingender writes the following: “…the emphasis Miss Rachel Levy places on the concept of ‘participation’ in her profound analysis of the Paleolithic ritual seems unduly spiritual. That the hunters’ attitude to their game may be expressed in terms of participation I am prepared to admit, but only on the level on which children conceive that term, when, for example, they ‘embody’ an admired creature's strength and virtues in themselves eating it” (p. 27).

⁸ The English interpretation of the Quran used throughout is that of'Abdullah Yusuf'Ah , The Meaning of the Holy Qur'dn (Brentwood: Amana Corporation, 1991)Google Scholar . For an insightful discussion of the implications of such Quranic passages as they are debated in a tenth-century Muslim fable, The Case of the Animals versus Man before the King of the Jinn of the Ikhwan al-Safa', see Zayn Kassam, “The Book of the Animals of the Brethren of Purity: Towards an Ecology of Being,” forthcoming in Waldau and Patton, ed., A Communion of Subjects.

⁹ The English translation of the Hebrew Bible and New Testament used throughout is that of The New Oxford Annotated Bible (NRSV; ed. Metzger, Bruce M. and Murphy, Roland E. [New York: Oxford University Press, 1994])Google Scholar.

¹⁰ Aquinas, Thomas, Summa Theologica, Question 64Google Scholar , Article 1 . English text by the English Dominican Fathers (New York: Benzinger Brothers, 1918)Google Scholar.

¹¹ Carlin, David R., “Rights, Animal and Human,” First Things 105 (2000) 16–17.Google Scholar

¹² Nor, for that matter, is such a principle any more helpful in exegeting the same issue in the Eastern traditions, but again, for different reasons.

¹³ See Fisch, Menachem, Rational Rabbis: Science and Talmudic Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997)Google Scholar . For the halakhic challenge to the divine bat qol, see b. B. Mesi^ca 59b.

¹⁴ For an encyclopedic and learned example of this theological stance, see Schochet, Elijah Judah, Animal Life in Jewish Tradition: Attitudes and Relationships (New York: KTAV Publishing House, 1984)Google Scholar.

¹⁵ Linzey, Andrew, Animal Theology (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995).Google Scholar

¹⁶ For example, in collections such as Animals on the Agenda: Questions about Animals for Theology and Ethics, ed. Linzey, Andrew and Yamamoto, Dorothy (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998)Google Scholar.

¹⁷ Tanakh Job 41:10.

¹⁸ Al-Ghazall's distinction of human beings from among other creatures and everything else in the world thus separated him, ideologically, from the strictest construction of tanzih, or the prohibition against anthropomorphism in theology. God is not utterly removed from association with His creatures; through Adam we can discern a likeness between the human spirit and that of God in its essence, quality, and action. Just as Allah rules the world, so a person analogously rules his or her body. However, in the Madnun al-saghir, al-Ghazali makes it clear that one can avoid the danger of anthropomorphic theology—of tashblh— since Adam is not self-sufficient. God alone, unlike Adam, is qayyum (“self-subsisting”).

¹⁹ MacDonald, D. B., “Allah,” in The Shorter Encyclopedia of Islam, ed. Gibb, H. A. R. and Kramers, J. H. (Leiden: Brill, 1974) 41.Google Scholar

²⁰ This sometimes surfaces in poignant ways. That the creation stories of Genesis could be understood as implying direct divine paternity of the animal kingdom is clear enough in the cry of the cock in the medieval work of Jewish fiction written by Kalonymous ben Kalonymous in 1316, Iggeret Baalei Hayyim:

At midnight I rise to pray

But the sleeping ones lay hold of me…

They slaughter me and eat me.

Have we not all one father?

Has not one God created us all?”

Note that the cock rises not simply characteristically to cry out, but to pray.

²¹ Bukhari 5:153. This Divine Saying (in qad qarasatka namlah ahlakta ummah min al-umam tusabbihu) is also found in Muslim's compilation. For an annotated discussion of this hadith and another version, see “Saying 25” in William A. Graham, Divine Word and Prophetic Word in Early Islam: A Reconsideration of the Sources with Special References to the Divine Saying or “Hadith Qudsi,” Religion and Society 7, ed. Leo Laeyendeker and Jacques Waardenburg (Paris: Mouton, 1977).

²² Masri, Al-Hafiz B. A., Animals in Islam (Petersfield, England: Athene Trust, 1989).Google Scholar

²³ Sefer ha-Mitzvot, Commandments 202, 203, and 270 (negative). Compare Mishneh Torah, Neziqin, Hilkhot Rozeach uShmirat Nefesh, ch. 13. Discussed in , Schochet, Animal Life in Jewish Tradition, 197–98Google Scholar.

²⁴ See Schochet's discussion of this story in Animal Life in Jewish Tradition, 164-65. Here Schochet's rationalist framework clearly becomes for him an exegetical impediment: “…the narrative is a troubling one. Is there any justification in concluding from it that one has a moral obligation to rescue any animal designated for slaughter? After all, is it not permissible to eat the meat of kosher animals which are properly slaughtered? Or is it, ideally? Why then should Rabbi Judah be condemned from heaven for not interfering with what is a legitimate under-taking!?]. Yet he is condemned. He is clearly judged guilty of having shown no pity toward the frightened calf, and is severely punished for failing to emulate Him whose ‘tender mercies are over all His works.’”

²⁵ In the Zohar, God is furious with Noah when he emerges from the ark and asks why all the world had to be destroyed. God rebukes him for being so passive and for not pleading for mercy for the rest of creation at the time he was commanded to build, but only selfishly saving his family and the designated creatures as he was commanded and then despairing after the fact. The Zohar implies that had Noah pleaded for mercy before the catastrophic rains, God would have spared the world from the flood (Zohar Hadash 22 c–d and 23a, extrapolating, as Daniel Matt shows in his commentary, from Debarim Rabbah and Isa 54:9 [where the flood is called “the waters of Noah”]). See

²⁶ Mystic Treatises by Isaac of Nineveh, trans. Wensick, 1923; retranslated from the Syriac by Sebastian Brock in Daily Readings with Isaac of Syria (ed. Allchin, A.M.; Springfield: Templegate, 1989) 29Google Scholar.

²⁷ Quran S 22:28.

²⁸ Eric Mortensen, “Raven Augury from Tibet to Alaska: Dialects, Divine Agency, and the Bird's-Eye View,” in Waldau and Patton, ed., A Communion of Subjects (forthcoming). For the scientific question of raven mentation, see Heinrich, Bernd, “An Experimental Investigation of Insight in Common Ravens (Corvus Corax),” Auk 112 (1995) 994–1003CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁹ Animals prophesy because the other world speaks to them and is understood. In Mediterranean and other mythologies, both indigenous or classical, gods consistently communicate with animals without the necessity of human interpretation; both parties usually know more than do people about what is “really” going on in a given course of events. The Iliad gives us the magical talking horses of Achilles, Xanthos, and Balios, horses “stormy Podarge once conceived of the west wind” (II. 16.149-51). As they mourn the death of Patroklos and antici-pate that of Achilles, the horses lean their heads along the ground and weep “warm tears,” soiling their bright manes. Powerless to forestall their loss, Zeus laments together with them: “Poor wretches, I why then did we ever give you to the Lord Peleus, I a mortal man, and you yourselves are immortal and ageless? I Only so that among unhappy men you also might be grieved? I Since among all creatures that breathe on earth and crawl on it I there is not anywhere a thing more dismal than man is” (II. 17.442 [trans. Richmond Lattimore; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951]).

³⁰ As Masri insists and ^cAlI concedes, the verb here (wahyun) ordinarily has God as its subject, and means “to reveal, to inspire to put a special message into the human heart”; it is used of God's revelation to all His Prophets, including the Holy Prophet Muhammad. The interpretation “taught” is an attempt to soften the theological impact of God's mysterious communication with the bee, which takes the form of revelation (See discussion in Masri, Animals in Islam, 12; ^cAlI, The Meaning of the Holy Qur'ān, S 16:68, note 2097).

³¹ In the Book of Jonah, for example, in order to accomplish his ends, God “commands” (mān̅ah) and is understood by the fish (Jon 1:17), the vine (Jon 4:6), and the worm and the wind that attack the vine (Jon 4:7 and 4:8). There are thematic parallels in the Islamic version of the career of Yunus.

³² Bernhard W. Anderson, commentary on the book of Numbers in The New Oxford Annotated Bible, ed. Metzger, Bruce M. and Murphy, Roland E. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994) 197Google Scholar . The passage continues to provoke scholarly analysis, especially in studies of Biblical satire; to name only a few works, see Moore, Michael S., The Balaam Traditions: Their Character and Development (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1990)Google Scholar ; Scolnic, Benjamin, “Balaam and the Power of Words: A Deconstructive Reading,” Conservative Judaism 44 (1992) 47–56Google Scholar ; Savran, G., “Beastly Speech: Intertextuality, Balaam's Ass, and the Garden of Eden,” 750764 (1994) 33–55Google Scholar ; Marcus, David, From Balaam to Jonah: Anti-Prophetic Satire in the Hebrew Bible (Atlanta: Scholar's Press, 1995)Google Scholar.

³³ Bukhari 66.11; TirmidhI 46.25; compare Muslim 6.240-42. William A. Graham comments upon this account in Beyond the Written Word: Oral Aspects of Scripture in the History of Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) 93Google Scholar and n. 50, and extensively discusses the meaning of sakinah in his Divine Word and Prophetic Word in Early Islam, 21, n. 13.

³⁴ “Peace be upon you, Prophet Muhammad, messenger of God!” Abu Nu'aym and Bayhaql tell this story in their respective works on “signs of prophethood” (Dalā'il an-Nubuwwah), works as discussed by Annemarie Schimmel in the chapter, “Legends and Miracles” in her And Muhammad Is His Messenger: The Veneration of the Prophet in Islamic Piety (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985) 76Google Scholar . Schimmel notes that in Swahili Islamic poetry, the green lizard is called muslim muumini, “the Muslim lizard” (p. 279, n. 38). These animal addresses appear as a kind of sign of the Prophet's barakah, and the cosmic nature of his election, as, for example, in the medieval Spanish-Arabic poet Ahmad al-'Arusi: “Is it not you who has been sent as mercy to mankind? I Is it not you whom the pebbles praised I And whom the lizard in the desert addressed, and the wolf too? I Is it not you for whom the full moon in the sky was split?” , Nabhani, Al-majmumú'a an-nabhāniyya, 477–49Google Scholar , cited in , Schimmel, And Muhammad, 76–77Google Scholar and 280, n. 46.

¹⁵ Vita S. Pachomii 17, 19 (Migne, PL 73. 240), trans. Waddell, Helen in Beasts and Saints, ed. Waal, Esther de (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995) 16.Google Scholar

³⁶ “St. Macarius of Alexandria and the Grateful Hyena” (from a French translation of the Coptic text by Amelineau, Monasteres de la Basse-Egypte, 233), in , Waddell, Beasts and Saints, 13Google Scholar.

³⁷ , Colgan, Vitae Sanctorum…Hiberniae 1. 244aGoogle Scholar , in , Waddell, Beasts and Saints, 127–30Google Scholar . The Vita remarks of the mouse's behavior: “Dear was this office to the man of God, for by it he saw not only his vows fulfilled, but himself provoked by a dumb creature to the service of God.”

³⁸ Ibid., 130.

³⁹ It is interesting that here the Arabic adjective saffat (“spreading out [wings]”) that describes al-tayr, “the birds,” can carry with it the sense of “stretched out in rows,” that is, in imitation of the prayer rows in which the salat is performed. The idea of birds praising God appears elsewhere in the Quran, for example, in SS 21:79; 34:10, and 38:18-19. Paret notes that in S 37:165–66, where the angels declare that “we are verily ranged in ranks [saff] (for service); and we are verily those who declare (Allah's) glory!” saff stands in close relation to sabbaha, “to praise or magnify” (Paret, Rudi, Der Koran. Kommentar und Konkordance [Stuttgart, 1993] 414, 419).Google Scholar

⁴⁰ Their souls rose free of all they'd been before;

The past and its actions were no more.

Their life came from that close, insistent sun

And in its vivid rays they shone as one.

There in the Simorgh's radiant face they saw

Themselves, the Simorgh of the world—with awe

They gazed, and dared at last to comprehend

They were the Simorgh and the journey's end.

They see the Simorgh—at themselves they stare,

And see a second Simorgh standing there;

They look at both and see the two are one;

That this is that, that this, the goal is won.

Attar, Farid ud-din, The Conference of the Birds (Manteq at-Tair), trans. Darbandi, Afkham and Davis, Dick (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984) 219.Google Scholar

⁴¹ Ibid. The translators make the observation about the pun as a possible origin of the poem.

⁴² Gasztold, Carmen Bernos de, Prayers from the Ark (Prières dans I'Arche, 1947)Google Scholar and The Creatures’ Choir (Choral des Bêtes, 1960), tranGodden, s. Rumer (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977) 37, 45Google Scholar.

⁴³ Beit-Arie, M., who edited the critical edition of Pereq širah as his doctoral thesis at Hebrew University (2 vols.; Jerusalem, 1966)Google Scholar , also wrote the entry, “Perek Shirah” for the Encyclopedia Judaica, vol. 13, cols. 273-76. The text exists in a number of different versions (Oriental, Sephardi, Ashkenazi).

⁴⁴ See Beit-Arie, M., “Perek Shirah,” Encyclopedia Judaica, col. 274.Google Scholar

⁴⁵ Ibid.

⁴⁶ The extracanonical psalm had been known only in Septuagint manuscripts of the Psalter such as codex Sainaiticus, codex Alexandrinus, etc. until Qumran Cave yielded a Hebrew Psalter, designated HQPs', which included Pss 151, 154, and 155 (the latter two found only in a Syriac Psalter). See the texts in Hebrew and English of Sanders, J. A. in Discoveries in the Judaean Desert of Jordan, vol. 4 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965)Google Scholar and Bruce Metzger's discussion of the MS tradition in The New Oxford Annotated Bible, “The Apocryphal Deutercanonical Books of the Old Testament,” 282-84. I am grateful to Professor James Kugel of Harvard and Bar-Ilan Universities for his informed direction on this issue.

⁴⁷ Through its abstinence from food from which demai have not been separated, the donkey thus not only foils its captors (who cannot use a starved animal), but shames those who know of its strictness such as R. Jeremiah and R. Ze'ira, who inadvertently cause the consumption of untithed figs: “If the early [Rabbis] were angels, then we are humans; while if they were humans, we are asses. R. Mana observed: We are not even asses. R. Pinehas b. Jair's ass refused untithed barley which was offered to it, whereas we have eaten figs in an untithed state” (Gen. Rab. 60:8). The abstinent donkey of Pinehas b. Jair also appears in b. Hullin 7a-b.

⁴⁸ I am grateful to Eleanor Mitten, Harvard Divinity School M.T.S. 2000, for drawing my attention to tales in Hindu bhakti devotionalism of what she calls “beasts as bhaktas.” For example, we encounter the combination of natural, unnatural, and antinatural elements in the foundation legends of the temple of Kalahasti on the banks of the Mogileru river in Andhra Pradesh. In the Kalahastisvara Mahatmyamu, “Sacred Legends of the Lord of Kalahasti,” a spider, snake, and elephant worship Siva in ways that are highly idiosyncratic to their respective species. When a lingam miraculously appears in the forest, the spider reverently decorates it with webs. Siva sets the webs on fire using the flame of a nearby lamp. The spider triumphs in the test, as it tries to consume the blaze. It is rewarded by the revelation of Siva, who, in the words of English translator Heifetz Rao, “bestows upon him that permanent presence in the heaven of Shiva which is Saivite liberation.” The snake and the elephant also adorn the lingam, but a peculiar rivalry develops. The snake, a cobra, places the jewels he has grown in his hood upon the lingam. The elephant, coming later, whisks these away with his trunk so that he can bathe the lingam by spraying it and then offering flowers and foliage. The snake, returning for its devotions, removes the flowers and replaces the gems. This cycle continues until both animals resolve to spy upon their respective rivals. A great conflict ensues. The snake crawls into the elephant's trunk and “the elephant, crazed by the venom, smashes his head against a hill, killing both himself and the cobra.” Mitten remarks, “Siva, then in his mercy, reveals himself and ‘takes them both into his heaven.’ In the story the animals so selflessly absorb themselves in their devotion to Siva, and Siva's loving response to them becomes the basis for the narrative of the temple's sacred origin. According to the narrative, the temple is quite literally founded on the devotion of a spider, a snake, and an elephant.”

⁴⁹ Bonaventure Major Life of St. Francis 8. 9.

⁵⁰ Again, one can find support for the charge that classical Christian thought, particularly in the medieval period, has often not ascribed reason to animals. Thomas Aquinas writes, “Dumb animals and plants are devoid of the life of reason whereby to set themselves in motion; they are moved, as it were by another, by a kind of natural impulse, a sign of which is that they are naturally enslaved and accommodated to the uses of others” (Summa Theologica, Question 64, Article 1). This premise has in turn informed scientific research into questions of animal mentation, as discussed below.

⁵¹ Masri rightly observes that “the most our scientists have credited animals with are some propensities such as instinct and intuition. Research work in this field starts with the hypothesis that no creature other than…humans has been endowed with a conscious mind and hence, has no faculty for psychical cognition” (, Masri, Animals in Islam, 11).Google Scholar

⁵² Farthing, G. William, The Psychology of Consciousness (Engleviood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1992).Google Scholar

⁵³ Griffin, Donald R., “From Cognition to Consciousness,” Animal Cognition 1 (1998) 5CrossRefGoogle Scholar ; Griffin also offers a summary of the most important research during the past decades bearing on the debate. Here Griffin cites Natsoulas, Thomas, “Consciousness,” in American Psycholo-gist 33, 2 (1978) 906–14CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵⁴ Summarizing this position, Helena Cronin responded to the publication of Griffin's Animal Minds (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992)Google Scholar with the following: “All that Mr. Griffin's animal stories illustrate is the immense power of information-processing machinery to produce versatile behavior. But information processing need not involve consciousness…my computer had to be programmed. So did the animals. Their programmer is natural selection, which writes in the language of genes.”

⁵⁵ Boakes, Robert, “Subjective Experience,” Times Higher Education Supplement, 29 Nov. 1992, 22.Google Scholar

⁵⁶ Lorenz, Konrad, Studies in Animal and Human Behavior, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971).Google Scholar

⁵⁷ Hediger, Heini, “1st das tierliche Bewusstsein unerforschbar?” Behaviour 1, 2 (1947) 130–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar and “Proper Names in the Animal Kingdom,” Experientia 32 (1976) 1357–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵⁸ Ebersole, Gary, “The Function of Ritual Weeping Revisited: Affective Expression and Moral Discourse,” History of Religions 39 (2000) 214CrossRefGoogle Scholar . Ebersole continues, “Many myths and tales from around the world tell of animals, gods, demons, and other nonhumans weeping. What are we to make of these? If we uncritically take our parsing of human nature [i.e., that only humans weep] to be normative and universal, then the very myths and tales through which other people have posed and explored questions surrounding human and nonhuman nature are perforce dismissed as being little more than the products of anthropomorphic projections, unconscious fantasies of some sort, or the creations of a primitive mentality.” For further discussion of the unquestioned charge of “anthropomorphism” levied against human-like behaviors in both God and beasts, see the next section of the present discussion, “Divine Ipseity.”

⁵⁹ Scientifically challenged first by Darwin, Charles, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (London: Murray, 1872)CrossRefGoogle Scholar , and most consistently in recent history by Griffin, Donald R. (see Animal Minds [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992]Google Scholar and “From Cognition to Consciousness,” cited previously). See also the far less rigorous work of psychoanalyst Masson, Jeffrey, When Elephants Weep: The Emotional Lives of Animals (New York: Delacorte Press, 1995)Google Scholar.

⁶⁰ , Griffin, “From Cognition to Consciousness,” 6Google Scholar . Griffin observes that “locating where in a brain some function occurs tells us almost nothing about how human or other brains generate conscious as opposed to nonconscious thinking, as emphasized by Chalmers (1996) and Block (1996). Therefore there is no basic reason why cephalopods or insects cannot be conscious simply because the gross anatomy of their small but intricately central nervous systems is very different from ours.” Griffin's response to criticisms such as Helena Cronin's, in other words, is that genetic programming does not preclude consciousness. “Interactions among neurons, synapses, and possibly glial cells are also assumed to generate conscious experience. Given these assumptions, how can we be certain that genetic influences do not also guide or even determine some of the conscious experiences to which these nervous systems arise?” (, Griffin, “From Cognition to Consciousness,” 12)Google Scholar.

⁶¹ Griffin, Donald R., emeritus, Department of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University, personal correspondence, 31 May 2000.Google Scholar

⁶² Miller, Peter, “Jane Goodall,” National Geographic, 188 (1995) 102–29Google Scholar , esp. 110. Goodall reiterated those views orally in an televised interview for National Geographic the same year. Five years earlier, she wondered whether the wild displays are “expressing feelings of awe such as those which, in early man, surely gave rise to primitive religions, worship of the elements?” Goodall, Jane, Through a Window: Thirty Years with the Chimpanzees of Gombe (London: Penguin, 1990) 202Google Scholar.

⁶³ Goodall, Jane, Reason for Hope: A Spiritual Journey I Jane Goodall with Philip Herman (New York; Warner Books, Inc., 1999) 173–74.Google Scholar

⁶⁴ Or the Durkheimian sublimation of collective social values, the Freudian sublimation of unresolved infantile yearnings for paternal power and care, and so on.

⁶⁵ Goodall, charged by paleontologist Louis Leakey to study African chimpanzees in the hopes of deepening our knowledge of earlier human nature in the course of evolution, writes of her initial work in Gombe, Tanzinia: “And all the time I was learning more and more about the chimpanzees. As I got to know them as individuals I named them. I had no idea that this, according to the ethological disciplines of the early 1960s, was inappropriate—I should have given them more objective numbers. I also described their vivid personalities—another sin: only humans had personalities. It was an even worse crime to attribute human life emotions to the chimpanzees. And in those days it was held (at least by many scientists, philosophers, and theologians) that only humans had minds, only humans were capable of rational thought. Fortunately I had not been to university, and I did not know these things. And when I did find out, I just thought it was silly and paid no attention. I had always named the animals in my life. Moreover, Rusty [Goodall's child-hood dog] and a series of cats, and assorted guinea pigs and golden hamsters, had taught me well. They had made it abundantly clear that animals had personalities, could reason and solve problems, had minds, had emotions—I thus felt no hesitation in ascribing these qualities to the chimpanzees. How right Louis had been to send someone to the field with a mind uncluttered by the theory of reductionist, oversimplistic, mechanistic science” (, Goodall, Reason for Hope, 74).Google Scholar

⁶⁶ In the prayer-manual as-Salatu 'l-ghaibiyya, cited in Constance Padwick, E., Muslim Devotions: A Study of Prayer-Manuals in Common Use (London: SPCK, 1961) 157Google Scholar.

⁶⁷ Irenaeus Against Heresies 2. 1; see also ibid., 2.5.4; Theophilus of Antioch To Autolycus 1.1-5; Tertullian Against Marcion 1.8; Origen On First Principles 1.1.6; idem, Against Celsus 4.14 ; , AugustineCity of God 11. 10Google Scholar ; , AthanasiusAgainst the Heathen §28Google Scholar ; idem, Defending the Nicene Definition 3. 11 ; , Gregory of , NyssaTo Eunomius 3. 5Google Scholar ; Cyril of Jerusalem Catechetical Lectures 4.1.4 and 6.7 ; , Gregory of , NazianzenOrations 30Google Scholar ; Hilary of Poitiers On the Trinity 2.6-7 ; , John of , DamascusExposition of the Orthodox Faith 1. 9–14Google Scholar . I am grateful to Professor David Gouwens, Associate Professor of Theology, Brite Divinity School, Texas Christianity University, for these references.

⁶⁸ Fiorenza, Francis Schiissler and Kaufman, Gordon D., “God,” in Critical Terms for Religious Studies, ed. Taylor, Mark C. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998) 143Google Scholar . Anselm of Canterbury repeatedly expresses the idea: “summa natura…per se ipsam et ex se ipsa est, quid quid est” (Monologion 6); “summa veritas.…nulli quidquam debet nee ulla ratione est, quod est, nisi quia est ut sint et ut bene sint” (De veritate 10); “…te tibi omnino sufficiens et nullo indigens quo omnia indigent ut sint et ut bene sint” (Proslogion 22); “Ille igitur solus a se habet, quiquid habet” (De casu diaboli 1). Ronald Thiemann remarks, “Anselm himself seems not to use ‘aseity’ as a technical term; rather, he provides some of the classic reflections on the nature of God's freedom, i.e., that God's freedom, understood as self-determination, makes possible God's free gift of creation without God in any manner being bound either to create or, once he had created, being bound by that creation–except as God has freely determined so to be bound. Thus God remains graciously free but still in relation to everything in the universe. Thus the use in Anselm of the prepositional phrases ‘per se ipsam’ ‘et ex ipsa’ and particularly ‘a se habet'” (Ronald F. Thiemann, Department of Theology, Harvard Divinity School, personal correspondence, 30 June 2000). I am grateful to Francis Schiissler Fiorenza, also of the Department of Theology at Harvard Divinity School, for his help in tracing the history of aseity.

⁶⁹ Hillman, James, Dream Animals (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1997) 86–88.Google Scholar

⁷⁰ Pseudo-Dionysius (St. Dionysius the Aereopagite) On the Divine Names 972A; PG 3.12.4, trans, by Luibheid, Colm, in Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, The Classics of Western Spirituality (New York: Paulist, 1987)Google Scholar.

⁷¹ Ibid., 709C-709D; PG 3.4.12, trans. Luibheid.

⁷² Yannaras, Christos, Elements of Faith: An Introduction to Orthodox Theology, trans. Schram, Keith (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1991) 70.Google Scholar

⁷³ Maximos Confessor Scholia concerning On the Divine Names of Dionysius the Aereopagite 4.17; PG 4.268-69, trans. Yannaras and Schram.

⁷⁴ On the Divine Names 712A-B; PG 3.4.13. Here Yannaras and Schram's rendition is closer to the transgressive, revelatory beauty of the Greek than Luibheid's.

⁷⁵ For example, “our praise resounds for that generous Source of all holy enlightenment, a Source which has told us about itself in the holy words of scripture. We learn, for instance, that it is the cause of everything, that it is origin, being, and life. To those who fall away it is the voice calling, ‘Come back!’ and it is the power which raises them up again. It refurbishes and restores the image of God corrupted within them. It is the sacred stability which is there for them when the tide of unholiness is tossing them about. It is safety for those who made a stand. It is the guide bringing upward those uplifted to it and is the enlightenment of the illuminated. Source of perfection for those being made perfect, source of divinity for those being deified, principle of simplicity for those turning toward simplicity, point of unity for those made one; transcendently, beyond what is, it is the Source of every source. Generously and as far as may be, it gives out a share of what is hidden. To sum up, it is the Life of the living, the being of beings, it is the Source and the Cause of all life and of all being, for out of its goodness it commands all things to be and it keeps them going” (pseudo-Dionysius, On the Divine Names, 589B-589C, trans. Luibheid).

⁷⁶ Ibid., 712A; PG 3.4.13, trans. Luibheid. Editorial insertion mine.

⁷⁷ Ibn ‘Arab!, Fusus al-hikam, ed. Afifl, A. (Beirut: Dar al-Kitab al-'Arabi, 1966) 50–51Google Scholar . The passage is translated by Sachiko Murata in “The Angels,” in Islamic Spirituality: Foundations, ed. Nasr, Seyyed Hossein, World Spirituality: An Encyclopedic History of the Religious Quest 19 (New York: Crossroad, 1991) 341–42Google Scholar.

⁷¹ See MacDonald, D. B., “Allah,” SEI 41.Google Scholar

⁷⁹ A lovely example is God Creating the Animals, an illumination from the Bodleian Library at Oxford, reproduced on the cover of Andrew Linzey's Animal Theology.

⁸⁰ See Gardet, Louis, “al-asma” al-husna,” Encyclopedia of Islam, 2d ed., 1. 714–17Google Scholar ; Gimaret, Daniel, Les noms divins en Islam: exegese lexicographique et theologique (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1988)Google Scholar.

⁸¹ The Most Beautiful Names, compiled by Sheik Tosun Bayrak al-Jerrahi al-Halveti (Putney, Vermont: Threshold Books, 1985). Traditionally, God has more than ninety-nine names; rather, there are three thousand: “One thousand He has revealed to His angels; one thousand He has revealed to His prophets; three hundred are in the zabur—the psalms of David; three hundred are in the Torah; three hundred are in the Gospel[s]; 99 are in the Holy Qur'an. One, the name of His Essence, He has kept for Himself and hidden in the Qur'an” (The Most Beautiful Names, 3).

⁸² Ibn ‘Arab!, Fusiis al-hikam, trans. , Murata in Islamic Spirituality, 341–42.Google Scholar