LAUSR

One of the most interesting points that came up in these texts concerns the relationship between the Fall and the boundary between humans and animals. For William of Auvergne, the Fall has made us more like animals, more brutish, less noble, and so on. On this view, as Wei notes, ‘a blurred boundary between humans and animals was a consequence of the Fall’ (p. 89). Bonaventure, however, takes a slightly different view. He in no way seeks to undermine the distinction between human and animal—among all the theologians under consideration he emphasizes this point most consistently—but he regards the enmity between humans and some animals as a consequence of the Fall. Those saints who communed with wild animals—Bonaventure is thinking of Francis, we might think of any number of Irish saints—are evidence of this process in reverse (p. 137). Bonaventure does not blur the boundary, but he shows that this boundary does not mean separation. Wei occasionally draws out the ways in which these theologians point to animals as examples of this or that virtue. Aquinas thinks through the purpose of human marriage, for example, by recourse to examples of mating in various animals (pp. 197 ff.). It might have been interesting, at these points and at other points throughout the book, for Wei to have made connections between this exemplary analysis of animals and the bestiary literature, so widely used in the preaching of Dominican friars (one of Aquinas’s Cologne classmates, for example, compiled a collection of preachable stories about the behaviour of bees). It might also have been useful for Wei to make clear, especially in the case of Albert, that his selection of texts leaves out a great deal more material that might nevertheless be relevant to the topic. The whole of Albert’s De animalibus contains material relating to the human–animal boundary, for example, and not just Books 20 and 21 which Wei considers. Similarly, I felt it would have been worth at least pointing to Bonaventure’s Commentary on the Hexaemeron, and Aquinas’s equivalent creation-commentary in Summa Theologiae I, qq. 65–74. Maybe, though, these inclusions would have led us too far into the forest, whereas Dr Wei rightly wants to keep his readers in the clearing he has made for them. Theologians and historians, even those unfamiliar with scholastic theology, will find in this book a straightforward and helpful exposition of difficult texts, and a springboard for deeper reflection.