[History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom by Andrew Dickson White]@TWC D-Link bookHistory of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom CHAPTER I 47/124
Thus from the book On Bees, the Dominican Thomas of Cantimpre, we learn that "wasps persecute bees and make war on them out of natural hatred"; and these, he tells us, typify the demons who dwell in the air and with lightning and tempest assail and vex mankind--whereupon he fills a long chapter with anecdotes of such demonic warfare on mortals. In like manner his fellow-Dominican, the inquisitor Nider, in his book The Ant Hill, teaches us that the ants in Ethiopia, which are said to have horns and to grow so large as to look like dogs, are emblems of atrocious heretics, like Wyclif and the Hussites, who bark and bite against the truth; while the ants of India, which dig up gold out of the sand with their feet and hoard it, though they make no use of it, symbolize the fruitless toil with which the heretics dig out the gold of Holy Scripture and hoard it in their books to no purpose. This pious spirit not only pervaded science; it bloomed out in art, and especially in the cathedrals.
In the gargoyles overhanging the walls, in the grotesques clambering about the towers or perched upon pinnacles, in the dragons prowling under archways or lurking in bosses of foliage, in the apocalyptic beasts carved upon the stalls of the choir, stained into the windows, wrought into the tapestries, illuminated in the letters and borders of psalters and missals, these marvels of creation suggested everywhere morals from the Physiologus, the Bestiaries, and the Exempla.( 14) (14) For the Physiologus, Bestiaries, etc., see Berger de Xivrey, Traditions Teratologiques; also Hippeau's edition of the Bestiare de Guillaume de Normandie, Caen, 1852, and such medieaval books of Exempla as the Lumen Naturae; also Hoefer, Histoire de la Zoologie; also Rambaud, Histoire de la Civilisation Francaise, Paris, 1885, vol i, pp. 368, 369; also Cardinal Pitra, preface to the Spicilegium Solismense, Paris, 1885, passim; also Carus, Geschichte der Zoologie; and for an admirable summary, the article Physiologus in the Encyclopedia Britannica.
In the illuminated manuscripts in the Library of Cornell University are some very striking examples of grotesques.
For admirably illustrated articles on the Bestiaries, see Cahier and Martin, Melanges d'Archeologie, Paris, 1851, 1852, and 1856, vol.ii of the first series, pp.
85-232, and second series, volume on Curiosities Mysterieuses, pp. 106-164; also J.R.Allen, Early Christian Symbolism in Great Britain and Ireland (London, 1887), lecture vi; for an exhaustive discussion of the subject, see Das Thierbuch des normannischen Dichters Guillaume le Clerc, herausgegeben von Reinisch, Leipsic, 1890; and for an Italian examlpe, Goldstaub and Wendriner, Ein Tosco-Venezianischer Bestiarius, Halle, 1892, where is given, on pp.
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