american-holocaust

172 AMERICAN HOLOCAUSTwithin even the most holy of the Church's saints, the beast-like basenessthat must be overcome-if need be, by excruciating rituals of self-tormentor by terrifying campaigns of violence-were the Christian saint or theChristian soldier or adventurer to attain a proper state of holiness. Shouldsuch a wild man be on the right side of the indistinct boundary separatingman and beast, of course, he was not necessarily beyond the reach ofChristian taming and teaching, not necessarily beyond conversion. But beforehis potential virtue could be released from its dark imprisonment, asFrederick Turner correctly notes, the wild man, as wild man, "must ceaseto exist, must either be civilized or sacrificed to civilization-which amountsto the same thing." 69Determining whether a particular collection of wild people, or otherswho, differed greatly from the European ethnocentric ideal, were actuallyhuman was no easy task. We have seen how Augustine wavered on thetopic. So did innumerable others. That is because the framework, the organizingprinciple that guided such thinking, was deliberately ambiguous.The idea of the Great Chain of Being that categorized and ranked all theearth's living creatures was born among the Greeks, but like so much elseof such provenance it became central as well to medieval Christian thought.As the fifteenth-century jurist Sir John Fortescue explained, in God's perfectordering of thingsangel is set over angel, rank upon rank in the kingdom of heaven; man is setover man, beast over beast, bird over bird, and fish over fish, on the earthin the air and in the sea: so that there is no worm that crawls upon theground, no bird that flies on high, no fish that swims in the depths, whichthe chain of this order does not bind in most harmonious concord. . . .God created as many different kinds of things as he did creatures, so thatthere is no creature which does not differ in some respect from all othercreatures and by which it is in some respect superior or inferior to all therest. So that from the highest angel down to the lowest of his kind there isabsolutely not found an angel that has not a superior and inferior; nor fromman down to the meanest worm is there any creature which is not in somerespect superior to one creature and inferior to another.7°However, within that formal "hierarchy of nature," observes AnthonyPagden,the highest member of one species always approaches in form to the lowestof the next. . . . There might, therefore, be, in the interstices of these interlockingcategories-in what Aquinas called the "connexio rerum," "thewonderful linkage of beings"-a place for a "man" who is so close to theborder with the beast, that he is no longer fully recognisable by other menas a member of the same species. 71