american-holocaust

SEX, RACE AND HOLY WAR 173Indeed, as Aquinas's thirteenth-century teacher, Albertus Magnus, put it:"nature does not make [animal] kinds separate without making somethingintermediate between them; for nature does not pass from extreme to extremenisi per medium." Or, in theologian Nicolaus Cusanus's words:All things, however different, are linked together. There is in the genera ofthings such a connection between the higher and the lower that they meet ina common point; such an order obtains among species that the highest speciesof one genus coincides with the lowest of the next higher genus, in orderthat the universe may be one, perfect, continuous. 72Somewhere in these murky zones of species overlap, such Europeanthinkers were certain, there lived creatures who may have seemed bestial,but who were humans, with souls, and who even-as, again, with St.Christopher-might become the holiest of saints if treated with Christiancare. However, in that same indistinct, borderline, substratum of life, therealso existed human-like creatures whose function in God's scheme of thingswas to be nothing more than what Aquinas called "animated instrumentsof service" to civilized Christian humanity. That is, slaves. And finally,there were those residents of this dark and shadowy nether realm who mayhave been distant descendants of the children of Adam, but whose line ofancestry had become so corrupt and degenerate that, as Hayden Whiteputs it, "they are men who have fallen below the condition of animalityitself; every man's face is turned against them, and in general (Cain is anotable exception) they can be slain with impunity." 73The same ambiguity existed in the European mind regarding the homelandof the wild man, the wilderness itself. Although it has become commonplacein the past few decades for writers on Western attitudes towardthe environment to assert that, with almost no important exceptions,Christians traditionally have regarded nature and the wilderness in negativeterms, in fact, Christianity's view of untamed landscapes has alwaysbeen acutely ambivalent. 74 On the one hand, as Ulrich Mauser has shown,the Old Testament language describing the wilderness into which the ancientJews were driven does indeed combine "the notion of confusion anddestruction with the image of the barren land." 75 Even more importantly,in this same vein, adds David R. Williams, for Jews and Christians alikethe wildernessbecame a symbol of emptiness at the core of human consciousness, of theprofound loneliness that seemed to open like a bottomless pit underneaththe vanity of each of humankind. It became the symbol of a place located inthe mind, a black hole of unknowing around which orbit all the temporaryillusions of human self-confidence. . . . a realm of chaos that completelysurrounded and undermined the vanities of human consciousness. 76