Abstract
This paper will explore the carceral logics affecting nonhuman and human animals in a popular second-century Christian text, the Acts of Paul. Two parallel scenes feature imprisoned animals pitted against imprisoned humans in the punitive entertainment spectacle of the amphitheater. Through these scenes, this paper will examine the ancient practice of animal captivity, the “de-animalizing” effects of imprisonment on human and nonhuman victims, and the problematic witness of early Christian writings to these phenomena as the texts, and the humans in them, variously exploit, fear, threaten, anthropomorphize, are protected by, compete with, and enter into solidarity with other imprisoned animals. Finally, it will discuss the (potentially) inclusive role of this text in naming animals as “confessors,” or imprisoned, suffering witnesses to the gospel, in a carcerally-controlled world.
Introduction
The fates of intensively farmed chickens, lab rats, tigers in zoos, and human beings in jail cells are rarely considered in conjunction. Similarly, “imprisonment” or “incarceration” is not often deemed a cross-species phenomenon. Nonetheless, as Lori Gruen and Justin Marceau argue in their recent edited volume Carceral Logics: Human Incarceration and Animal Captivity, the world we live in is one in which “both humans and nonhumans are suffering because of oppressive carceral logics.”1 Animals2 in many parts of the world are routinely subject to mass incarceration for the purposes of human economic gain or entertainment, whether in “concentrated animal feeding operations (cafo s), research labs, [or] zoos and other carceral spaces.”3 We justify this denial of freedom much as we justify the imprisonment of humans accused of crimes: with carceral logics of worthlessness, disposability, and sub-humanity.4 As this article will argue, animal incarceration with its attendant cross-species carceral logics is in fact an ancient phenomenon as much as a modern one. This paper will explore carceral dynamics in the popular second-century Christian text the Acts of Paul (hereafter ap). This text, with its two dramatic scenes of imprisoned humans and animals forced into confrontation in Roman amphitheaters (related in chapters 4 and 9), participates in many assumptions of the inferiority and disposability of animals, assumptions that have long legitimized their incarceration. However, and almost in spite of itself, it also offers a surprising image of parity between imprisoned humans and animals, affording a glimpse of the subversive possibilities of non-competitive, non-aggressive relations between human and nonhuman victims of carceral logics, and testifying to the witness of nonhuman “confessors” or prisoners for Christ.
Ancient Animal Incarceration
… [it] is one of the outstanding paradoxes of the Roman mind—that a people that was so much alive to the interest and beauty of the animal kingdom […] should yet have taken pleasure in the often hideous sufferings and agonizing deaths of quantities of magnificent and noble creatures.7
καὶ πικρὰ λέαινα προσδραμοῦσα εἰς τοὺς πόδας αὐτῆς ἀνεκλίθη· ὁ δὲ ὄχλος τῶν γυναικῶν ἐβόησεν μέγα. καὶ ἔδραμεν ἐπ’ αὐτὴν ἄρκος· ἡ δὲ λέαινα δραμοῦσα ὑπήντησεν καὶ διέρρηξεν τὴν ἄρκον. καὶ πάλιν λέων δεδιδαγμένος ἐπ’ ἀνθρώπους ὃς ἦν Ἀλεξάνδρου ἔδραμεν ἐπ’αὐτήν· καὶ ἡ λέαινα συμπλέξασα τῷ λέοντι συνανῃρέθη. (4.8 [33] [p. 259])8
And a savage lioness ran up to her and lay down at her feet. And the crowd of women made a great cry. And a bear ran up to her; but the lioness ran to meet it and tore the bear to pieces. And again a lion, trained against humans, one of Alexander’s, ran up to her: and the lioness was locked in combat with the lion; and they both perished.
ἡ μὲν οὖν ἔβαλεν ἑαυτὴν εἰς τὸ ὕδωρ ἐν τῷ ὀνόματι Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ· αἱ δὲ φῶκαι πυρὸς ἀστραπῆς φέγγος ἰδοῦσαι νεκραὶ ἐπέπλευσαν. (4.9 [34] [pp. 260–61])
So she threw herself into the water in the name of Jesus Christ. But the seals, seeing a bolt of fiery lightning, floated dead.
Αἱ δὲ γυναῖκες ἄλλων θηρίων βαλλομένων φοβερωτέρων ὠλόλυξαν, καὶ αἱ μὲν ἔβαλλον φύλλον, αἱ δὲ νάρδον, αἱ δὲ κασίαν, αἱ δὲ ἄμωμον, ὡς εἶναι πλῆθος μύρων. πάντα δὲ τὰ βληθέντα θηρία ὥσπερ ὕπνῳ κατασχεθέντα οὐχ ἥψαντο αὐτῆς … (4.10 [35] [p. 261])
And the women wailed as other terrifying beasts were thrown in (to the arena), and some threw leaves, and others nard, and others cassia, and others amomum, and they made a great fragrance. All the beasts thrown at her were hindered by sleep and they did not touch her.
Καὶ ἔδησαν αὐτὴν ἐκ τῶν ποδῶν μέσον τῶν ταύρων, καὶ ὑπὸ τὰ ἀναγκαῖα αὐτῶν πεπυρωμένα σίδηρα ὑπέθηκαν, ἵνα πλείονα ταραχθέντες ἀποκτείνωσιν αὐτήν. (4.10 [35] [p. 262])
And they bound her by the feet between the bulls, and they placed burning irons on their genitals, so that, greatly agitated, they would kill her.
It comes as no surprise to the reader that this, too, fails to finish Thecla.
Christian Participation in the Cult of Animal Death
Notably, all actors in this tale are complicit in the abuse of the captive animals involved: the Roman soldiers and guards, the female spectators, and the thunderbolt-dealing God. Their efforts combine in a near-perfect illustration of Gruen and Marceau’s summary of the fate of (modern) incarcerated animals: they are “poked, prodded, branded, injected, shocked, subject to noxious stimuli, forcibly impregnated, and they can’t escape.”10 The bulls suffer poking, prodding, and branding. The seals receive a divine, fatal electric shock.11 The other nameless “terrifying beasts” are drugged by the female spectators’ mass perfume intervention—not, on the face of it, the most noxious of stimuli, but with empirically negative effects on their health, causing instantaneous unconsciousness. Of Gruen and Marceau’s list of abuses, only injection and forcible impregnation are missing.
This text, with its casual dispatch of multitudinous animals whose participation in Thecla’s punishment is entirely nonvoluntary, offers a Christianized version of the Greco-Roman fetish for the suffering and death of captive beasts. Indeed, early Christian texts frequently seem to revel in stories of large, fierce wild animals kept captive, abused and pitted against the Christian hero or heroine. A mighty beast vanquished by God’s power, as here, emphasizes the underdog (pun intended) triumph of the Christian hero or heroine.12 Conversely, when the death of the martyr is required, these tales compel the involvement of fiercer and more numerous animals in order to enhance the Christian’s suffering still further. For instance, Perpetua’s fellow-catechumen Saturninus in the Martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicity insists on being “exposed to all the different beasts, so that his crown might be all the more glorious” (19);13 the second-century bishop Ignatius, concerned that the amphitheater’s stock of captive animals may prove rather reluctant agents of his martyrdom, claims “I will even coax them to consume me promptly […] Even if they are unwilling, I will force them” (Rom. 5.2).14 As these examples demonstrate, Christian texts were not greatly concerned with the fates of the animals who suffered and died in the process of their saints’ martyrdoms.
Human Victims of Incarceration—Treated “Worse than Animals”?
For even the wretches whom they will send into the bodies of asses and mules to be punished by drudgery and slavery, how will they congratulate themselves on the mild labour of the mill and the water-wheel, when they recollect the mines, and the convict-gangs, and the public works, and even the prisons and black-holes, terrible in their idle, do-nothing routine? (An. 33)15
because of our posture as prisoners and branded characters as alleged criminals, the administration and prison employees no longer consider or respect us as human beings, but rather as domesticated animals selected to do their bidding in slave labor and furnished as a personal whipping dog for their sadistic, psychopathic hate …16
The “present system of brutality and dehumanization,” the Attica prisoners continued, was wholly contrary to the principles of “this day of enlightenment.”17
“De-Animalization”
The problem with intensive confinement […] is not just that it treats human prisoners like animals, but that it fails to treat them like animals, where animals are understood as living beings whose corporeal and intercorporeal relations with other living beings in a shared, open-ended space sustain a meaningful sense of the form of life that is proper to their species.19
Thus, prisoners are not so much dehumanized by their treatment, but “de-animalized.”20
It is important to remember that Guenther is speaking primarily of solitary isolation here, a modern carceral method not to be too readily equated with the triumphant, somatic exhibitionism of Roman penality. Our imprisoned (human) protagonists, Thecla and—in a later scene we will come to shortly—Paul, are not isolated from other beings in a solitary cell: indeed, their many interlocutors include the jeering crowds, the guards or soldiers who prevent their escape, and the animals with whom they are to do battle. The world they are forced into is in fact filled with both humans and animals, yet is nonetheless deeply inhuman and un-animal. The precise bodily, psychic, and affective implications of the amphitheater as a specific brand of carceral treatment—and indeed of ancient incarceration in general—have been little studied, but Guenther’s concept of “de-animalization” proves useful here. Humans and animals in the amphitheater are treated as fleshy entertainment fodder, not as “living beings.” “Corporeal and intercorporeal relations” with other beings are exclusively violent and degrading, forcible, carceral. The amphitheater is the precise opposite of an “open-ended space”: the lives lived there, being artificially brutalized and truncated, are hardly proper to any species. “De-animalization” thus seems to me at least as apt a term as “dehumanization” for the effects of the amphitheater upon its victims.
Reversing De-Animalization: Human-Animal Relationships in Carceral Contexts
The animal, in this case Spud, is free of the judgments that a human might make. He does not see Greco as a prisoner—simply as a friend and caregiver. Prisoners dwell in institutions that reinforce their criminal identities, ceaselessly reminding them that they are defective and malicious. The uncritical gaze of an animal helps one to experience and express a better self.21
[κα]ὶ τῇ πίσ̣τ̣ι φερόμενος ὁ Παῦλος ε̣ἶ̣[πεν·] λέων σὺ ἦς [ὃ]ν ἔλουσα; καὶ ἀπ̣οκριθὶς ὁ λέων εἶπεν τῷ Παύλῳ· ν̣[αί.] ὁ δὲ Παῦλ[ος] ἐδευτέρου καὶ εἶπεν αὐτῷ· καὶ πῶς ἐκυνηγήθης; ὁ δὲ λέων εἶπε̣ν μιᾷ φωνῇ· ὡς κ̣αὶ σὺ Παῦλε. (9.24 [p. 40])
And borne up by faith, Paul said: Lion, are you the one I baptized?
And the lion answered and said to Paul: Yes.
And Paul spoke a second time: And how were you hunted down?
And the lion spoke with one voice: Just like you, Paul.
In a few words, the text acknowledges and equates Paul’s and the lion’s mutual captivity. As they simultaneously recognize the other as victim and fellow-captive—rather than combatant and competitor—they share a moment of profound re-animalization in defiance of the carceral forces around them. Their unexpected alliance yields very material benefits for them both: with the help of a godly hailstorm to disrupt the proceedings in the arena, they escape and regain their freedom and natural territory, the true “shared, open-ended space” in which to live the life “proper to their species.”23
Humanizing Animals?
Paul and the lion thus experience a degree of re-animalization in their encounter. However, the lion was arguably never very “animal” in the first place. He has a human voice, speaks Greek, and adopts human religious commitments, including baptism and voluntary celibacy (ap 9.7–9). Laura Hobgood-Oster argues that even his capture is human in nature: as a “baptized Christian” lion, he is “more susceptible to imprisonment” and persecution than the average pagan lion.24 Similarly, his deliverance is predicated on his unique humanity/Christianity: the other animals in the arena are killed or forced to flee in a divine hailstorm, while Paul and his feline counterpart escape unharmed.25
The human-lion stands firmly in the tradition of humanized animals—humanimals26 —in the Apocryphal Acts. Within the catalogue of animals in these texts doing “extraordinary”—or humanimal—things, Janet Spittler also includes the talking donkey of the Acts of Thomas, the unusually co-operative bedbugs of the Acts of John, and the dog who acts as an intermediary between Peter and Simon the Magician in the Acts of Peter.27 Perhaps the most noteworthy example of apocryphal humanimals, however, comes in the later (5th–6th century) Acts of Philip, which features a kid and leopard who plead, weeping, with the apostles for the inclusion of animals in the eucharist.28
even the creature, visible in the figure of the lion, is brought to faith by the preaching of the apostle [i.e. Paul], undergoes baptism and turns away from the world. Thus the οἰκονομία of God is fulfilled through Paul’s deeds.31
This incident is proof, for Schneemelcher, of the inclusion of the animal kingdom in God’s salvation.
Conclusion: Animal Participants in Christian Carceral Suffering
“Can animals be martyrs, thus achieving the most prestigious form of life and death in Christianity?” asks Hobgood-Oster of the lioness who saves Thecla, arguing that the lioness’ sacrificial death could constitute “baptism by blood.”32 Paul’s lion, with his certifiable baptism and audible confession of faith, would be an even stronger candidate for martyrdom—except for his survival. However, if the text stops short of animal martyrs, it is certainly a witness to animal confessors, animal “prisoners of Christ.” ap effectively equates the captivity of a wild lion with the incarceration of the most famous Christian prisoner of all, the apostle Paul. It thus represents not only the inclusion of animals (albeit very selectively) into Christian belief, but also into Christian suffering.
ap is a rich resource for the study of the humanimal nature of ancient incarceration. It demonstrates the carceral logics that sent thousands of humans and animals to miserable confinement and brutal death; it participates in many places unreflectively in such logics, glorifying the (Christian) human prisoner at the expense of the animal. It is a witness both to the de-animalizing efforts of ancient incarceration and to the power of human-animal solidarity to subvert all such efforts. Finally, its portrayal of the captive lion, humanimal rather than animal though the lion may be, is nonetheless a surprising and subversive one, opening a theological door to the suffering, solidarity, and witness of animals in the carceral record of early Christianity.
Lori Gruen and Justin Marceau (eds.), Carceral Logics: Human Incarceration and Animal Captivity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), p. 2.
The authors I cite in this article use varying terminology for nonhuman animals, with some preferring to specify “nonhumans” and others referring simply to “animals.” I will use both terms interchangeably, aiming to satisfy the purposes of both clarity and ease of reading.
Gruen and Marceau, Carceral Logics, p. 226.
See e.g. “Rethinking Prisoners and Animals: ‘They’re Animals’ and Their Animals,” in Drew Leder, The Distressed Body: Rethinking Illness, Imprisonment, and Healing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), pp. 196–210. “Carceral” and “carceral logics” can be confusing terms, as they are used in multiple ways. “Carceral,” in its basic sense, refers to imprisonment, from the Latin carcer, “prison.” However, it can also be used more broadly to refer to “a wider range of experiences marked by state-sponsored control of, and violence against, both individual bodies and the social body”—that is, slavery, exile, arrest or threat of arrest, immigration detention, and the like (Sarah Jobe, “Carceral Hermeneutics: Discovering the Bible in Prison and Prison in the Bible,” Religions 10.2 [2019], pp. 101–15 [102]). “Carceral logics,” meanwhile, is also multivalent (see Gruen and Marceau, Carceral Logics, p. 4). This term may firstly refer to the logics behind (state-sanctioned) imprisonment and detention. These logics include rationales which justify imprisoning certain individuals, such as the specter of the incorrigible, morally “subhuman” criminal, or the animal that does not suffer from captivity in the same way a human would. Secondly, this term also has wider, Foucauldian connotations of the logic of the prison that is discernible behind many of our modern institutions: schools, hospitals, the military, and so on (see Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison [trans. Alan Sheridan; 2nd edn.; New York: Vintage Books, 1995], although Foucault does not use the term “carceral logics” himself here). In this article, I use “carceral” in the wider sense to include the amphitheater as a carceral space, and “carceral logics” chiefly in the narrower sense of the mechanisms of, and social reasoning behind, incarceration.
J. Donald Hughes, Environmental Problems of the Ancient Greeks and Romans: Ecology in the Ancient Mediterranean (2nd edn.; Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2014), pp. 108–9.
Donald G. Kyle, Spectacles of Death in Ancient Rome (London: Routledge, 1998), p. 77.
J. M. C. Toynbee, Animals in Roman Life and Art (2nd edn.; Barnsley, South Yorks: Pen & Sword Archaeology, 2013), p. 21. Also cited in Christopher R. Matthews, “Articulate Animals: A Multivalent Motif in the Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles,” in Francois Bovon, Ann Graham Brock, and Christopher R. Matthews (eds.), The Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles (Harvard Divinity School Studies; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 205–32 (219, n. 46).
Several Greek versions of the Acts of Paul and Thecla survive. This citation, and all following Greek citations from this text (but not the later scenes from the Acts of Paul), is taken from R.A. Lipsius, Acta apostolorum apocrypha (Leipzig: Mendelssohn, 1891 [repr. Hildesheim: Olms, 1972]), vol. 1, pp. 235–71. The ap numbering system of chapters and verses is followed, with the alternative Acts of Paul and Thecla numbering in square brackets. Page numbers from Lipsius follow individual citations. Translations are my own unless otherwise stated.
This mini-episode raises the interesting question of whether ancients were aware that seals do not typically eat humans. Horst Schneider (“Thekla und die Robben,” vc 55 [2001], pp. 45–57) points out that the harmlessness of seals was on the whole “durchaus bekannt” in the ancient world (p. 47), but a few ancient sources disagreed: Homer (Od. 4.443) characterized them as sea monsters (κήτος), stinking, uncanny, and with a taste for human flesh (pp. 51–52).
Gruen and Marceau, Carceral Logics, p. 226.
As Janet Spittler notes, the manner of the seals’ death is ironic, since—according to ancient science—seals were one of only two animal species that could not be killed by lightning (Animals in the Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles: The Wild Kingdom of Early Christian Literature [WUNT II/247; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008], p. 181).
See also Spittler’s characterization of Thecla as an “ironic heroine,” the “fly that gets the better of the much larger beast” (Animals in the Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles, p. 180).
Translation by Herbert Musurillo (ed.), The Acts of the Christian Martyrs (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972), p. 127.
Translation by Jack N. Sparks (ed.), The Apostolic Fathers (Nashville: Nelson, 1978), p. 100. For animal roles in the accounts of Perpetua and Ignatius, see also Laura Hobgood-Oster, Holy Dogs and Asses: Animals in the Christian Tradition (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008), p. 55.
Tertullian, “A Treatise on the Soul,” translated by Peter Holmes, in Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, The Anti-Nicene Fathers: Translations of the Writings of the Fathers down to A. D. 325 (revised by A. Cleveland Coxe; New York: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1885; repr. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1997), vol. 3, pp. 181–235 (214).
Cited in Lisa Guenther, Solitary Confinement: Social Death and Its Afterlives (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), p. 125.
Cited in Guenther, Solitary Confinement, p. 125.
See e.g. Delcianna G. Winders, “Treating Humans Worse than Animals? Exposing a False Solitary Confinement Narrative,” in Gruen and Marceau, Carceral Logics, pp. 187–203. Winders notes that those “working to end solitary confinement of human prisoners” often “misunderstand deeply” the habitual treatment of animals, citing (p. 188) a 2013 report on New York prison conditions which commented, unwittingly echoing Tertullian, that human prisoners were kept “in physical environments in the likes of which no zoo director would be permitted to place wild animals” (James Gilligan and Brandy Lee, Report to the New York City Board of Correction [Sept. 5, 2013], https://solitarywatch.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Gilligan-Report.-Final.pdf, p. 17). As Winders comments, this is not only a naïve and “fundamentally inaccurate” picture of animal incarceration, but it provokes an unreflective public outcry against treating humans “worse than animals,” thus “pit[ting] human and nonhuman interests against one another unnecessarily” (p. 89).
Guenther, Solitary Confinement, p. 156. Also cited in Lori Gruen, “Abolition: Thinking beyond Carceral Logics,” in Gruen and Marceau, Carceral Logics, pp. 400–16 (407).
Guenther, Solitary Confinement, p. 143.
Leder, “Rethinking Prisoners and Animals,” p. 204.
Greek texts for this passage are taken from Wilhelm Schubart, ΠΡΑΞΕΙΣ ΠΑΥΛΟΥ (Acta Pauli): Nach dem Papyrus der Hamburger Staats- und Universitäts-Bibliothek, Carl Schmidt (ed.) (Veröffentlichungen aus der Hamburger Staats- und Universitäts-Bibliothek 2; Glückstadt: Augustin, 1936). Page numbers are in brackets following the citation in the main text. Translations are again my own unless otherwise stated.
Guenther, Solitary Confinement, p. 156.
Hobgood-Oster, Holy Dogs and Asses, p. 54.
Hobgood-Oster, Holy Dogs and Asses, p. 54.
This article was originally presented as a paper in the 2023 Humanimal Conference, which explored the roles of nonhumans in biblical texts and questioned the boundary between human and nonhuman animals. I employ the term “humanimal” here as a shorthand for the (potential) transgression of the human/nonhuman binary.
Spittler, Animals in the Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles, p. 6.
For a discussion of this passage, see Spittler, Animals in the Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles, pp. 224–25; Matthews, “Articulate Animals,” pp. 225–31.
Spittler, Animals in the Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles, p. 49.
Translation by Thomas P. Halton, St Jerome: On Illustrious Men (The Fathers of the Church, vol. 100; Washington D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1999), p. 16.
Wilhelm Schneemelcher, “Der getaufte Löwe in den Acta Pauli,” in Alfred Stuiber and Alfred Hermann (eds.), Mullus (Festschrift Theodor Klauser; JACSup, 1; Münster Westfalen: Aschendorff, 1964), pp. 316–26 (326). Translation my own.
Hobgood-Oster, Holy Dogs and Asses, p. 54.
