Lydia Herndon, University of Chicago
Ambrose of Milan’s Hexameron, a series of sermons on the six days of creation originally delivered to a congregation participating in a fast for holy week, is preoccupied with questions of food, edibility, and poison. Within these homilies, Ambrose’s “zoological imagination” (Cox Miller, 2018) extends to a fascination with what animals eat: starlings consume poison hemlock (Hex. 3.9), lions hate having leftovers for dinner (6.14), and tortoises season their diet of serpents with marjoram (6.19). By considering the culinary inclinations of creatures, Ambrose layers two slippery conceptual spectra over each other—that of animality and humanity, and of medicine, food, and poison. Preaching on the creation of dry land and plants on the third day, Ambrose declares “food is our sole medicine” (3.57). Within the Hexameron, Ambrose’s theorization of both food for animals and food derived from animals fits into the broader phenomenon of “conflation of remedy and poison in Roman antiquity” (Olson, 2009). Ambrose draws from the Physiologus tradition to describe to his audiences the myriad ways in which animals use food as medicine, consume poison as food, and experience human foods as toxic and harmful. As he explores animal interactions with the ever-shifting semantic compound of medicine/food/poison, Ambrose also raises questions about the boundaries between human beings and non-human animals. In this paper, I argue that Ambrose’s fascination with the interplay of animality and edibility serves to both enhance and complicate his argument for an ascetic anthropology. As Patricia Cox Miller (2018) has argued, hexameral writings from antiquity are loci for both the rhetorical assertion of a hierarchy of humans over non-human animals, as well as elaborate examples of thinking with animals about continuities between the two. Ambrose’s Hexameron is surely no exception; he justifies his lengthy teaching on the animals to his tired and hungry congregants by exhorting them that “we cannot fully know ourselves without first knowing the nature of all living creatures” (6.3). Ambrose asserts and reasserts the need for people to learn from animals, while never allowing his listeners to forget that human persons are superior to their animal counterparts. Once again, the preeminence of humans over other animals is best seen in relation to what both groups do or do not eat. He writes, “A serpent suffers death after tasting the sputum of a man who is fasting. You see, then, what potency there is in fasting, when a man can kill a serpent with his own sputum” (6.28). For Ambrose, the primary advantage of humanity over animality is the ability to fast. By reading Genesis 1:1-25 for the animals, Ambrose participates in the same asceticizing exegetical project that “made the entire Bible speak to the practical as well as theological concerns of Christian renunciants” (Clark, 1999). As he invokes the unstable category of medicine/poison/food as the third term in his comparison of humans and non-human animals, Ambrose promotes an ascetic anthropology even before he narrates the creation of human beings.