At the end of his short work on prayer, the north African theologian Tertullian wrote something surprising about non-human animals: “The whole creation prays,” he said.

Cattle and wild beasts pray, and bend their knees, and in coming forth from their stalls and lairs look up to heaven, their mouths not idle, making the spirit [or breath] move in their own fashion. Moreover the birds now arising are lifting themselves up to heaven and instead of hands are spreading out the cross of their wings, while saying something which seems like a prayer.

Aside from its rustic beauty, the interesting thing about Tertullian’s description is his willingness to attribute to beasts what is usually considered a human intention. When barnyard animals look up and bleat or whinny, they are acknowledging God. When birds fly in cruciform, crying as they go, they make their offering. But, we skeptical moderns and postmoderns might ask, what is really happening when Tertullian sees the birds praying? Is he really telling the truth about them, or is this a projection of himself and his categories? If he is truth-telling, what difference does that make? I have begun with a florid, eighteen-hundred-year-old image, but this is also a question for our own quotidian life and time: can I tell the truth about you, or this table, or the building we’re in, or the institution of Notre Dame, and if so, what is happening when I do that?

In response to these questions, I want to advance a series of four theses: 1. We can tell the truth; 2. To tell the truth is to participate in divine creation; 3. At the heart of creative truth-telling is a literary figure: personification; 4. Personification is our path to sanctity.

To get at the first of these, return for a moment to Tertullian’s birds. The doubt in our post-Cartesian, post-Kantian heads is whether he is seeing what he wants to be the case, or perhaps overlaying the instinctual behavior of a brute animal with a salutary moral meaning: who knows what birds “mean” by flying and making noise, but it’s certainly edifying to think of it as prayer. But to think thus is to presume an abyss, a defining breach, between my life as a thinking, speaking animal and the unspeaking modes of existence occupied by other creatures. Yet, as recent work by Peter Wohlleben, Rowan Williams, Catherine Pickstock, and others has suggested, there are good reasons to think of nonhuman creatures, both in nature and in the constructed human world, as communicating—or “speaking”—in their own ways. Obviously, the vocalizations and other signature sounds of nonhuman animals carry meaning, from the mating invitations of whales to the flight patterning calls of geese, to the warning rattles of diamondbacks. The sounds they make are signs, and signs can be interpreted—told as truth: the rattle of that snake’s tail means keep your distance. 

Of course, animals also make silent communications of various kinds, but these overt, instinctual gestures, along with vocalized communication, are only the tip of the iceberg, for we may also speak of the logos of creatures simply being there: this is a kind of “language” we can find in all finite beings, animal, vegetable, mineral, or composite. Every thing that exists is what it is in relation, which is to say that it stands in a specific tension with the other things around it: as Ishmael says toward the start of Melville’s Moby-Dick, “there is no [thing] in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself.” Because they are fundamentally relational, one bird will behave differently if another bird is nearby—not to mention a predator; a sapling that grows up near a full-grown tree will develop differently because that tree is there, and its growth will further vary depending on whether the mature tree is a sugar maple, or oak, or conifer; a boulder or rock face, furthermore, is what it is in relation to the wind and weather of its location, resisting decomposition in specific ways, and at a measurable rate. Even the manmade desk on which I wrote this paper pushes down into the carpet of my walk-in closet with a specific force, the two physical objects defining themselves in relation to one another. This way of being toward others in all finite things is a communication of specific information, and the communication, we know is heard, inasmuch as it changes the modes of being of those around it. This is all to say, finally, that organized communication, or logos, is not uniquely human, but basic to being as such, so that my words about that tree or this bird need not be impositions. Truth-telling, on this account, is something always already happening around us. Human words fit organically into this picture, as we express in a different way what things are already “saying.” Our language, as Jean-Louis Chrétien once wrote, “gives voice within itself to the polyphony of the world.”

Now, my second thesis is that the uniquely human way of truth-telling, our logos, is an active participation in divine creation. This has certainly been the intimation of many Romantic and post-Romantic thinkers in the last two hundred years: in the late eighteenth century, the German poet and philosopher Novalis thought that the world is always, as it were, waiting for humans to complete it—“we and it are integral halves,” he said—and we complete it precisely by “romanticizing” it in language:

By endowing the commonplace with a higher meaning, the ordinary with mysterious respect, the known with the dignity of the unknown, the finite with the appearance of the infinite, I am making it Romantic.

As William Wordsworth wrote a few years later, the sun seemed to become more itself in his poem The Prelude. And as Rainer Maria Rilke intuited early in the twentieth century, our minds are somehow necessary for the full becoming of things around us: “What birds plunge through,” he wrote, when they fly, is not simply the air, but also the terrain of our perception and imagination, and there—“in the intimate space” of the mind, “in which you see all things intensified,” the birds’ flight most fully comes into its own. But what can such a claim mean? 

To get at what makes Wordsworth or Rilke’s vision possible, we need to venture into the metaphysics they both presumed, but did not investigate. Broadly, it is Christian-Platonic and Augustinian, a view of reality according to which creatures are most themselves inasmuch as they relate to their creator. The model comes clear at a climactic moment in Confessions, Book Ten, where Augustine moves through the creation, asking each type of creature, 

“Tell me of my God.
You are not he, but tell me something of him.”
Then [all creatures] lifted up their mighty voices and cried,
“He made us.”
My questioning [Augustine adds] was my attentive spirit,
and their reply, their beauty.
[interrogatio mea intentio mea / et responsio eorum species eorum]

Right at the point where each creature’s species, its particular beauty or specific form, stands forth most clearly: that is where it declares, with the logos of its being, the name of the God who made it. In other words, for Augustine, when a thing is most beautifully itself, it is most connected to God. And conversely, when a creature is seen in God, or perhaps narrated into God, it becomes more fully itself, as Rilke understood. To tell the truth about a thing is to see it in God—as God sees it, in some sense—and by that very fact it must be a participation in the divine creation, for the return of all creatures to their creator is the work of God par excellence, and a work he accomplishes through our mediation. So, to the extent that we use our words to give voice to the things around us, we are being let in on the work God is always and everywhere doing.

Now for my third thesis: it is that personification goes to the heart of our creative truth-telling. At the outset, it is possible to miss quite how important personification—what the Greeks called prosopopoeia—is to our understanding and speech. But if the late philosopher Robert Spaemann was right, it is actually impossible for us to approach other creatures at all without presuming some degree of likeness between us, at least as a starting point: “if we want to do it justice,” we “have to view [non-human life] anthropomorphically,” for otherwise, how would we begin talking about it at all? “We are able to speak adequately,” Spaemann said, “about unconscious, non-human life, only on the basis of the conscious life that we ourselves are. We do not have any direct access to non-human life. We can only think of it as conscious life minus the consciousness.” What he is saying, then, is that we necessarily approach other living things with the presumption of likeness—think Tertullian, looking up at the birds—but strip away the attributes that do not seem to be relevant to the other species: birds seem to have drives for hunger, mating, and so forth, but they do not have my consciousness, my capacity for rational reflection on those drives. To get at birds at all, I must presume some sense of what it is like to be a bird, and I do that by thinking analogically of its overlap with myself. The same is true, Spaemann thinks, even of inanimate objects such as rivers or rocks: to get at what they are, we identify them with ourselves—moving and solid beings that we are—but strip away an even greater number of human and animal attributes.

In practice, this means that personification is the natural starting point for human truth-tellers. In giving voice to things around me, as Augustine did in the Confessions, I attribute to them something like agency, some sort of teleological drive, and a basic kind of intelligible action. Any speech would show this, but let us take an example from one of the great personifiers in the history of fiction, Charles Dickens. In his novel Bleak House, he describes one character as living

in a pretty house, formerly the Parsonage-house, with a lawn in front, a bright flower-garden at the side, and a well-stocked orchard and kitchen-garden in the rear, enclosed with a venerable orchard wall that had of itself a ripened ruddy look. But, indeed, everything about the place wore an aspect of maturity and abundance. The old lime-tree walk was like green cloisters, the very shadows of the cherry-trees and apple-trees were heavy with fruit, the gooseberry-bushes were so laden that their branches arched and rested on the earth, the strawberries and raspberries grew in like profusion, and the peaches basked by the hundred on the wall.

In giving the house a “front” and “side” and “rear,” Dickens implies an orientation toward the street, a point of focus and directionality for the house that is not unlike the frontward sense that humans necessarily have of their own bodies. The “ripened ruddy look” of the orchard wall gives one a sense of long experience and perhaps joy or some other emotion, while the “heavy,” “arched,” resting, basking fruit trees all suggest various sorts of lovely, but exhausted action. Everything bears an analogy with its human viewer, and as Dickens shares his life with these lesser creatures, he lifts them up into the light of a greater intelligibility: they are not humans, but they stand forth in his speech as enhanced versions of themselves, becoming somehow more of what they already are. That is to say, when Dickens, or Rilke, or any of us, speaks of other beings as sharing human life, that sharing is a way of bringing them into God, lifting them up through analogy into clearer contact with the ground of all analogy: the creator. In personifying the birds and lowing cattle as praying, Tertullian saw them in direct relation to the core of all reality.

This brings us to my fourth thesis: personification is the human path to sanctity. Obviously, the vocation of every person is to God himself, which means that we are called to holiness of life. At the most basic level, this means that all our life, every object of our attention, needs to be brought—perhaps dragged—into relation with the divine, and if speech, and especially personification, are some of our most important ways of doing that, then they must be part of the path to heaven. By sharing my life with the things I address, and deepening the analogy between us, I participate in their continuing creation, lifting them up into the divine life to which we are all called. Jean-Louis Chrétien thought of this as “the ark of speech,” in which we, like Noah, raise all creatures above the devastating flux of time, bringing them with us into the beautiful clarity of the God’s own eternal life. But the mystery is that, even as we elevate others, we ourselves are also being elevated, for the to lift other creatures into God is to praise: as Paul Claudel wrote in the third of his Great Odes, “free her, the earth, by my mouth, with this praise / I owe you.” There is only one ark of speech, and it is the Logos of God: when we creatively lift all that touches us into it, we will find ourselves in the ark as well, carried ever deeper into the depths of being.

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Dwight Lindley is a professor of English at Hillsdale College.