Gesta Romanorum, a thirteenth-century Latin collection of stories for preachers to use in sermons, includes a story about a parishioner’s response to a corrupt priest. When that priest was scheduled to celebrate Mass, the parishioner would skip the service. One day while so skipping Mass and walking in a meadow, the parishioner became desperately thirsty. The parishioner found a tiny stream of pure water from which he drank. Seeking to better allay his thirst, he sought for the tiny stream’s source. A wise man pointed him to a fountain:
He {the parishioner} there beheld a putrid dog with its mouth wide open and its teeth black and decayed, through which the whole fountain amazingly gushed. The man regarded the stream with great terror and confusion, ardently desiring to quench his thirst, but apprehensive of poison from the fetid and loathsome dog carcass that apparently had infected the water. [1]
The wise man explained that the parishioner had already drunk of that water and that it was indeed good. The wise man explained:
See now, as this water, gushing through the mouth of a putrid dog, is neither polluted nor loses any of its natural taste or color, likewise celebration of Mass by a worthless minister. Therefore, although the vices of such men may displease and disgust, yet you should not forego the services that they are ordained to provide.
In short, God can work through corrupt priests, and through other corrupt persons, too.
Figuring the corrupt priest as a putrid, dead dog has considerable scriptural support. Dogs in the bible are associated with vicious, worthless, foolish, and evil beings. Consider:
Dogs have surrounded me; a band of evildoers has encompassed me.
Do not give what is holy to dogs, and do not throw your pearls before swine, or they will trample them under their feet, and turn and tear you to pieces.
It is not good to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.
Like a dog that returns to its vomit is a fool who repeats his folly.
Beware of the dogs, beware of the evil workers, beware of those who mutilate the flesh!
Outside are the dogs and the sorcerers and the immoral persons and the murderers and the idolaters, and everyone who loves and practices lying. [2]
The story of the pure water flowing through the putrid dog carcass makes good sense as an allegory for receiving sacraments from a corrupt priest.
The application of this story provides a far more sophisticated allegory. After wryly noting that Scripture associates priests with dogs more frequently than with any other animal, it quotes Latin poetry:
In a dog are twice two aspects; a medicinal tongue,
a keen-smelling nose, complete love, and being always ready to be roused to bark.{ In cane bis bina sunt; et lingua medicina,
Naris odoratus, amor integer, atque latratus. }
The text then allegorized those four good canine aspects to priests:
- Priests with their tongues possess the power of a physician in healing the sick of heart and probing the wounds of sin. They are careful also to avoid too rough of treatment that would exacerbate rather than cure wounds. It is likewise the nature of dogs to lick the body’s wounds.
- As a dog, by keenness of scent, distinguishes a fox from a hare, so a priest, by the quickness of his perceptions in confessions to the ear, should discover what pertains to the cunning of the fox; that is, to heretical and sophistical perverseness. Also, what to internal struggles and evil or hopelessness of pardon, and what to the unbroken ferocity of the wolf or lion, originating in a haughty contempt of consequences, as well as other distinctions of like character.
- The dog is of all animals the most faithful and ready in defense of his master or family. Priests should also show themselves staunch advocates for the Catholic faith and zealous for everlasting salvation, not of their parishioners alone, but of every denomination of true Christians. …
- As a dog by barking betrays the approach of thieves, and doesn’t permit the property of his master to be invaded, so the faithful priest is the watch-dog of the great King. He is one who by his bark, that is his preaching and his watchfulness, doesn’t cease to defeat the schemes and machinations of the devil against our Lord’s treasury, that is the soul of his neighbor, which our Lord Jesus Christ has redeemed with the mighty ransom of His precious blood. [3]
Medieval Latin literature regarded a dog as man’s best friend.[4] Redeeming scriptural disparagement of dogs and allegorizing priests to dogs as a positive exemplum shows the amazing range and creativity of medieval Latin literature.
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Read more:
- dogs better pets than cats in medieval European literature
- men are dogs: important truth in disparaging men
- crapping crows, laying eggs & medieval masculine difference
Notes:
[1] Gesta Romanorum, Tale 12, from Latin trans. Swan & Hooper (1876) p. 23. Subsequent quotes are from id, pp. 23-6, unless otherwise noted. I’ve made some minor, non-substantive modernization of the English.
[2] Psalm 22:16; Matthew 7:6, 15:26; Proverbs 26:11; Philippians 3:2; Revelation 22:15. The bible does, however, credit dogs with attacking a vicious, evil woman:
The dogs shall eat Jezebel in the territory of Jezreel, and none shall bury her.
2 Kings 9:10.
[3] Cynics, an ancient Greek school of philosophers, were etymologized with the ancient Greek word for dog-like (kynikos). A scholium on Aristotle gave a fourfold explanation of why Cynic philosophers were dog-like. Dudley (1937) p. 5, giving an obscure reference to Brandis’s edition of Aristotle’s scholia. Being a good guard and being discriminating were two components of that explanation.
[4] Writing early in the nineteenth century, Charles Darwin accounted reasons to marry and reasons not to marry. Among his reasons to marry a woman:
Object to be beloved and played with. Better than a dog anyhow
Evolutionary thinkers are just beginning to recognize the importance of culture. In the legal and cultural circumstances that men face today, getting a dog almost surely is more rational, at the level of the individual man, than getting married.
Women are socially dominant and have a legally privileged position in family and criminal law. Nonetheless, many women today prefer cats to men. Perhaps dogs are too similar to men to be a favored alternate companion for women.
[image] Saved. Painting of Milo, the dog of the Egg Rock Lighthouse in Massachusetts, with girl he rescued. By English painter Sir Edwin Henry Landseer, 1856. Thanks to New England Lighthouse Stories.
References:
Dudley, Donald Reynolds. 1937. A history of cynicism from Diogenes to the 6th century A.D. London: Methuen.
Swan, Charles, and Wynnard Hooper, trans. 1876. Gesta romanorum: entertaining moral stories. New York: Dover Publications Inc. (reprint edition of 1969).