Seeing the wickedness of the earth, God, in his wrath, elects to preserve but one man—Noah—who, being just, was pleasing in his sight. The seething crowds of humanity lie fallow and unrighteous on the earth, and Noah alone is deemed worthy of being spared the waters. Yet in effecting Noah’s deliverance, a whole host of other creatures, human and non-human, must also be preserved. Noah is not an isolated entity; he is not, in the strict sense, an individual, but a household. Indeed, he is yet more than a household, for the ark contains not only Noah’s relatives and domestic beasts, not only those necessary for the making of a livelihood, but also the wild, the strange, the impure. Properly examined, Noah stands at the center of a whole ecosystem, and it is only within this ecosystem that the full lineaments of his being find expression, that the full powers of his self are realized. The multitude-teeming ark, floating precariously upon the waves, is a cosmos in miniature, and this cosmos constitutes Noah’s self.
Without this full reach, stretching from the aviary to those that creep upon the earth to the men and women of Noah’s human relationships, Noah himself would not be saved. And without the interrelationships that constitute the ark, Noah could not in any real sense be just and so could not merit his deliverance. For it is the proper relationship between things that constitutes justice, and this relationship is often, and likely best, described in terms of the arrangements of the human and the animal using analogies in which the beings of the world as a whole are used to describe those within a smaller neighborhood of reality: any particular instantiation of justice is a reflection of the cosmic arrangement in which justice subsists, in which each finds its perfect realization by existing in harmony with the whole. The hierarchical ordering of the human and the animal becomes an apt image for this arrangement, for the human, traditionally understood, is uniquely privileged with reason, the possession of logos, and so is able to actualize harmonious relations. Thus it is that the Gospel of Thomas can state, “Blessed is the lion that the human will eat so that the lion becomes human. And cursed is the human whom the lion will eat, and the lion will become human.”1 We may be struck by the strangeness of this image, and its meaning appears obscure, but it is of a type hardly uncommon in the ancient world and becomes clear when seen in the light of comparable images. Plato, in his great treatise upon the subject of justice, The Republic, makes a similar statement. He invites us to “Fashion a kind of multicolored beast with a ring of many heads that it can grow and change at will—some from gentle, some from savage animals. . . . Then fashion one other kind, that of a lion, and another of a human being.” This chimera, the artificial lion, and the human being are then wrapped around by the image of the human so that “anyone who sees only the outer carving and not what’s inside will think it a single creature, a human being.” Such is the nature of the human creature. Each person contains a menagerie of beasts, each clamoring for recognition and nutriment. They must be fed, for they are part of us, but they must be given their proper place, and it is this that we call justice:
If someone maintains that injustice profits this human being and that doing just things brings no advantage, let’s tell him that he is simply saying that it is beneficial for him, first, to feed the multiform beast well and make it strong, and also the lion and all that pertains to him; second, to starve and weaken the human being within, so that he is dragged along wherever either of the other two leads; and, third, to leave the parts to bite and kill one another rather than accustoming them to each other and making them friendly.
The just man, on the other hand, is the one who cares for these beasts as would a farmer, discerning their natures, encouraging their benign attributes, and discouraging hostility to make them his and each other’s allies.2
The ark, too, has its proper order, its taxis in which all things are harmoniously arranged around the headship of Noah, who is the representative of the whole. Yet unlike the metaphor of Plato, the ark is not only a representation of the interior orderliness of Noah’s soul. Indeed, Plato described the soul in such terms, as well as in those of a city, because there is a harmony, an analogy, between the interior and exterior; the two are connected. There is no such thing as purely interior justice. The person who orders his or her own internal impulses and faculties must also order his or her behaviors and relations to the external world. These two are not ultimately separable. To treat others with justice, particularly the vulnerable who are in our care and under our power as are the beasts of the fields, it is necessarily to inhibit avarice, rage, lust. Thus, the ark is simultaneously the life of Noah’s soul and the relations that constitute the world itself, which he is called to harmonize, for the two are not ultimately divisible. Noah, and so also his justice, exists in community, in relation, and the whole cosmos is contained within those relations.
It is for this reason that the ark is not simply one instance of community or of justice, but the image of the macrocosm, of the world as God intends it to be. It is the perfected whole contained in miniature, a seed floating, like the Spirit of God, upon the waters in an act of recreation, containing within itself the generative principles of all things. It is no surprise, then, that the ark has been read as representing the church; and Noah, a type of Christ. Augustine, for instance, attempts to show us that the dimensions of the ark are in exact proportion to those of a man lying upon his back and holds that the door in the side of the craft represents the wound wherein the spear pierced the Crucified, and blood and water flowed.3 And why not? The patterns are, viewed in a certain way, identical. For the church is, like the ark, the just city, the eschatological perfection of creation realized as the body of Christ, and in it are contained all things. The church, the ark, the perfect union of God and creation contained in eternity, is present in time as a seed seeking realization, like the ark floating upon the waters and seeking a place to land.
Yet this image, the ark, wherein is contained the salvation of a cosmos and the revitalization of every species, sits in exact negative parallel to another kind of ship—a ship of demonic mien, stinking of excrement, sweat, death. As the ship of Noah carried the salvation of a cosmos, the ships that carried purchased Africans to Europe and the New World represented the destruction of a cosmos, indeed, the destruction of millions of them. Where the ark contained in miniature the entirety of Noah’s ecosystem, the connective webs of his self, the slave ships carried fetters and the systematic erasure of just such ecosystems, the reduction of selves to the exploitability of naked individuality. Removed from their homelands, locked in cages with foreigners, reduced to shackled berths the bare dimensions of their frames in a stinking underdeck, this “human cargo” was systematically dehumanized, torn from relation to person and place, removed to foreign lands and cultures.
It was precisely this isolation that was demanded for the particular use to which these people were put. The early American settlers were themselves foreigners and suffered from their ineptitude in lands wherein their knowledge and numbers could barely provide sustenance. In colonies such as Jamestown, death openly rode the homes and byways as starvation and disease. The American natives, though lacking in the military might wrought by the colonists’ particular technologies (aided by the import of diseases cataclysmic to the locals), were at home, in full possession of themselves in the land, and as such could not be exploited for the purposes of settler survival. Still within the living ecosystems of communal self, their powers were yet too great for direct subjugation; they were too capable of resistance. European labor, too, possessed a cultural and racial claim upon the colonists and thus, while exploitable, could not be fed upon with complete impunity, at least not to the scale called for by the needs and lurking passions of the times. In slaves the colonists found a population removed from its ecosystem, denatured of the powers of self that inhere beyond the individual, reduced, as much as possible, to malleable physicality, the pure atomic human animal which is the ideal profitability of the market.
Once the slaves had landed, the masters quickly learned that the art of their subjugation lay in perpetuating the conditions of the slave ship—the greatest possible maintenance of the slave’s deracination. All communion between them and their new environs was to be kept to a minimum, for in such communion their powers might grow, their selves be more fully realized, and rebellion flower as a result. Isolation, fear, ignorance: an old tale. Give them a relation to their neighbors in servitude, an education, a single claim to the surrounding culture or a voice with which to speak, and it would quicken into a weapon against their exploitation. In the ideal of chattel slavery, the individual was just and only that—anything more was a liability.
Such ships and practices, and the principles upon which they operate, are no strangers to present reality. They are in many respects the archons of the fallen world, in which violence and oppression is widespread among the relationships of being. It is, after all, the state of isolation, of enmity and disconnection from one’s neighbors and environment that is most conducive to vulnerability and thus to manipulation and oppression. The more out of place a being is, the more easily abused. The vulnerable in our own society are generally those who have few or no connections or resources—the poor, the homeless, the refugee, the orphan, the immigrant. There are always vultures lurking to devour in violent or discriminatory ways what usefulness such persons may carry, or else simply to abuse and lambast them. Often, such people are merely ignored, rejected, given a wide berth in which to suffer.
Even among the more middling classes, one finds similar principles at work. People have begun to speak of a “loneliness epidemic” (heightened now by the effects of the pandemic), the negative effects of which include heightened risk for depression and early death.4 Networks of mutually supporting families, friends, and neighbors, have in many places disappeared and taken along much of the sharing of skills and resources that they once enabled. The result is a wash of atomization: the individual, with few skills or connections, is forced to rely upon the market and the commodification (often by large, ethically suspect corporations) of many basic needs. Unsurprisingly, such a circumstance benefits the wealthy and further disenfranchises the poor.
It is arguable, moreover, that this state of enmity and isolation is one of the principle characteristics of modernity. George Steiner has argued as much, at least, in his work Real Presences. Modernity, he says, is best described in terms of the loss of faith in the capacity of language to intelligibly describe reality, and the fragmentation of the self. The schism between language, and thus of mind, between its own inner logic and semantics and the wider world cuts the individual off from all recognizable community. Awash in confusion, nihilism, and loneliness, this self begins to fragment, to be lost in the chaos of competing voices, all prating, demanding, conjecturing—what? The words slip from the tongue and find no landing; the mind knows not the world nor itself: “Je est un autre,” declares Rimbaud. We come, like Kant, to see only our own selves in our experiences; the other vanishes, and one cannot say how, or if, that other relates to oneself. This self, too, loses its center in the “widening gyre,” and cracks become splinters.
Among these competing energies of the self, a governance is needed, a head by which the whole may be organized. Yet in the chaos, no governance is found, and the lion eats the man, and becomes human; the passions lurking in the human heart spring up and begin to take control. This leads to greater division, greater violence within and without. The fecundity, the generative potential of all things are divided. The animals fight among themselves and the males and females among them engage in warfare. Lust and violence pull all things apart. Lust for exploitation, rage for destruction of the other as if it had no bearing on oneself. The world, deprived of intelligibility, seen as lifeless, as lacking any real presence of another, becomes a field of resources to be used for the voraciousness of self flailing in the disintegration, tearing all things apart even as it dissolves. As the particles grow smaller and smaller, they mix and churn until they produce the flood.
Injustice breeds the chaos of the waters. The greater the abuse, the greater the isolation of entities within a whole, the greater the chaos within and destruction of that whole. The flood is not the directly willed punishment of a vengeful God, but a description of the destructive results of injustice. And it is not merely humanity that suffers, for the human, like the individual, is not alone. From the birds of the sky to the plants standing forth from the earth, all is drowned in the vast waters. Only a solitary vessel remains.
And yet it is not solitary, for it is the whole world in miniature, the seed of a new beginning, an archetype containing the principles of all things in a properly ordered mutuality. The waters wash over the earth, but they cannot destroy the seed of this primordial cosmos, of the community in justice, a community best understood as a living unity, as representable by, as incarnated in, a human being. This need not be the end. Just as the ark has been seen as the church and Noah as Christ, so the flood has been seen as an image of baptism or of the eschaton in which all injustice is washed away and truth finally established. The foundation of the cosmos is inviolable, and so also is the foundation of each thing. If destruction is inevitable, it is only of that which is unreal, falsehood, lies. It is only the ending of improper relations between things, the corrupted conditions of the fall. This end must come. The flood is an image of the death-ladenness of injustice, of the antipathy of entities deluded or corrupted into a state (or belief in the primacy) of splintered individuality, of the assertion of oneself over and against the other.
The ship of the world in which we live often resembles that of the slaver, but the world that God is bringing into being, is saving, is that primordial cosmos, that ordered harmony of creatures united in the bonds of incarnate love represented by the ark. We ought to know which is the more buoyant.
Gos. Thom. 7, translation by Ehrman and Pleše.
Rep. 11.599c–589b
Augustine, Civ. 15.26.
Mane Yara-Yakoubian, “Massive meta-analysis finds loneliness has increased in emerging adults in the last 43 years,” PsyPost, January 17, 2021, https://www.psypost.org/2022/01/massive-meta-analysis-finds-loneliness-has-increased-in-emerging-adults-in-the-last-43-years-62377; Center for Disease Control, “Loneliness and Social Isolation Linked to Serious Health Conditions,” last reviewed April 29, 2021, https://www.cdc.gov/aging/publications/features/lonely-older-adults.html.
Any credits for the art?