Dogs, Lions, and Saints

Late Antique and early medieval stories about saints and the wild animals they miraculously tame are clearly fantastic; they tell us nothing about actual lions, wolves, hyenas, or bears. If, however, we scrape away the surface of the stories, we find close and empathetic observations of ordinary animal-human interaction: the behavior of the wild animals in these stories is modeled on careful observations of real domestic dogs’ interactions with humans. Dogs were maligned in the Scriptural tradition and were too commonplace to star in saints’ lives and passions, which trafficked in vivid memorable excess. Christian texts do not linger on or celebrate dogs, but these works contain a legible canine substrate. By reading Greek and Latin hagiography alongside recent research on canine ethology, we see that these depictions of holy people and wild animals reflect the enduring utilitarian and affective bonds of a shared human-canine culture, which long predated Christianity.