Christian Symbolism: The Pelican in Her Piety — St Mary Magdalen School of Theology

Continuing our series on Christian symbols, Fr Jonathan Jong writes on the Pelican in her Piety.

The Physiologus is a strange hybrid of genres, at least to modern eyes. Much as the Gospels are neither quite straightforward biography as we now understand the genre, nor entirely pious fiction, the Physiologus is neither quite natural history nor entirely a collection of just-so-stories. Also like the Gospels, its author is unknown, though many proposals have been made of prominent men: King Solomon, the saints Basil of Caesarea, Ambrose, John Chrysostom, Jerome. Typically thought to be from the second century Alexandria, the Physiologus is the earliest known bestiary—compendium of beasts—that staple of medieval literature. Like many of its inheritors, the Physiologus contains information about a variety of animals, and in each case, a theological interpretation of it. It is difficult to appreciate how, for early Christians, the Bible and the natural world really did make up “two books” to be read and interpreted and mined for meaning. Concerning the pelican, the Physiologus says that

it is an exceeding lover of its young. If the pelican brings forth young and the little ones grow, they take to striking their parents in the face. The parents, however, hitting back kill their young ones and then, moved by compassion, they weep over them for three days, lamenting over those whom they killed. On the third day, their mother strikes her side and spills her own blood over their dead bodies (that is, of the chicks) and the blood itself awakens them from death.

It does not take a subtle mind to see how one might theologise this ornithological observation. Humans strike God in the face by scorning God and even murdering God on the cross: Christ’s side is indeed struck, pouring out water and blood (John 19.34), which in the eucharist is our spiritual drink. The Physiologus conveniently neglects theologising the bit about the pelican killing her offspring. In any case, over the centuries this disturbing aspect of the legend will be tamed: closer to our times, people say that the mother pelican pecks her beast to feed her young. Her wrath is exised, as indeed is the reference to resurrection. Even legends get de-mythologised.

To be fair to our forebears, some of them were sceptical of the veracity of this entry. Augustine mentions it in this commentary on the sixth verse of Psalm 10), which the Vulgate (and the King James) renders “I have become like a pelican in the wilderness, and like an owl among ruined walls”. After exegeting this as referring to a preacher among unbelievers, he then—unnecessarily—brings up the legend, matching the Physiologus’s description very closely, but with this caveat:

Let us not pass over what is said, or even read, of this bird, that is, the pelican; not rashly asserting anything, but yet not passing over what has been left to be read and uttered by those who have written it. Do ye so hear, that if it be true, it may agree; if false, it may not hold. […] This may be true, it may be false: yet if it be true, see how it agrees with Him, who gave us life by His blood.

Augustine repeats the analogy between the self-sacrificial pelican and Christ’s sacrifice on the cross, and then highlights the self-sacrifice act as maternal by bringing up another avian image of Christ from Matthew 23.37:

It agrees with Him in that the mother's flesh recalls to life her young with her blood; it agrees well. For He calls Himself a hen brooding over her young.

Interpreters have not always emphasised this point: indeed, the legend is sometimes told about pelican fathers, both as the violent abuser and murderer of his offspring and as their saviour.

Augustine also offers more than the Physiologus does by confronting the business of the pelican slaying her own young, citing Deuteronomy 32.39, “I kill and I make alive; I wound and I heal”, and likening conversion to death (and rebirth).

The vulning pelican—now, there’s a word we owe largely to this image: irregularly derived from the Latin meaning “to wound”, and from which we get the word “vulnerable”—remains alive in the Christian imagination throughout the Middle Ages, probably in part thanks to Isidore of Seville, whose entry on the pelican in Etymologies repeats the legend, with Augustine’s grain of salt (XII.vii.36).

Interest in the pelican seems to intensify from the 12th century onward, around which time bestiaries also have their heyday. Certainly by the 14th century, the pelican is no longer confined to this genre, but finds itself in psalters and prayer books and missals, often in or alongside images of Christ’s passion.

As with many things historical, causality is difficult to ascertain, but it is the wont of the St Mary Magdalen School of Theology to find Thomistic influence in as many places as possible, and so we note that in the sixth verse of Adoro te devote (ca. 1260), a hymn for liturgical use on Corpus Christi and during eucharistic adoration, Thomas Aquinas addresses Christ as Pie Pelicane, whose blood cleanses us, a single drop of which sets the whole world free.

Closer to home, Richard Foxe—then Bishop of Winchester—founded Corpus Christi College, Oxford in 1517, and naturally included the pelican in its coat of arms; a half century later, (the Protestant) archbishop Matthew Parker gave its Cambridge counterpart its first coat of arms, also featuring the vulning pelican. Some time in between these events (ca. 1544), Thomas Cranmer had had his coat of arms altered, from three cranes to three pelicans. The pelican is famously featured in the portraiture of Queen Elizabeth I. In these latter two cases, the meaning of the pelican seems to have shifted somewhat. According to the 17th century biographer John Strype, Henry VIII likened Cranmer himself to the pelicans, which signify that the archbishop “ought to be ready…to shed his blood for his young ones, brought up in the faith of Christ”. Likewise, Elizabeth I co-opted to Christological symbol to refer to herself, as self-sacrificial mother of the nation. Sometimes Protestants destroy icons; other times they destroy icons.

There is really nothing surprising in the Church’s extensive use of the pelican as a Christological image: this was, as it were, pre-determined by the entry in the Physiologus. The legends origin itself is a greater mystery. The story often told is that the ancients observed pelicans feeding bloody pre-macerated fish to their young, which they confused for the pelican feeding herself to her offspring. There is, as far as I can tell, no historical basis for this tale. Indeed, any particular facts about pelicans may well be irrelevant, as the mythical pelican is simply not the ornithological pelican. Consider Psalm 102 above: it is not always translated pelican, sometimes appearing as vulture or owl. Indeed, owls might be more fitting as pelicans are not, as the psalm asserts, solitary creatures. Nor do pelicans live in the desert, which the psalm also says.

A large flock of pelicans, on water. Image from The Press-Enterprise.

The word is qaath in Hebrew, with Jerome’s Vulgate renders as pelican: but the same word is translated onocrotalus in Leviticus 11.18. The identity of the qaath has in fact been a subject of debate across the centuries: a cursory reading of commentaries produces such candidates as swan, goose, and kingfisher, on top of the birds already mentioned. For a less time-consuming exercise, search for images of “medieval pelicans”, and you will find all kinds of birds, few of which look anything like any species of pelican.

Some modern renditions have brought the mythical and ornithological together, but it’s not clear that this is a good thing, theologically-speaking.

Pelican in her piety. Edward Burne-Jones (ca. 1880).

It’s the whole science-and-religion thing again. “What has ornithology to do with Christology?”, and all that. One one hand, all this theologising about birds seems blend disciplines in a potentially unhelpful way. But recall Augustine’s “This may be true, it may be false: yet if it be true, see how it agrees with Him”. This is clearly not to confuse ethology and theology; nor is it to disregard the ethological facts for the sake of a good metaphor: that too would be anathema to Augustine. And nor is it to infer theological truths from particular facts about the natural world: the truth about Christ’s self-sacrifice does not turn on the particularities of avian behaviour. Rather, Augustine is reading into nature some theological truth he already knows by other means. The mode here is eisegetical, rather than exegetical. Much disaster can be avoided by taking this stance more generally in the interaction between theology and the natural sciences.

This reminds me of a historical thesis that comes up a lot in science-and-religion classes. Whether it is eisegesis or exegesis, what Augustine does is to interpret the natural world, rather than to describe it, as it were, literally. The historian Peter Harrison argues that this allegorical view of nature is replaced during the Reformation with allegorical readings of Scripture: as the Bible is read literally, so is the natural world, which provides a sounder basis for natural science. It is a neat theory, though it risks underestimating the continuity of medieval and early modern science. I remain unpersuaded.