The Method Is the Book

Every chapter has the same three parts and the repetition is the point. A creature is named, usually with a scriptural verse that mentions it. A fact about its nature is stated, introduced by the formula that the naturalist says such and such. Then the fact is interpreted as teaching something about Christ, the church or the soul, and the chapter ends. The book never argues, never compares accounts and never asks whether the fact is true, because truth of that kind is not what it is after. The consequence is that the natural history is subordinate throughout.

Where the observation is accurate it is used no differently from where it is wholly fabulous, and the author would have seen no distinction worth drawing: the created world is legible, and a creature's behaviour is a sign placed in it deliberately. That is a coherent position and it explains why correcting the zoology would have struck a reader as beside the point. What the method produced was a stock of images that could be used anywhere, in preaching, in verse, in mosaic and in carving, without their source ever needing to be named. A great deal of what is taken for Christian animal symbolism in general is in fact this book's interpretive habit, applied to creatures that scripture mentions only in passing or not at all, and carried into the visual arts by people who had met the readings rather than the book.