Beasts Beyond Babel

Are we on the brink of true communication with animals?

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Are rationality, language, and self-reflective consciousness unique to humans, or do other creatures also partake in these capacities? According to the ancient Jewish and Christian traditions, Adam used to speak with the animals, but as man became estranged from the beasts, this knowledge of how to communicate with them was lost. With the dawn of the Enlightenment, the ancient Biblical notion of thinking and talking animals was dismissed as fantastical and faded from cultural consciousness.

The enlightened philosophes held up humans alone as the only rational and linguistic beings. Yet, even when René Descartes declared beasts to be soulless and mindless automatons, the scientific enterprise espoused by Sir Francis Bacon envisioned a future when humans would inherit the mantle of Adam and once again be able to communicate with creatures, calling them by their true names.

In the early 21st century, the science of the animal mind empirically established that many animals besides humans have self-reflective thought and even rational deliberation. More recently, with the help of AI, we have begun to decipher the details of animal languages. Approaching the realization of Bacon’s dream, we are now on the brink of true communication with animals.

Adam and the Animals

In the book of Genesis, the first human being, Adam, is brought into the world surrounded by animals. God sees it fitting that these creatures be man’s first companions, and, in an act that calls to mind the ancient Hebrew relationship between a father and his children, Adam even gives the animals their own names. In the Hebrew Scriptures, the act of naming someone by their own name went beyond a concern for a convenient means of providing individual designation.

Naming was intended to capture in some way the essence of an individual, expressing actual identity rather than mere identification. A name was understood to accurately reveal and reflect the individual’s character, personality, and even destiny, and one’s “name was often considered to be but an expression, indeed a revelation, of his true nature.”¹

Parting ways from the surrounding cultures of the Ancient Near East, where animals are depicted merely as the mindless instruments of the gods, both Hebrew Scripture and other early Jewish texts portray animals as conscious and at times able to communicate via speech. The ancient Jewish (and Christian) traditions tell us that Adam used to converse at length with the animals about many things under the sun. In this primeval age of the long forgotten human past, when, according to the Biblical record, human consciousness first emerged from the dust of the earth, Adam’s animal companions possessed both rationality and language.

In Genesis, the serpent, who is clearly defined as an animal that God created,² converses with humans and morally deliberates with them. Likewise, the book of Numbers portrays Balaam’s donkey as morally aware and able to speak to him after the donkey’s mouth is “opened.” Here, the donkey is seen as “originally having speech, not being given speech.”³ In the case of Balaam’s beast, the Biblical author “does not portray the donkey with speech patterns or formulas common in folklore or biblical nature personification, but as a self-aware and round character, who brings awareness of sin to her owner in a clear and honest manner.”⁴ This is in clear “contrast to animals in other ancient Near Eastern texts which only talk in human speech to deities or other animals, not humans.”⁵

Rational Linguistic Animals in Early Jewish and Christian Thought

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The ancient Biblical understanding of rational language-bearing animals was not lost to the sands of time but continued to be influential among Jews in the age of the Roman Empire. For instance, the Roman Jewish historian Josephus tells us that when Adam was first brought into the Garden in Eden, “all the living creatures had one language at that time.”⁶ However, says Josephus, “the serpent, which then lived together with Adam and his wife, showed an envious disposition at his assumption of their living happily and in obedience to God’s commands. And thinking that if they disobeyed them, they would fall into misery, he persuaded the woman, out of a malicious intention, to taste of the Tree of Knowledge…”⁷

Similarly, in the Early Jewish Book of Jubilees, well before the time of Josephus, “animals are portrayed as having originally possessed rationality and the ability to speak, sharing a language with humans, but [they] lost these abilities after the expulsion from the Garden of Eden.”⁸ The Ancient Aramaic translation of Genesis, Targum Neofiti, agrees and tells us that at the time of Adam, “animals could speak with humans and each other…and all the inhabitants of the earth were of one tongue and one speech, and in the language of the Temple they used to converse, for through it had the world been created in the beginning.”⁹

The ancient Hebrew and early Jewish idea of conscious, linguistic animals was inherited by the early Christians of the East. Following the interpretation of Jubilees, these early Christians, such as John Chrysostom and Ephrem the Syrian, understood the serpent in Genesis as a “wild animal” or “reptile” who had the capacity to communicate verbally with the first humans.

Generations later, John of Damascus writes that the serpent was a “wild animal” who “before the fall…was on intimate terms with man, associating with him more than all the rest and conversing agreeably with him.”¹⁰ In one early Christian document known as The Acts of Paul and Thecla, the Apostle Paul is approached by a lion who is able to communicate verbally with Paul because, like Balaam’s donkey, God has opened his mouth. Paul enquires of the lion what he wishes from him, and the lion responds, saying that he wishes to be baptized. Paul subsequently agrees to baptize the lion in a nearby river and describes how he “took him by his mane and…immersed him three times. And when he came up out of the water, he shook out his mane and said to me: ‘Grace be with thee!’ And I said to him: ‘And likewise with thee.’ And the lion ran off to the country rejoicing.”¹¹

In a manner similar to St. Paul talking to the lion, the ability of saints to communicate with animals and know them by their true names is a constant theological theme of the Early Christian Church Fathers. John Chrysostom, Theodoret of Cyrus, Theodore of Mopsuestia, Basil of Caesarea, Ephrem of Nisibis, Gregory of Nyssa, Narsai, and Diodore of Tarsus all view this ability of saintly human beings as an aspect of their attainment of Adam’s likeness with God.¹²

These Church Fathers also portray animals as having the capacity to listen to and obey righteous humans, even over against their natural instincts. The closer that humans progress toward God, the more they would manifest the ability to communicate with animals and be able to command them as their sovereigns. Thus, when a holy monk, such as Pachomius, needed to cross a river, “crocodiles would carry him with the utmost subservience, and set him down at whatever spot he indicated.”¹³ And when animals needed help, they would seek out such holy men and women for aid.

Thus, a lion with an injured paw impaled by a thorn goes to Gerasimus. After “the saint removes the thorn,” and “cleans and binds the wound…the grateful lion insists on following the holy man as a disciple.”¹⁴ Regardless of whether or not one considers such accounts to be historical, what it clearly demonstrates is that the early Christians who wrote them believed that some animals had consciousness, agency, some degree of rational deliberation, and the capacity to make decisions that went beyond their natural instincts.

One significant case of animals going against their instincts is found in the Judeo-Christian idea that one aspect of the image and likeness of God was Adam’s kingship over the animals. Beyond this, the ancient Jewish and Christian traditions held that when Adam’s descendants obeyed the commandments of God, they would become Adam’s royal heirs to whom the animals would pay homage. Thus, early Christian iconography portrays the pre-fallen Adam as the king of the animals, “fully dressed and seated upon a throne in the midst of a throng” of non-human subjects who are awaiting their chief’s commands.¹⁵

While Adam’s race may be the rightful sovereigns of the animal kingdom, the animals will only obey sons and daughters of Adam when they follow God. Many Church Fathers pick up on this theme and employ the dutiful behavior of animals as a positive example to their listeners. For instance, Basil of Caesarea states that many animals are “not far from reasoning intelligence,” and he calls on his congregation to learn that “if even brute beasts can take care of their lives through rational prudence, so should human beings have forethought for the salvation of their souls.”¹⁶

The Enlightenment Eclipse of the Animal Mind

As the Enlightenment dawned, the ancient Jewish and early Christian understanding of thinking and speaking animals was eclipsed by the Modern view that animals are fundamentally mindless and soulless entities whose sole purpose is their material utility to humans. Consequently, sixteenth-century humanist and “herald of the Enlightenment” Giordano Bruno sees “man as no longer a creature among fellow creatures,” but as “superior to the other animals,” and “unconstrained by the laws of nature.” Through his intellect and freedom, declares Bruno, man can “make himself god of the Earth.”¹⁷ Here’s man’s vocation is no longer to become the humble servant king of the free animals, but rather a tyrant who can even defy God’s laws of nature through the attainment of knowledge.

Seventeenth-century French Enlightenment philosopher René Descartes similarly elevates humans metaphysically above all other beings, arguing that nonhuman animals lack souls, and are devoid of minds, perceptions, feelings, sensations, and voluntary action. Descartes regards language as necessary for cognition, and he contends that animals have neither. The skills of animals, says Descartes, derive from “innate mechanisms rather than from reason,” because “reason is a universal instrument which can be used in all kinds of situations.”¹⁸

Since Descartes did not know of any evidence showing that animals possess the same type of general problem-solving abilities as human beings, he concluded that they must not possess rationality. Instead of seeing animals as acting on their thoughts, Descartes likens them to “hydraulic machines in which innate structures or ‘instincts’ are mechanically set in motion by sensory stimulation.”

David Hume, an eighteenth-century Scottish Enlightenment philosopher, goes beyond Descartes to apply the Cartesian mechanical view of nature to humans as well as animals. Understanding beast and man alike as machines, Hume argues that both humans and non-human animals possess analogous intellectual capacities owing to innate mechanical principles. Hume explains that the capacity to “reason itself, which we possess in common with the beasts” is “nothing but a species of instinct or mechanical power.”¹⁹

In “the great machine of nature,” he says, “everything is conducted by springs and principles, which are not peculiar to man, or any one species of animals.” Because both humans and animals are nothing but mechanical material entities, for Hume, there is no fundamental difference in the nature of their relative capacities for rationality.

The Scientific Rise of Linguistic and Rational Animals

Around the same time that Descartes was philosophically lobotomizing animals in France, in England, Sir Francis Bacon was developing “a program for the reformation of natural philosophy” (aka science) which entailed “the eventual recovery of pre-fallen knowledge of creation and the concomitant original human mastery of nature.”²⁰ Using as his model the lives of the Christian saints and focusing on their authority, which enabled them to tame wild beasts, Bacon, in his mission to mend “the sovereignty and power” that Adam had possessed “in his first state of creation,” asserts that “whensoever he shall be able to call the creatures by their true names he shall again command them.”²¹ Bacon believed that, through science, Adam’s race could once again speak to animals in their own languages and thus one day return as their rightful sovereigns.

Within the last few decades, advanced cognition has been experimentally demonstrated in a variety of animal groups, and researchers have observed that “complex cognitive abilities evolved multiple times in distantly related species with vastly different brain structures in order to solve similar socioecological problems.”²² It has now become clear that “the capacity for abstract thinking does not belong to humans alone, as studies of other vertebrates,” such as primates, corvids, elephants, dogs, and dolphins, have shown.²³

In-depth scientific studies on animal cognition have shown that animals as a whole can no longer be categorically dismissed as beings who lack the capacity for rational thinking. Today, “empirical researchers show little hesitation in describing animal behaviour as rational,” and there exists a clear scientific consensus that many animals besides humans are rational. Consequently, say such researchers, “human uniqueness with respect to rationality and reflection is a myth, even by the standards of the most demanding of sceptics.”²⁴

The Comeback of Chrysippus's Canine

Chrysippus, an ancient Greek philosopher, once recounted a case where a hunting dog’s behavior appeared to reflect disjunctive syllogistic reasoning—and thus rationality. In this account, the dog arrived at an intersection where three roads met the path he was on. Smelling two of the roads by which the prey had not passed, the dog set off on the third path without hesitation or any further sniffing. The question of whether or not Chrysippus’s dog is a genuine case of inferential reasoning within a non-human animal was debated for over a thousand years.

Today, however, scientifically documented cases of inferential reasoning among animals are commonplace and, from a scientific perspective, the debate is over. In one study showing inferential reasoning in animals, researchers presented baboons with a hidden item in one of four cups to test their understanding of disjunctive syllogisms. In this task, there was a dependent relationship between each set of two cups, where the baboon had to use inferential reasoning to figure out where the reward was.

The results showed that the baboons were not only successful in their logical reasoning but were also confident in their deliberations. The researchers thus concluded that “Overall, our results show that nonhuman primates have the capacity to represent the abstract, combinatorial, or logical thought required to reason through a nonverbal disjunctive syllogism.”²⁵

Other research has demonstrated that dogs can use inferential reasoning by exclusion, and that they can find a hidden object by logically eliminating other possible locations after observing where the object was originally. These studies have shown that dogs can solve problems with incomplete information, in the same way that humans can logically deduce where a hidden object is located after observing actions revealing where the object is not.

The Return of Talking Beasts

In the 20th century, many linguists and philosophers argued that key structural features of human language distinguished it from animal communication. Yet, every time a linguistic feature was proposed as “the Rubicon separating human language and animal communication,” animal researchers would look for evidence of that ability in other species, and in case after case, they would eventually discover the proposed uniquely human capacity in one or more non-human species. “Each time a property [was] proposed to set human language apart (e.g., reference, syntax), some version of that property [would be] found in animals.”

Fast-mapping was discovered in border collies, linguistic recursion in corvids, and syntax in songbirds and apes. A study of African elephants has found that they have names for each other and address one another by name, and an experiment on border collies has discovered that they comprehend sentences containing a prepositional object, verb, and direct object.

More recently, Bacon’s dream of Adam’s race once again talking to animals in their own languages has come one step closer to reality as researchers employing AI have uncovered sophisticated structures in sperm whale communication similar to those found in human language. AI pattern recognition helped scientists to identify a “sperm whale phonetic alphabet,” revealing how “they vary the rhythm, tempo, and duration of their clicks to communicate, similar to how humans use tone and word order.”

These results “show that the sperm whale communication system is, in principle, capable of representing a large space of possible meanings, using similar mechanisms to those employed by human sound production and representation systems (e.g., speech, text, Morse code, and musical notation).” Considering the high degree of complexity of sperm whale brains, and that they reached this degree of complexity at least thirty million years before humans, when we finally figure out how to talk with them, we will be amazed by what they can teach us.

1. G.F. Hawthorne, “Name,” in The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia, ed. Geoffrey W. Bromiley, Volume Three: K-P (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1986), 485, 481.

2. The serpent is described as one of the “wild animals” that the Lord God had made (cf. Gen. 1:25; 2:19), and within the text there is no question of the serpent being anything other than a wild animal.

3. George Savran, “Beastly Speech: Intertextuality, Balaam’s Ass and the Garden of Eden,” Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 64 (1994): 33-55.

4. A. Rahel Wells, “‘One language and one tongue’: Animal speech in Jubilees 3:27–31,” Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha, 28:4 (June 2019), 319-337.

5. Wells, “‘One language and one tongue’: Animal speech in Jubilees 3:27–31.”

6. Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews 1.40.

7. Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews 1.40.

8. Wells, “‘One language and one tongue’: Animal speech in Jubilees 3:27–31.”

9. Targum Neofiti (Genesis 11:1).

10. John of Damascus, Orthodox Faith 2.10. See also Ephrem the Syrian, Commentary on Genesis 2.9.3.

11. Tam´as Adamik, “The Baptized Lion in the Acts of Paul,” in The Apocryphal Acts of Paul and Thecla, ed. Jan N. Bremmer (Kok Pharos, 1996), 64.

12. Alexander Toepel, “Adamic Traditions in Early Christian and Rabbinic Literature,” in New Perspectives on 2 Enoch: No Longer Slavonic Only, eds. Andrei Orlov and Gabriele Boccaccini, Studia Judaeoslavica, Vol. 4. (Brill, 2012) 312.

13. Vita Sancti Pachomii, PL 73, cols. 229–72; ch. 19, col. 241.

14. Dominic Alexander, Saints and Animals in the Middle Ages, (Boydell & Brewer in 2008) 21.

15. Toepel, “Adamic Traditions in Early Christian and Rabbinic Literature,” 312.

16. Basil of Caesarea in David Clough, On Animals, (T&T Clark, 2012).

17. Giordano Bruno quoted in Richard Bauckham, “Modern Domination of Nature: Historical Origins and Biblical Critique,” in Environmental Stewardship: Critical Perspectives – Past and Present, ed. R. J. Berry (T&T Clark, 2006) 36.

18. Rene Descartes, quoted in John Cottingham, “Cartesian Dualism: Theology, Metaphysics and Science,” in The Cambridge Companion to Descartes, ed. John Cottingham (Cambridge University Press, 1992), 249.

19. David Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, 9.6.

20. Sir Francis Bacon, The Great Instauration in The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, and Douglas Heath (Longman, 1857–74), iv, 7.

21. Sir Francis Bacon quoted in Peter Harrison, The Fall of Man and the Foundations of Science (Cambridge University Press, 2007), 27.

22. Shigeru Watanabe and Ludwig Huber, “Animal logics: Decisions in the absence of human language,” Animal Cognition 9:4 (October 2006): 241.

23. Kate Wong, “Brainy Bees Think Abstractly,” Scientific American (August 2005): 5.

24. Giacomo Melis and Susana Monsó, “Are Humans the Only Rational Animals?” The Philosophical Quarterly, Volume 74, Issue 3 (July 2024).

25. Stephen Ferrigno, Yiyun Huang, and Jessica F. Cantlon, “Reasoning Through the Disjunctive Syllogism in Monkeys,” Psychological Science, 32:2 (2021), 292–300.