Saint Hervé and the Hierarchy of Frogs
From the Cutting Room Floor
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One of miracles of Saint Hervé has me puzzled. According to the story, croaking frogs in a swamp were a huge nuisance to some nearby peasants. Saint Hervé comes to the swamp and demands of the frogs that they be silent, and they are never noisy again.
Some scholars have scandalously suggested that Hervé silenced the frogs not with a Christian prayer but with an old bardic charm. I doubt it, but the more interesting question to me is…
What’s so bad about croaking frogs? Why is this a miracle at all? Am I the only person who rather enjoys the babble of frogs croaking away in a nearby stream on a hot summer evening?
I don’t understand the frog hate. But I do know that a dislike of frogs is a constant among some Northern Europeans through the Middle Ages and well beyond.
Take the patroness of the Anglican Ordinariates, Our Lady of Walsingham. In a break with the usual symbolism where Mary crushes a serpent, Our Lady of Walsingham is shown treading on something considered just as bad: a toad.
This loathing of frogs lasted well into Early Modernity. By the 17th century, when widespread pet ownership had made many people wonder whether animals might go to heaven too, one of the arguments for thinking that animals could not have souls was that if they did, even the bad animals would have souls. Did anyone want to go to a heaven, asked one 17th century thinker, that was full of “all the Toads and Frogs and poysonous Serpents”? Even those who disagreed accepted the thrust of the argument, saying that frogs and toads were possibly warped by Adam’s fall, and that the original, untainted versions of the creatures were surely what we would find in heaven.
All I can offer by way of explanation of this strange prejudice against frogs is a distinction: not all frogs are bad. Saint Hervé may well have encountered the extremely popular bestiary the Physiologus, which continued to be read well into the Middle Ages, and which distinguishes between two types of frogs, the good ones and the bad ones. First:
There is a frog called the cerseus, meaning “the one from the dry place.” This frog is not bothered by the heat during summer but, if he is caught in the rain, he will die. (Michael J. Curley translation)
This is in marked contrast to the lower class of frogs that live in places like swamps.
“The ones from the dry place” represent fine, abstinent men who are unaffected by working patiently in abstinence; however, if they are caught in the rain (that is, in worldly desires), they die. The water frogs, however, are those who cannot stand abstinence. If these abstain until daytime, not being able to bear a ray of intelligible sunlight, they slip back again into their former desires.
So at least we can add this small clarification: it is against these second sorts of frogs, these enemies of abstinence, that the actions of Saint Hervé were directed.
