Over and above the said offence was another, they had burglariously entered the stores, and carried off the flour which was kept for the service of the community. Well, the local ants already had a solid foothold in the area, “It happened, according to the account of a monk of the said order in that province, that the ants, which thereabouts are both numerous, large, and destructive, had, in order to enlarge the limits of their subterranean empire, undermined the cellars of the Brethren, burrowing beneath the foundations, and thus weakening the walls which daily threatened ruin. They had dug some nice cool cellars beneath the foundations to store staple foods like flour. But in the early 1700’s, the Franciscans ran into a problem with their monastery in Pridade no Maranhao. Those guys really knew a thing or two about managing an apostolate. Their efforts were later overshadowed by the much more efficiently organized Jesuits.
As it so happens, as early as 1549 A.D., the Franciscans were busy setting up missions in northeastern Brazil, catechizing the natives, and tending to the souls of Portuguese settlers. Of course, Saint Francis had long been deader than a mackerel when the legal tribulations of the Brazilian ants arose, so we can’t be sure what sort of amicus curiae he would have submitted. Hey, what can I say, theological arguments get funky sometimes. While he obviously thought the ants had an important lesson about sloth to teach us, he regarded their hoarding as an affront to reliance upon God’s providence.
But yet the ant teacheth us that we ought not to be slothful in the summer of this present life, so that we be not found empty and barren in the winter of the last day and judgment” (Assisi per Brunforte, 1910 ed., p166). Francis as other living things because of the great diligence she hath in gathering together and storing up, in the time of summer, a treasure of grain for the winter but he was wont to say that the birds pleased him much more, because they laid not up one day for the next. Francis, presumed to have been written by an obscure Italian Franciscan monk named Ugolino Brunforte), remarking “the ant was not so pleasing to St. Francis’ original companions noted his distaste (as recorded in the 14 th Century work Little Flowers of St. Blessed Brother Giles of Assisi, one of St. If it were up to me, William Burroughs and Robert Anton Wilson would be Doctors of the Church. Not very saintly it seems, but I don’t exactly have the official theological credentials to judge. Frank was a big fan of finned, feathered, and furry critters, dude passionately hated ants. Now, it’s a little odd, given that Saint Francis of Assisi is generally regarded as the patron saint of animals that monks of his order elected to prosecute their eusocial Brazilian neighbors, but as it turns out while St. At the opening of the 18 th Century, the Friars Minor of Saint Anthony (a Franciscan order) of the province of Pridade no Maranhao in Brazil unwisely took the local ants to court for violations of their property rights. While you’re at it, be afraid of any animal, mineral, or vegetable that knows a thing or two about jurisprudence or has the gumption to hire a savvy attorney. It is at our own peril that we overlook those ants who have learned to work the human legal system. The unwary assume that the only ants that pose any real existential threat to humans are the giant, mistakenly irradiated kind that stomp cities or those unpleasant, but generally non-lethal fire ants. The notion of an “anti-colonial” ant is a bit counterintuitive, as they pretty much have a lock on the concept of the colony as a super-organism operating as a unified entity, collectively working together to support the greater ant good, as well as the fact that they themselves have colonized every landmass that is remotely hospitable, and together form in the neighborhood of 25% of terrestrial (animal) biomass. “The ant is knowing and wise, but he doesn’t know enough to take a vacation” – Clarence Day Does anybody know a good lawyer?
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