On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears

by Asma, Stephen T.

  Most scholars agree that John of Patmos is providing a coded narrative about the religious persecution of Christians, a persecution that received imperial sanction under Nero’s rule (54–68) and may have become acute under Domitian (81–96).13 The symbolism is further nuanced by the introduction of the two monstrous henchmen, the beast from the sea with seven cat-like heads and the horned beast from the earth, subsequently referred to as the pseudoprophetes, “false prophet.” In some readings the Roman emperor himself is identified with the satanic dragon; others read the beast of the sea as the emperor, the seven heads symbolizing the succession of emperors (Revelation 17). In the early modern period, Protestants read the beast as the Roman Catholic pope, while the Catholics returned the favor by reading the beast as Luther himself. In any case, the chain of monster command is clear in the scripture: the satanic hydra is the central authority of evil, giving power and strength to the beast from the sea, who in turn is served by the beast from the earth (pseudoprophetes). It is this subservient beast of the earth that famously encourages humans to get “the mark” of the sea beast, the number 666 (sescenti sexaginta sex).14 The pseudoprophetes acts as a kind of public relations manager for the sea beast. The mark of the beast, worn on the right hand or forehead, is an indicator of allegiance to the evil power, a sign of collusion with the wicked temporal world because only by this mark can man have economic commerce. One suspects that this is a coded way for John to express his call to Christians to reject the temptations of acquiescent pagan life under Roman rule. Martyrdom is preferable to submission.

  All of this monster activity precipitates the great battle between good and evil at Armageddon, located between Tel Aviv and Nazareth. During this battle the legions of the beast will fight against the righteous and the beasts will be vanquished to the lake of fire. The satanic dragon will be trapped for a thousand years, after which there will be yet another era in which the evil one seduces humankind, the “children of disobedience.” The beasts of Revelation, finally vanquished by God, explicitly echo the monsters from the Book of Daniel (ca. second century BCE), 15 and together they show us another important function of monsters in biblical culture. The prophet Daniel dreams of four great beasts that rise out of the sea (et quattuor bestiae grandes ascendebant de mari diversae inter se, 7:3); each of them foreshadows the versions in the Apocalypse. The description is truly frightening, in particular that of the fourth beast, and it deserves to be quoted in full.

  The first was like a lioness, and had the wings of an eagle: I beheld till her wings were plucked off, and she was lifted up from the earth, and stood upon her feet as a man, and the heart of a man was given to her. And behold another beast, like a bear, stood up on one side: and there were three rows in the mouth thereof, and in the teeth thereof, and thus they said to it: Arise, devour much flesh. After this I beheld, and lo, another like a leopard, and it had upon it four wings, as of a fowl, and the beast had four heads, and power was given to it. After this I beheld in the vision of the night, and lo, a fourth beast, terrible and wonderful, and exceedingly strong, it had great iron teeth, eating and breaking in pieces, and treading down the rest with his feet: and it was unlike to the other beasts which I had seen before it, and had ten horns. I considered the horns, and behold another little horn sprung out of the midst of them: and three of the first horns were plucked up at the presence thereof: and behold eyes like the eyes of a man were in this horn, and a mouth speaking great things. (Daniel 7:4–8)

  This nightmarish cadre of monsters wages war against the “saints of the most high God,” and the “talking horn” on the head of the fourth beast leads the charge. There is considerable disagreement about how to interpret the beasts, but most scholars see them as corresponding to the four empires that threatened and even occupied Palestine between the sixth and second centuries BCE; the lion-eagle hybrid represents Babylon, the toothy bear represents the Median Empire, the four-headed leopard is the Persian Empire, and the egregious fourth beast is the Greek and Macedonian Empire (Alexander the Great conquered Judea in 332 BCE). 16 The monsters win their temporary successes against the righteous, but God is always ultimately victorious and the eventual victory is characterized as eternal because God’s power is “an everlasting power that shall not be taken away” (potestas eius potestas aeterna quae non auferetur, Daniel 7:14).

  The stories of these creatures in Daniel and Revelation bring into relief a texture of monsterology that eventually comes to dominate the medieval religious mind. These monsters are symbols of prideful insurgency, and as such must be brought low and be damned by God’s overwhelming justice. They are symbols of what men will inevitably become, pawns in various regimes of torture, if they attempt to rule without the guidance and approval of Yahweh. In the Jewish tradition the monsters are incarnations of the inevitable political trouble that arises when gentiles impose upon the chosen people. In the prophecy traditions, monsters are not creatures of natural history but symbolic warnings of a horrifying life without the Abrahamic God (or, in the case of Christians, without his son). They are the symbols of both degenerate paganism and fallen “children of disobedience,” those who should know better but have given in to earthly temptation. In Old Testament beast narratives, such as the Book of Daniel, the reckoning is accomplished by Yahweh’s greater strength. But in Christian versions, such as in the Book of Revelation, the paradoxical ingredient of the lamb’s blood (Christ’s sacrifice) is added as the ultimate weapon in the arsenal.

  The “Beast” with seven cat-like heads, from the Book of Revelation. From Alixe Bovey, Monsters and Grotesques in Medieval Manuscripts (University of Toronto Press, 2002). Reprinted by kind permission of the British Library.

  It may be worth mentioning that these prophetic books of the Bible have themselves been treated in some quarters as monstrous appendages on the sanctified scriptural corpus. In addition to the obvious recent history of suicidal apocalyptic groups such as the American Branch Davidians and the Ugandan Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God, one finds warnings about these prophetic scriptures in both Jewish and Christian theology. Maimonides (1138–1204), who is probably the most influential Jewish philosopher of the medieval period, argued that only fools try to calculate the actual end time. To attempt to prophesy a precise coming of the Messiah is a dangerous business, and an untutored public will be led astray by such pseudo theology. From the father of the Christian Reformation himself, Martin Luther (1483–1546), we hear serious anxiety about allowing the flock to read the potentially dangerous Book of Revelation.17 Dangerous or not (or perhaps because they were dangerous), these biblical monsters were like manna for the medieval imagination and served to simultaneously inspire wonder, provide metaphysical explanations of history, legitimize authority, and foster fear-based morality.18

  A medieval depiction of hell as a monstrous mouth. From Alixe Bovey, Monsters and Grotesques in Medieval Manuscripts (University of Toronto Press, 2002). Reprinted by kind permission of the British Library.

  Throughout the medieval era, the scriptures and their subsequent interpretations and pictorial representations slowly build a new version of God. The monotheistic deity becomes the most fearful entity in the medieval imagination, partly because he’s capable of staggering violence, but also because he’s unknowable and infinitely powerful.

  GIANTS

  A race of biblical monsters that seem largely forgotten by the moderns but were a source of endless fascination for the medievals is the giants. Most of the speculation about giants stems from a passage in Genesis (6:1–4): “And after that [Noah becoming a father] men began to be multiplied upon the earth, and daughters were born to them, the sons of God seeing the daughters of men, that they were fair, took to themselves wives of all which they chose…. Now giants were upon the earth in those days. For after the sons of God went into the daughters of men, and they brought forth children, these are the mighty men of old, men of renown.” This passage, together with other cryptic references to
giants (Numbers 13, Genesis 10:8–9, I Samuel 17:4–5), account for a popular theory about giants who roamed the earth prior to the Flood (most of whom died in the deluge, but some of whom may have lived on). Mainstream interpretations of the Genesis text follow the tradition laid down by Jerome and endorsed by Augustine, wherein the “sons of God” reference was interpreted as the offspring of Seth (Adam and Eve’s other son, besides Cain and Abel), and the “daughters of men” was read as the children of Cain.19 But a radically different interpretation, further developed in the Book of Enoch,20 seems to have predated, and even run parallel to, this now standard version.

  In this alternative interpretation, the “sons of God” are taken to be angels who fall from grace because they have sex with beautiful human women (daughters of men). The Book of Enoch (7:2) says, “And when the angels, the sons of heaven, beheld them, they became enamored of them, saying to each other, Come, let us select for ourselves wives from the progeny of men, and let us beget children.” When these fallen angels, called Grigori or “the Watchers,” mated with mortal women, their offspring were giants called nephilim (from the Hebrew root naphal, “to fall”). The Grigori angels were punished for leaving their rightful place and cavorting with human women, and the giants were then destroyed by the Flood. In fact, the tradition that takes its lead from Enoch suggests that it’s the destruction of these mongrel giants, not man’s sinfulness, that explains God’s true motive for the Flood. In chapter 7 Enoch explains that a kind of war had broken out between the giants and the humans. The giants had “consumed all the acquisitions of men. And when men could no longer sustain them, the giants turned against them and devoured mankind. And they began to sin against birds, and beasts, and reptiles, and fish, and to devour one another’s flesh, and drink the blood” (7:4–6). Finally, according to the story, the archangels went to God and asked him to resolve the bloodbath, and the cathartic Flood followed accordingly.

  But the giants proved to be a wily breed and crop up from time to time in postdiluvian episodes, both canonical and apocryphal. The Venerable Bede (ca. 672–735), a Benedictine Church father, commented on the famous Genesis passage by saying, “It calls ‘giants’ men who were born with huge bodies, endowed with excessive power, such as, even after the Flood, we read that there were many in the times of Moses or David.”21 For example, Nimrod, the grandson of Ham and instigator of the tower of Babel, was sometimes interpreted as a giant, and Goliath, whom David unexpectedly defeated with a slingshot, is described as the Philistine Giant. It’s worth quoting David’s battle speech to the incredulous Goliath: “This day, and the Lord will deliver thee into my hand, and I will slay thee, and take away thy head from thee: and I will give the carcasses of the army of the Philistines this day to the birds of the air, and to the beasts of the earth: that all the earth may know that there is a God in Israel” (I Samuel 17:46).

  Like some other monsters in the Bible, giants symbolize hubris or arrogance. As such, they play the necessary foil to God’s righteous demonstrations of superior power. David is only a small boy relative to the giant Goliath, but his faith and courage create a conduit for Yahweh’s dispensation of justice. If you trust in the God of Abraham, even giants will fall.

  6

  Do Monsters Have Souls?

  Monsters are not contrary to nature, because they come from divine will.

  ISIDORE DE SEVILLE

  ST. AUGUSTINE REJECTED the Enoch-based interpretation of Genesis, that fallen angels (Grigori) mated with human women who gave birth to giants (nephilim).1 But he did not reject this version on the grounds of some general prescientific skepticism. A careful reading shows that Augustine specifically objected to the fallen angels as begetters of giants. Humans of gigantic stature, Augustine observes, actually lived before, during, and after the episode of these fallen angels. By an impressive sleight of hermeneutical hand, he reads “angels” as “messengers” and then interprets these fallen men as just a different ethnic group (the sons of Seth) from the women (daughters of Cain), thereby tossing out the supernatural sex part of the story. The giants are preserved.

  Augustine accepts the reality of individual giants and also the possibility of giant races in far-off lands. Moreover, he is convinced that the average pre-Flood humans were larger compared to contemporary humans:

  But the large size of the primitive human body is often proved to the incredulous by the exposure of sepulchers, either through the wear of time or the violence of torrents or some accident, and in which bones of incredible size have been found or have rolled out. I myself, along with some others, saw on the shore at Utica a man’s molar tooth of such a size, that if it were cut down into teeth such as we have, a hundred, I fancy, could have been made out of it. But that, I believe, belonged to some giant. For though the bodies of ordinary men were then larger than ours, the giants surpassed all in stature.2

  He cites a variety of ancient writers in defense of this general thesis, including Pliny the Younger, who concluded, “The older the world becomes, the smaller will be the bodies of men.” Which I suppose is a reasonable theory, albeit unfamiliar, when one is regularly digging larger bones out of the earth than one is encountering in the flesh.

  The most marvelous of these giants were thought to be drowned in the Flood, of course, but Augustine reminds readers that giants of some sort will always be around. “Was there not,” he asks, “at Rome a few years ago … a woman, with her father and mother, who by her gigantic size overtopped all others? Surprising crowds from all quarters came to see her, and that which struck them most was the circumstance that neither of her parents were quite up to the tallest ordinary stature.”3 Giants, in this sense, are part of the natural order of things, rare but unsurprising.

  Archbishop Isidore of Seville (566–636), the learned author of the influential Etymologiae, reiterated Augustine’s views on giants, affirming their probable existence but denying their origin from angel-human coitus.4 Like other issues in his encyclopedic summary of medieval knowledge, the word gigantic is dissected and given etymological analysis. Isidore’s analysis shows that the word is derived from the Greek ge (earth) and genos (kind, or clan), suggesting a race of powerful earth-born men (terrigenas).

  According to Isidore, giants are just one of the various types of monsters (such as Cynocephali, Cyclopes, and Blemmyae) that exist at the margins of God’s creation.5 But of course anomalies crop up inside the perimeter as well. In his chapter “De Portentis,” he corrects the pagan scholar Varro’s earlier claim that portentous births are “contrary to nature.” “But they are not,” Isidore counters, “contrary to nature, because they come by the divine will, since the will of the Creator is the nature of each thing that is created.”6

  MONSTERS AND A CREATOR GOD

  Nature is a reflection of God, and like other reflections doesn’t contain anything beyond the original source. This intimate relationship, according to Isidore, leads pagans to sometimes refer to God as “Nature” and sometimes just “God.”7 Being a good Christian during an era when intellectuals were still extricating themselves from impressive Greek and Roman philosophy, Isidore sought to improve on pagan ideas of God. The idea that God created the world from nothing (ex nihilo) was a relatively recent idea, and it was considered incoherent by pagan intellectuals. Most ancient theories claimed instead that God was the force that gave shape and character to an otherwise unformed, shapeless matter.8 By these ancient principles God did not create matter, which was thought to be contemporaneous with God, he only wrestled it into a coherent system. The explanatory advantage of this viewpoint with regard to monsters is that distorted and malformed beings could be seen as an unfortunate but necessary consequence of “difficult” matter. God tried to make this species perfect, but damnable matter proved recalcitrant during construction.

  But a heavier burden of explanation falls to Augustine and Isidore because, if God made matter, then he must have wanted these monsters to exist. In Western monotheism God cannot get off the hook by
complaining of stubborn, unaccommodating building supplies. Hermaphrodites, conjoined twins, all birth defects, and a slew of monstrous races must be, as Isidore claims, expressions of God’s will because nothing, after all, is outside of God’s will. The medievals embarked on a rich speculative tradition that tried to articulate what God wanted when he made monsters. What was his purpose?

  If giants, for example, expressed God’s divine will, then what was God up to when he made them? Augustine suggests that giants exist in order to fall. The bigger they are, the harder they fall. Augustine writes, “It pleased the Creator to produce them, that it might thus be demonstrated that neither beauty, nor yet size and strength, are of much importance to the wise man, whose blessedness lies in spiritual and immortal blessings, in far better and more enduring gifts, in the good things that are the peculiar property of the good, and are not shared by good and bad alike.”9 The point of being a giant, then, is to overreach and fail, and in that failure highlight their corruption to others as a cautionary tale and consolation. Notice that Augustine’s theory applies to beautiful people as well as the vertically prodigious giants. Based on the same logic, they too will ultimately demonstrate their flawed unen-during rank to the uglier but more spiritually righteous. Extraordinary people, or should I say fabled extraordinary people, are at once flattened into one-dimensional morality lessons by this symbolic approach, a confident approach that applies beautifully to people you’ll never actually meet. But this moralizing tendency gets stronger and more pernicious when it spreads eventually to cover other, real races and nations whom you might actually meet.