A great challenge was thus posed to the Church. It was met with avidity. Stories circulated throughout medieval Europe of creatures with hooves for feet, and with claws, who had been converted to the way of Christ; of people as small as seven-year old children, with horses the size of sheep, who had been brought to see the light. Even people with the heads of dogs and who ate human flesh were said to have been brought within Christianity’s embrace. Indeed, in several accounts of the conversion of St. Christopher—for centuries one of the Church’s most popular saints—the pre-conversion Christopher was a Cynocephalus, or dog-headed creature with “long hair, and eyes glittering like the morning star in his head, and [with] teeth like the tusks of a wild boar.”62 If, however—to some enthusiastic Christians, at least—physical appearance was no bar to conversion and even to sainthood, another less generous conclusion from this same premise was equally important, and equally linked with Augustine’s earlier ambivalence on the subject: those creatures who made up the alien races in far flung lands and who were not “rational”—that is, unlike St. Christopher and others, those who were incapable of being converted—must be considered beyond the most charitable definition of personhood.
Gradually, during the later Middle Ages, interest in the great variety of monstrous races that Pliny and others laboriously had described began to fade. Concern increasingly focused on a single example of the type—the sylvestres homines, or wild man. As Richard Bernheimer, in the classic study of the subject, describes the wild man, it is a hairy creature
curiously compounded of human and animal traits, without, however, sinking to the level of an ape. It exhibits upon its naked human anatomy a growth of fur, leaving bare only its face, feet, and hands, at times its knees and elbows, or the breasts of the female of the species. Frequently the creature is shown wielding a heavy club or mace, or the trunk of a tree; and, since its body is usually naked except for a shaggy covering, it may hide its nudity under a strand of twisted foliage worn around the loins.63
Hidden or not, however, the loins of the wild man and his female companion were of abiding interest to Christian Europeans. For, in direct opposition to ascetic Christian ideals, wild people were seen as voraciously sexual creatures, some of them, in Hayden White’s phrase, “little more than ambulatory genitalia.” Adds historian Jeffrey Russell: “The wild man, both brutal and erotic, was a perfect projection of the repressed libidinous impulses of medieval man. His counterpart, the wild woman, who was a murderess, child-eater, bloodsucker and occasionally a sex nymph, was a prototype of the witch.”64
Wild men, like the other representatives of the earth’s monstrous races, had inhabited the Near Eastern and Western imaginations for millennia. So too had the wild man’s adversary, the heroic human adventurer. And from at least the time of the ancient Epic of Gilgamesh, with its numerous parallels in Old Testament ideas, one recurring characteristic of the wild man’s brave antagonist was his avoidance of, and even flight from, sexuality and the world of women. In the Gilgamesh legend, for example—which was composed in about 2000 B.C. from tales that are older still—the first wild man encountered is Enkidu. Possessed of “titanic strength,” Enkidu’s “whole body is covered with hair; the hair of his head is long like that of a woman. . . . With the game of the field he ranges at large over the steppe, eats grass and drinks water from the drinking-places of the open country, and delights in the company of animals.”65 In time Enkidu acknowledges Gilgamesh, the story’s hero, as his superior, but only after Gilgamesh has had Enkidu brought down by the wiles and seductions of a courtesan.
With Enkidu now in tow—indeed, having almost merged into a second self—Gilgamesh next encounters another wild man, a terrifying, forest-dwelling, and far less cooperative ogre named Humbaba, and together—with the help of the sun god—Enkidu and Gilgamesh destroy Humbaba and cut off his head. Impressed by Gilgamesh, Ishtar, the goddess of love, proposes marriage to him, along with all the riches and accompanying pleasures she can give him; but Gilgamesh rejects her, knowing of her reputation as a fickle consumer of men. After another sequence of events Gilgamesh proclaims himself “the most glorious among heroes . . . the most eminent among men” and receives the approving acclaim of multitudes. The spurned Ishtar has her revenge, however, and Enkidu is killed, leaving Gilgamesh to cry “bitterly like unto a wailing woman,” for seven days and seven nights, before launching a quest for the secret of eternal life. At last he is given it, in the form of a thorny plant from the bottom of the sea—but before he can use it the plant is stolen from him by a serpent, and Gilgamesh returns home to live out his days condemned to the ultimate fate of all mankind.
There are, certainly, numerous themes in the Gilgamesh story that have worked their way into the patterns of subsequent Western literature, and certainly the quest for eternal life, whether in the form of the earthly paradise or the fountain of youth, is relevant to understanding the adventures of Columbus and many of the European explorers who followed him. Of more immediate concern, however, is that the world of the adventurer is not only a male world, but a world in which women are at best irrelevant or ineffectual, and at worst are harlots, castrators, or murderesses. As such, they must at all costs be avoided. Paul Zweig has shown how this is true not only in the obvious cases (as with Beowulf having to overcome both Grendel and Grendel’s monstrous mother, or in Odysseus’ various dealings with Calypso, Circe, Scylla, and Charybdis), but also in the genre that, of all male writings, seems most sympathetic to women—the medieval romance. For on the whole, Zweig observes:
medieval romance follows an implicit pattern which enables the adventurer to triumph over his female adversary. Typically, the romance opens as the knight gratefully swears oaths of love and loyalty which bind him to the lady of his choice. Before the story even begins, he is “defeated,” helplessly in love. All he desires, apparently, is to sit idly at the feet of his queen. What could be more painful than to leave the lady’s presence? But that is precisely what he must do; because his lady requires proof—he encourages her to require proof—of his love. And so the knight is banished into the wandering, unattached life of adventure, proving his courage and improving his reputation, all for the greater glory of the lady, whom he may, in fact, never see again.66
But, of course, seeing her again is not the point. The point is to live a life of exploration and danger—though a properly chaste and Christian life of exploration and danger, fighting against devilish men and beasts of the woods—preferably in the company of one or more male companions. “What is done for the lady, need not be done with her,” Zweig notes. Indeed, from Achilles and Patroclus in the Iliad to Cervantes’s Don Quixote and Sancho Panza—to say nothing of numerous examples up to the present—the same motif “recurs in the literature of adventure”:
uprooting himself from women, the adventurer forms a masculine friendship so intimate, so passionate, that it reasserts, in male terms, the emotional bond which formerly anchored him within the world of the city. . . . The adventurer, in his desire to reinvent himself as a man, reinvents his emotions, so that they may be served wholly by male pleasures: the rooted society of women superseded by the mobile society of men.67
Such relationships, to modern observers, often are viewed in a homo-erotic light. Zweig is ambivalent on the point, and it is not of particular importance in the context of this discussion, except to the extent that in the Christian versions of this literature, at least, the consciously idealized life of the adventurer not only is adamantly non-homosexual, it is determinedly non-sexual in every possible respect. It is, and must be, determinedly so, however, because carnal temptation lurks externally at every bend in the road, as well as deep within the Christian’s imperfect self. Indeed, once on the march against the beasts of the forest or the enemies of God and civilization, this most noble of the Church’s non-ordained representatives constantly has to contend with the fact that the most abhorrent (because salacious) characteristics of both the wild man and the devil—in whateve
r guises they may appear—are perpetually latent within the darkness of even the finest Christian’s own heart.
In sum, the wild man and his female companion, at their unconstrained and sensual worst, symbolized everything the Christian’s ascetic contemptus mundi tradition was determined to eradicate—even as that tradition also acknowledged that the wild man’s very same carnal and uncivilized sinfulness gnawed at the soul of the holiest saint, and (more painful still) that it was ultimately ineradicable, no matter how fervent the effort. The fact that failure was inevitable in the quest to crush completely such festering inner sinfulness was discouraging, of course, as we saw in the dramatic testimonies of the Church’s early ascetic hermits; but as those testimonies also revealed, to the true Christian believer discouragement was only prelude to ever more zealous and aggressive action.
As Richard Bernheimer and others have shown, the very notion of wildness, to the European mind at this time, suggested “everything that eluded Christian norms and the established framework of Christian society, referring to what was uncanny, unruly, raw, unpredictable, foreign, uncultured, and uncultivated.”68 However, the wild man, in that sense, was only the outer personification of the beast-like baseness that existed within even the most holy of the Church’s saints, the beast-like baseness that must be overcome—if need be, by excruciating rituals of self-torment or by terrifying campaigns of violence—were the Christian saint or the Christian soldier or adventurer to attain a proper state of holiness. Should such a wild man be on the right side of the indistinct boundary separating man and beast, of course, he was not necessarily beyond the reach of Christian taming and teaching, not necessarily beyond conversion. But before his potential virtue could be released from its dark imprisonment, as Frederick Turner correctly notes, the wild man, as wild man, “must cease to exist, must either be civilized or sacrificed to civilization—which amounts to the same thing.”69
Determining whether a particular collection of wild people, or others who differed greatly from the European ethnocentric ideal, were actually human was no easy task. We have seen how Augustine wavered on the topic. So did innumerable others. That is because the framework, the organizing principle that guided such thinking, was deliberately ambiguous. The idea of the Great Chain of Being that categorized and ranked all the earth’s living creatures was born among the Greeks, but like so much else of such provenance it became central as well to medieval Christian thought. As the fifteenth-century jurist Sir John Fortescue explained, in God’s perfect ordering of things
angel is set over angel, rank upon rank in the kingdom of heaven; man is set over man, beast over beast, bird over bird, and fish over fish, on the earth in the air and in the sea: so that there is no worm that crawls upon the ground, no bird that flies on high, no fish that swims in the depths, which the chain of this order does not bind in most harmonious concord. . . . God created as many different kinds of things as he did creatures, so that there is no creature which does not differ in some respect from all other creatures and by which it is in some respect superior or inferior to all the rest. So that from the highest angel down to the lowest of his kind there is absolutely not found an angel that has not a superior and inferior; nor from man down to the meanest worm is there any creature which is not in some respect superior to one creature and inferior to another.70
However, within that formal “hierarchy of nature,” observes Anthony Pagden,
the highest member of one species always approaches in form to the lowest of the next. . . . There might, therefore, be, in the interstices of these interlocking categories—in what Aquinas called the “connexio rerum,” “the wonderful linkage of beings”—a place for a “man” who is so close to the border with the beast, that he is no longer fully recognisable by other men as a member of the same species.71
Indeed, as Aquinas’s thirteenth-century teacher, Albertus Magnus, put it: “nature does not make [animal] kinds separate without making something intermediate between them; for nature does not pass from extreme to extreme nisi per medium” Or, in theologian Nicolaus Cusanus’s words:
All things, however different, are linked together. There is in the genera of things such a connection between the higher and the lower that they meet in a common point; such an order obtains among species that the highest species of one genus coincides with the lowest of the next higher genus, in order that the universe may be one, perfect, continuous.72
Somewhere in these murky zones of species overlap, such European thinkers were certain, there lived creatures who may have seemed bestial, but who were humans, with souls, and who even—as, again, with St. Christopher—might become the holiest of saints if treated with Christian care. However, in that same indistinct, borderline, substratum of life, there also existed human-like creatures whose function in God’s scheme of things was to be nothing more than what Aquinas called “animated instruments of service” to civilized Christian humanity. That is, slaves. And finally, there were those residents of this dark and shadowy nether realm who may have been distant descendants of the children of Adam, but whose line of ancestry had become so corrupt and degenerate that, as Hayden White puts it, “they are men who have fallen below the condition of animality itself; every man’s face is turned against them, and in general (Cain is a notable exception) they can be slain with impunity.”73
The same ambiguity existed in the European mind regarding the homeland of the wild man, the wilderness itself. Although it has become commonplace in the past few decades for writers on Western attitudes toward the environment to assert that, with almost no important exceptions, Christians traditionally have regarded nature and the wilderness in negative terms, in fact, Christianity’s view of untamed landscapes has always been acutely ambivalent.74 On the one hand, as Ulrich Mauser has shown, the Old Testament language describing the wilderness into which the ancient Jews were driven does indeed combine “the notion of confusion and destruction with the image of the barren land.”75 Even more importantly, in this same vein, adds David R. Williams, for Jews and Christians alike the wilderness
became a symbol of emptiness at the core of human consciousness, of the profound loneliness that seemed to open like a bottomless pit underneath the vanity of each of humankind. It became the symbol of a place located in the mind, a black hole of unknowing around which orbit all the temporary illusions of human self-confidence. . . . a realm of chaos that completely surrounded and undermined the vanities of human consciousness.76
From this perspective, the wilderness was, in fact, nothing less than an earthly representation of Hell. However, since a true Christian properly had to undergo a time of testing and trial prior to revelation, the image of the wilderness also carried with it, conversely, the sense of a place of repentance—even a place of sanctuary. As well as the preserve of dangerous and lurking beasts, then, in addition the wilderness was “the location of refuge, trial, temptation, and ultimate victory over Satan” for the truly soul-purifying holy person.77 Thus, the would-be Christian—saint and soldier alike—was drawn to the wilderness, the wilderness both within and without, in part precisely because it was a place of terror and temptation, and therefore of trial, and in part because it provided the only true path to salvation. In sum, the wilderness and the carnal wild man within the wilderness—like the irrepressibly sensual wild man within the self—were there to be confronted by the Christian, confronted and converted, domesticated, or destroyed.
IV
Much of Christianity’s success in establishing itself as the state religion of Europe was due to the exuberant intolerance of it adherents. In a sense, the faith itself was founded on the idea of war in the spiritual realm—the titanic war of Good against Evil, God against Satan. And within the faith non-belief was equivalent to anti-belief. To tolerate skepticism regarding Christianity’s central tenets, therefore, was to diminish in power the source of the belief itself. Non-believers, in sum, were seen as willing the death of the Christians’ God.78
During
the first centuries of Christianity’s existence, when the religion’s faithful were subject to intense persecution, Christianity often was regarded by its critics as a cult of orgiastic devil worshipers who indulged in rituals of blood-consuming infanticide and cannibalism.79 Once in a position of power, however, Christianity turned the tables and leveled precisely the same accusations against others—first against pagans whom they regarded as witches, magicians, and idolaters, and eventually against all non-Christians. And, of those who were near at hand, few were regarded as more non-Christian than Jews.
During the Middle Ages Europe’s Jews lived a precarious existence, subject to constant harassment and accusation from Christian zealots. Charges against Jews ranged from the claim that they indulged in ritual murder of Christians (allegedly using the Christian victims’ blood for the preparation of matzo, for circumcision rituals, for the anointing of rabbis, and for various medicinal purposes) to the imputation that Jews were engaged in conspiracies to buy or steal consecrated Hosts, intended for use in Catholic Communion ceremonies, in order to desecrate them and thereby to torture Christ.80 The Jews, in the meantime, had their own popular ideas about Christianity, based in large measure on their Ma’aseh Yeshû (“Story of Jesus”) or Tôldôt Yeshû (“History of Jesus”) dating from the late second century. Created as a defense against Christian teaching and proselytizing, this work tells the story of Jesus’ illegitimate birth nine months after his mother had been seduced during her menstrual period; from there it goes on to describe the young man’s life as a blasphemous sorcerer, his execution by hanging, and the theft of his body from its grave—followed by the dragging of the corpse through the streets of Jerusalem, thereby putting to the lie any notions that he had not died or that he had been bodily resurrected.81
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