On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears (15 page)

Perhaps the best evidence for a charitable Christian view of monsters (viewing them as redeemable) is the fact that St. Christopher was himself a Cynocephalus. The dog-headed version of Christopher, a third-century martyr, is not well known among Roman Catholics or Protestants, but he was venerated in the Eastern Orthodox tradition. Before his conversion Christopher was known by the name Reprobus and was said to have come from the land of cannibals and dog-headed people. According to a medieval Irish
Passion of St. Christopher
, “This Christopher was one of the Dog-heads, a race that had the heads of dogs and ate human flesh.”
²²
Reprobus, a gigantic and fierce warrior from a tribe west of Egypt, was captured by Romans sometime around 300. He appears to have been a Berber from the tribe of Marmaritae, and after his capture he was enlisted to fight for the Romans in a Syrian garrison. Sources are confusing, but he seems to have converted and been baptized shortly after his capture; subsequent to his conversion he refused to abandon Christianity under Roman pressure in Antioch. The
Passion
explains that Reprobus “meditated much on God, but at that time he could speak only the language of the Dogheads.” After asking God to give him the gift of speech, “an angel of God came to him and said: ‘God has heard your prayer.’” The angel blew upon Reprobus’s mouth, and “the grace of eloquence was given him as he had desired. Thereupon Christopher arose and went into the city, and immediately began to stop
the offering of sacrifice. ‘I am a Christian,’ he said, ‘and I will not sacrifice to the gods.’ ” Authorities in Antioch tried repeatedly to kill him but he proved magically resilient. They tried burning him, skinning him, throwing him down a well, and various other techniques.

St. Christopher, the Cynocephalus. The dog-headed version of Christopher was venerated in the Eastern Orthodox tradition. Pen and ink drawing by Stephen T. Asma © 2008.

The dog-headed Christopher proved to be troublesome company because every Antioch citizen who came in contact with him converted to Christianity. The frustrated authorities then set upon these fresh converts with redoubled zeal, torturing and killing them because they too refused to worship the Roman gods. “Christopher kept encouraging the Christians, telling them that the kingdom of heaven awaited them. And on that Sunday ten thousand three hundred and three of the Christians were put to death.” Finally Christopher agreed to his own martyrdom and allowed the executioner to remove his canine head.
²³

The legend speaks a lesson of possible redemption for even the most vile of creatures. Not only is a Cynocephalus saved, but he is sainted and
celebrated for his evangelism, devotion, and courage. With popular tales like this floating around in the folk cultures of the medieval era, it is understandable that sophisticates like Augustine could take a charitable view of the beasties.

A monster who converts to Christianity certainly demonstrates, by exercising his higher faculty, the existence of his soul, but another type of monster posed special difficulties for the soul question. When beings appear to be made up of multiple creatures, to be at once unitary and multiple, how should we understand their spiritual status? How many souls, for example, reside in the conjoined twin? In the case of newborn conjoined twins, most of whom would not live long enough to demonstrate the existence of their rational souls, the question of their status weighed heavily on the practical question of baptism. If the monster was truly human, then it needed to be baptized immediately to save it from eternal damnation.

The medieval scholar John Block Friedman has pored over church manuals for parish priests and discovered that some rough-and-ready rules of thumb could be utilized by the baffled clergy. When the offspring
looks
humanoid (form indicating function), then one should treat it as bap-tizable. When the baby has one head but excessive body parts, then one should baptize it as one soul. When two heads are present, one should treat it as two souls in need of baptism.
²⁴

This question about the souls of conjoined twins and other monsters continued to fascinate European clergy well into the scientific era. The seventeenth-century magazine
Athenian Mercury
considered the famous Italian conjoined brothers, Lazarus and Baptista. Added to the old question of the rational soul, Christians wondered whether the
bodies
of these extraordinary creatures would also be resurrected on the Day of Judgment.

Lazarus toured all over Europe in the 1630s and 1640s, exhibiting himself for money. His parasitic brother, Baptista, consisting of a head, torso, and leg, emerged from Lazarus’s chest and hung upside down. Baptista showed negligible signs of consciousness and did not speak, but he did respond reflexively to pain. According to the
Athenian Mercury
(1691), Lazarus would probably go to beatific eternity alone, without his more deformed brother. The magazine suggested that because Baptista did not demonstrate rationality, Lazarus would surely “rise without him at the Day of Judgment, for there will be no monsters at the Resurrection.”
²⁵
And if Baptista should turn out to have a very rudimentary, passive mind, then he will be raised up with the children and imbeciles but housed in a new, perfected body.

The famous Italian conjoined brothers, Lazarus and Baptista. From George Gould and Walter Pyle,
Medical Curiosities
(W. B. Saunders, 1896).

In addition to all this theorizing about the souls of monsters, theologians were also intrigued by the question of their genealogy: Who or what were the progenitors of these misshapen creatures? In particular, the races of monsters were difficult to square with the biblical Table of Nations. If they were indeed men, then we must conclude that they, like every other human race, were descendants of Adam.

The descent of monsters was usually put in the context of Genesis 9. Two very important themes arise from this chapter. One theme is Noah’s lineage: that “the sons of Noah, who came out of the ark, were Shem, Ham, and Japheth…and from these was all mankind spread over the whole earth” (9:18–19). Another theme is the “curse of Ham.” In this narrative Noah gets drunk and passes out naked in his tent. Ham accidentally witnesses his naked father and reports it to his two brothers, Shem and Japheth, who quickly walk backward (to prevent seeing Noah’s nakedness) and cover
him with a cloth. When Noah awakes from his drunken state and “learns what his younger son has done to him” he curses the descendants of Ham, decreeing that subsequent generations of Ham’s son, Canaan, will have to be the servants or slaves of Japheth’s and Shem’s descendants. This influential episode eventually served as a map by which Christians viewed infidel races. By the time of the Crusades the Table of Nations had become a handy template for metaphysically separating the “noble” races from the ever-threatening exotic foreign hordes. Monsters, Jews, races of color, and Muslims all came to occupy a conceptual territory
outside
orthodoxy. The curse of Ham was just one of these many boundary inventions.
²⁶

On the face of it, the curse of Ham episode makes little sense. A son sees his father naked, and because of this the father damns all subsequent generations to live in servitude. The narrative seems incoherent on both dramatic and theological grounds, and several schools of interpretation arose around this passage. The rabbinic interpretations suggest that Ham actually castrated Noah and was subsequently punished severely, or Ham’s son Canaan castrated Noah, or Ham had sex with a dog while on the ark and this led his offspring to be “dusky,” or Ham raped Noah, or even that he raped and then emasculated Noah.
²⁷
The Christian interpretations, found in Augustine and Ambrose, among others, are rather more symbolic and perhaps tame by comparison. According to Augustine, Noah’s naked state is symbolic of Christ’s vulnerability, the Passion itself. Augustine claims that Ham laughs at or derides his naked father, symbolizing the betrayal of Jesus by the Jews (Christ’s own family).
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Whatever the actual sin was, the cursed party was more obvious. Ham’s descendants were people of color (i.e., Africans, but also Asians and eventually Americans), and their plight in life was to be subservient to the favored races (i.e., Semitic descendants of Shem and Indo-European descendants of Japheth).
²⁹

In addition to these potent claims about the origins of tribal and national difference, we must also recognize the importance of the Tower of Babel story in Genesis 11. Here we find a relatively unified people working together with one language. These descendants of Noah (possibly led on by the hubristic giant Nimrod) decided to build a tower that would reach Heaven and thereby glorify themselves. God responded by striking down the arrogant humans and their tower, leaving them impaired by multilin-gualism, unable to understand each other.

These Genesis verses came to dominate medieval and even early modern theories about racial and geographical differences. This ethnological story of Genesis, with its Table of Nations, had an influential role in explaining the dispersion of humans and pseudo humans throughout the earth.
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The questions of race and monstrosity became even more intertwined in the age of exploration, which we’ll turn to presently. But first, let’s look at Augustine’s influential ideas about monster genealogy.

The fact that Augustine even addresses the question of monster genealogy suggests that it was a point of contention for early medieval scholars. The three options preferred by Christians at the time were that monsters descended from Ham’s descendants, or from Adam directly, or even possibly from pre-Adamite races. Augustine remained convinced of a single ancestry, reaching back to Adam. But Augustine and other patristic writers were up against some compelling non-Christian alternative theories about national ethnic origins. Julian the Apostate (331–363), emperor of Rome (of the Constantine dynasty) and a proud pagan, once challenged Christians with a theory of “national theology.” Instead of one God and one original man, Adam, from whom all races descended, Julian suggested that each nation had its own origin by the hand of its own specific God. It would be reasonable, on Julian’s account at least, to argue that monster races had their own monster gods. Indeed, polytheism easily makes room for monsters. Part of the challenge to monotheism is to persuasively fit “abnormalities” (exotic races and even monsters) into the table of normality.
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In
The City of God
Augustine suggests that distant monstrous races and local individual monstrous births are closely interconnected. We have direct evidence of abnormal births, but only hearsay about faraway abnormal races. When we encounter an innocent child born with extreme physical maladies, we might naturally conclude that God is a poor craftsman. But Augustine proposes that monstrous races may exist
in order to
prevent us from drawing this impious conclusion and show us instead that God knows what He’s doing. When we realize that our newborn cycloptic child has some parallel with an entire race of Cyclopes, we cannot think of our child as a “mistake” or a “failure.” Moreover, he suggests that the logic works both ways. We know that the individual child is not a mistake because of the existence of monstrous races, and we know that monstrous races are not mistakes because individual monsters crop up regularly. “What if God has seen fit to create some races in this way, that we might not suppose that the monstrous births which appear among ourselves are the failures of that wisdom whereby He fashions the human nature, as we speak of the failure of a less perfect workman?”
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As time passed, few followed Augustine’s charitable single-ancestry theory for all races, including monsters. Most seemed to prefer the xenophobic uses of monsters, and by the late medieval period mainstream Christians
were not only distancing themselves further from the legendary exotic tribes but they were also adding more proximate ethnicities (Jews, Tartars, Moors, etc.) to that reprobate category.
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In this more dominant mind-set, “their deformed characteristics were believed to be signs of God’s displeasure, corroborated by crusading literature that was replete with evidence of projection of monstrous traits upon the enemy.”
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Augustine and Isidore had answered the
whence
and
why
questions by putting monsters
inside
the system of God’s benevolent plan, but many later medieval Christians interpreted monsters as threatening forces from
outside
the kingdom of God, opponents to be overcome in the crusade of righteousness. The fact that, philosophically speaking, there is no
outside
of God’s plan (as expressed in the first line of the Nicene Creed) doesn’t seem to have stopped people from imagining such radical enemies.