On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears (54 page)

12
. Augustine, Sermo 37, “Ad Fratres in Eremo.”

13
. See chapter 20 of Umberto Eco’s entertaining novel
Baudolino
(Harcourt, 2002).

14
. Isidore of Seville,
Etymologiae
, book XI,
chapter 3
, 18.

15
. See St. Jerome’s
The Life of Paulus the First Hermit
.

16
. Augustine,
Confessions
, book XIII, chapter 33. Also see Isidore’s
Etymologiae
, book XI,
chapter 1
, for a similar discussion of
mens
and
anima
.

17
. Aquinas,
Summa Theologica
, first part, question 93, article 2.

18
. For the captain metaphor, see, for example, Plato’s
Republic, Phaedrus
, and
Phaedo
. For the ghost metaphor, see Descartes’
Meditations
and
Discourse on Method
and Gilbert Ryle’s influential interpretation of Descartes in
Concept of Mind
. For comparison with the East, see the Hindu notion of soul (
atman
) as the captain or rider of a chariot in the
Katha Upanishad
and the Buddha’s rejection of soul in the
Potthapada Sutta
.

19
. Aquinas,
Contra Gentiles
, book II, chapter 82.

20
. “In everything that is apt to arrive at any perfection, there is found a natural craving after that perfection: for good is what all crave after, everything its own good.” Aquinas,
Contra Gentiles
, book II, chapter 82.

21
. Augustine,
City of God
, book XVI, 8.

22
. This and other quotes from the Irish
Passion of St. Christopher
are from a 1913 Fraser translation, which can be found at
www.ucc.ie/milmart/chrsirish.html
.

23
. Most Roman Catholic versions contend that Reprobus, instead of being a dog-headed Berber, was a giant of a man who converted to Christianity and was instructed by a hermit ascetic to help people cross a difficult river. He dutifully carried many people across the turbid waters until one day a small child asked for his assistance. The child was heavier than any other human that Reprobus had previously encountered, and it
was revealed to him that the child was actually the incarnation of Jesus, heavy with the burden of human sin.

24
. Cited in
chapter 9
of John Block Friedman’s masterful study
The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought
. Guido of Mont Rocher (b. 1333) laid out the relevant considerations for struggling clergy: “And for this reason it may be supposed that if there be two chests and two heads there are two souls. If however, there be one chest and one head, however much the other members be doubled, there is only the one soul.”

25
. The story of Lazarus and Baptista and this quote from the
Mercury
are nicely discussed in Stephen Pender, “No Monsters at the Resurrection,” in
Monster Theory: Reading Culture
, edited by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (University of Minnesota, 1996).

26
. The idea that Ham’s descendants were damned to servitude was often employed by anti-abolitionists in nineteenth-century America to justify the slavery of imported Africans, particularly between the years 1830 and 1865. See Stephen Haynes,
Noah’s Curse: The Biblical Justification of American Slavery
(Oxford University Press, 2002), chapters 4, 5.

27
. For a discussion of the rabbinical and Christian historical exegesis of the Genesis passage, see Haynes,
Noah’s Curse
,
chapter 2
.

28
. Augustine,
City of God
, book XVI.

29
. This color-coding was based on an interpretation of Ham’s name as alternately “burnt” or “hot” or “dark.” A more comprehensive listing of the Table of Nations might be as follows: the descendants of Ham would include Egyptians, Ethiopians, Phoenicians, Hittites, and the Mongol tribes; the descendants of Shem would include the Hebrews, Persians, and Assyrians; the descendants of Japheth would include the Greeks, Romans, Spaniards, Celts, Scythians, and Medes.

30
. It is interesting to note that the Table of Nations is still the preferred explanation of races among some contemporary fundamentalist Christians. The stories of the relative offspring of Ham, Shem, and Japheth are detailed as “good creation science” in the displays of the Kentucky Creation Museum (opened in spring 2007 in Peters burg). The racist interpretation of the table has been removed in the museum version, and an egalitarian tone is brought to bear on the story of Ham, Shem, and Japheth. For an overview of the museum itself, see Stephen T. Asma, “Dinosaurs on the Ark: The Creation Museum,”
Chronicle of Higher Education
, May 18, 2007.

31
. Augustine,
City of God
, book XVI.

32
. Ibid.,
chapter 8
. It’s difficult to penetrate further Augustine’s thinking here. The argument as presented begs for further clarification, but none is given. For example, should the deformed baby be considered an actual
member
of a faraway race, or merely an isomorphic token of such a race, a symbol? If the child is in fact a proper member of the monstrous tribe, how are we to understand its gestation in a nonmonstrous woman? Even when we abandon our contemporary notions of heredity, Augustine’s theory still seems peculiar. It is as if he were thinking about a biological atavism (a throwback), but along geographical rather than temporal lines. One suspects that the whole argument hinges on treating the parallel between race and individual as symbolic rather than literal. But whatever the case on this issue, Augustine ends the reflections by emphasizing, yet again, that all such oddities are indirect descendants of Adam.

33
. It’s interesting to note that by the time Columbus set out for the New World, and no doubt long before, the criteria for identifying threatening and irredeemable races had become more explicitly physiognomic. In his famous letter of 1493, Columbus informs his fellow Europeans that the new native races will most likely be receptive to conversion. His optimism is based on his admission that they are not the monsters that he fully expected to encounter. They do not appear to have tails or dog’s heads or one eye, or other abnormality.

34
. Naomi Reed Kline, “The World of the Strange Races,” in
Monsters, Marvels and Miracles: Imaginary Journeys and Landscapes in the Middle Ages
, edited by Leif Sondergaard and Rasmus Thorning Hansen (University Press of Southern Denmark, 2005).

35
. For a good discussion of the
mappaemundi
and Alexander’s gates, see Evelyn Edson, “Mapping the Middle Ages: The Imaginary and the Real Universe of the Mappaemundi,” in
Monsters, Marvels and Miracles
, edited by Sondergaard and Hansen. According to Edson, Alexander’s achievements were often included on Christian maps because “he was thought to be a precursor of Christ—as Alexander conquered the physical world, so Christ conquered the spiritual world.”

36
. My discussion of the Hereford map draws on Kline’s fine essay “ ‘The World of the Strange Races.”

37
. See Friedman,
Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought
,
chapter 5
.

38
. Ibid.

39
. Both the
Travels of Sir John Mandeville
and the
Travels of Marco Polo
(1299?) describe Alexander’s gates. Both were highly influential travel narratives and helped to codify and transmit ideas about exotic lands and peoples well into the age of exploration. Both are also filled with fantastical and bogus stories (including, quite possibly, the existence of Mandeville himself), and many of these stories resurrect the ancient monsters, but now with travelers’ tales that either discredit or more likely corroborate their existence.

40
. According to legend, ten Jewish tribes were deported out of Samaria after the Assyrians conquered the region. They disappeared from recorded history, and most modern-day Jews trace their lineage to the remaining tribes of Benjamin, Judah, and Levy.

41
. To this extent, Mandeville at least demonstrates a better understanding of Islam than does the twelfth-century French epic
La Chanson de Roland
. In
The Song of Roland
the Moors of Saragossa are erroneously thought to worship a trinity of gods: Mohammed, Termagant, and Apollo. This confusion undoubtedly made it easier for some European Christians to group Muslims in with other forms of polytheistic paganism.

42
. For a fuller discussion, see Andrew Fleck, “Here, There, and In Between: Representing Difference in the Travels of Sir John Mandeville,”
Studies in Philology
97, no. 4 (2000).

43
. I am obviously tracing the discourse about monsters as it appears in the theological and travel writings of the time, but it bears mentioning that the larger, illiterate European majority was probably not as Christian as is usually supposed. Theological nuances in particular were probably not as relevant in driving prejudices as were things like images and rumors. In
The Black Death
(Harvard University Press, 1997), David Herlihy points out that “early in 1348, the rumor arose that the Jews of Northern Spain and Southern France were poisoning the Christian wells, and thus disseminating the plague” (65). The rumor spread all over Europe, and probably did much more damage than any doctrinal or lettered form of prejudice. Christianity itself, which we usually think of as typifying the medieval mind, probably floated more like a small elite island on a sea of folk religion (animism) and culture. Herlihy argues that the black plague probably helped to Christianize the illiterate populations by driving them to develop cults of saints in order to garner improved protections against the raging disease. He offers compelling evidence for this claim by combing over birth records and finding a huge spike in the saints’ names given to newborns during the plague period. I mention these points as a simple reminder that although my study must of necessity track the literate cultures of a given era, much more than literature and education were at work in these eras.

44
. Judith Taylor Gold,
Monsters and Madonnas: The Root of Christian Anti-Semitism
(Syracuse University Press, 1999), epilogue.

45
. Considerable interpretive differences continue, however, with some scholars arguing that Dhu’l-Qarneyn is Cyrus the Great. Those who suggest that he is Alexander point to the popularity of the early Alexander legends during the Hellenistic era, a popularity that extended throughout Christian and Jewish as well as pagan cultures. The stories of Alexander’s gates were probably already in circulation in the Hellenistic era, and it’s likely that they would have been known by the people of the Arabian peninsula.

46
.
Qur’an, Surat al-Kahf
, verses 92–96, translated by Marmaduke Pickthal.

47
. My discussion here draws from Aziz Al-Azmeh, “Barbarians in Arab Eyes,”
Past and Present
, no. 134 (1992).

48
. See Andrew Runni Anderson,
Alexander’s Gate, Gog and Magog, and the Enclosed Nations
(Medieval Academy of America, publication no. 12, Cambridge, Mass., 1932).

1
. Quotes from
Beowulf
are from Frederick Rebsamen’s translation (Harper Perennial, 1991).

2
. In “
Beowulf
as Palimpsest,” in
Monster Theory
, edited by Cohen, Ruth Waterhouse points out that the passage attributing Cain’s bloodline to Grendel is probably a rewrite by the scribe who replaced the Old English “in chames cynne” (in Ham’s kin) with “in caines cynne” (in Cain’s kin). We’ve already seen that both Ham and Cain were historically assigned the status of “monster father,” but the
Beowulf
scribe’s alteration might indicate a point at which Cain made more sense to European Christians. In medieval folk traditions Cain had become more loathsome, and the tradition of assigning him paternity to the monsters had become more entrenched. But the original use of Ham is telling and reveals the racist genetic connection assumed between the human races of color (African and Asian races, usually assigned to Ham) and the monsters.

3
. J. R. R. Tolkien’s “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” was read on November 25, 1936, as the Sir Israel Gollancz Memorial Lecture (published by Humphrey Milford, 1937).

4
. Tolkien’s position, that the poem is a unified Christian critique of paganism, has been taken up more recently by Andy Orchard in
Pride and Prodigies
. Orchard makes a very compelling argument, based on a comparison with the other works bundled together with the Nowell Codex, that an overarching critique of pagan pride can be detected in each. My own discussion of the issue is much informed by both Orchard and Tolkien, but I’m aware that their reading is still a minority report in the sense that they ascribe a purposeful unified voice to the poem.