God and Medieval Monsters: The Strange Tale of Some Recent History of Science
That isn't a typo. Monsters have become a fairly prominent avenue of research into the history of ideas, and even in the history of the rise of the sciences. Why monsters? We might take a cue from J.R.R. Tolkien, who wrote a now famous essay "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics." In the essay Tolkien chides many critics who take Beowulf merely as an item of philological and historical significance while being practically embarrassed at the presence of Grendel as a sort of aesthetic mistake that we moderns must condescend to overlook.
Tolkien states, rather "the monsters are not an inexplicable blunder of taste; they are essential, fundamentally allied to the underlying ideas of the poem, which gives it its lofty tone and high seriousness." Through the artfulness of Tolkien's critique, Tolkien nearly single-handedly transformed the critical literary tradition regarding the poem's merits. Just as important, part of Tolkien's argument rests on the fact that Beowulf "was written in a language that after many centuries, still has essential kinship with our own."
To rehabilitate the image of the monster isn't to justify the amount of Searching for Bigfoot that now clutters the History Channel. It is rather to note, as Jeffery Cohen does in his interested book On Giants, that "the monster's body is a cultural body. [It is both] a construct and a projection." Monsters as such are key doorways to investigating how the world was once seen.
When attempting to explain to us what Medieval life was like, for example, famed historian Jacques Le Goff does not merely detail daily activities, or major figures, or brutal wars. He does this, to be sure. But at a wonderful turn he frames what he calls the "medieval imagination" of the world by conjuring the image of the Forest as a Tolkien-esque perilous realm. The forest "was full of ... imaginary or real dangers," says Le Goff. "It formed the disquieting horizon of the medieval world. The forest encircled the medieval world, isolated it, and restricted it." As such, he notes in passing (and in tune with our thoughts here), "it was easy for the medieval imagination, drawing on an immemorial folklore, to turn ... devouring wolves into monsters" for example.
And yet, precisely as figures that embody contradictions, hybridity, deformation, monsters do not embody social mores and values in any straightforward manner. And this, in particular, is where interest in them for the history of science and Christianity comes in to play. For part of the idea of their "warfare" turns on ideas of nature overtaking the supernatural as John Hedley Brooke and Geoffrey Cantor have cogently argued in Reconstructing Nature:
[Andrew Dixon White and John William Draper’s] preconception that, as science has advanced, phenomena once considered supernatural have yielded to naturalistic explanation, is not without support. But it assumes a dichotomy between nature and supernature that oversimplifies the theologies of the past. If a supernatural power was envisaged as working through, as distinct from interfering with, nature, the antithesis [between science and theology] would partially collapse. … The significance given to explanations in terms of natural causes depends on higher-level assumptions embedded in a broader cultural framework. In the history of Western culture, it has not simply been a case of nature swallowing supernature. Something had to happen to change the higher-level assumptions if the conflict between science and religion was to achieve the self-evident status proclaimed by Draper, White, and their successors.
Monsters are liminal, hybrid figures. As Cohen argues they are "harbingers of a category crisis." They are indices, concentrating and exemplifying how this interplay of nature/supernature might be negotiated (or undone) in any given period. So Cohen again: "[To examine the figure of the monster] necessarily involves how the manifold boundaries (temporal, geographic, bodily, technological) ... become imbricated in the construction of the monster -- a category that is itself a kind of limit case."
Monsters have in this way and others become integral to reexamining historiography--as surprising as that may be. One way this is so, as Bettina Bildhauer and Robert Mills put it in their edited volume, The Monstrous Middle Ages, is simply to "rehabilitate them" much as Tolkien did as worthy objects of study:
An analogy may be made here with the efforts of medieval historians in the twentieth century to 'modernize' the Middle Ages - to alter perceptions of the Middle Ages as an epoch of dark and sinister backwardness ... In the same way that Beowulf's under-valuation as an aesthetic entity coincided with the marginalization of its monsters, so the Middle Ages has traditionally been marginalized by mainstream historiography, regarded, to borrow a phrase from Deborah Young and Simon Harris ... as a 'temporal monstrosity.'The triumph of science is often seen as all the brighter against a history of darkness--one full of monsters that haunt its edges, or as they hide leering from some unseen middle distance. But to reject the monster as absurd, as Beowulf's critics often did, is to miss a wealth of information. That is what many are now seeking to overturn.
Monsters were often seen in surprisingly natural terms, for example (however much we might find their characterizations absurd). And yet, as monsters they escaped any totally natural classification and were often seen as omens, portents, signs of God's action. The monster becomes a particularly good figure to reveal the absurd simplicity of the concept of the "supernatural" wielded by so many today who champion the story of it succumbing to the purely natural. Such borders were never obvious to medieval men and women - the supernatural could appear as a traveler on the road as much as an angelic chorus. The line of nature and supernature (which were not categories used in the Middle Ages, anyway) could never be known until supernature had already unexpectedly crossed the line to announce itself within nature.
Such unexpected horror or wonder often drove investigation itself.
Especially pertinent: "the history of science does look different when organized around ontology and affects rather than around disciplines and institutions." They find, through the category of wonder and the monster that "these narrative conventions [of periodization, divorcing medieval from modern in speaking of the rise of science] imported into intellectual history from the eighteenth and nineteenth century political historiography, only distort the nonlinear and non progressive cultural phenomena. [The story is] for the most part not punctuated by clearly distinguished epistemes or turning points, but is undulatory, continuous, sometimes cyclical."
To tell the tale of wonder and the monster is to investigate how the boundaries of natural and supernatural moved to and fro through epochs, events, and bodies like tides ebbing and flowing, negotiating, separating, frothing. Here "nature" and "supernature" are not a zero-sum game of fixed quantities, one superordinate above the other here, subordinate there. Rather the very nature of their boundaries and distinctions were precisely what was being limned; discerned in the monstrous which, much like the mixed hybrid figures in medieval art, never stood still as definite lines of "here" and "there."
In particular, the fascinating and complex story they tell is one in which wonders and monsters were actually signs of being part of the scientific cultural elite. The elite were those who thought themselves to have found this or that key to expand the nature of the real, or to poke holes in it and begin again. To have a cabinet of wonders, to bring back exotic finds from a dig or an expedition, were part and parcel of scientific discovery and the growing network of scholars. Yet through a cultural shift, wonders and monsters were banished in the eighteenth century when they became seen--much as Beowulf's Grendel--as an embarrassing detail to the story. To "wonder" in this sense now meant to be stupefied. For Daston and Park, to watch the tale of the monster through history is precisely to see the construction of an order of nature that excluded the wonderful.
As I only just started it (about 100 pages in), I will leave a teaser about it here. Williams finds a startling connection in medieval literature between monsters and apophatic (or "negative") discourse about God, particular as mediated through the tradition of pseudo-Dionysius. I'll let him explain:
[Dionysian theology] then, suggests a clear preference for style in which the most inappropriate and unnatural relation between sign and signified will be employed, because the deforming of the bond between like and like reveals the true but hidden process of meaning. What Denys is describing is the theoretical basis of the grotesque.
Denys uses the Biblical examples of God as worm ... (Celestial Hierarchy 145A) ... or as Drunkard ... (Mystical Theology 1105B) ... [And this itself is part of the broader neo-Platonic tradition of the monstrous like] Proclus, whom Dionysius clearly echoes: 'It seems to me that the grim, monstrous, and unnatural character of poetic fictions moves the listener in every way to a search for truth.'
What follows is a meticulous, nearly four-hundred page study exploring the historical examples through medieval maps, bestiaries, legends, and travelogues that display this conceptual connection. What he finds (as far as I can gather) is a fascinating tale that shows that God and the monstrous began to be seen as superfluous to science not because science overtook God, but defined him out of existence. As such, if there is a "conflict" of science and religion, this is because a new grammar to understand the world has been invented, almost by fiat:
The replacement of God by nature as the source of deformation is not a simple substitution. For the Middle Ages ... the existence of the monster did not constitute a contradiction of nature, but a contradiction of 'man's understanding of nature.' ... For the Renaissance, however, nature is totally comprehensible to man, in theory at least. Thus the invocation of nature is a strategy in which the monstrous, as part of nature [that part which, via pseudo-Dionysius, was often, paradoxically, the clearest expression of God] is drawn into a definition wholly of human making.As such by a different method (albeit not independently as he cites them frequently), Williams arrives at a similar conclusion regarding the banishment of wonder as did Daston and Park:
Through science, nature, and art, then, the postmediaevals saw the route to the rational control of their world. By appropriating the monster to an image of the self-- a knowing, controlling, totalizing self -- the deformed, the apophatic, and the grotesque are all absorbed into the subjectum of the intellect, and thus all sciences becomes merely an anthropology.
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