[Book Excerpt]: How The Genre of the "Saint vs. the Monster" Became Secularized as "The Scientist vs. the Blinded Faithful."
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| The Temptation of St. Antony by Salvador Dali |
The ancient trope
of the Saint vs. the Monster—a commonplace in medieval hagiography (that is,
literature which heaps exaggerated praise upon the figure it is
remembering)—appears time and again in the secularized form of heroic tales of
the valiant scientist or freethinker conquering a blind and ghastly piety. What
we shall see many call “great interruption” (or, if you please, “The Dark
Ages”) takes here the traditional set-piece of the desert (not just sand, but
in ancient and medieval parlance “desert” could also mean the infinite marches
of forest, the snow-locked roofs of the world, the trackless cobalt of the
sea). These already sublime vistas
swell further as they scaffold the stage for the play of principalities and
princes and powers: “The history of the desert has always been compounded of both
material and spiritual realities, of constant interplay between symbol and
realities, of constant interplay between geography and symbolism, the imaginary
and the economic, the social and the ideological..."[1]
In the Christian
tales of saint and beast, the latter operates in a variety of ways as
“metaphors of pre-Christian and heterodox beliefs … [and] functioned as
representatives of generalized evil, and also acted as a useful foil to ideas
of human civilization.”[2]
The saints, “as perfect humans were defining humanity by their ability to
transcend the bestial, wherever they found it” says Joyce Salisbury.[3]
The saint in
the desert is not merely a spiritual figure in a sort of ethereal bout of
fisticuffs with “monsters.” As made famous by legends associated with St.
Francis, for example, befriending and taming wild beasts was often taken as a
sign that the saint spread not just the love and knowledge of God, but also the
benefits of a civilization mirroring the original ordering of God at creation.
Quite literally, they were attempting to civilize the wild through prayer, and
persistence, and presence. That is, to “cosmicize” the world—to bring it to one
or another idealized order:
Now the cosmos idea
derived from the ancients best fitted cultivated land. This fully met the norms
of order, which are built etymologically into the very term. Wilderness and
desert places could be seen as in a sense unfinished, that is, not yet fully
brought into conformity with the shaping Ideas. In ancient Babylon wild,
uncultivated regions and the like are assimilated to chaos; they still
participate in the undifferentiated, formless modality of pre-creation. This is
why, when possession is taken of a territory—that is, when its exploitation
begins—rites are performed that symbolically repeat the act of Creation; the
uncultivated zone is first cosmicized then inhabited. We find something of this idea
recurring the European Middle Ages, when religious orders moved into forests or
wastes and turned them into cultivated land ... and this work was sometimes
represented as like creation, a human participation in God's work.[4]
Despite
how commonsense it may seem, even the very term “world” has a history. The
notion that we somehow inhabit a totality, that is, a system of interlocking
and ultimately harmonious parts, had to arise from a greater theoretical
position that joins the many into the one uni-verse which always, nevertheless,
remains absent to us.[5] As odd as it may seem
given how easily we use the concept in our everyday lives, “’World’ has never
designated a simple description of reality; it has always translated a value
judgment, the fruit of a sort of act of faith, either positive or negative.”[6] And so when the narrative
of scientific progress cultivating the arid desert of the “Dark Ages” portrays
for us our world, this is not how things “are” but is a construct building its
own moral universe, inflecting how things should
be. It is no secret that
even cultures who never went through such a period as the “Dark Ages” can
casually exclaim they wish to avoid “medieval” postures—and this in
justification of one or another social or economic policy. Who today would want
to claim for themselves the descriptor “medieval” in casual conversation? And
yet in truth both modernity and postmodernity (if we are allowed to continue
with those broad divisions for a moment) do truly represent, each in their own
way, the persistence of “a certain middle ages.”[7]
What we do not
mean is to deny the obvious progress made in areas of technology, science,
human rights, and any number of other benefits of our time. What we do mean to
deny is that these can somehow be painted as antithetical in their nature and
meaning to the very span of time that gave birth to the grammars, tools,
theories, institutions, and practices as we recognize them today. What’s more,
we deny what Charles Taylor aptly describes as “subtraction stories,” of those
who not only wish to blot this period from our memory, but also claim that it
was only by overcoming its fetid
imbecility that we could make the progress of discovery:
[All
the various subtraction narratives of secularization] make a crucial move which
they present as a ‘discovery,’ something we ‘come to see’ when certain
conditions [like the Scientific Revolution, or the Death of God] are met. In all cases, this move only looks like a
discovery within the frame of a newly constructed understanding of ourselves,
our predicament and our identity. The
element of ‘discovery’ seems unchallengeable, because the underlying
construction is pushed out of sight and forgotten. … All these accounts ‘naturalize’ the
features of the modern, liberal identity. They cannot see it as one,
historically constructed understanding of human agency among others.[8]
Taylor continues:
“Unbelief
for great numbers of contemporary unbelievers is understood as an achievement
of rationality. It cannot have this without a continuing historical awareness.
It is a condition that cannot be only described in the present tense, but which
also needs the perfect tense: a condition of 'having overcome' the
irrationality of belief.”[9] That is, the world as we
secularists know it cannot come about without the saint-scientist marching into
the deserts of ignorance to tame and civilize them. The philosophical stakes
are high, and the “perfect tense” condition is ripe for baking allegory from
the ingredients of history, to produce a “heroic” model of science, and tales
of isolated “geniuses” moving through the benighted dark—sometimes even to die.
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| Hypatia |
So with
the trope of the Saint and the Monster, comes the genre of Christian
martyrology as well, again transposed in a secular key. And these figures—as we
will see, for example, Giordano Bruno, or Galileo—serve still as conduits of
spiritual and social power. As Peter Brown has expertly written regarding the
evolution of the so-called “Cult of the Saints,” the holy dead served as
“invisible companions” or ever present and powerful patrons, who not only gave
spiritual “credit” to those seen as within their favor, but also sanctified these
new causes as holy.[10] This could also create a
sort of competition among those who desired to be seen as most in line with the
martyred, and so most worthy of exaltation themselves.[11] Again, we see this Cult
of the Saints and often an often wild-eyed hagiography appear in the history of "science and
reason." So, in a particularly widespread example—poor Hypatia, the renowned
female Greek philosopher now dies not just once, one tragic day in 415 AD. Like
the “Lamb, slain from the foundations of the world” (Rev. 13:8), in Taylor’s
“perfect tense” she bears the weight of doxologies that begin in earnest in the
18th and 19th centuries, where “all have used the figure
of Hypatia to articulate their attitude toward Christianity.”[12] Her bones and flesh are
torn now not just by knives, but flay as grist pressed under the mill of
history. Reborn in our collective memory, she incarnates “the spirit of Plato
and the body of Aphrodite”[13] (pay no mind to the fact
that she died, not a precocious youth, but in her sixties).
One of the
more rambunctious specimens of this sort of mystification is John Toland’s comically
titled work of 1720, the Hypatia, Or, the
History of the Most Beautiful, Most Virtuous, Most Learned and in Every Way
Accomplished Lady, Who Was Torn to Pieces by the Clergy of Alexandria, to
Gratify the Pride, Emulation, and Cruelty of the Archbishop, Commonly but
Undeservedly Titled St. Cyril.[14] If that is its title, one
can only imagine the flourid and sprawling prose waiting within the book
proper. In this style—if not quite with Toland’s flourish—many others followed suit.
Like the Greek myth of Dionysius, Hypatia’s rendered flesh is reassembled and
transcends into a new unity, only to be splintered again into many fragments of
useful myth; here she becomes a “symbol of … sexual freedom”; there she is a
sign for “the decline of paganism—and with it the waning of free thought,
natural reason, freedom of inquiry.”[15]
In the
poem Hypatie by Charles Leconte de
Lile, for example, she becomes something like the incarnation of wisdom
herself. There are, in fact, two versions of the poem. The first, written in
1847, paints Hypatia as merely the victim of the inexorable and passionless
laws of history, detached from any system, religion, or government; here, there
breathes no hint of a Christian plot. Then in 1874, as anti-clerical sentiment
rose, de Lile placed this anti-Christian hue upon the death of his fair lady:
“The vile Galilean cursed you,” he says in the second edition. And he
continues, describing how Hypatia lives now, immortal in the Western
imagination and the Hellenic inheritance of Europe:
She alone survives, immutable,
eternal;
Death can scatter the trembling
universes
But Beauty still dazzles with her
fire,
and all is reborn in
her.
And the worlds are still prostrate
beneath her feet.[16]
The
language echoed from scripture (“every knee shall bow, every tongue confess …”
Romans 14:11), or perhaps from the Wisdom of Solomon (“Wisdom, She is more
mobile than any motion; because of her pureness she penetrates all things … in
every generation she passes into holy souls and makes them friends of God”;
4:24-28) along with the menacing portrait of “the Galilean” means quite
literally that the poor woman has been turned into an anti-Christ. And here
too, there are monsters and desert beasts upon this map being painted. Charles
Kingsley in his Hypatia, Or the New Foes
With An Old Face (1853), for example has his Hypatia exclaim—perfectly
inverting the vision of St. Antony battling with beasts and demons—that monks
themselves are “bigots, wild beasts of the desert …”[17]
[1] Jacques Le Goff, The Medieval Imagination trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1992), 52.
[2] Samantha J.E. Riches, “Encountering the
Monstrous: Saints And Dragons In Medieval Thought,” in Bettina Bildhauer and
Robert Mills, The Monstrous Middle Ages,
196-218, quote at 197-198.
[3] Joyce E. Salisbury, The Beast Within: Animals In The Middle Ages (London: Routledge,
1994), 178.
[4] Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University,
2007), 335-336.
[5] For a lengthy discussion on this point,
see: Alexei V. Nesteruk, The Sense of the
Universe: Philosophical Explication of Theological Commitment in Modern
Cosmology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015), esp. 199-305.
[6] Remi Brague, The Wisdom of the World: The Human Experience of the Universe in
Western Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 23.
[7] Catherine Pickstock, “Duns Scotus: His
Historical and Contemporary Significance,” Modern
Theology 21:4 (2005): 566, 568. I should place in the notes at this
juncture, for those who might care, the disclaimer that I am not myself an
adherent to the so-called Radical Orthodoxy movement, though I do have a few
sympathies.
[8] Taylor, A Secular Age, 571.
[9] Ibid.,
269.
[10] Peter Brown, The Cult of the Saints: Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity (Chicago:
University of Chicago, 1981), 62-68.
[11] Ibid.,
33, 38.
[12] Cited in Maria Dzielska, Hypatia of Alexandria trans. F. Lyra
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 101.
[13] Ibid.,
9.
[14] Ibid.,
2.
[15] Ibid.,
102.
[16] Ibid.,
5.
[17] Ibid.,
9.
[18] Stephen T. Asma, On Monsters: An Unnatural History Of Our Worst Fears (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2009), 14.
[19] Hart, Atheist Delusions, 46.
[20] David Bentley Hart, “Hypatia
Reassembled,” in David Bentley Hart, The
Dream Child’s Progress and Other Essays (Ohio: Angelico Press, 2017),
91-97.
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