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Posted 11-15-01
Beal examines Religion and Monsters in new book
CLEVELAND -- The monster in the closet won't die. It keeps crawling from the abyss, raising the hairs on our arms with some pending evil force. It's hard to run far from it, because it is the other within us.
"Maybe our monsters keep coming back because they still have something to show us about ourselves," says Case Western Reserve University religion scholar Timothy Beal. He is the author of the new book Religion and its Monsters.
Monsters are "in the world but not of it," says Beal, the Harkness Associate Professor of Biblical Literature. Akin to Freud's idea of the unheimlich, or "unhomely," monsters personify the outside that has gotten inside, the "other" within the ordinary.
Whether we demonize them, deify them, or something in between, monsters inspire in us a vertigo-like combination of both fear and desire, awe and dread, that is reminiscent of a religious experience.
"One of the starting points for this book project was noticing that between the ways people describe religious experience and the ways people describe experiences of monstrous horror are often similar. From there I began to look for other meeting places between the religious and the monstrous," says the author.
Beal asks what we can learn about religion -- in this case, Jewish and Christian biblical tradition -- by getting to know the religion's monsters, and what we can learn about monsters by getting to know their religious backgrounds?
In a sense, he says, he wants to look at religion as horror and horror as religion: "Monsters haunt religion, and religion haunts the monstrous."
Beal compares the monsters of biblical tradition to the monsters on ancient maps. Those monsters often indicated unknown territories, regions of dangerous uncertainty.
"They occupied the edges of unknowing, simultaneously forbidding and enticing would-be adventurers to draw near. So too with the monsters within the biblical landscape. Like the monsters on those ancient maps, biblical monsters often stand for unknown territories within the theological landscape, those regions of religious uncertainty and ambiguity where clear understanding may give way to fascinating and terrifying mystery," he explains.
Take the biblical sea monster Leviathan, for example. "The biblical tradition as a whole does not seem to know quite what to do with Leviathan," Beal says. Some biblical passages describe Leviathan as the monstrous and chaotic archenemy of God and God's created order. Yet other passages describe God identifying with this monster, inspiring both wonder and terror.
In one of the Psalms, God "sports" with Leviathan in the sea. And in the book of Job, God sings the chaotic Leviathan's praises in a climactic speech from the whirlwind that overwhelms Job's questions about divine justice in the face of unjustifiable suffering. In fact, Beal says, the book of Job presents Leviathan as God's ultimate self-revelation, a figure of "sacred chaos."
"Nietzsche warned that if you stare long into the abyss, you might find the abyss staring back. That's terror enough. But what Job finds is God staring back," Beal says.
God's ambiguous relations with monsters like Leviathan raise profound theological questions. What kind of world is this? What kind of divine justice is this? What kind of God is this? Is God a monster killer, a monster rouser, or a monster? Such questions, he writes, "pry cracks in the world's foundations that open onto abysses of unknowing."
Religion has its monsters, but monsters also have their religion. Beal explores the religious roots of many of today's most well-known monster tales -- from novels like Dracula and Frankenstein to movies like Nosferatu, Hellraiser, and Shadow of the Vampire. He shows how many of the monsters of contemporary horror have family ties that reach all the way back to Leviathan in the Hebrew Bible, and to his diabolical offspring, the seven-headed red dragon, in the New Testament's book of Revelation. These ancient monsters continue to swim their way through history, resurfacing in new forms in contemporary horror films, books, and music.
But Beal's exploration of the relationship between religion and horror goes deeper than simply showing the biblical roots of today's monsters. He proposes that horror is often an "alternative venue" for religious reflection. "Most of us don't go to monster movies or read Gothic horror novels to get religion. But supernatural horror literature and movies frequently explore how gods and monsters relate -- change places, even -- in culture and in our imaginations," he adds.
Tales like Frankenstein, for example, Beal says might prompt us to ask, "Who is more monstrous, the Creation who must live through this vale of tears or the Creature who put him here?" Still other horror tales, like Shadow of the Vampire, ask whether the monster is a god. "The monsters of supernatural horror are often identified with the divine, especially with its more dreadful, maleficent aspects," says Beal.
Last spring Beal taught a course called "Religion and Horror," in which his manuscript for Religion and its Monsters served as a primary textbook. In fact, he credits his students from courses taught over the past five years with the primary inspiration behind the book. "They are often aficionados of monsters as much as they are scholars of religion, and they immediately see connections between religion and horror. In a sense, I suppose I wrote this book with my students."
When asked what drew him to this subject, Beal says he is not entirely sure. "It's an understatement to say that I've not always been a horror fan. As a child it took me years just to make it all the way through The Wizard of Oz."
One colleague suggested to him that his research on this subject might even be counter-phobic. On the other hand, he says, "I've always tried in my scholarship to find my way into areas and questions that push the limits of my own thought. And never let sleeping leviathans lie."
