Beal,
Timothy K. New York: Routledge, 2003. 235 pp., $21.95 (USD).
ISBN 0-415-92588-6 (paper).
[1] With the publication of Religion and its Monsters, Timothy
Beal has brought together worlds that rarely come into contact:
the worlds of religious studies, biblical studies, theology, and
the sometimes sublime and often diabolic, but always awful (that
is, full of awe) and horrifying, world of monsters. Beal’s
book is a highly insightful and very readable study on horror and
religion. Like Beal, I am fascinated by the intricately connected
worlds of horror and religion, and I have written on horror cinema
and theology. It is an interest I experience in isolation however,
because it is perceived as eccentric at best in most faculties of
theology. For this reviewer, Beal’s book is a reminder that
the “monstrous” margins of academia are not as lonely
as one might expect.
[2] Beal’s book is not an exhaustive inquiry into the varied
worlds and histories of monsters in different religious traditions.
It is focused on the traditions that have had an impact on Western
culture, especially in light of the deployment of the “monstrous-diabolic” as
a weapon in colonial expansionism, crusades, inquisitions, fundamentalisms,
and in the present context of the so-called “war on terror.” But
Beal reminds his readers that demonizing the other as monstrous
is not the only trajectory in the history of religious monsters;
he also argues that the deification of monsters, the “monstrous-sublime,” is
an important and often forgotten tradition, especially in the texts
of the Hebrew Bible, but also in the writings of H.P. Lovecraft,
and in films such as Nosferatu (1922).
[3] Beal’s theoretical moorings are imbued with a postcolonial
critical sensitivity. Hence, he tends to prioritize questions of
suffering, social justice, asymmetrical power, colonial histories,
marginalization, and of course, “monstrous” alterity.
Because monsters are always liminal creatures—creatures on
the edge, so to speak—whose otherness and marginal
status often reveal the unspeakable anxieties and fears of individuals,
communities, and nations, postcolonial theory is an invaluable resource
because of its critique of the very Manichean perspectives of colonial
and neocolonial worlds. Monsters tend to reveal an in-between
status that disrupts or challenges colonial notions that sequester
the “civilized” from the “primitive,” the
pure from the impure, the normal from the abnormal, and even the
sacred from the profane. Monsters are ripe creatures for theological
analysis, and the Bible, Beal reminds us, is riddled with them.
[4] The first part of the book concentrates on the monsters of religion,
or “religion as horror.” Beal focuses primarily on mythical
monsters from the history of ancient Near East, the Hebrew Bible,
Christian scriptures, and rabbinical literature. In the second part,
the book focuses on the religion of monsters, or “horror
as religion.” Here Beal examines the political philosophy
of Thomas Hobbes, the “orientalist” and “primitivist” theories
of Georges Bataille and Antonin Artaud, the literatures of Bram
Stoker and H. P. Lovecraft, the cinema of F.W. Murnau (Nosferatu)
Fritz Lang (Metropolis, 1926), and Tod Browning (Dracula,
1931), a fifties B-horror film entitled, The Giant Behemoth (1958),
as well as contemporary Goth culture. Quite the list! Not the usual
topics one finds in the pages of an academic book in theology or
biblical studies.
[5] For Beal, theology and horror are unmistakably linked. He writes, “the
horror of Frankenstein is a profoundly theological horror.” Hence,
like the central themes in Mary Shelley’s famous novel, Beal
engages the areas of suffering, creation, and chaos. Beal develops
these themes into a theology that highlights questions of theodicy,
as well as questions about the function of cosmogony and apocalypse
in both the Christian and Jewish traditions. His chapters on the
Book of Job examine the role of chaos-monsters in Job’s anguished
protest against God and against his suffering. Beal suggests that
in Job we find a God who identifies with the monsters of Job’s
protest.
[6] However, Beal also examines John’s Book of Revelation,
where the experiences of exile, oppression, and persecution transform
the sublime chaos-monsters of Job into the diabolic Red Dragon (Rome/Babylon),
a creature that constitutes a threat to the cosmic order. Beal reminds
his readers that when Revelation’s Red Dragon is removed from
the early Christian context of persecution and vulnerability under empire,
it is deployed by a church of empire to demonize enemies
and strangers.
[7] Unlike the Red Dragon, the chaos-monsters in Job, such as Yam
and Leviathan, are not so much threats to the cosmic order, but
the means by which God affirms Job’s rage against his undeserved
pain. “God out-monsters Job,” writes Beal, because instead
of crushing Job’s protest, God stirs up monsters, creating
a theological crisis that takes Job to the edge of an abyss. Theodicy
is an abyss that awakens monsters. And God identifies with these
monsters by affirming Job’s protest against God. In the theodicy
of Job, argues Beal, lies the trajectory of God’s terrible
glory revealed through the presence of monstrous creatures.
[8] For Beal, chaos-monsters are not simply threats that intrude
on God’s sacred order. Chaos-monsters are a sublime revelation
of God’s creation. They constitute a “paradox of the
monstrous,” that of fascination and repulsion, desire and
dread. Beal links the monstrous-sublime to Rudolph Otto’s
notion of the religious experience: a relationship with the mysterium
tremendum. In other words, an aw(e)ful experience with the wholly
other that involves a combination of fascination, terror, dread,
and wonder.
[9] Otto’s ideas may have influenced horror writer H.P. Lovecraft,
who Beal characterizes as a “theologian without God,” and
whose monstrous creatures are very biblical. In his definition of
horror, Lovecraft argues that a truly horrifying tale is one that
offers as sense of dread of the unknown through an attitude of “awed
listening for the radically other.” Lovecraft’s
writings are a good example of what Beal calls “horror as
religion” in the second part of the book. Like no other writer
of the genre, Lovecraft’s work has been taken-up by a devoted
group of horror enthusiasts who desire the return of his monster
gods (the Old Ones), especially those created in his Cthulhu Mythos,
a mythology that revels in monstrous chaogony. Like Otto’s
concept of the wholly other, Lovecraft’s Old Ones reveal both
proximity and transcendence. Yet, unlike Otto’s concept of
divinity, the Old Ones are both divine and putrid, sublime and rotting;
they are hybrid creatures that lurk on the edge of the known and
unknown, as threats to the cosmos.
[10] Beal presents his reading of the monstrous-sublime as a challenge
to the established notion, from the influence of Mircea Eliade,
that religion is fundamentally about the establishment of order
against chaos. But as Job’s monster-rising theodicy reveals,
Biblical chaos-monsters are not simply threats to established order.
Instead, we find that God also revels and participates in chaos-creation.
Hence, Beal argues that if Genesis is cosmogonic in emphasis,
Job is chaogonic. As a result, the Bible canonizes this ambiguity.
[11] Beal is trained as a biblical scholar, but he also brings to
this eclectic book a rare combination of research in religious studies,
theology, history, literature and film theory. It is this combination
that I find particularly important, especially in an academic context
where disciplines interact only within their own specialized ghettos.
For some readers, Beal’s approach will seem a little too all-embracing,
and therefore lacking specialized focus and depth in certain areas.
But Beal makes up for this with the originality of his themes, a
well-argued thesis, and a writing style that is as penetrating as
it is interesting. This is a book that will have much appeal in
classrooms, especially among students with a interest in the relationship
between religion and popular culture, postcolonialism, critical
theologies, biblical theodicy, and of course, the fascinating yet
terrifying world of gods and monsters.
Mario DeGiglio-Bellemare
University of St-Michael’s College
Toronto School of Theology
marioscido@yahoo.com
