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
