In The Image: Gods and Monsters

"Scary" Things, Theodicy, and Our Human Tendencies

Welcome to the September installment of In The Image — a bimonthly guest column on the intersection of faith and the arts, written by Matthew J. Andrews. In addition to serving as a previous poetry editor for Solum, Matthew is a private investigator and writer. He is the author of the chapbook I Close My Eyes and I Almost Remember and the full-length collection The Hours, which is a forthcoming Solum publication.

Gods and Monsters

Fall is upon us, which means we’re reaching that time of year when darkness reclaims the territory it ceded in Spring and casts its long shadow over the remaining daylight. These are the months where cultures all over the world have traditionally turned their attention not just to death, but to the things that reside beyond the grave but emerge from the ever-porous liminal spaces. In other words: spooky season.

In the spirit of this otherworldly time of year, here’s a provocative excerpt from the first chapter of Esther J. Hamori’s God’s Monsters, in which she gives a sneak peek of what to expect from the rest of the book:

Terrifying, serpentine seraphim flap around God’s throne and burn a witness with glowing coals. Hybrid cherubim serve as monstrous bouncers and bodyguards. We’ll see God dispatch the Adversary, his enhanced interrogation expert, to torture and kill at his behest; we’ll watch as God deploys stealthy spirits as psyops specialists to manipulate and gaslight his targets. And as devastating as the demons he sics on the population are, they don’t hold a candle to those most lethal shapeshifting soldiers: God’s angels, who execute thousands in the blink of an eye, when they’re not attacking on a more intimate level. Throughout the Jewish and Christian Bibles, from Genesis through Revelation, God commands an entourage of monsters.

If you felt the burn of defensive emotions coming up in your throat, you’re not alone. The rhetoric is certainly inflammatory, but Hamori does well to back up at least most of her point, often dwelling in the Bible stories you probably didn’t learn about in Sunday School and that don’t find their way into a lot of daily devotionals. If nothing else, one walks away from the book with a better understanding of why divine agents bearing good news often had to calm the overwhelming fears of the recipient first. 

Hamori’s ultimate thesis is that because He leads a posse of strange and violent creatures, God himself is the ultimate monster. Your mileage on that conclusion will vary; indeed, Hamori’s tone is so sardonic and pop culture-laden that it’s hard to know how seriously even she takes the whole argument. But rather than using these strange stories to make a judgment about God, I think it’s far more interesting to adjust our gaze to ponder what they say about the people holding the pen. In fact, one of the book’s great strengths is how it contextualizes the very idea of divine monsters in the larger culture. Hamori again:

The Bible is a collection of texts from ancient Southwest Asia…, and in literature from this region, as in Greek mythology, there are monsters spilling out of the windows. From Canaan to Mesopotamia, people wrote spectacular epics and poetic masterpieces about their gods—including the monstrous figures who served them, fought them, and ruled among them. Being divine, you see, was not in conflict with being a monster.

The word of the biblical authors was certainly an enchanted one. Not only was the idea of a deity who controlled a council of strange beings the norm, there was a whole marketplace of these deities, purported gods who were, time and time again, so enticing to the ancient Israelites that it’s difficult to call them monotheists. Given this, it shouldn’t be surprising that they used the lens of their culture to dip their toes occasionally into what we might now call horror. 

The persistence of horror as a genre is a good indication that, despite our revulsion a few paragraphs ago, we’re not as advanced as we seem. We still have our monsters, but we (much more like the New Testament authors) are likely to use a dualistic lens, with the grotesque working in opposition to God rather than under his purview. Even when you take God out of the equation, the monsters remain; stories about zombies, aliens, vampires, and the like are prevalent in every artistic medium, completely divorced from the enchantment so common in antiquity.  

For all the changes in how we formulate the horrific, the connection between gods and monsters hasn’t been totally erased from our cultural landscape, and it’s worth exploring one example in some detail to get to the bottom of why we need monsters as much as the ancient authors did: Prometheus (Ridley Scott, 2012), a prequel to the persistent Alien franchise. The film focuses on a space expedition led by two scientists who, after studying artifacts from civilizations around the world, have come to believe that humans were created by an alien race they call The Engineers, and that these beings left behind a map to their home planet, presumably as an invitation. As you might expect, things don’t go as planned; the planet appears deserted upon arrival, home only to strange ruins and cinema’s favorite parasitic superkiller.

In between moments of mayhem, our protagonists grapple with conflicting truths: The Engineers did in fact create the human race, but they also created the monsters, seemingly with the goal of sending a spacecraft full of them back to Earth to wipe out their initial creation. They recoil in shock, asking why their creators would do such a thing, but they (and we) never get any answers. The questions linger as the credits roll.

At first glance, this seems to be another postmodern shot at the idea of God, but I think something more interesting is happening here. For one, we see in the film’s prologue that an Engineer does indeed create life on earth, and through an act of ritualistic self-sacrifice no less. And to serve as a contrast to the earnestness of the film’s intergalactic pilgrims, we have David (Michael Fassbender), an android who confronts the fallibility of his creators on a daily basis and can barely conceal his disdain. To despise one’s maker, the film seems to argue, is a distinctly unhuman trait, even if the maker is faulty.

In the swirl of all this conflicting information, what are we left with? The same things as our biblical authors: unanswerable questions about weighty problems like theodicy and divine justice. In The Engineers, we have both creator and destroyer, and where those identities intersect: a monster. One can easily imagine the author of Job giving Scott a sympathetic nod.

Ultimately, monsters exist in every culture, including ours, as a visual representation of our anxieties, of the parts of life where we just can’t make the math work. When we look inside ourselves and see a mixture of both good and evil, we fill the grey areas with werewolves, ghosts, and other manifestations of our unease. When the look turns skyward, when we realize that we can’t figure out how to fit God into the rottenness we see in this world, we form a monster, whether it’s a demon, a destroying angel, or a prowling xenomorph. 

I don’t know about you, but stories of angels killing Israelites with snakes and wiping out firstborns make me feel a strange kinship with the biblical authors. They too wrestled with fear and felt slightly more comfortable when that fear developed definable traits, be they flaming swords or wheels full of eyes. “And one of the reasons the Bible remains a vital document, thousands of years on,” film critic Josh Larsen reminds us in his book Fear Not! A Christian Appreciation of Horror Movies, “is because it encompasses the entirety of our human experience, both the lovely moments and the ghastly one.” As the sun sets and darkness begins its reign, amen to that. 

---

---