MYSTERIUM TREMENDUM.

Religion and Its
Monsters
Timothy K. Beal
Routledge, $19.95, 256 pp.

There's something real about monsters. That is why they keep coming back to hound us--in our imaginations, in our films, even in our experience of God. In this highly readable book, Timothy Beal says that monsters of all traditions bring us face-to-face with the unheimlich, a term that Beal borrows from Freud. It refers, Beal says, to "that which threatens one's sense of 'at-homeness,' not from the outside but from within the house." When the thing we fear most arises amid what we know best, when we face "otherness within sameness," we confront a monster. Order may emerge from the encounter but, in the meantime, chaos prevails and we are left to cower and tremble. Presiding over order and chaos alike, God is in our monsters and, as Beal observes, sometimes behaves monstrously.

The idea that the gods can do monstrous things is a very old one. In the Babylonian tradition, the battle between Marduk and Tiamet leads to the creation of the cosmos out of the pieces of Tiamet's "filleted corpse." Tiamet lies defeated, but she is quite literally everywhere and everything--the sky above and the soil below. This, Beal says, gets at the essence of what is monstrous. To encounter the monstrous is to confront the presence of disorder within order, otherness within sameness.

Like their kin in other traditions, "biblical monsters," Beal says, "bear no single meaning, no overall unity or wholeness." Whereas in Psalm 104, Leviathan is among the wonders of God's creation, in Psalm 74 the annihilation of the creature stands as a sign of God's justice. Surely, the Psalmist reasons, if God "crushed the heads of Leviathan," then God has the power to deliver Israel from its affliction. If Leviathan has two faces, so does God. Beal asks, "Is God a chaos tamer or a chaos monster? Or both?" The story of Job shows that the human encounter with God is as much about the penetration of order by chaos as it is about the defense of order against chaos.

Beal's understanding of the monstrous recalls the theory of ritual developed by anthropologist Victor Turner, to whom Beal refers. Turner described ritual as an experience of the "betwixt and between." In the "liminal" moments of ritual the prevailing social structure momentarily breaks down. For a period of time, the unfamiliar, the uncontrollable, and the upside-down have the run of the house. Ritual, as Turner understood it, engages and then puts to work what Beal describes as the "precariousness and insecurity built into the order of things." Monsters, then, are liminal creatures. To encounter a monster is to "balance between terror and fascination." There is potential to be found in this balance, for it is here that new forms of order emerge.

Herein lies the "sense of paradox" that Beal says characterizes our experience with monsters. As our appetite for scary movies and books attests, we seem never to get enough of this paradox. Beal suggests that monster movies serve as rituals, giving us a way to confront the unknown and the unrealized without being destroyed in the process. He even goes so far as to liken the experience of the movie house, with its "common meal uniquely blessed for movie time," to a liturgy. In the light of Turner's thinking, movies look like rituals that suffer from excessive domestication. Still, Beal's reading of movies as rituals reminds us that even in a society like ours, which makes relatively little use of ritual, people take ritual where they can get it. That's why they keep paying good money to encounter monsters at the movies.

We dress up like monsters, we laugh at them, we enjoy them as entertainment, but we don't give them much theological attention. Not so long ago, the devil was the religious monster par excellence. Today, however, many American Catholics are inclined to turn away from the monstrous aspects of religious experience. They deem insignificant sins that the church considered monstrous only a few generations ago. They regard the notion of Original Sin as dated and oppressive. But what is Original Sin but the monster "within the house," that bit of Tiamet that is in each of us?

Modern society too often either looks away from its monsters or vanquishes them by reducing them to cuteness. The recent animated film, Monsters, Inc., depicts the monsters behind the closet door as not only harmless but lovable. Of course, what lurks behind the closet door of a child's room is none of these things. What lurks there is the child's very real awareness of her vulnerability, her utter dependence on grownups whose behavior can be erratic and neglectful. Behind the door (for ourselves as well as our children) are living people jumping out of the twin towers, the fickleness of friends, the fear of sickness, the inescapability of death, the pervasiveness of injustice. These are monsters that we cannot wish away.

If we cannot wish them away, we can at least aspire to transform them. As inheritors of a sacramental faith we have at our disposal a powerful means of undertaking this work. The Eucharist does not downplay the suffering and death of Jesus. It does not seek to diminish the monstrousness of Calvary. Rather, it transforms that monstrousness into Easter. This transformation occurs on mysterious terms. Here, indeed, is the mystery of the monstrous. Beal reminds us that heaven and earth are full of monsters, and that grappling with them--and sometimes transforming them--has always been one of the principal tasks of religion. We should set ourselves squarely to this task, rather than live in the naive belief that we have nothing to fear from monsters.

William Jordan is a student at the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago.