Religion and Its Monsters
Beal, Timothy K.
NYSTERIUM TREMENDUM Religion and Its Honsters Timothy K. Beal Routledge, $19.95, 256 pp. William Jordan There's something real about monsters. That is why they keep coming back to hound us-in...
...Turner described ritual as an experience of the "betwixt and between...
...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...
...Like their kin in other traditions, "biblical monsters," Beal says, "bear no single meaning, no overall unity or wholeness...
...For a period of time, the unfamiliar, the uncontrollable, and the upside-down have the run of the house...
...The recent animated film, Monsters, Inc., depicts the monsters behind the closet door as not only harmless but lovable...
...In the "liminal" moments of ritual the prevailing social structure momentarily breaks down...
...If Leviathan has two faces, so does God...
...It refers, Beal says, to "that which threatens one's sense of 'at-homeness,' not from the outside but from within the house...
...This, Beal says, gets at the essence of what is monstrous...
...But what is Original Sin but the monster "within the house," that bit of Tiamet that is in each of us...
...Monsters, then, are liminal creatures...
...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...
...They regard the notion of Original Sin as dated and oppressive...
...In the light of Turner's thinking, movies look like rituals that suffer from excessive domestication...
...It does not seek to diminish the monstrousness of Calvary...
...Presiding over order and chaos alike, God is in our monsters and, as Beal observes, sometimes behaves monstrously...
...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...
...As our appetite for scary movies and books attests, we seem never to get enough of this paradox...
...As inheritors of a sacramental faith we have at our disposal a powerful means of undertaking this work...
...In this highly readable book, Timothy Beal says that monsters of all traditions bring us face-to-face with the unheint-lich, a term that Beal borrows from Freud...
...Thaf s why they keep paying good money to encounter monsters at the movies...
...To encounter the monstrous is to confront the presence of disorder within order, otherness within sameness...
...That is why they keep coming back to hound us-in our imaginations, in our films, even in our experience of God...
...When the thing we fear most arises amid what we know best, when we face "otherness within sameness," we confront a monster...
...The idea that the gods can do monstrous things is a very old one...
...Beal's understanding of the monstrous recalls the theory of ritual developed by anthropologist Victor Turner, to whom Beal refers...
...The Eucharist does not downplay the suffering and death of Jesus...
...There is potential to be found in this balance, for it is here that new forms of order emerge...
...To encounter a monster is to "balance between terror and fascination...
...Or both...
...We should set ourselves squarely to this task, rather than live in the naive belief that we have nothing to fear from monsters...
...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...
...William Jordan is a student at the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago.nion in Chicago...
...Beal asks, "Is God a chaos tamer or a chaos monster...
...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...
...Here, indeed, is the mystery of the monstrous...
...Ritual, as Turner understood it, engages and then puts to work what Beal describes as the "pre-cariousness and insecurity built into the order of things...
...They deem insignificant sins that the church considered monstrous only a few generations ago...
...Rather, it transforms that monstrousness into Easter...
...If we cannot wish them away, we can at least aspire to transform them...
...Not so long ago, the devil was the religious monster par excellence...
...This transformation occurs on mysterious terms...
...Surely, the Psalmist reasons, if God "crushed the heads of Leviathan," then God has the power to deliver Israel from its affliction...
...These are monsters that we cannot wish away...
...Order may emerge from the encounter but, in the meantime, chaos prevails and we are left to cower and tremble...
...Of course, what lurks behind the closet door of a child's room is none of these things...
...We dress up like monsters, we laugh at them, we enjoy them as entertainment, but we don't give them much theological attention...
...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...
...Modern society too often either looks away from its monsters or vanquishes them by reducing them to cuteness...
...Herein lies the "sense of paradox" that Beal says characterizes our experience with monsters...
...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...
...Tiamet lies defeated, but she is quite literally everywhere and everything-the sky above and the soil below...
...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...
...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...
...Today, however, many American Catholics are inclined to turn away from the monstrous aspects of religious experience...
Vol. 129 • March 2002 • No. 5
