A paper I delivered yesterday at the Sacra Doctrina Project’s annual conference. Enjoy!

Eamonn Clark, STL

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The Genesis narrative of the Fall presents us with an image in the Serpent which seems at once foreign and familiar: a talking animal. But this is no normal talking animal, the type we’ve come to expect to meet in everything from folktales to Hollywood movies – it is an animal mixed with an angel. One is led to ask of such a thing, “What is it?” This framing of the primeval encounter of our first parents with the Evil One reveals a fundamental psychological dynamic in the history of religions which I will now explore only briefly.

The oldest extant statue which we possess is the Lowenmensch, found in a cave in eastern Germany. It is dated to around 33,000 to 39,000 BC. It is a small statue of a figure which has a human body with a lion’s head. It is not entirely clear what the use of the figurine was, though given that it is made from mammoth-tusk, it evidently involved a considerable amount of time and skill to produce – an attempt at recreating the figurine took experts some 370 hours. Justifying that kind of effort in a subsistence community means that the figurine was likely some kind of religious totem or idol; this is the most reasonable conclusion.

Other lion-headed figures exist throughout the history of religions – in Mithraism, in the Egyptian pantheon (Sekhmet), in the Hindu pantheon… These traditions and myriad others have many similar characters as well, other chimeras, whether physical chimeras where there is a visible mixture of man and animal, or an invisible chimera where an animal shape is given a human voice. Egypt is most familiar to us. One might think of Ra, the sun god, usually depicted as a man with the head of a falcon, though sometimes as a man with a beetle’s face, sometimes with a ram’s head (especially when seen roaming around the underworld every night), sometimes as a full-bodied animal. While the Egyptian pantheon has plenty of characters which are not chimeras, at least in their “default” representation, Ra is particularly significant because he was treated as the creator of all life on Earth, as well as being responsible for sustaining life through the sun. Just as well, eventually, the cult around the pharaohs grew to the point where they were seen as sons of Ra, or embodiments of him.

We might also point to the Egyptian treatment of cats as particularly noteworthy. While many gods and goddesses might turn themselves into various animal shapes, only one, Bastet, could turn into a cat. So revered were cats on account of the belief in their mediation of the spiritual world, in particular the bringing of good luck, that they were dressed in jewels, they were formally mourned and mummified upon death, and accidentally slaying one was treated as a capital crime. We then think too of the sphinxes, cat or lion-bodied chimeras with a human head, sometimes with wings, which in both the Greek and Egyptian mythological traditions act as guardians, especially to temples. The Babylonians had their own sphinxes as well, the lamassu, bearded sphinxes, which you have no doubt seen.

Egyptian religion itself stands as a particularly significant foil for the truth revealed among the Jews who were captives there. God chose to reveal Himself to Moses in a very different kind of chimeric theophany – through a plant! Sacred trees are not unknown in world religions, for sure, but the “chance encounter” with the Burning Bush is altogether different from anything else one might find in the pagan world, from the druids’ sacred oaks to the Germanic Yggdrasil. Trees don’t speak, and on the rare occasions they do in mythology they don’t burn without being consumed.

In the Burning Bush, God is showing that He is unlike any of the other gods on offer in the ancient world.

We would expect that the Canaanite pantheon would be similar to the Egyptian pantheon. But it is not. There are very few if any chimeric representations of the Beyond in Canaanite religion. Recent scholarship even suggests that the famous Philistine god Dagon was not a “fish god,” despite this having caught hold in popular treatments of the story of Samson. The same can be said of Assyria and Babylon, though minor mythological figures are chimeras (such as mermaids and the “urmahllulu,” another lion-man, who guards, of all things, bathrooms). With the Achaemenid Empire, host of the Jews during the last part of the Babylonian Captivity, we encounter primarily Zoroastrianism, a monotheistic religion. Rome, too, despite its polytheism has few if any chimeras in its vast pantheon, except for, oddly enough, Pan, who has a goat-ish head. If Egypt is a polar opposite to Hebrew religion, the surrounding and invading cultures are nonetheless more dissonant on account of their similarity, like half-notes being played together. We find more and more the projection of the divine onto human figures – including onto men who really lived and walked the earth, a clear correlative to the cult around the pharaohs. We see this especially, of course, in the cult of the Roman emperors. But unlike Egypt, these religions are less diverse in their perverse ideas – the Egyptians are, in a word, all over the place. They do all of the wrong things.

If we turn our attention back to Eden, we see how this dynamic is set up. Adam is given the lower creatures to rule, and then the cleverest of them approaches. The serpent is in fact a chimera – an angel-animal chimera – and a plant is used as a means for deception and gaining power over Adam and Eve. Dead or dying leaves are then used to cover themselves, and then dead animal skins, procured by the hand of God. The angel who pretended to be an animal inclined man so violently towards a plant in pursuit of man’s own will that man subsequently stooped to protect himself with plants. God sees that this is inadequate and elevates the protection. The elevation will need to touch man’s attention as well. He will subsequently begin to worship plants and animals, even dead things like rocks. This was how violent the downward motion was in the Fall. Man now acts like a beast, and so he identifies the Beyond with beasts, and even with plants and dead things. Thus, he needs them somehow to explain the gap in between his own existence and the Other. They are, after all, on different levels of being from him; they are just on lower levels.

I note in passing that in Genesis, when angels appear, they appear as men, almost as if to inaugurate a movement away from the disorder in Eden. We’ve already noted the shock of the Burning Bush, and another shock comes with the pagan prophet Balaam, whose donkey speaks to him under prophetic influence. Balaam behaved like an animal, but he was really a prophet, as his unwilling utterance of prophetic blessing over the Israelite camp shows. The mediation, then, is fitting for its end – men who act like lower creatures can be instructed by them, if put under God’s influence. He is willing to reach that low to instruct and save us.

I therefore propose that the intuition found in the vast array of animal worship in the pagan world in general does prepare man for the reception of the Gospel, in the very act of pulling him away from it. It is the Gentile world that is most ready to hear the teaching of Christ, not the Jews, most of whom have grown into a kind of spiritual laziness and entitlement due to their familiarity with God and His Covenants and laws. The Gentile world has known idols, slowly becoming aware of the futility of their religious observance. This is, as it were, the long arm of the first stage of St. Thomas’ explanation for why the Incarnation did not take place immediately after the Fall. Man needed to come to know his need for law, then needed to see that he could only follow the law with the help of grace. The latter applies to the Jews, while the Gentiles were left to be even more open to the shock of the Gospel.

In the sacramental economy inaugurated by Christ, many religious desires and intuitions of the pagan world are sublimated – everything from the intuition of human sacrifice, to the desire of local and individual houses of worship where God truly dwells in a visible form. The Incarnation is the sublimation of the intuition about the utility of chimeras, as seen in the animal-human hybrids and similar things throughout the pagan world, and the sense about the divinization of man himself, as seen in the Roman and Canaanite world, among others. And, just as with the serpent in Eden, we have a mixture of beings separated by a level – an angel and an animal – so too in the Incarnation we have a “mixture” of beings separated by a level – true God and true man. But in the Incarnation, there is really one person, and the human nature is really united to the Person in the hypostasis, and so on – the point is, it is not illusory, as with the Devil’s puppeteering of the serpent. God really “mixed” with man in Christ and divinizes him, in a non-Eutychian sense.

What to make of all of this? A foil for understanding the union found in Christ as a springboard to the supernatural vision of God in the act of faith is found in the logic of the Jewish ritual purity laws. Purity is against “mixtures” of things – even something as mundane as fabric – so that it is clear what a thing is, and, more importantly, where it is from – principally, whether it is from the world of the living, or the world of the “non-living” or “Beyond.” Thus, things directly connected to birth or death are impure. When something is not clearly “this” or “that,” but some sort of mixture of the living and non-living, the things of this world, and the things of the Beyond. What happens in the Incarnation is an intentional obscuring of these lines to form a true bridge, rather than a symbolic one. It can be asked of Christ, “What is it?” or, “Manna?” He is, in fact, the true Manna come down from Heaven – He is the true “what is it,” the true chimera which our psychology needs and has longed for since the Fall in Eden to grasp what there is in the Beyond, for to see Him is to see the Father, for He and the Father are One. It subsequently is revealed in the Incarnation that we, man, are actually much more the world of the non-living than the living.

Christ is extremely intentional in his use of the uncomfortable space which the impure, the mixture or in-between, occupies in the human intellect. He goes there, he touches it, he speaks about it and to it. From the very first moment of the Public Ministry, He surrounds Himself – literally – with the in-between places, of life and death – the place where the Lord was baptized is The Middle: in between Israel and the Nations, the Sea of Galilee and the Dead Sea, in a jungle surrounded by desert, going down into water – which gives and takes life – and in what is by far the lowest place on planet Earth. Another particularly striking example of this is in His interaction with the woman with the hemorrhage. This is a direct inversion of Haggai’s dialogue with the priests (Haggai 2). Impurity travels through fallen men, like a disease. One who touches an impure thing can then transfer that impurity from himself to something else, such as food. Purity, however, does not transfer in this way, not even if one is holding sacred flesh in his garment. However, in Christ we see the opposite dynamic, the transfer of power from His hyper-sacred Flesh through His garment which purifies the woman in the act of healing her. Nothing could be clearer about the program of the Messiah… He, the God-Man, is the One Who forms the bridge between the worlds, and He is therefore fully part of them both, a fact made clearest in the Resurrection, the shock of all shocks to human psychology. He passes from one world to the other, and He comes back again, victorious. He is the gatekeeper – a bit like a sphinx, and He too, like Oedipus’s sphinx, tells riddles which we must solve in order to pass through the gate, which is in fact Himself, as He is not merely raised from the dead but is the Resurrection. As with the woman with the hemorrhage, we are now to touch Christ, albeit not directly, as He warns Mary Magdalene in the encounter by the tomb, but indirectly, by means of faith, through the interior riddle put to us by the fact of our existence in the universe, with the help of grace.

Most heresies which are Christological in nature operate based on a confusion of Christ as a true mixture of the kind which heals and elevates the pagan intuition and completes the recapitulation of the Serpent-qua-chimera in Eden. He is either “just this,” or “just that,” but not “both-and.” To know Christ in faith is in fact to embrace Him for the “true chimera” which He is. Today’s attempts to domesticate or politicize Christ are not so different – while older errors could be said to neglect Christ’s desire for friendship with man, today He is often seen as just a pal, just a “co-pilot,” just one voice among many; or, He is “pro-immigrant,” or “pro-tax,” or “pro-environment.” While it is not necessarily incorrect to derive public policy from the teaching of Christ, the temptation is not all that different from the multiplication of the loaves which occurs before the Bread of Life discourse, which is to fall into thinking of Christ in worldly terms – a political “this” or political “that,” when actually He is the Manna, the What-is-It, Whose Kingdom is not of this world.

The insight that Christ is a fulfillment of the pagan intuition about chimeric theophany might help us to explain some other phenomena today, in addition to the possibility of helping to explain some of the symbols in the Book of Revelation and perhaps elsewhere in Scripture, such as the Holy Spirit descending “like a dove,” which I will leave aside today. It’s true that in the West, simple or “real” idolatry is uncommon. However, we somehow approach idolatry in all sin which is a conversion towards a creature, rather than sin which is merely “away from” God. I suggest that we find echoes of the pagan religious world in the over-personification of domesticated animals. As Pope Francis has pointed out, a world that chooses pets over children is on its way to loneliness and misery. Even more poignantly, G. K. Chesterton observed that “where there is animal worship, there is human sacrifice,” and we see this on display in those who worry about the safety of rare turtle eggs and scold people for eating meat but are marching for abortion later the same day. God did not become a cat, and this would never be appropriate – this is what such people need to be helped to see in order to be prepared for the reception of the gift of faith… that God became man. Another relevant phenomenon is found in the world of social media, where we go to divinize ourselves and encounter others as disembodied idealized humans – just like the ancient pantheons. There is an entire world unto itself in each social media platform which often has little if anything to do with the real world. One can get lost in these worlds, and those who do need to be forced out of them to be prepared for the gift of faith. Social media addiction is violently anti-contemplative, as the most cursory experiential familiarity with “unplugging” will teach someone who has any semblance of a life of prayer. These people need to be helped to see that God became man. If pageant shows for dogs are Egypt, then Twitter is Rome – while the former is further away from truth, the latter is in some way more dissonant with what is contained in its well-ordered pursuit. At least the spiritually blind cat-lady is obsessed with something that is flesh and blood.

Are there “seeds of the Word” in the pagan religions on account of their intuitions about the Incarnation, whether in chimeric theophany, or divinized men? No. There is simply an echo of what we once were in Adam – the pattern of his perfect mind has left its traces in ours, built for the story which Christ Himself tells, enters into, and fulfills. We were written as characters, through Him, the Word. It only makes sense then that we would constantly be looking to get back to Him as we once were, longing to get at least our minds across the gap between us, even through disordered means. Christ fulfills this desire in the Incarnation and exceeds it, by offering to those who believe His teaching and obey His precepts to take not just our minds, but our entire selves, body and soul, across the gap to Himself in the glory of Heaven.