When I started reading the Bible as a teenager, I was shocked to read the Revelation of John for the first time. I had no idea that Scripture, a book that had an image of such a loving God—I had started with the Gospel of John—could have so many violent scenes and so many monstrous beings in its last book.
Then I discovered that the presence of monsters is not exclusive to the Apocalypse. The attentive reader of the Bible has already noticed the number of beings in the Old and New Testaments that do not correspond to the conventional forms of humans and animals that we find in the world on a daily basis.
The Bible makes references to sea monsters, such as Leviathan, or land monsters, such as Behemoth. The celestial world is also inhabited by unusual beings, such as the seraphim or the cherubim, not to mention the hybrid beings, the “living creatures,” which we find in the Book of Ezekiel.
However, it is in apocalyptic texts that these beings are most frequent and are the best known. This is the case with the Book of Daniel and the Revelation of John. The presence of these strange beings surprises us and makes us ask, Why are there so many beings in the Bible that do not have counterparts in the real world? What role could they have in Scripture?
The response to these questions holds significant value for readers of Scripture, as these monstrous beings potentially promote violent actions, some of which are in divine service. Because of their presence and powerful actions, monsters must be incorporated into a broader view of biblical interpretation.
Biblical interpretation in history has dealt with these strange beings in various ways. One way was to interpret them allegorically. Each part of them would correspond to a doctrinal or moral element. This was the preferred view of the ancient and medieval church.
Then, in modern research, it has become more common to understand these beings as metaphors for historical elements. In fact, the monsters of Jewish and Christian apocalyptic literature are ways of representing imperial powers, such as the Seleucid or Roman empires.
However, this approach solves the problem only superficially, the question remaining as to why these powers are described in such bizarre ways. Nor does the political interpretation of monsters explain all the monsters in the Apocalypse, much less the violence promoted by divine agents at the end of time.
More recently, some interpreters have begun to ask new questions about these strange beings. They have come to the conclusion that it is not enough to list monsters and acknowledge their presence; a proper approach is needed to understand them.
I argue that monsters are, fundamentally, cultural creations through which we express our tensions toward society and ourselves. They inhabit the mythology of peoples and the depths of our psyche, emerging within our dreams. Therefore, an experience of the sacred also passes through the articulation of monsters, both internal and cosmic. This perspective has a clear consequence in the interpretation of the Bible: As Scripture addresses the fundamental dramas of the human soul and of creation, it also manifests the actions of monsters in all their power and ambiguity.
The theory of monstrosity, as this approach has been conventionally called, seeks a complex understanding of culture by formulating the following proposition: It is possible to study a culture based on the monsters it creates. This perspective began to be considered in the 1990s in cultural studies, gaining applications in literary research as well. I will focus on three of its central ideas.
The first is that cultures often depict what they perceive as external to themselves as threatening, dangerous, destabilizing, animalistic—that is, as a monster. They do so not only through concepts but also and above all through hybrid and grotesque images.
The beings on the edges of the world—think of exotic peoples or imaginary beings from outside the known world—are the other, a threatening other.
None of this is new. After all, we know very well that human groups tend to define themselves with positive, “civilized” characteristics, attributing to people outside their group a character that is not only threatening but also destabilizing. We are aware of the devastating effects of this position in multicultural and multiethnic societies like ours.
The novelty of the theory of monstrosity is its second emphasis, inspired by psychoanalysis: The monsters we identify as external actually reflect internal ruptures and traumas. What I project onto the other as monstrous in some way refers to myself.
It is no wonder, theorists of the monstrous would say, that in 19th-century Victorian England, literature began creating monsters. Confident in science and progress and holding a key position among imperial powers, the British faced threats that emerged from within.
Think of Count Dracula, a vampire and undead from the East, who visits London in search of a woman who will free him from his solitude. Or the creature of Frankenstein, a monster in whom the most forbidden and fascinating fantasy of science is realized, creating life by usurping the divine place.
By creating monsters, people point to something threatening that is “out there” but also to a danger that is “here,” within themselves and their culture.
The third element of the theory of the monstrous guides us to pay attention to monsters’ forms: Monsters are frightening because they are aberrant images and as such must be seen and imagined not just as mere allegory. After all, these images provoke emotional reactions. Monsters are hybrid beings, malformed, gigantic, grotesque. This is society’s way of questioning the world and its categories, considered normative.
I return to my question, now focused on the biblical world: “Why are there so many monsters in the Bible?” This is a delicate issue that affects our beliefs and sensibilities. After all, we always think of the God of the Bible as a loving Father and the story told in the Bible as the story of salvation.
The fact that divine agents present themselves as monstrous and violent is the critical point of our reflection. I am of the opinion that this question, even if it does not receive quick and easy answers, should be on the agenda of a critical theological reflection.
After all, Christianity, a religion that should spread the message of God’s love for humanity, has also manifested itself as a religiosity of violence and hatred, promoting war, slavery, oppression, and death. Facing the monstrous aspects within our traditions and especially in the Bible is a way for us to vigilantly deal with this potential for destruction and violence that exists alongside love and solidarity.
The monsters in the Apocalypse of John offer insight to the master narrative of early Christianity about the future of the world governed from the divine throne. The book of Revelation is about the eruption of divine power over the cosmos, including society and the powers that govern it. In this sense, the Apocalypse offers a total narrative of a radical ecology. The plagues executed by the angels affect not only people but also the stars, the waters, the plants, and the empires of the earth.
In this vindication of the suffering of the righteous, all levels of the cosmos and all expectations of power are shaken. However, the execution of divine judgment and the establishment of the reign of God cannot take place in the outdated categories of the society that it is seeking to supplant. The “I am making everything new” (Rev. 21:5) also applies to the language and categories used to narrate this “end of times.” Therefore, nothing in the Apocalypse is narrated in everyday language; everything is presented for the first time in its depth, in an unveiling (apokalypsis) of reality.
The monsters are the agents of this narrative. The oppressive Roman Empire is revealed in all its demonic power in the monsters presented in chapter 13, whose strength comes from the red dragon with seven heads and ten horns—another monster, presented in chapter 12. This dragon, in turn, opposes the “woman clothed with the sun” (v. 1), causing chaos and trying to devour her son.
The Roman Empire, which conceived of itself as the guarantor of an era of peace (the Pax Romana), is presented in terms of cosmic, demonic chaos, destabilizing the world’s order and challenging God himself. Presenting the Roman Empire’s oppressive power in the form of a monster serves to reveal its true identity.
But the monster described as external also refers to the internal. God and the angels are also presented with violent and disruptive characteristics. In the first vision of Revelation, Jesus appears as the apocalyptic Son of Man—dazzling and exalted, holding stars in his right hand and carrying the key to Hades. A sword emerges from his mouth. This powerful figure of the cosmic Christ rules both the celestial and lower worlds.
But in chapter 5 at his enthronement, Jesus is presented as “the lion of the tribe of Judah” (v. 5) and then as a slain lamb. Here he passes from the image of one animal (victor) to another (victim), without any reference to his humanity.
These presentations of Christ, at the same time as a cosmic being and as a slain animal victim, so far removed from each other, connect him with the experience of humiliation and the hope of exaltation of his followers, the readers of the book. Christ’s followers experience the empire as demonic and themselves as vindicated victims, but neither of these views uses historically situated categories.
Only the monstrosity of external and internal images allows them to imagine this world of inversion of positions and of radical experience of the sacred. Without monsters, the language of the Apocalypse would have lost all its power. The suspension of common-sense categories allows for a full religious experience, even if it is often violent.
In a world of extreme violence and internal violence, the violence that is suffered and the violence that is imagined (or desired) must also be visited. The reader of the Apocalypse—and of the entire Bible—is invited to a radical experience of God, in which the reader’s and his ways of naming the world do not occupy the center.
This destabilizing experience, though shocking and uncomfortable, removes the reader from the role of a powerful interpreter. It challenges the idea of controlling or viewing the sacred as something entirely external and objective. The encounter with God is an experience that causes us fear—not a reverent and formal “fear” but an experience that theologian Rudolf Otto called a “tremendous and fascinating mystery.”
There are authors who insist that the origin of religion—and in Judaism and Christianity it would be no different—is in an experience of the sacred perceived as powerful, disruptive, and violent. In this sense, reading Scripture is not the reproduction of a position of power, equated with Western projects of civilizing culture.
The Bible, with its monstrous beings, leads us to an experience of radical otherness, which is reflected outside and inside us, inserting us into a radical ecology in which God manifests himself, destabilizing categories and creating new worlds that were previously unimaginable.
Monsters strip us bare, pushing us beyond the comfort of self-centered interpretation, allowing us a radical experience of God amid the drama of his creation.
Paulo Nogueira holds a PhD in theology, is a lay member of the Anglican Episcopal Church of Brazil, and is a professor of religious studies at the Pontifical Catholic University of Campinas in Brazil.
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