Part 2 | Understanding the Dog-Headed Icon of St. Christopher
The shape of the world
The key to understanding the strangeness of St. Christopher is in the ability to truly grasp the rigorous analogy between the individual Man and the entire Cosmos. Saint-Maxime reminds us that Man is Microcosm, that he contains in himself all creation because he is the center of creation, this place where all creation converges. Man as the centre, as a mediator between heaven and earth, has two horizons; one leading inwards and upwards, towards the Angelic sphere to the Uncreated, the other leading outwards and downwards, towards the rest of creation and ultimately towards primordial Chaos. Man even participates in the existence of the Cosmos by the action of “naming”. We see this in Genesis when Adam names animals, acting, admittedly, as a kind of “demiurge” to creation. Man reflects on a smaller scale, by his own logos, what the Logos did as the Father’s Creator Word. The Divine Logos is the source of being: “Let there be…” The logos of Man is the source of specificity: “this is a…”.
Through the Fall, man was “off-centered” from his own heart, which resulted in his banishment from the cosmic center, from the Holy of Holies, from the garden where the tree of life is located. In this state, the two horizons mentioned — one leading to God and the other leading to Chaos — are transformed into limits, into borders. Before the fall, it is said of man that he was clothed in splendour, and in a similar way that he had access to the splendours of God. The fall “hardened” these splendours, turned them into borders. Two borders appear to man, a border to each “horizon”. The inner border is the cherub holding a flaming sword and blocking the entrance to paradise, while the outer border is that layer of skin, that demarcation of corporeality or animality that prevents our complete dissolution in the chaos of death. Even if wherever one stands one can perceive only one border on each of the two horizons, the borders are many — there are several veils of the heart, several garments of skin. We must understand them as being like the layers of an onion, like the rungs on the Divine Ascension ladder, at the levels in the Hierarchy described by the Areopagite. The clearest image is found in the Old Testament Tabernacle, the inner linen veil being adorned with a cherub, covered with a series of thicker, “wilder” coverings, then a veil of wool, a ram’s skin dyed red, and then what is possibly the skin of a porpoise or at least a completely wild animal (see Exodus 36).
The two borders after the fall. The Cherub and skin clothes.
The structure I have described is the ontological form of everything: the form of man, the form of a church, a temple, a city, a civilization, and even the cosmos itself. It was when they were immersed in this kind of symbolism that ancient civilizations developed their cosmology; the idea that “their” center, their “omphale”, was surrounded away from the center by peoples and creatures more and more chaotic, foreign, even monstrous, until one reached a border, these “Caspian Gates” in the North, beyond which existed a darkness, an almost “unnamed” chaos. There was also this other frontier — a more inner set of “veils,” eventually leading to a distant blessed land, a paradise, an Eden. In a church, these two borders are the iconostasis that conceals the altar, and the western border of the church, where the main entrance is located. At this point, it will come as no surprise to learn that in some Greek traditions, the icon of St. Christopher is placed above the West exit door so that it is, in a way, the last icon that is seen before descending into the chaotic world. This is obviously a symbolism similar to that of the gargoyles arranged on the outer walls of Western churches.
The shape of the Frontier
Monstrous races appearing at the ends of a Medieval map.
The border, the limit or the ‘buffer’ between two things, as a manifestation of skin clothes, are presented to us as death and obscuration. This marginal space can also appear to us as a hybrid, a mixture, an in-between that mixes elements together. Hybridity, like a bridge that touches both banks of a river, is the natural form of an intermediate place. This is also what inevitably happens to the unknown when it presents itself to us. When we have an unusual encounter, it is a certain chaos for us; one could say that the object of this meeting has not yet been well “named” — in the manner of Adam who gives a name to animals — it is not united to our logos. Whatever unknown thing presents itself to us, it will seek to appear in one of the categories we already know. Yet this appearance will become monstrosity, a mixture between two categories, or too much or too little of something. In extreme cases, this unknown can present itself as the inversion of a category that we know, its own possibility of existence being lacking. All monsters and fantasy species of ancient times possess one of these forms; giants, mermaids, unicorns, Amazons and even the dragon in traditional iconography appears as a hybrid: a snake or lizard with wings and often hairy places.
The dragon as a hybrid creature that represents chaos.
The encounter with the unknown, as a social manifestation of chaos and death, corresponds to our own individual passions, caused also by our mortal state; These two levels will coincide with each other, intersect, the first being the outer or inner sign of the second. Chaos is an absence of order, an absence of logos, a question requiring an answer. Just like a passion, it presents itself as a hunger, as a lack that will torture us until it is filled. There is, therefore, when we encounter the relative chaos that hides at the limits of who we are, a certain danger both at the individual and social level. This danger is an overwhelming desire to “fill the void”, to know impetuously what one is facing. This desire to know is the same as Eve’s for the fruit of knowledge, a desire to eat, to absorb. There is in us an irrepressible urge to immediately “participate” in this chaos, to consume it and often to lose ourselves in it, not through the reasonable mediation of the logos but through a preliminary intermingling. If we allow ourselves to be tempted by chaos, we will then project what resides in our own periphery into what is unknown to us, that is, our secret passions: either our desires and greeds or our fears and hatreds. There is no difference between these two extremes on a spiritual level. Finally, the savage barbarian cannibal and the noble savage united with nature are two sides of the same coin, two ways of projecting our passions into the unknown.[1]
The architecture of the relationship of the center with the periphery, of the logos with chaos, explains some of the stranger aspects of the Orthodox tradition. When I read the reservations about St. Christopher and the way he presents himself, I often wonder if the people who formulate them have read even a little about the lives of the saints. In monastic writings, especially among the Desert Fathers, we see this pattern unfolding again and again. In the life of St. Anthony himself, we find the beginning of this pattern. St. Anthony meets Satan in the form of an Ethiopian boy, and throughout the Middle Ages this symbol will be repeated in monastic writings; the demons, closely linked to the passions of the saint, will present themselves as Ethiopians. The Ethiopian, as in the story of conversion in the Acts of the Apostles, becomes the image of the border, although here we see the negative aspects of death, the dangerous side of the skin clothes acting there as a vehicle of the demonic. Such stories of Ethiopians have led many to interpret these monastic narratives as a kind of proto-racism, albeit a very anachronistic and simplistic interpretation. For those who have followed my constant conversations about skin clothing and the double movement of the periphery, a much more subtle and profound picture will emerge.
Indeed, there are other accounts of Ethiopians in the tradition. For example, in the story of St. Arsenius of Scetus when he decided to leave the desert, we read: “Near the river, an Ethiopian slave approached and touched her goatskin, and the old man reprimanded her. The young slave replied, ‘If you are a monk, go into the desert.’ The old man, struck with compunction by these words, said to himself, ‘Arsenius, if you are a monk, go to the desert.’[2]
The reader will no longer be surprised to find the “water crossing” structure outlined in the first article. All the symbols are present: the scene takes place in front of a river, the “garment of skin” is touched by the Ethiopian girl, and although a priori the saint is frightened and reproaches her, he finds in her the way to return to the desert, to cross the river again as Elisha had done. So in this narrative, the Ethiopian appears as the positive side of the periphery, as the Ark by which the saint is saved from his temptations. In the life of St. Moses the Black, we still find the same structure. His story tells him being thwarted by a dog while he commits a robbery, and later we find him swimming across a river, to go and slaughter the sheep of the owner of this dog. He then hid with monks where he became a Christian and later a saint. Notice the dog, the river, the dead animal and the crossing that leads to salvation. The same story happens over and over again as the margin can be the image of death as a border or death as a crossing.
St. Anthony not only encounters the demonic in the form of an Ethiopian boy, but he also encounters the limit as a hybrid. In the desert, he faces a Satyr and a Centaur, two animal-human hybrids, connected, even in Greco-Roman thought, to lust, passions and the periphery.[3]
Saint Moses the Black, fresco of Macedonia
The centaur Nessos kidnaps Dejanire, the wife of Heracles. Greek vase.
At this point I will provide a clear example from recent history in order to avoid the danger that what I present looks like esoteric speculation. At the end of the nineteenth century, during the imperialist expansion of the Western powers, “tribal” art began to emerge abundantly on the European horizon. Welcomed as “curiosities”, these images extracted from their traditional context appear as objects of speculation and fantasy. Many were amazed and others disgusted by these images since the features, such as sharp teeth, scarifications, geometric abstractions, were extremely foreign to Western sensibilities.
African art and passion. Photo by avant-garde photographer Man Ray
However, many artists saw in these masks and statuettes the image of wild creativity, visual freedom and unleashed sexual passions. Dadaist artists strutted half-naked, wearing masks and banging on drums, producing crazy sounds in a kind of emotional and sexual frenzy in a way that they felt reproduced tribal culture. Artists who were determined to destroy the artistic order of things began to include these masks in their paintings, especially the German Expressionists, but also others like Picasso, who put African masks on his prostitutes in the famous painting “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon”. The unknown in this case was used as a vehicle to project everything that was on the borders of civilization, as a tool to overturn the laws of visual coherence. These images were used by early modern artists in a way that can only be described as “demonic”. Contrary to the image of “raw creativity” attributed to them, these objects are extremely typological, and their forms are copied and transmitted from generation to generation. Thus, from an African perspective, these objects are used primarily as “identity shapers,” as a way of preserving social structures and customs, including sexual norms and taboos, not as a way of destroying them — as Europeans used them.*
Picasso. Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, prostitutes wearing African masks as the expression of an unraveled sexuality.
In order to counterbalance my last point, it is important to specify that hybridity and darkness do not appear exclusively at the outer border, but also at the internal border, as the veil covering the glory of God. The Cherub forming the throne of mercy on the Ark, the Cherub embroidered with the veil of the holy of holies, the Cherub twirling his flaming sword at the gate of Paradise, this Cherub who appears to Ezekiel as he approaches the glory of God, are all described as four-headed hybrids: man, ox, The Lion and the Eagle.
Tetramorph of the Meteor Monastery
They are described as sporting four wings to cover themselves and having the legs of an ox. Many have associated them with the Babylonian Kerub which plays a similar role to the sphinx, which also guarded a holy place.
Babylonian Kerub
In iconography, the cherubinic structure appears in the tetramorph and is connected to the borders, the “four corners” of the glory of Christ, while being associated with the “hardening”, with the externalization of the Logos in the four gospels. However, even the more “personal” angels like St. Michael or St. Gabriel who, although they have human faces, still appear as hybrids because of their bird wings. And just like the cherub with a sword or like Saint Christopher the glorious fighter, the original iconography of the Archangels represents them as warriors. Our perception of angels has been much softened since the Renaissance when we gave in to the pastel and floating blondinets of New Age sensibilities. But even the Most Pure Mother-of-God was at first terrified to meet the Archangel.
Meeting the margin in our own culture
The experience of the unknown as a relative form of chaos is something that each of us has had to face. If we hear a language close to ours, if, for example, a French speaker hears Spanish or Latin, he will be able to discern a little of the meaning of what is being said. If a French speaker hears Russian, he will not be able to understand anything but may perceive the structure, the words, the tone. But if he hears Vietnamese, he will find it difficult to distinguish even the slightest structure, the tone, and some sounds will even be impossible to perceive since they are too “far” from the horizon of his hearing. For him, it’s noise. This experience is the origin of the word “barbarian” most often cited. The language of foreigners was in the ears of the Greco-Romans like animal noises, a kind of barking: Bar-Bar-Bar-Bar. The dog-headed man is a visual version of this perception. The difficulty for us today is that because of mass media and image culture, we have “seen it all”; The visual experience of the unknown is therefore difficult for us to experience markedly, but perhaps we have all at least encountered a lighter version of this experience. Almost all of us have talked to someone who believes they are a stranger and then, for one reason or another, realize that we know that person. Suddenly our perception of their faces is transformed before our eyes; What appeared to us as a face like any other becomes the face of an acquaintance, so much so that it would be difficult for us to remember how we perceived it before this little revelation.[5] While there are no categories or formulas that can capture the difference between the face I didn’t know and the one I know, it would be dishonest to say that either of my experiences were “wrong.” Scientific data, the cold scientific description of a face, if such a description can even exist, are of no help in differentiating between what is foreign from what is familiar. The unknown and the familiar are unquantifiable and are entirely within the realm of human experience. And it is precisely the human experience and not some kind of dissection of the clinical and alienated world that is the basis of all Christian symbolism. To deny it would be to compromise enormously. To deny it would be to make incoherent the “heavens” themselves to which Christ made his ascension since it can be said without scruples that he did not go floating up there with the space station.
I am convinced that the icon of St. Christopher offers us a visual representation of this experience of the unknown. It is that encounter with a face that is so far from our ability to perceive familiarity that it presents itself as monstrous and hybrid. When we look at the stories of Dog-headed Men and other monstrous breeds, travelers encounter them in all margins, even as this margin moves farther and farther east, west and north. If Alexander in his Romance meets the cynocephalus in Asia Minor, King Arthur meets him in Scotland; Charlemagne met them as Vikings of Scandinavia, Marco Polo and other travelers met them even further, and eventually Columbus himself thought of seeing them in the Americas.
Borders always appear monstrous to us. This is how human beings interact with the world, whether we fear and hate this monster or desire and idealize it, its monstrosity remains. St. Christopher is for us the most “distant” person, this being that we can barely distinguish because of our own limited horizon. It is also for us our own limit, our garment of skin, whose danger and monstrosity we should not deny but which also has the potential to be christophoros, just as the furthest person harbors the same potential, since these were Christ’s last words for us: that he would be with us to the ends of the earth. And finally, as Gentiles we are these first “strangers,” for as St. Paul insists: “And you were once strangers to God, and even his enemies, by your evil thoughts and deeds. But now God has reconciled you to him, in the body of Christ, his body of flesh, by his death, in order to introduce you into his presence, holy, immaculate, blameless.” (Col. 1:21–22)
I was hoping that two publications would have sufficed to get to the bottom of this topic, but despite all that has been said it seems that I have not yet quite answered the great objection to St. Kitts: in our scientific age as fully rational and objective people, we no longer have these monstrous races hidden in the dark corners of our maps. Well, we may have to look at these cards another day, because out of the corner of my eye I seem to have seen something jiggling over there! I also left a strange question, one that emanates from the fact that the cherub and the monster at the ends of the world seem to share common traits. This is a question that would be dangerous to leave unanswered. So we will need a final part to this series, where we will talk about cannibalism, foreign women and little green men. Let’s hope it’s the weirdest post I’ve ever composed!
1. This structure of antipodes in the perception of the stranger is often said to have originated in the 17th century, with the resurgence of slavery opposed in the other extreme by Rousseau’s Noble Savage; but even in Roman times, Tacitus’ Germania used the Germans to thwart Roman identity.
2. Quoted in David Brakke, Demons and the Making of The Monk: Spiritual Combat in Early Christianity, Harvard University Press, 2006. P.171
3. A clear example appears in the story of the centaur Nessos in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Heracles asked Nessos to take his wife across a river. There is often a twist in the stories of crossing the waters, which relates to the dual nature of skin clothing, the ultimate being Christ overcoming death by death. In the story of St. Christopher, Christ uses this ploy by not revealing his identity until the crossing is complete. In the Jordan crossing of the Exodus, let us remember that it was two spies who made the crossing. In the story of Odysseus and the Cyclops, Odysseus uses cunning to trick the Cyclops into believing that he is called “nobody” and only reveals his name when he escapes by clinging to the wool (skin) of sheep’s belly.
*My aim here is not to give either a detailed critique or a defense of African religions, but rather to show that the monastic experience of the margins as the foreigner is still valid today. I used African art because I know it well and because of the reference to Ethiopia in monastic writings, but we can recognize this same pattern in the contemporary obsession with Buddhism, where a lack of real knowledge will allow everyone to project into it all their fantasies and ideals. Those of us who have converted to Orthodoxy should beware of the initial “exotic” attraction, which for those who come from outside can ultimately become an impediment to true communion.
