Understanding The Dog-Headed Icon of St-Christopher

BY JONATHAN PAGEAU ON JULY 8, 2013

This is post 1 of 2 in the series “The Dog Headed Icon of St-

Christopher”

Jonathan Pageau traces the pattern of meaning in Dog-headed

representations of St-Christopher and how they relate to our
experience of the world.
17th century icon of St-Stephen and St-Christopher

The icon of St-Christopher is one of the most astounding images

found in the Orthodox Tradition. Showing a dog-headed warrior
saint, it conjures fantastical stories of werewolves or of monstrous
races from Pliny’s edge of the world. Because of all the difficulties it
presents, the icon was proscribed in the 18th century by Moscow.

The Orthodox icon of St-Christopher

presents him as a warrior cynocephalus, a dog-headed man from
Lycea. Sometimes he is also of gigantic size as well. According to his
tradition, he was a Roman soldier taken from the far end of the world
who converted and was martyred by an Emperor.
In the Roman Catholic Church, the feast of St-Christopher was
suppressed entirely with Vatican II modernization, though he
continues to be one of the most popular saints in Catholicism — his
image adorning the dashboard of cars all over the world. I believe
understanding St-Christopher and his iconography is of prime
importance today, and hopefully it will become clear why as we travel
through the Bible, Tradition and iconography to see if we can decipher
this saint who is such an affront to modern sensibilities.
Western images of St-Christopher present him as a giant Canaanite
who’s main story has him helping people cross a river by carrying
them on his back. One day he crosses a young child who becomes
heavier and heavier as Christopher advances in the water, so much
that he is afraid he will drown. Upon asking the child why this is so,
Christopher discovers the child to be Christ, hence his name:
Christopher, the “Christ-carrier”[1].Scholarly studies on the origin of
St-Christopher are available[2]. But in these, one must endure the
usual ho-hum conclusions that Christian tradition develops basically
as a series of misunderstandings, confusions and fantastical
exaggerations. Modern scholars seem to believe that coherent
meaning and analogy cannot exist without a kind of mechanical
cause-effect historical development. When they see the overlays
occurring in tradition between the term “Caïnite” – sons of
Cain, “Canaanite”(cananeus) – giants of Canaan, and “Caninite”
(canineus)—Dog-men, these scholars immediately enlighten us on
the mistaken transcriptions of those cave-dwelling Cro-Magnons of
the middle ages. Yet these same scholars remain blind to how
profound and intuitive some of these relations can be.
Iconography of Monsters

The use of dog-headed men in iconography is not limited to the icon

of St-Christopher. They also appear most commonly in images of
Pentecost, prominently in Armenian manuscripts, but also in Western
images.
Manuscript illumination of Pentecost with a dog-headed man
The Dog-headed men are seen as the farthest race present at
Pentecost. Because they are the farthest, in some Armenian images
they appear in the center of the door or else they appear alone,
representing a distilled image of the ultimate foreigner. There are
some other images, for example a well-known image where dog-
headed men are represented as the Barbarian enemies who threaten
Christ. Sometimes they are seen as one of the races encountered in
the mission of the Apostles.

Christ surrounded by Cynocephalic warriors. Kievian Psalter. 15th

century
Finally, dog-headed men appear in the story of St-Mercurios[3], a
warrior saint who’s father was eaten by two dog-headed men later
converted by St-Mercurios. These dog-headed men’s savage nature
could be unleashed by St-Mercurios on the enemies of the Roman
empire in a way analogous to how Romans and later Christians used
Barbarians in their own wars. The most obvious examples of this is
how the recently converted Germanic Barbarians stopped the
advance of Islam into Europe or how the recently converted
Scandinavian prince of Kiev provided the Emperor in Constantinople
with a personal Varingian guard.

The tradition of St-Mercurios is alive and well in Ethiopia, where I

documented these contemporary images of St-Mercurios and his two
companions on the outside of a church”
These iconographic examples show the dog-headed men as
representing barbarian foreigners par excellence, those living on the
edge of the world, the edge of humanity itself. They are cannibal,
savage, hybrid creatures who later will be conceived as descendants
of Cain fallen to a monstrous state. The giant Canaanite of Catholic
images, who has now often integrated Orthodox iconography, though
less visually shocking for having lost his monstrous face, signifies the
same reality as Dog-Headed men. The giants in the Bible and in
Christian tradition are often also interpreted as descendants of Cain
and monstrous cannibal barbarians, who by their excessive bodies
represent the extreme of corporality itself.

The relation of the foreign and marginal with excessive corporality,

animality and disordered passions like cannibalism must be seen
within a general traditional understanding of periphery. In a
traditional view of the world, there is an analogy between personal
and social periphery, both pictured in patristic terms as the garments
of skin, those garments given to Adam and Eve which embody
corporal existence. What appears at the edge of Man is analogous
to what appears at the edge of the world both in spatial and temporal
terms, so the barbarians, dog-headed men or other monsters on the
spatial boundaries of civilization and the temporal end of civilization
are akin to the death and animality which is the corporal spatial limit
of an individual and the final temporal end of earthly life. The
monsters as part of the garments of skin dwell on the edge of the
world, and though they are dangerous, like Cerberus at the door of
Hades, they also act as a kind of buffer between Man and the outer
darkness. Just as our corporal bodies and its cycles are the source of
our passions, they are also our “mortal shell” protecting us from
death. It will therefore be by a more profound vision of the garments
of skin across different ontological levels of fallen creation that we
can make sense of St-Christopher[4].
St-Christopher in the Bible.

The relation of the Dog to periphery appears several places in the

Bible. Dogs are of course an impure animal. They are seen licking
the sores on Job’s skin[5]. They are excluded from the New
Jerusalem[6]. They eat the body of the foreign queen Jezebel after
she is thrown off the wall of the city[7]. The giant Goliath himself
creates the St-Christopher dog/giant/foreigner analogy when he asks
David: Am I a dog that you come at me with sticks?[8] The dog is
used by Christ as a substitution for a foreigner when he tells the
Samaritan that one should not give to dogs what is meant for the
children[9]. The answer of the woman is also telling as she speaks
of crumbs falling off the edge of the table, clearly marking the dog as
the foreigner who is on the edge. Just these examples might be
enough to explain St-Christopher symbolically, but there is still more.

The key to finding St-Christopher more profoundly in the Bible is the

story of his crossing the river. In Scripture, there are several
significant stories of water crossings, and through these appear the
essential elements of the St-Christopher story as it relates to
periphery and the garments of skin. As we search we must remember
the movement of the garments of skins being both death and cure for
death, both the cause of and the solution to the world of the fall. This
means that the symbols will all be there in the different stories, but
they can sometimes slip from one side to the other. The first example
comes in the flood story, where Noah builds an ark, a shell full of
animals to escape the world of fallen giants[10]. Then in the crossing
of the Red Sea, the Israelite mix with a host of foreign nations to
escape the foreign Egyptians[11]. This last one might not seem as
clear, but it becomes so upon the next “crossing”. When the mix of
Israelite and foreigners coming from Egypt finally do cross the Jordan
to enter the land of the Canaan where the giants live, there are only
two people left of the adults in the original group. Of all those who
fled Egypt, the only adults from the original group who cross the
Jordan as the Ark of the Covenant separates the waters are the two
spies Joshua and Caleb[12]. Joshua, which means “savior”, is of
course the name Jesus, and he would become the leader of Israel as
they enter Canaan. As for the other fellow, one of the meanings of
the name Caleb is “dog”. This meaning is emphasized in the text
because Caleb is a foreigner, a Kenizite who is said to have been given
the periphery, “the outskirts” of the land taken by Israel[13]. And so
here we have two people entering the promised land, crossing the
Jordan, Jesus and the Dog, Christ and the Foreigner, the “head” and
the “body”. The term Kenizite, is one of those terms that will annoy
modern scholars when I mention that it also has the “K-N” sound of
Cain, Canaan, and Canine – just a coincidence worth mentioning.

The next examples of water crossing that will bring all of our
discussion back on itself are the Jordan crossings of Elijah and
Elisha[14]. This happens in the same place as their ancestors, near
Jericho, the first city taken by Joshua. Elijah uses his garment, which
was a “hairy garment”[15], a garment of skin, to separate the waters
and then leave this world bodily (just as Enoch did before the flood
and Moses did before the entry into Canaan), and then Elisha, having
received Elijah’s garments with a double portion of his power, used
the garments of skin to return to the side of Jericho. This story is of
course symbolically linked to the flood and the Ark, as well as to the
crossing of Joshua and Caleb with the Ark of the covenant, and so
when we put all of these together we have: giants, garments of skin,
arks, dogs, foreigners, and “the savior” who wields all these things in
order cross the chaotic waters. What we have before us is an image
of baptism, but in a deeper way the image of St-Christopher with
Christ on his back crossing the river is also an image of the Church
itself.

Elijah ascends as
Elisha grabs on to his garments of skin. Icon from Novgorod.
The relation between the crossing of waters and baptism is brought
out in several stories of the New Testament, but regarding St-
Christopher and the relation of the Church to the foreigner, we must
look at the story of the Ethiopian eunuch[16]. Of all the conversions
in the early Church, St-Luke chose this story for a reason. The full
meaning can only be understood if we know what an Ethiopian and a
Eunuch meant in the ancient world. Eunuchs played a role very similar
to what we have been describing all along. Just like dogs, they were
excluded from the temple. By castrating themselves they became
strange hybrid creatures, neither male nor female. They were
outcast, sterile and without descent. This is of course bolstered by
the fact that eunuchs were often slaves. But because they had no
place in society, no posterity to favor, they often became the “guards”
of royalty or emperors. Even until Justinian, it was not rare to find a
“buffer” of eunuchs around the emperor protecting his person and his
affairs. Foreigners could also play this role, as the Varingians I
mentioned earlier. This of course is the role of our Ethiopian Eunuch,
as he is said to be responsible for the treasure of the queen of
Ethiopia. Ethiopia in the ancient world was the home of the far away
races, monstrous races even, and was the original land of the
Sphinx. The detail that the Ethiopian was of the court of Candace,
queen of the Ethiopians is meant to evoke for us the queen of Sheba
who came to pose her riddles to Solomon. And so our Ethiopian
Eunuch represents all of what the garments of skin represent. And
just in case some doubts linger, an interesting detail in the story may
convince. It is said that after Philip baptizes the Ethiopian, “The spirit
of the Lord caught away Philip, that the Eunuch saw him no
more”… This is of course the same phrase as in the story of Elijah
and Elisha, that after Elijah ascended, Elisha “saw him no more”. The
use of the same phrase is there to remind us of the connection, of
how the story of the Eunuch and his baptism is related to all the
“water crossing” stories I have mentioned, many of which have
someone ascending as part of them, all of which have as a “vehicle”
for the crossing some aspect of periphery, some image of the
garments of skin. This ascending and leaving behind a “body” is also
related to the Ascension of Christ leaving behind him the Church.

Philip and the Ethiopian

Eunuch from the Menologion of St-Basil
There are many other stories, taken even from other cultures, where
this structure appears. From Odysseus’ encounter with the Cyclops,
the giant “Little John” fighting Robin Hood on a river to the three billy
goats gruff, examples abound showing how deep and noetic the story
is in human experience. The most recent clear example of this
structure is the very successful book “Life of Pi”. As is usual in
contemporary story telling which wants to push things further, here
the movement of the garments of skin is brought to its extreme. In
order to assure his “crossing”, the main character must rely on
cannibalism imaged as a Tiger in the bottom of his boat. Cannibalism
is of course one of the most common attributes given of the
monstrous foreign races and is a very strong image of death.

Hopefully our trip will have proven how rather than simply being a
series of accidents and exaggerations, the basic story and
iconography of St-Christopher are perfectly coherent with Biblical
narrative and tradition. Whether the dog headed warrior or the river
crossing giant, both strains of iconography point to the deep meaning
of flesh being a carrier of Christ, being “christophoros”, of the
foreigner being the vehicle for the advancing of the Church to the
ends of the Earth. Indeed, the story of St-Christopher is in fact an
image of the Church itself, of the relationship of Christ to his Body,
our own heart to our senses, our own logos to its shell.

Despite all of this, in the end, the big objection is still lingering: Yes,
these stories are well and good, but in our savvy scientific age, no
one believes in dog-headed men and races of giants anymore. St-
Christopher remains an embarrassing trace of mistaken belief held in
the past and should, for that reason alone, be sidetracked.

In my next article therefore, I will try to take the reader on an

encounter with St-Christopher.

Fresco of unknown origin showing St-

Christopher as a mix of his eastern and western stories.

[1] The most complete version of this story is in the Golden

Legend: http://www.catholic-forum.com/saints/golden234.htm
[2] David Woods, the Origin of the Cult of St-Christopher, 1999
[3] For an account of the legend, see Myths of the Dog-Man by David
Gordon White, p.37-38, The University of Chicago Press, 1991.
[4] For a general treatment of the Garments of Skin in St-Gregory of
Nyssa and other Church Fathers, see my article on the
subject : http://pageaucarvings.com/2/post/2012/9/the-garments-
of-skin.html
[5] Job 30:1
[6]Rev. 22:15
[7]2 Kings 9: 33-37
[8] 1 Sam. 17:43
[9] Mat. 15:26
[10] Gen. 6-7
[11] Ex. 14. The Egyptians are seen very explicitly as symbols of the
garments of skin by St-Gregory of Nyssa, relating them to the general
notion of the foreigner and foreskin. See for example Life of Moses,
book II, section 38-39.
[12] Num. 14: 29-30
[13] Joshua 21: 11-13
[14] 2 Kings 2
[15] 2 Kings 1:8
[16] Acts 8: 26-40

(pt.2): Encountering Saint-Christopher

BY JONATHAN PAGEAU ON AUGUST 26, 2013

This is post 2 of 2 in the series “The Dog Headed Icon of St-

Christopher”

Jonathan Pageau traces the pattern of meaning in Dog-headed

representations of St-Christopher and how they relate to our
experience of the world.

In my last article on the dog-headed icon of St-Christopher, I

promised to take the reader on an encounter with the Saint. In order
to do this, we must travel quite far from our main subject of
iconography, but this is necessary to understand such a peculiar
Saint. Hopefully, the reader who approaches the edge and even
enters the water with me will emerge with a clearer vision of St-
Christopher and why he is worth our attention.

The shape of the world.

As I already mentioned, the key to the strangeness of St-Christopher
lies in truly grasping the strict analogy between individual Man and
the entire Cosmos. Saint-Maximos reminds us that Man is
Microcosm, that he contains within him all of creation by being the
center of creation, the place where all of creation converges. Man as
center, as mediator between heaven and earth, has two horizons, one
leading inward and upward to the Angelic realms and finally to the
Uncreated, and one leading outward and downwards towards the rest
of creation and ultimately reaching primordial Chaos. Man
even participates in the very existence of the Cosmos by the act of
“naming”. This is seen in Genesis when Adam names the animals,
acting, let’s face it, as a kind of “demiurge” in regards to
creation. Man mirrors on a more limited scale by his own logos what
the Logos did in being the Father’s means of Creation. The Divine
Logos is the source of actual being: “let there be…”. Man’s logos is
the source of specificity: “this is a…”.
Through the Fall, man was “decentred” from his own heart, the result
of which is also to be chased from the cosmic center, the Holy of
Holies, the garden where the tree of life is. In this state, the two
horizons I mentioned, one leading towards God, and one leading
towards Chaos are changed into limits, boundaries. Before the fall it
is said Man was clothed in glory, and similarly he had access to the
glories of God. The fall “hardened” those glories, transformed them
into limits. There are two limits appearing to man, one limit on each
“horizon”. The inward limit is the cherub with a flaming sword
preventing the entry into paradise, and the outward limit is that layer
of skin, that limit of corporality or animality blocking our complete
dissolution into the chaos of death. Although wherever one stands,
one can only perceive one limit on each horizon, there are many of
these boundaries, many veils of the heart, many garments of
skin. We should understand them as akin to layers of an onion, as
rungs on the ladder of Divine Ascent, levels in the Hierarchy described
by the Aeropagite. The clearest image is in the Old Testament
Tabernacle, having a cherub on its inner most veil of linen, then a
series of thicker “wilder” coverings, a wool veil, a ram’s skin dyed red,
and then what is possibly the skin of a porpoise or at least a fully wild
animal (see Exodus 36) .
 The two
limits after the fall. The Cherub and the garments of skin
The structure I have just described is the ontological shape of
things: the shape of man, of a church, a temple, a city, a civilization,
and even the cosmos itself. It is bathing in this type symbolism that
ancient civilizations developed their cosmology, the idea that “their”
center, their “omphalos”, was surrounded by progressively more
chaotic, foreign, even monstrous peoples and creatures until one
reached a limit, those Caspian Gates in the North, beyond which was
an almost “un-named” darkness and chaos. There was also that
other limit- a more inner set of “veils”, leading finally to a far away
land of the blessed, a paradise, an Eden. In a Church these two limits
are the iconostasis which veils the altar, and the western limit of the
church where the main door is. By now one will not be surprised to
know that in some Greek traditions, the icon of St-Christopher is
placed above the western exit door so that it is in a way the last icon
seen before going out into the chaotic world. This is of course a
similar symbolism as that of gargoyles placed on the outer walls of
Western churches.
The shape of the Limit.
Monstrous races appearing on the edge of a Medieval map.
The limit, edge or buffer between two things, as a manifestation of
the garments of skin, comes to us as death and darkening. This
marginal space can also appear as a hybrid, mixture, an in-between
which mingles elements together. Hybridity, like a bridge touching
both sides of a river, is the natural shape of an in between place. It
is also something that inevitably happens with the unknown as it
presents itself to us. When we encounter something unusual to us, it
is for us a relative chaos, we could say that it has not yet been
properly “named” in the sense of Adam naming the animals, it is not
in unity with our logos. Whatever this foreign thing presenting itself
to us, it will attempt to appear within the categories we know, yet
this will cause monstrosity, mixture between two categories or else
too much or too little of something. This unknown can in extreme
cases, lacking for us its own possibility to exist, present itself as an
inversion of a category we know. All the monsters and fantastical
races of Ancient times have one of these forms, giants, mermaids,
unicorns, Amazons, even the dragon in traditional iconography
appears as a hybrid: a snake or a lizard, with wings and often some
hairy parts.
The dragon as a hybrid creature representing chaos.
The contact with the foreign as a social manifestation of chaos and
death is akin to our own individual passions which are also caused
by our mortality, and these two levels will inevitably overlap with each
other, one being the outward or inward sign of the other. Chaos is a
lack of order, a lack of logos, a question that begs to be answered.
Just as a passion, it appears as hunger, as a lack that tortures us until
it is satisfied. And so there is a certain danger when we encounter
the relative chaos which lurks at the limit of what we are, both in
individual or social terms. The danger is an overwhelming desire to
“fill the void”, to impetuously know that which we face. This desire
to know is the same as Eve’s desire for the fruit of knowledge, a desire
to eat, to take in. It is an urge to immediately “participate” in that
chaos, to consume it and often to lose ourselves in it, not through the
reasonable mediation of logos but through a mingling at the edge. If
one lets oneself be tempted by chaos, one will project into what is
unknown those things which lie at our own edge, our secret passions,
either our want and desire, or our fear and hatred. There is no
difference between these two extremes in spiritual terms. In the end,
both the Cannibal Barbarian Savage and the Noble Savage united with
Nature are two sides of the same coin, two ways of projecting our
passions into the foreign1.
The structure of the relation of centre to periphery, of logos to chaos
explains some of the stranger aspects in the Orthodox
tradition. When I read of people’s problem with St-Christopher and
the way he presents himself to us, I often wonder whether these
people have at all read the lives of the saints. In monastic writings,
especially in the desert Fathers we will see this structure being played
out again and again. In the life of St-Anthony itself, we find the
beginning of the pattern. St-Anthony encounters Satan as an
Ethiopian boy, and this will continue to be a characteristic of monastic
writing all through the middle ages, where demons, being tightly
linked to the saint’s passions, will appear as Ethiopians. The
Ethiopian, just as in the conversion story in Acts, becomes the image
of the limit, though here we see the negative aspects of death, the
dangerous side of the garments of skin acting as vehicle for the
demonic. Such stories of Ethiopians have led many people to
interpret these monastic stories as a kind of proto-racism, though this
is a very anachronistic and simplistic interpretation. For those who
have followed my constant discussions on the garments of skin and
the double movement of periphery, a far more subtle and profound
image will appear.
Indeed there are other stories of Ethiopians in tradition. For example,
in the story of St-Arsenius, having decided to leave the desert, we
read that : “Near the river a certain Ethiopian slave-girl approached
and touched his sheepskin, and the old man rebuked her. Therefore
the slave-girl said to him, ‘If you are a monk, go to the desert.’ The
old man, struck by compunction at this word, 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 expounded
in my last article. All the symbols are there: It happens at a river,
the monk’s “garment of skin” is touched by the Ethiopian girl, and
although at first the saint is terrified and rebukes her, he finds in her
the means to return to the desert, to cross back over the river as
Elisha did. So in this story, the Ethiopian appears as the positive side
of periphery, as the Ark by which the saint is saved from his
temptations. In the life of st-Moses the Black, we also find this same
structure. His story has him being foiled by a dog in committing a
robbery and later swimming across a river to slaughter the sheep of
the dog’s owner. He then hides with monks where he becomes a
Christian and later a saint. Notice the dog, the river, the dead
animals and the crossing over which leads to salvation. Over and over
the same story occurs as the edge can be an image of death as limit
or death as crossing over.
Saint Anthony does not only encounter the demonic as an Ethiopian
boy, he also finds the limit as hybrid. In the desert he faces a Satyr
and a Centaur, two animal-human hybrids linked even in Greco-
Roman thinking with lust, passion and the edge3.
 St
Moses the black. Fresco from Macedonia
 The centaur
Nessus kidnaps Daeinera, the wife of Heracles. Greek Vase.

African art and passion. Photo by avant-

garde photographer Man Ray
At this point I will give a clear example from recent history to avoid
the danger that what I am saying might seem like esoteric
speculation. At the end of the nineteenth century, through the
imperialist expansion of Western powers, much “tribal” art began to
appear on the European horizon. Greeted as “curiosities”, these
images, which had been yanked from their traditional context
appeared as objects of speculation and fantasy. Many people would
experience surprise and some disgust facing these images, as the
features, like pointy teeth, scarifications, geometric abstraction were
extremely foreign to Western sensibilities.
Many artists, though, saw in these masks and statuettes an image of
wild creativity, of visual freedom and sexual passions let loose. The
Dadaist artists would prance around half naked wearing masks and
beating drums, making incongruous sounds in a kind of emotive and
sexual frenzy which they thought imitated tribal culture. Artists who
were bent on destroying the artistic order of things began including
these masks into their paintings, the German Expressionists
especially, but also people like Picasso, who put African masks on his
prostitutes in the infamous “Demoiselles d’Avignon”. The foreign, in
this case, was used as a vehicle for projecting all that was on the
edge of their civilization, a tool to destroy the rules of visual
coherence. These images by early modern artists were used in a way
that can only be called “demonic”. But having lived in Africa for 7
years I can say that contrary to being “wildly creative”, these objects
are extremely typological and their forms are copied and handed
down from generation to generation. Also, in an African view, these
objects are mostly used as “identity forming”, as ways to preserve
current social structures and practices, including social sexual norms
and taboos, not as ways to destroy them, which is what Europeans
used them for. It was the “foreign” nature of these images, the fact
that they appeared detached from anything they knew which brought
people to project into them whatever they had in their own “dark
corners”4.
 Picasso. Demoiselles
D’Avignon, Prostitutes bearing African masks as expressions of
unbound sexuality.
In order to balance out my last point, it is important to specify that
hybridity and darkness do not just appear at the outer edge, but they
also appear at the inner limit, as the veil covering the glory of
God. The Cherubim forming the mercy seat on the Ark, the Cherubim
stitched into the veil of the holy of holies, the Cherub spinning the
flaming sword at the gate of Paradise, that cherub which appears
to Ezekiel as he approaches the glory of God are all described as a
hybrid with four animal faces: the man, the ox, the lion and the eagle.

Tetramorph from Meteora Monastery

They are described as having four wings to cover themselves and the
legs of an ox. The cherub has been linked by many to the Babylonian
Kerub which plays a similar function as the sphinx, both of which
guarded holy places.

Babylonian Kerub
In iconography, the Cherubic structure appears in the tetramorph and
is attached to the limit, the “corners” of Christ’s glory while being
associated with the “hardening”, the exteriorisation of the Logos into
the four Gospels. But even the more “personal” angels, like st-
Michael or st-Gabriel who though they have human faces, also appear
as hybrid with their bird-wings. And just as the cherub with a sword,
or as st-Christopher the warrior saint, the original iconography of
Archangels is to show them as soldiers. Our perception of angels has
been much softened since the Renaissance, giving in to the pastel
floating blonds of New Age sensibilities. But even the most holy
Theotokos was at first terrified at her contact with the Archangel.
 The
four hybrid aspects of the tetramorph appear as the four corners of
Christ’s glory. Detail of my own carving
Experiencing the limit in our own culture
The experience of what is foreign as a relative chaos is one all of us
have had to differing degrees. If one hears a language close to our
own, if an English speaker hears German or Latin for example, one
will be able to make out some of the meaning. If an English speaker
hears Russian, that person will not understand anything but will be
possibly be able to perceive structure, words, tone. But if one hears
Vietnamese, one might find it difficult to even make out any structure,
any tone and there are some sounds an English speaker will not even
be able to perceive as they are “too far” from one’s horizon of
hearing. It is noise to us. Such an experience is the most cited
origin of the word “barbarian”, that is how the language of foreigners
appeared to the Greco-Roman world as animal noises, a kind of
barking: Bar-Bar-Bar-Bar. The dog-headed man is a visual version
of this perception. The problem for us today is that because of mass
media and image culture, we have “seen it all” and so the extreme
visual experience of the foreign is difficult to have, but maybe all of
us have had at least a somewhat milder version of this. Most people
have experienced talking with someone and thinking that person a
stranger, and then for some reason one discovers that the person is
someone we know. Suddenly our perception of their face changes
before our very eyes, what was a random face becomes the face of
our acquaintance, so much that we would find it difficult to remember
how we saw the very same face before our little revelation5. Although
there is no scientific category or formula that could capture the
difference between that face I did not know and the face I know, it
would be very dishonest to say that either of my experiences was
“wrong”. The scientific “data”, the cold clinical description of a face,
if that description actually even exists, cannot help to differentiate
between what is foreign and what is familiar. The foreign and
familiar are unquantifiable and entirely within the realm of human
experience. And It is precisely human experience, not a kind of
clinical and alienated dissection of the world, which is the basis of all
Christian symbolism. To deny this is to put much into jeopardy. To
deny this is to make incoherent the very “heaven” where Christ
ascended, for certainly he did not go float up there where the space
station hangs.
I believe in the case of the icon of St-Christopher we have a visual
representation of this experience of the foreign. It is the encounter
with a face that is so far from our capacity to perceive familiarity that
it presents itself as monstrous and hybrid. If one looks at the stories
of Dog-Headed men or other monstrous races, travellers encounter
them in every limit, even as this limit moves further east, west and
north. If Alexander in his Romance encounters the cynocephali in Asia
minor, King Arthur encounters them in Scotland, Charlemagne as
Vikings from Scandinavia, and Marco Polo and other travellers would
also encounter them further out, and finally even Columbus himself
will think he finds them in the Americas. The limit always appears as
monstrous. This is just how human beings interact with the world,
and whether you fear and hate that monster, or whether you desire
and idealize it, it is monstrous none the less. St-Christopher is to us
the “farthest” person, the person which we can barely see because of
our own limited horizon. He is also for us our own limit, our garments
skin, to which we should not deny the danger and monstrosity, but
which has the potential of being christophoros, just as that farthest
of persons has the same potential, for it was Christ’s last words to us
that he would be with us until the ends of the earth. And in the end,
as Gentiles, it is we who are this original “foreigner’, for as so St-Paul
insists: “ And you who were once strangers and enemies in mind,
doing evil deeds, he has reconciled in his fleshy body so as to present
you holy and blameless and irreproachable before him. »6
Well, I was hoping to get to the end of all this within two posts, but
despite all that has been said, it still seems I have not fully answered
the big objection to St-Christopher: how in our scientific age, as fully
rational and objective people, we no longer have these monstrous
races in the dark corners of our maps. Well, it seems we might have
to look at those maps again, because from the corner of my eye, I
think I saw some strange things moving about there! I have also left
open a strange question of how both the cherub and the monster at
the edge of the world seem to share common traits. This can be a
dangerous question to leave open, so we need one final part of this
series, where we will talk of cannibalism, foreign women and little
green men. Hopefully it will be the strangest post I will ever have to
write fo the OAJ. After that, we can get back to liturgical art.

———————————————————————————–
1 This structure of extremes in perception of the foreigner is often
said to originate in the 17th century with the strong resurgence of
slavery opposed by the other extreme of Rousseau’s Noble Savage,
but even in Roman times Tacitus’ Germania uses Germanic people as
a foil to 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 Nessus from
Ovid’s Metamorphosis. Heracles asked the centaur Nessus to cross
his wife to the other side of a river. But in this version of the limit
and water crossing, the hybrid centaur tricks Heracles and makes off
with his wife. There is often a trick in the water crossing story. This
is related to the very double nature of the garments of skin, the
ultimate “trick” being Christ’s trampling down death by death. In the
story of St-Christopher, this trick is played by Christ on St-
Christopher in not revealing who he is until the end of the crossing. In
the Exodus crossing of the Jordan, we must not forget that it was two
spies who crossed. In the story of Odysseus and the Cyclops,
Odysseus tricks the Cyclops in believing his name is “nobody”, and
only reveals his real name when he has escaped by holding unto the
underside (skins) of sheep.
4 My point is not to give either a detailed critique or defence of African
religions, but it is rather to show how the monastic experience of the
edge as foreigner is one which is still valid today. I used African art
because I know it well and because of the Ethiopian reference in
monastic writings, but one can see the same pattern in contemporary
obsessions with Buddhism, where a lack of knowledge will permit
people to project into Buddhism all their fantasies and ideals. This is
even something those of us who converted to Orthodoxy should be
aware of, that is how the original “exotic” appeal of Orthodoxy can in
the end become a barrier to true communion for those coming from
outside.
5 My wife and I lived in Africa for 7 years. Though I grew up in North
America, where people of African descent are a normal part of life,
my wife grew up in Slovakia where she had almost never seen an
African person until she moved to North America. Because the
encounter with Africans had for so long been beyond my wife’s
horizon, while in Africa she always had difficulty recognizing people
and differentiating people’s faces. This was not something she was
deliberately doing as it caused her much difficulty in her daily life.
6 1 Col 1:22