Cardinal Bellarmine’s Monster:
On the Shock Value of Christian Art

The dark crannies of Christian iconography carry many dusty and strange effigies. Some, like St. Liberata, the bearded lady of hagiography were once lovingly venerated by their votaries but have forever been lost by simple neglect. Others, like the Sacred Heart of Mary, were suppressed for their dubious theological value. Many seem bizarre and even ferocious to modern eyes, like the rigid zoömorphic evangelists on the ceiling of the Romanesque baptistery at Lucca, St. John with the frightful head of a transmogrified Byzantine Thoth, St. Matthew as a terrifying angel.

And then there’s the Monstrum.

The Trinity has been depicted in manifold ways over the ages. The most ancient symbol of the Godhead was the equilateral triangle, which later nearly vanished between the fourth and eleventh centuries on the strength of St. Augustine’s testimony that similar signs were used among the Manichaean cults he once frequented. While the triangle returned again in the mystical seventeenth and rational eighteenth centuries, the so-called Monstrum did not.

While the three Persons of the Trinity depicted in human form was comparatively rare in the West, rarer still was the three-faced or three-headed Trinity. At the height of the Middle Ages, however, it enjoyed a vogue of sorts that began in the eleventh century, though it was subsequently condemned by Anthony of Florence. St. Robert Bellarmine called it a Monstrum, a monster, a thing to be gawked at. It was eventually suppressed by order of Urban VIII in the seventeenth century, though it did not finally vanish until nearly two hundred years later. A few examples of it can be found amid the Greeks.

Urban’s condemnation notwithstanding, I have an inexplicable fondness for the Monstrum. Part of it, I must confess, is my selfish love of the outré that urges me to ferret out the oddest relics and the strangest miracles. Another part, though, I believe, is legitimate, and it is precisely because, as Cardinal Bellarmine said, that this Trinity looks like a monster. It is sometimes good that art should terrify, or at the very least throw our smug suburban souls a little off-balance. If we can grow used to something so powerful as a Crucifix, how much easier is it to write off the equally mediocre plaster Good Shepherds and geometrically gnomelike Oregon Catholic Press apostles. Terribilis locus este?

Admitted, there would be something un-Christian in a wrathful and perverse desire to bedeck our churches with Catholic equivalent of the gory, knife-wielding deities of Goa or the blood-soaked mysteries of Mithras, but the sentimental sweetness of so much nineteenth-century popular piety has an equal lack of balance. Sentiment lapsed into niceness and niceness into blandness and blandness into Rothko and Vosko and the Cosmic Christ. Perhaps had a little of that old shocking spark remained, popular Catholic art might have had something to trim the boat with, something to hang off until it was swept into the river of bad lithography and even worse abstractionism.

The Monstrum has a touch of the Sabelian about it, I’ll admit: it obscures the individual Personhood of Father, Son and Holy Ghost. Just like the triangle before it, it seemed heretical and in those days of theological confusion, it may well have been. But symbols change and can change: a Buddhist sigil can become a sign of bloodshed and megalomania, or an instrument of criminal torture can change into a jewel-bedecked insignia carried before kings and emperors. The swastika and the cross. The Monstrum throws us off, and if one is already unbalanced, being thrown off may just knock you straight, and not just from mere shock.

I speak from my own perspective: I always had a touch of modalism or perhaps even Arianism in my mind as a child. It was always unintentional: I understood Christ’s divinity but it was too easily to think of the Trinity as being God, Christ and the Holy Spirit, too easily to forget that the Son of God was God the Son, one with the Father, the very Image of the Father. Sometimes the Holy Spirit could get lost in the shuffle, less substantial and lingering than the old-fashioned Holy Ghost or that mysterious and gem-set word, the Paraclete. Nobody even got around to telling me about the Homoosion, much less the mystical procession of the Holy Ghost that makes such a grand and awe-inspiring mystery out of that puzzling phrase that can seem either simpering, troubling or marvelous, “God is Love.”

We need, I think, multiple images to understand the Trinity, as if extrapolating the cut of some sacred and precious garment on our backs by the use of a forest of mirrors. The truth lies somewhere between the Monstrum and the Throne of Grace. Pater non est Filius. Filius non est Spiritus Sanctus. Spiritus Sanctus non est Pater. Pater est Deus. Filius est Deus. Spiritus Sanctus est Deus. It’s the Catholic way, this game of balance, of webbed doctrines counteracting each other with glorious glee, Divine omnipotence and free will, grace and works.

All the great heresies, religious and secular, have all knocked out one truth of that complex interplay and blown it up to mammoth proportions. Calvin was right: God’s power is absolute. But he was not right enough: God’s absolute power was to give us wills. Arius was right: Christ was a Man. But he was not right enough: that Man was also God. Balance. All exaggerations are right, if they exaggerate the right thing. And if they exaggerate in a polyphonic unity, neither homogeneous nor discordant, but harmonious.

Perhaps Bellarmine was right: it is a monster. But the word monster, Monstrum comes from the Latin monstrare, to show. People gawk at monsters, but they also gaze at monstrances, those gilded wombs that bear up the sacred Host to be worshipped, and the Trinity is mystery at the heart of our faith is a true wonder to be gazed upon in speechless and wonderful amazement.