Catholicism and Monsters: At the Borders of the Beautiful
Mizu is a monster. That is the first thing we understand about her in Blue Eye Samurai (Netflix): that she is an onryo, a demon or a monster. Seventeenth-century Japan has recently closed its doors to the West. Europeans are not allowed to enter Japan. Any children produced from their recent presence in the empire are to be killed. Unfortunately for Mizu, she is very identifiably one of those “half-breeds” that should die. Her blue eyes signify something about her immediately and make her monstrous to everyone around her.
Monsters are theologically and aesthetically interesting. That is the case I want to make in this essay. Blue Eye Samurai will help me make my case. It is my example. The show will also help me register concern about some trends in Catholic “aesthetic” discourse. By this discourse I mean many things: Catholic imagination, Catholic culture (or cultures), Western tradition, Catholic arts, Catholic theology and the arts. These are different discussions but they are connected by their interest in aesthetics and art.
By aesthetic I mean anything having to do with appearance: the “appearing” of anything to the senses, though the word “appear” connotes visuality. And by art I mean the arts, all of them, and any ars, which means among other things “the skill of making.” These are not entirely separate things. Imagination, for example, involves both the aesthetic and ars: it is a power over images in the mind and so it contributes to the things we end up making. Similarly, if I say “beauty” or “the beautiful,” the term can encompass both elements and more.
Our aesthetic and artistic discourse in Catholicism at present is wide-ranging. It occupies scholars and appears in popular magazines. Though I think that many Catholic discussions escape my concern, I still want to address a pattern. That it is a pattern means that many essays and efforts will fall into the span of my critique. Even my own work.
I am doing my best to lay out all my cards early and plainly because criticism is not a simple or easy thing to receive. So, let me insist on this part at least: failure is interesting and limitation is natural to all human things. No essay is every essay; no idea is every idea. We overlook and misstep and mischaracterize as a mode of our own learning, which Bernard Lonergan calls “a self-corrective process.” What, then, do we do once we notice failure or limitation? How do we enter into a self-corrective process? Thinking about monsters will be in some respects my demonstration of one among many useful options.
Sometimes I wonder whether Catholics know what to do with monsters. We like to describe Catholic creativity in positive terms. We speak about the beautiful like it is a uniquely Catholic entryway to faith, or we express fascination with the particularities of a “Catholic imagination” (whatever that might mean), or we exalt our great works of art and architecture. Which is fine. It can feel a bit like an advertisement for being Catholic, sometimes, but that can be fine, too. I am a good Aristotelian on most days: seek the mean. The mean of “selling” Catholicism’s artistic treasures and the immense creativity of Catholics across time. Convincing people that we are pretty interesting is good.
Still. We seem not to know what to do with things that we dislike. Our discussions of Catholic aesthetic reality always curate which aesthetic and which reality (time, place, character). But that curation is what makes beauty, conceived of as an argument for or a defense of or a description of Catholicism, both narrow and fragile. We leave out all kinds of moments and all kinds of arts and all kinds of Catholics and all kinds of times and all kinds of places. This leaving out serves a purpose. But as strategy to describe Catholicism, it will always have an edge that indicts itself: it is not very curious about the other parts of Catholicism.
Our grand narratives always make me think of monsters. Of ugliness. Of the broken things left out of the presentation or the lecture, gathering dust in an old closet. Just as well: one only has so much time. But if we commit the leaving-out often enough, ugliness may as well not exist. Or, worse: we imply that anything ugly is not Catholic (gargoyles excepted) or else we imply that ugliness is simply bad. Perhaps both.
I always want to know about the unlovely things. Luckily, I am not alone. Hans Urs von Balthasar, a theologian famous for discussing “the beautiful,” directly asks us about the significance of ugliness:
Precisely this borderline case [ugliness] . . . reveals the problems of “exact aesthetics” more deeply than it would itself like and realizes: Can beauty which appears, or that which appears in beauty, make of its own opposite (ugliness) one of the poles of its expressivity? And if not, is then its idea limited, and it itself seriously threatened by the unloveliness of the real or by the dark backdrop of the world? The threads become confused.
Mizu is unlovely. She is not very likable or easy to be around. Everyone calls her a monster, and that does something to them and to her. The decisions the character makes are embedded in monstrosity, in the things in her life that render her insoluble to the world around her, like a permanent fragment in a cool cup of water. Her rage over this permanent estrangement from others is wide enough and deep enough to swallow the world. She will settle for killing each of the four white men who might be her father. In this way, a completely ordinary cinematic samurai task gains its unusual edge, framing an unusual protagonist. She has a sword and dresses as a man. She is very, very good at martial arts. She is an onryo.
Monstrum: A Sign
Blue Eye Samurai digs its fingers into hidden wounds in Catholic aesthetics at least as we presently tend to practice it. Examining the narrative at all forces us to ask which arts and which themes get to count as objects of study or as representatives of Catholic aesthetic-theological interests. Is a Netflix cartoon series for adults set in early modern Japan a good subject? Is it artistic or theological “enough?” Do we only care for Catholics? (The show has one. He is a very bad man and an excellent character.) Do we search only for Christian themes? (The resident Catholic speaks to Christ on a crucifix seriously and sincerely, acknowledging without remorse that Christ would not approve of—well, all the very bad things.) What kinds of stories—when we speak of stories—qualify for the eyes of Catholic imagination?
Mizu’s monstrosity, like all monstrosity, is uneven and many-sided. “The monster is dangerous,” says literary theorist Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “a form suspended between forms that threatens to smash distinctions.” Sometimes Mizu’s monstrosity is simply her rage. Her rage is entirely understandable but still monstrous: it pulls apart her capacity to relate to others, leaves a trail of blood, fails to entirely protect her from further emotional injury.
Other times the monstrosity on display is Mizu’s immense capacity for violence. She is not the only monster built from violence: everyone else runs at her with swords. Especially when they see her eyes. At other points in the narrative, Mizu’s monstrosity is her coldness toward others, her willingness to abandon them without a word of comfort. We eventually learn its mimetic quality: her “mother” twice abandoned her to death, and so did a lover, and so did her entire hometown. Mizu’s gentle and generous companion—Ringo, her only friend in the world, and she never has any good idea how to treat him—highlights all her sharp edges. Mizu would not be comprehensible or sympathetic without his enormous softness, which constantly supposes the possibility of her own heart.
Cohen says that “monsters ask us how we perceive the world, and how we have misrepresented what we have attempted to place. . . . They ask us why we have created them.” Blue Eye Samurai is empathetic but honest about its protagonist’s intense self-loathing—the furious monster made by the rage and disgust of others. Mizu’s blue eyes follow us. They follow her. The show makes artistic decisions that reinforce her strangeness and her intelligence and her anger by visually focusing on her eyes. The “camera” focuses on her eyes, we see her think about angles of attacks, leverage points on human bodies, crafting useful makeshift instruments in a fight. The show intensifies the blue of Mizu’s eyes in various scenes, deploys color contrasts, thoughtfully arranges shadows.
At one point, Mizu accidentally breathes hallucinogenic pollen upon deciding to fight an entire castle of men alone. (The strategic approach is perpetually revelatory of the character: Mizu is suicidally brave and direct, and she experiences many accidents that she manages to survive, though notably not alone.) She breathes the pollen in the air. She hallucinates. Her monstrosity in her own eyes leaps onto the screen, her eyes glowing a vivid blue in the dark. Usually, she hides those eyes under a wide-brimmed hat and tinted glasses. Now she is a fearsome thing, unnatural. Mizu’s vision distorts the line between nightmare and wakefulness; we see how it is impossible for anyone to fear Mizu’s face more than she does.
For many literary scholars, monsters are ways to think about things that do not fit. Art, narrative, and myth tell us what the people who made them did not know how to confront except at a blurred angle. Something I find interesting about this field of scholarship, as a theologian, is the way the theory straddles story and history. Just because the monster or the myth never happened or never existed does not mean it lacks truth. The monsters of the past tell us what the past struggled to give words to. The monsters of our present tell us what we ourselves struggle to say.
Ambiguity is another important element of the literary study of monsters. It is not a subfield where we are expected to love every monster as if each one had the face of a prince secreted inside it. To borrow Balthasar’s language: monsters are a sort of limit case. Not every limit can or should be gotten around.
Catholicism can be extremely delicate with ambiguity. We are a long and old tradition with many features. But Catholicism, particularly as a theological and doctrinal tradition (so: everything related to reason), puts all its chips down on intelligibility. We trust that the world can be known. We think that natural reason can come to know that God exists. We build universities. According to ourselves, doctrines can be affirmed, dogmas can be proclaimed, and theologies can be disputed. God gave us minds for a reason, and one of those reasons is to use them. When we are in this mode of reflection, when we are in the intellectual pattern of experience, we tend to dislike ambiguity.
I am sympathetic to the ways that introducing monsters and ugliness—or Netflix or pop culture—into consideration might be unsettling. There is a part of me that also resists it. That part of me starts to worry about distinguishing between Catholicism and everything else. (But we are Catholic. Our business is, at least a little, everything else.) Another part of me worries about relativism, whether doctrinal and moral. If everything potentially counts for Catholic aesthetic reflection, then maybe nothing is special and lines cannot be drawn. But this worry starts to illustrate how tricky arguing about Catholic aesthetics really is. We are discussing imagination or culture or art, but what we really mean to describe is being Catholic. Dante can throw popes into hell, but still, nobody wants to call Catholicism monstrous.
Transition: A Theological Aesthetics
If I move away from describing Catholicism and toward Balthasar’s interest in the beautiful, the landscape of theology’s relationship to aesthetics shifts dramatically. We already saw that, for Balthasar, ugliness is a limit case for the beautiful. However, he also seems to think that one’s theory of beauty simply fails if it can do nothing but reject ugliness. This is not necessarily what we might guess from a theologian famous for making “beauty” his “first word.” But he insists that any theory of beauty that consigns ugliness to the edges is at best a fragment. In other words, such a vision of beauty only succeeds by ignoring everything that contradicts it. It is not a very good aesthetic, since it is “seriously threatened by the unloveliness of the real or by the dark backdrop of the world.”
Much like ugliness, monsters challenge the boundaries of what we think counts as worthy of our aesthetic attention. They ask us to set aside a specific kind of anxiety about beautiful things. We have to be willing to suspend the problem of what is wonderful enough to make us feel proud, or good, or lovely. We have to ask new questions of our art and our past and our own creativity. If our aesthetic interests are ultimately related to anything theological—if our interest is “the real”—then our notion of the beautiful requires modification.
Balthasar’s fundamental point about ugliness is theological. Wonderful things might be a special focus or a typical boundary for human aesthetic interests, but they are not God’s. “This line of questioning [about ugliness],” Balthasar insists, “points clearly beyond itself to a region where aesthetics must assume a theological form.” Ultimately, Balthasar argues that the Christ-form is a distinctive aesthetic form, one capable of embracing what worldly beauty cannot. Cyril O’Regan summarizes the theological aspect of Balthasar’s theological aesthetics in this way: “Christ is the Urform of beauty; the Urform is qualified by cruciformity, such that the form of forms encapsulates and encompasses formlessness.”
I like to think of Balthasar’s stubborn, somewhat obscure position in this moment as the appearance of a truly Catholic interest. The standard of a theological aesthetics is God. And not God as a vague idea or ideal. God as he has actually acted toward us, most of all in Jesus Christ. For Balthasar, the truth of God’s acting means that we need to love the whole world as it really is. Our “aesthetics” are not worth it if we cannot do that.
Balthasar is not making an argument about what good art is or about what the most Catholic aesthetic (as an aesthetic) is. Sometimes he will mention things like this. He seems to hate Wagner, for example. Wagner “nowhere—neither in the revival of the myths of the Nordic gods nor in Tristan or Parzival—confronts real existence.” That hurts. Which I find delightful. (I have no strong feelings about Wagner.) But for the most part, Balthasar is almost frustratingly disinterested in evaluating art as art. Or as Catholic. He is doing something else. So let us see what happens if we imitate him and try to do something else.
The Struggle To Be Whole
Mizu is a perpetually cornered character. She dresses as a man and fights with swords. People want her dead. The threat and the response are intimately related. Every decision that puts Mizu at odds with normal life—things like gender, or peace, or home, or self-regard—is a decision for survival. Desperate, clawing, survival somehow. She dresses as a man for many reasons, many of them very practical: she can travel without a chaperone, have her own money. Even the samurai revenge quest grasps at purpose, at making sense of the hate heaped on her.
The impossible challenge of being Mizu at any moment in her life reminds me of a particular essay Balthasar wrote called “The Christian Form” (Explorations in Theology vol. 4). In it, Balthasar tries to describe what it looks like when people truly try to give themselves to an ideal that seems impossible to really bring about. “Life itself is placed on the scales as living proof of one’s choice,” Balthasar says. We testify to the good with the only thing we ever really have: ourselves.
But goodness is a kind of infinity, expressive at countless angles yet always itself. We are finite. Balthasar describes a collision at the crossroads of our yearning and infinite goodness that seems to obliterate the possibility of devoting oneself to anything so good. We seem stuck with temporary goodness, or partial mercies, or the cruel parsimonies of realpolitik. And yet: sometimes people decide to give their life to true goodness anyway. Such a decision, Balthasar says, carries “all the more weight the more precious this finite existence knows itself to be, or the more radiant it can make itself appear to all the others in its frightening self-annihilation at the finale.”
Mizu is always stuck between her immense yearning and a series of impossible decisions to make, all of them bad. And Mizu’s decisions often make things worse. She runs headlong into danger, impatient with a world whose only words for her are Never and No. The narrative allows us to laugh at this sometimes. Mizu is a ridiculous person—stubborn, unhelpful, sarcastic. Thomas Aquinas says that one reason we laugh is because we notice incongruity, or things that do not fit. Mizu does not fit. One way of noticing this, narratively speaking, is by inviting us to laughter.
But the ways that Mizu does not fit are painful. Laughter gains us only a partial embrace of our protagonist. Sometimes she tries to do the right thing, in spare moments of beautiful and terrible risk, and the world brutally punishes her for daring it. It hurts to watch. It is so hard to be this kid who almost no one in the world loves. No single response to Mizu seems to get at all of her life. The narrative of Blue Eye Samurai seems aware of this, and so gathers for us more than one way to feel for the character, allowing us to feel more than one way about her.
This larger difficulty, where a single reply fails to be sufficient, is one of the things that Balthasar identifies when he calls our existence “finite.” No one has a perfect set of choices. Choices themselves are not infinite. Deciding anything often means doing one thing and not another. It is hard to know what to do or to know which thing—once done—meant that we did well. “We do not know ourselves very well,” Lonergan says. “We cannot chart the future; we cannot control our environment completely or the influences that work on us. . . . Our course is in the night; our control is only rough and approximate.”
There is something more difficult than simple finitude that presses Mizu’s freedom down strange hallways narrowed of choices. She is impossible. Her existence is not allowed. The world around her does not want her to live quite literally. Underneath this blunt violence, there resides a painful spiritual meaning: almost no one wants this kid to live—meaningfully, spiritually, nourishingly. This fundamental rejection is what makes all of Mizu’s choices imperfect, strange, contradictory—and even still—remarkable.
Lonergan often says that sin is a “surd” in the facts of a situation. Surds in themselves cannot be understood. So, Lonergan says, sin fragments the intelligibility of situations. It seems esoteric to say, at first, but to say that surds cannot be understood means that when we sin we make for ourselves a series of impossible, no-win situations. We still want to be good. But we have made being good more than unlikely. Situations now ask confusing things of us, contrary things of us. Imagine a classroom where students have the exam answer key and everyone is using it. (They would never. But pretend.) What should a good person do in order to be good? It will require a willingness to diverge from what situations seem to expect of us. It will require acting strangely.
For example, “Swordfather” is a blind swordsmith at the edge of town. He makes young Mizu into an apprentice of sorts. They both have to pretend that she is not a girl simply so that he can house her at all. (Her presence, among other things, would by force of cultural expectations make his swords impure.) Swordfather is maybe the only human being Mizu cares about. He cares profoundly for her. Sharing their survival with one another forces their divergence from normal living. They are estranged from familiar roles, but this allows them to find each other. The burdens that constrain them manage to invite their creativity. They take up that invitation. “For the very reason that my time limit is finite,” Balthasar says, “I have to, and am able to, create within it something for which I take full responsibility.”
Catholicism and Monsters
Good popular art—and good high art, for that matter—takes advantage of familiarity to confess something to us. Since it is a confession, art is not constrained to teaching lessons. Like the real situations that we create for one another, we are fragmentary creatures, divided by the lies that we tell. The lies that avoid truth, or difficulty, or complexity. Blue Eye Samurai takes advantage of samurai stories and their tropes to confess to us about our monsters and about what it is like to be a monster in the eyes of others. It is human to confess this way: what we know can be a bridge to what we do not yet know. Familiarity helps us to frame difficult and frightening themes with a measure of assurance that they can be faced at all.
Samurai stories speak the brutal and elegant language of violence in simple and complex ways. Akira Kurosawa’s presence in Blue Eye Samurai is perhaps most prominent, not only in the show’s remarkable wide shots and patience with human movement, but also in its searching question about whether it is good to be a samurai at all. Mizu does not echo much Bushido—this is perfect, since that would make no historical sense—and in that sense she is unlike Kurosawa’s samurai, who had so much of the early twentieth century to reevaluate. The only character who likes Mizu’s idea to seek revenge is Mizu. The moral solitude here suits the character. It re-articulates the basic challenge of her existence. It allows an audience to be worried that Mizu’s quest will end, to echo Balthasar, in “frightening self-annihilation at the finale.”
Narratives are flexible and Mizu, the character, serves a different purpose and asks different questions than older samurai movies do. Her agony is, like these movies, the agony of history. But hers evokes a particular history: early modern Japan and the threat of Europe. The violence of dividing people into races, which inevitably introduces the threat of “mixing” them. Mizu’s struggle is not a struggle to be good at fighting or to become a master. (She is great at fighting. It is awesome.) Her struggle is for meaning. Her struggle is for a life that means something, even if in the end it was strange, and brief, and bloody.
Catholicism can, I think, countenance Mizu. It can countenance other monsters, too. I think we should. It would not be simple, but it would be good.
Sometimes, maybe too often, I think about a miracle attributed to Anthony of Padua. The saint turns his eyes to a river. He asks the fish if they would like to hear about the compassion and mercy of God. Then I imagine the thousands of fish, all those foreign angles and flattened mouths, lining up neatly to listen to the saint. He tells them about God as they behave much more appropriately than the horrible people in the local town. In this story, at least, those little silver monsters manage more dignity than the people. Their strange dignity provokes the conversion of the townspeople to the good.
It is easy to dismiss the things that seem to deny that our art, or that we, are as wonderful as we say. Easy and understandable. The things that we have made, or that we might make, are important to be proud of and to share. But beauty cannot be an excuse to leave out the rest of life, when life is exactly what God is in the middle of redeeming.
Catholics can trust in God’s providence in a way that embraces even the measureless spaces between the stars. We know how, in a sense, if we remember that we know how. But we also know how in the sense that we have minds that we are called to use. We can learn. In such moments, we testify to a faith that genuinely believes that God made everything. We testify that God genuinely guides human history, though history is ugly indeed. We might not understand how and why, not yet, or not right here, but sometimes we manage to trust and to dare. We manage to be Daniel, wondering at God with the lions in the deep dark. We manage, sometimes, to part ways with normal living. And then we testify to God’s radically transcendent goodness, which can redeem all the things that we do not know how to.
