Word Play: God’s amazing bestiary

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MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Today is Friday, October 17th. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Myrna Brown.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. WORLD commentator George Grant wraps up our week with this month’s Word Play. Today, wonder, words, and the creatures that fill up God’s world. 

GEORGE GRANT: We live in an enchanted world of dizzying diversity and sacred swarming. God made the seas teem with living creatures, shoals of fish, and great monsters. He made the open expanse of the heavens teeming with flocks, murmurations, and throngs of winged birds in flight. He made the dry land teem with the beasts of the earth, the lowing cattle, and everything that creeps on the ground. He made each creature in this sacred teeming to be fruitful and to multiply after its kind, an endless array of mortal images with which He speaks to us of eternal things.

It is little wonder then that Christians in the Medieval Age were captivated by the idea of cataloging this creative splendor in detailed, sometimes wildly imaginative, compendiums called bestiaries. These were encyclopedic books that combined descriptions, illustrations, and moral lessons concerning all manner of fabulous creatures, some observed in the natural world and some mythically fanciful, some exotic, some mundane. Like the Aristotelian lists they imitated, medieval bestiaries became the lexicons or field reference guides for the analogical and metaphorical language of the epoch’s florid profusion of art, architecture, and literature.

In Umberto Eco’s classic medieval murder mystery, The Name of the Rose, the novice, Adso, approaches the soaring edifice of an abbey chapel. Above him is a carved tympanum. It is a bestiary in stone described in a stunning 250-word-long sentence, saturated with a riot of unfamiliar vocabulary. It was, Adso declares, an “enigmatic polyphony,” that was “assembled in a consistory,” with “sirens, gorgons, harpies, incubi, dragopods, minotaurs, lynxes, pards, chimeras, gryphons, leucrota, manticores, paranders, saurians, and dipsases.” It is enough to take your breath away.

J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth legendarium likewise features an immense cosmological bestiary populated with hobbits, elves, dwarves, and men. But there are also balrogs, nazgûl, kraken, orcs, trolls, ents, barrow-wights, and a host of other creatures.

C.S. Lewis gave us a Narnian bestiary that included centaurs, dryads, niads, fauns, nymphs, ogres, satyrs, sprites, unicorns, and wraiths—to say nothing of eloquent beavers, articulate horses, fluent pucks, and redemptive lions.

But perhaps the grandest bestiary of all is found in the Scriptures of the Old and New Testament. There is the sacred teeming in the celestial realm: angels, archangels, principalities, powers, and the hosts of heaven. There is the sacred teeming in the terrestrial realm: nephilim, rephaim, emim, and zamzumim. There are the apocalyptic creatures: dragons, winged beasts with the appearance of lions and leopards and rams and goats, the seven-headed horned Beast in John’s Revelation, and the bedazzling four living creatures of Ezekiel’s prophetic vision. There are the terrifying creatures of leviathan, behemoth, and rehab.

Is it any wonder then that when God charged Adam to name every creature in the vast sacred teeming, he would have to exercise such linguistic dexterity and creativity? God’s bestiary is indeed enough to take your breath away.

I’m George Grant.

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