Dog-headed saint

Permit me to remedy an omission in Maria J Pérez Cuervo’s excellent article on ‘The Politics of Monsters’ [ FT361:30

37]. She gives the impression that mediæval Christianity had an overwhelmingly negative attitude towards monsters; however, there was one monster who had a very positive place in the affections of Christians in earlier centuries. This is St Christopher, who came of the race of Cynocephali and yet served as a fierce (and pretty scary-looking) defender of the faith. To quote David Gordon White’s book Myths of the Dog

Man (Chicago, 1991, 35): “Saint Christopher’s cynocephaly is a constant theme in his Eastern iconography and hagiography, whereas he is only occasionally portrayed with a dog’s head in Western traditions. His function and situation are nevertheless identical in both traditions.” For those of us who reject the recent modernisation of the Church since the 1960s (when Christopher was, I gather, removed from the official martyrologies), to look on the monstrous dogheaded saint is to be freed from the danger of a bad death that day, hence his frequent appearance in wall paintings in mediæval church buildings.

To be fair, Cuervo’s article does mention Saint Augustine of Hippo’s reference to the monstrous races as worthy of salvation, but Christopher shows that monsters can even attain sanctity. [For more on the Cynocephali, see Matt Salusury’s “A Short History of Dog-Headed Men”, FT310:32-37] Paul Kitchenham Shotton, Flintshire, Wales