Gargoyles
The French city of Rouen used to have a curious tradition. Each year, on the Feast of the Ascension, a single death row inmate was released back into freedom. The practice lasted clear through the Middle Ages ― we have records of this from as early as the twelfth-century ― and only came to an end with the French Revolution.
Its roots were in a local legend. In the seventh-century, a dragon was said to have terrorized Rouen from a cave near the River Seine. It breathed fire upon the city, swallowed ships whole, and hurled river water through the streets. As the story goes, Rouen’s desperate inhabitants made a deal with the dragon. In exchange for peace, each year, the dragon would be given a single human to consume. To them, a death row inmate seemed the least costly.
At that time, Rouen’s bishop was Saint Romanus and, wanting out of this arrangement, he sought volunteers to help him capture and kill the dragon. He found just one taker: a death row inmate soon to be offered up.
They say that, to kill the creature, Romanus flung his priestly stole around its neck and the criminal wrestled and dragged it into town where it was burned at the stake. On account of his bravery, the condemned man was pardoned. More than that, a death row prisoner would now be released in his honor each year rather than sacrificed. Such was Rouen’s “Privilege of Saint Romanus,” as the custom came to be called.1
The dragon of Rouen had a name: La Gargouille ― “the Gargoyle.” Of course, these types of tales abounded throughout the Middle Ages. There’s a similar story from the other side of France about Graoully, a dragon who terrorized the people of Metz and was likewise vanquished by Saint Clement of Metz. This was all standard fare.
The claim in Rouen, though, was that, when they torched La Gargouille, the head and throat were so accustomed to fire they simply would not burn. So they chopped off the head and mounted it on a town wall.2 And thus the strange tradition of gargoyles is said to have been born. Even today, we see, perched upon Europe’s churches, town halls, and houses the descendants of La Gargouille ― monsters of stone, their body parts fantastically patched together, screaming at the townspeople below.
Technically, gargoyles are rain spouts. To prevent water from running down a building and eroding the mortar, rain is channeled toward a gargoyle and then spewed out its mouth and away from the wall. “Gargoyle” actually comes from the Latin word gargula, which means “throat.” The word “gargle” should come to mind.3 In Germany, gargoyles are just called “wasserspeier” ― “water spitters.”
Decorative and animal-like gargoyles have been used for centuries, long before they appeared on medieval churches or La Gargouille was supposed to have terrorized Rouen. The ancient Egyptians, Greeks, Etruscans, and Romans all used carved animal heads as water spouts.4
And yet not every gargoyle is a water spout. Those that are just decorative statues are more typically called chimeras or grotesques, rather than gargoyles proper.5 In ancient mythology, chimeras were creatures patched together from various distinct animal parts and the most recognizable gargoyles today are just these kinds of hideous hybrids ― grotesques that stitch together the whole span medieval fauna: dragons, griffins, monkeys, dogs, birds, even humans ― all of them deformed and contorted in unsettling ways.
But what do these gargoyles ― rain spouts or not ― actually signify, especially as features of church architecture?
We can start by noting that gargoyles seem like the very last thing medieval Christians would put on their churches. The Middle Ages were the days of the Scholastics ― adherents to a philosophy that privileged the serenity of order, both in the natural world and in architecture. They abhorred the wild and the unnatural. This is why Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, a twelfth-century Cistercian abbot, wanted the gargoyles knocked off his monastery. They were offenses against nature and disturbed its inherent harmonies: “What are the filthy apes doing [in the cloister]?… The creatures, part man and part beast? …. You may see many bodies under one head, and conversely many heads on one body.”6
Some moderns wonder if that was, indeed, precisely the purpose of gargoyles. Perhaps they functioned as a way for working class carvers to rebel against the medieval Church ― a “freedom of the press” where artists could scoff at orthodox thinking by erecting bizarre mockeries.7 This seems unlikely. In the Middle Ages, religious art was heavily regulated to ensure it offered safe spiritual messages.8 If gargoyles were even suspected of undermining the teaching of the Church, they would have been removed.9
Gargoyles did, however, give carvers the chance to add some personal flare and local charm to their churches.10 This is so much the case that their gargoyles often became landmarks that set specific churches and even cities apart.11 The most famous gargoyles in the world are those on Paris’s Notre Dame Cathedral. Even if most of its current gargoyles are from the nineteenth-century (not the Middle Ages) they have nevertheless become icons of Paris. One writer commented that they are “as crucial to the Paris skyline as the Eiffel Tower.” The famous Le Stryge gargoyle, the “pensive demon” whose head rests in its hands (pictured above), has become “the symbol of Notre Dame and … of Paris and even Frenchness.”12
It’s true that, in previous eras, churches needed waterspouts for practical purposes. But it’s also true that their necessarily odd shape lent itself to a bit of ornamental fun for the stoneworkers. Indeed, we shouldn’t discount the fact that gargoyles were partly about humor. Most ordinary medievals probably thought it was funny to see a monkey hurling runoff across the town square. It seems fitting, moreover, that something ugly would be doing the hurling. You’re not going to have a Saint Joan of Arc or a Venus de Milo vomiting rain from the rooftops, as one writer pointed out.13 This might be part of the reason why gargoyles are fearful, absurd, even demonic.
But how is it that these stone demons could have been allowed to perch on our churches? It’s important to grasp that, demonic or not, in the Middle Ages, gargoyles were not seen, even by the most orthodox (St. Bernard excepted), as religiously suspect. They were considered, rather, essential parts of the building’s spiritual significance.
It turns out that there are a vast array of theological opinions regarding gargoyles. For starters, gargoyles have been somewhat famously interpreted as apotropaic objects ― objects meant to ward off evil. It was thought that, by making gargoyles as ugly as possible, real demons would be frightened away from the church.14 This is similar to the still common opinion that the ringing of church bells frightens demons from churches.15
At the same time, gargoyles were also supposed to frighten the townspeople ― not away from the church, but into it. Peered at by monsters, the faithful were meant to realize that evil is all around them and, as two nineteenth-century writers remarked, “the only true refuge or remedy is within the church.”16 Those who prefer this interpretation often link gargoyles to a prayer from the Psalms: “Deliver … my life from the power of the dog! Save me from the mouth of the lion” (Ps 22:20-21).
Other interpreters point out that many gargoyles are carved in such a way that it’s clear they are not so much doing the frightening as much as they are themselves frightened ― and they’re frightened of us. When they look down into our lives and into the course of human affairs, there’s nothing to do but tremble and scream. It is an artistically ingenious indictment of our behavior. It’s a call to repent. Indeed, perhaps even the demons are scandalized by our lives.17
Still others interpret gargoyles as a spiritual metaphor, with a focus on their function. Yes, gargoyles remove rain from the church’s exterior. But perhaps they also remove sin from its interior, from the congregation within.18 This interpretation is most vividly represented by those gargoyles who are turned around and, instead of vomiting fluid from the gutter, defecate it.19
A very popular interpretation is the allegorical one. According to this line of thinking, each gargoyle on a church is said to symbolize some specific vice, usually one of the seven deadly sins.20 Some are seen pulling open their mouths ― a reference to gluttony.21 In general, at that time, animals were said to represent specific sins. The serpent was associated with envy; the wild boar with anger; and so on.22 It is common to interpret a medieval church this way, as though it were a “catechism of stone.”23
There are a number of additional, less common, interpretations. Some have fantastically described gargoyles as fallen creatures who have been kicked out of the sanctuary ― cursed humans, perhaps, who have distorted themselves and become permanently hardened in their place outside the church.24 Others have described them as captured demons who have been forced to perform menial tasks like spewing rainwater or even holding up the building.25
Part of the mystery of gargoyles is the way in which they defy straightforward interpretation. This has become markedly true as gargoyles have endured into the modern world.
The most famous gargoyle in the world is Notre Dame’s Le Stryge in Paris. At times, he’s been interpreted allegorically, as a straightforward symbol of either sloth or lust.26 The designer of Le Stryge, though ― Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc ― explicitly rejected the idea that his gargoyle was an allegory. Le Stryge was not carved in the Middle Ages, when allegorical interpretations were common, but in the nineteenth-century. Viollet-le-Duc insisted his gargoyle somehow spoke to the entire drama of the modern spirit. Indeed, Le Stryge was meant to capture what he thought of as the boredom, sadness, and anxiety of his contemporaries ― the spiritual hauntedness of modern humanity.27
Something like this was in Sigmund Freud’s mind as well. When he came to Paris in 1899, he couldn’t help but think of Notre Dame’s gargoyles as depictions of the disturbed mental states of modern Parisians.28 This was actually a common medical and psychological point of view from the time. “It is remarkable,” the historian Michael Camille has pointed out, “how many articles on gargoyles appeared in the pages of popular medical journals [in the nineteenth-century] … as doctors and medical students began looking at the sculpted stones vomiting and squirming in pain on their local churches as possible patients.”29
This is a very modern move ― rethinking gargoyles by way of psychology. Indeed, modern people often struggle to believe even in the existence of demons. We have, very often, reinterpreted demons as interior psychological problems rather than beings which live outside us. We talk about “inner demons,” but strain to believe in “outer demons.” It’s fitting, as a modern, that Freud could not see external-to-us demons in Paris’s gargoyles, but only the interior struggles of his patients. It’s fitting that Viollet-le-Duc saw Le Stryge as a depiction of sadness and anxiety. Human psychological difficulties are indeed very real, and it’s to modernity’s credit that we’ve become more aware of our “inner demons.” But seeing gargoyles this way does constitute an important change.
Gargoyles represent something of a touchstone for the way modern people think about history. For many moderns, gargoyles represent a medieval past that was marked by widespread irrationality and barbarism. What better image than the gargoyle exists to capture this?
Though this view of the Middle Ages has, by now, been somewhat thoroughly debunked, it remains striking to compare gargoyles carved in the modern world as an homage to the Middle Ages with those gargoyles that were actually carved in the Middle Ages. Medieval gargoyles were indeed disordered and unsettling, but modern gargoyles are actually far more grotesque and absurd.30 Not a few commentators have pointed out that these modern gargoyles reflect less of what the Middle Ages actually were and more of the way moderns imagine the Middle Ages to have been ― an age of unthinking savagery.31 We might even say that modern gargoyles function as a way to deliberately forget the “Dark Ages.” And so, by caricaturing them, perhaps we feel safe that ridiculous ideas like demons are safely in the past.
Today, gargoyles are only rarely installed and, when they are, their outlandishness makes them into mere novelties — something we’re unable to learn from. Their ridiculousness prevents us from believing in demons at all. We are now unable to encounter gargoyles in a serious way and, as such, unable, through them, to come to know something of ourselves, of evil, or of redemption.
In modern architecture or design, there is no longer any space for the gargoyle. I wonder if our tendency to see them as paragons of a dark past is somehow related to the bright and cleaned up style of modernity. Our buildings are “too bright, too clean, too transparent for the ghosts and memories of the unconscious to hide,” Christopher Grunenberg has said.32 The idea of “sin” and the demonic has disappeared under the fluorescent lights of our contemporary ways of seeing. As such, the gargoyles have disappeared from our buildings.
The medievals offered an altogether different picture of the world. For the medievals, even as reality is intelligible and able to be contemplated, it is also wild, mysterious, and unpredictable. “Gargoyles … may have been symbols of the unpredictability and chaos of life,” art historian Janetta Rebold Benton writes. And so “the structure of the medieval church offered a way to deal with this disorder and danger.”33 In the nineteenth-century, John Ruskin wrote of those who carve gargoyles: “It is because the dreadfulness of the universe around him weighs upon his heart, that his work is wild; and therefore through the whole of it we shall find the evidence of deep insight into nature. His beasts and birds, however monstrous, will have profound relations with the true.”34
On the inside, medieval churches were ordered and calming, even as they ushered in a sense of God’s transcendence. On the outside, this elaborate order was shot through with savagery, horror, and sin. The gargoyle gave the medievals a way of acknowledging the darker, more mysterious corners of life. Their incoherence teaches us something important ― namely, that the world is far more complicated than we think. Contemporary Catholics can sometimes too much desire clarity. There are answers for everything. This is Christianity, but without the gargoyles. The gargoyles remind us that God is far more strange than we often think.
Of course, gargoyles are not just about the dreadful universe around us. Gargoyles are also about us. In each of us, as in a medieval church, there is order and beauty and transcendence right alongside ugliness and sin. We are, each of us, a cathedral – we are beautiful but also disturbing, ordered and yet unpredictable, serene and yet wild.
In Victor Hugo’s novel The Hunchback of Notre Dame — more famous now for its Disney adaptation — there is a portrayal of gargoyles that captures this point. The book opens with Quasimodo, the bell-ringer of Notre Dame, described as though he is a gargoyle. “I hear him at night,” one man says, “prowling around in the gutters” of the church. He is described as “a giant who had been broken in pieces and badly soldered together again.” The name Quasimodo, in fact, means “in a way” – signifying the sense in which, because of his deformities, he is (like a gargoyle) only human in a way.35
Of course, Quasimodo lives in Notre Dame’s towers. And, like a gargoyle, he becomes a feature of the building and takes on its very spirit. “Little by little,” Hugo tells us, “[Quasimodo’s] spirit expanded in harmony with the cathedral; there he lived, there he slept; scarcely ever leaving it, and, being perpetually subject to its mysterious influence, he came at last to resemble it, to be encrusted with it.”36 We even learn that the “statues … of monsters and demons bore no malice against him. They resembled him too much for that.”37
Some of the book’s other characters deepen the point. The archdeacon Claude Frollo, who also lives at Notre Dame, is immersed in the occult, the whole of his attention moving among demonic things. His obsession with Esmeralda, who he both hates and lusts after, recalls the vices of the gargoyles and chimeras. Indeed, he often peers out from the balustrade right alongside them (or, we can say, as one of them), desiring Esmeralda, even while he judges and despises her.
But this is true for all of us. “Man does not stand proud on the tower, superior to the throng of monsters,” Michael Camille has said. “Instead, he is caught up himself with their shadowy world.”38 We are gargoyles. We are Quasimodo and Claude Frollo, we are criminals from Rouen, hunchbacked contortions of scattered vices that make us human in a way.
In the scriptures, we see Christians described as though they are the church ― even the church building. Saint Paul tells Christians: “you are God’s building” (1 Cor 3:9). And Saint Peter says that, “like living stones, you are being built into a spiritual house” (1 Peter 2:5). This is precisely what the medievals captured with their gargoyles. The Church is built up of souls which are both glorious and crooked; and so our church buildings are too. God “causes the rain to fall on the just and on the unjust alike” (see Mt 5:45).
Gargoyles are enigmatic, confusing, and frightening. They are like the Middle Ages and like modernity. They are like the Church and like you and me. And whether they scream upon our modern balustrades or not, our gargoyles are there ― haunting us, being frightened by us, and showing us who we are.
See Butler’s Lives of the Saints, vol. 4, ed. Herbert J. Thurston and Donald Attwater (Allen, TX: Christian Classics, 1996), 184-185. Of course, the link between the Privilège de Saint-Romain and the historical Saint Romanus is purely legendary. There is no evidence of death row inmates having ever been pardoned until the 12th century, 500 years after Romanus’s death. See Amable Floquet, Histoire du privilège de Saint-Romain (Rouen: E. Legrand, 1833).
See Janetta Rebold Benton, Holy Terrors, 12.
See Benton, Holy Terrors, 9.
Benton, Holy Terrors, 11.
See Rebold, Holy Terrors, 44.
Cited in Conrad Rudolf, The “Things of Greater Importance”: Bernard of Clairvaux’s Apologia and the Medieval Attitude toward Art (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), 11-12.
See Camille, The Gargoyles of Notre-Dame, 112 for more.
See Benton, Holy Terrors, 40.
See Benton, Holy Terrors, 21.
See Richard Taylor, How to Read a Church: A Guide to Symbols and Images in Churches and Cathedrals (London: HiddenSpring, 2005), 26.
See Benton, Holy Terrors, 42.
Patrice Higonnet, review of The Gargoyles of Notre‐Dame: Medievalism and the Monsters of Modernity, by Michael Camille, The Journal of Modern History 84, no. 2 (2010), 952.
See Louis H. Gibson, “Gargoyles” Modern Art 1, no. 3 (Autumn 1893).
See Benton, Holy Terrors, 24.
See the now abrogated 1908 Rite for Blessing a Church Bell which prays that “all evil spirits be driven afar” at the sounding of the bell. Available here: https://broshlegaspi.org/blessing-of-a-bell/.
Charles Cahier and Arthur Martin, Mélanges d'archéologie, d’histoire et de littérature, vol. 1 (Paris: Poussielgue-Rusand, 1847-1849), 76. Cited and translated in Camille, The Gargoyles of Notre-Dame, 44.
See Benton, Holy Terrors, 52.
See Camille, The Gargoyles of Notre-Dame, 17.
See Benton, Holy Terrors, 60.
See U. Voll and S.A. Kenel, New Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 4, 2nd ed. (2003), s.v. “Deadly Sins,” 565.
Benton, Holy Terrors, 56.
Benton, Holy Terrors, 86.
See Camille, The Gargoyles of Notre-Dame, 45.
See Benton, Holy Terrors, 25.
See Camille, The Gargoyles of Notre-Dame, 44; Benton Holy Terrors, 50.
See Camille, The Gargoyles of Notre-Dame, 208.
See Camille, The Gargoyles of Notre-Dame, 201.
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (London: Hogarth Press and Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1953), 199.
Camille, The Gargoyles of Notre-Dame, 263.
See Camille, The Gargoyles of Notre-Dame, 158.
See Camille, The Gargoyles of Notre-Dame, xi.
Christoph Grunenberg, Gothic: Transmutations of Horror in Late Twentieth-Century Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 116. Also see Camille, The Gargoyles of Notre-Dame, 304.
Benton, Holy Terrors, 25.
John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice (New York: Peter Fenelon Collier and Son, 1900), 3:143.
Victor Hugo, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, trans. Catherine Liu (New York: Modern Library, 2002), The Hunchback, 44.
Hugo, The Hunchback, 137.
Hugo, The Hunchback, 140.
Camille, The Gargoyles of Notre-Dame, 228.