On the cusp of the modern age, in the twilight of the Medieval era, a figure seeming to have emerged from the margin of a manuscript was caught by fishermen and presented to the King of Poland - a fish that seemed to wear something like the vestments of a bishop. This novelty was a great delight to the King, but when his bishops met the fish it indicated its desire to be freed. The episcopate prevailed upon their monarch who reluctantly released the fish. On its return to the sea it turned back and made a sign of the cross over those who released it.
This strange folk tale is clearly about a liminal figure, with the characteristics of absurdity and the monstrous one might expect to emerge from the sea. And yet does it reveal the arbitrariness of the late Medieval Catholic faith? Is not the bishop fish something like the arbitrary caricature of a deity reminiscent of the new atheists’ spaghetti monster, which was created to indicate the arbitrary absurdity of a world governed by a divine Logos rather than chaos.
The spaghetti monster is propaganda for the case that religious faith is arbitrary and a random belief. In one sense the Bishop Fish is both absurd and arbitrary. He emerges just as the world of Medieval symbolism is breaking down and nominalism is about to gain a hold over the European mind. Nominalism being that theological perspective that asserted God as free and therefore arbitrary. America is about to be discovered and the world proved to be round.
We can better understand this seemingly arbitrary figure through the work of the Pageau brothers, who make the case for the meaning and coherence of Medieval and Ancient symbolism. The marginal figure is indeed absurd because he represents the edge of and the limit of order. Jonathan Pageau has pointed to the gargoyles on the edge and outskirts of the church building, otherwise designed to follow a very exact and non-arbitrary hierarchical order, from the chancel to the nave. It is on the edge that symbolism breaks down. The monsters are found on the edge of the world.
From a traditional religious standpoint a character as arbitrary as the spaghetti monster would only be found in the liminal space - the edge of the world, the ocean. It points to the new atheist misunderstanding of religious faith in that traditional religion is an assertion of the order and structure of reality and the claim that reality is not arbitrary. Indeedin our postmodern times, the materialist’s world quickly breaks down into flux, with nothing transcendent to hold its structure together.
But the Bishop Fish is not simply liminal. He has the authority to give a blessing. In this sense he is more like the strange Orthodox icons of Saint Christopher depicted with a dog’s head (a favourite figure of Jonathan Pageau).
Surely what we see in the figure of the Bishop Fish is the order of the Logos through the Church giving meaning and structure even to the chaotic realm of the sea - formless and churning. One is reminded of the beginning of Genesis - And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
The Logos speaks order and form into the dark void of the deep. And a bishop who is also a fish might just symbolise the domain of the Logos over the watery chaos. And the Logos operates upon the world through His Apostolic Church. A bishop is an authority of the Church, a fish is a strange and monstrous creature, living under water, without legs or arms, existing in a dark and uninhabitable place. The combination has meaning, it is not arbitrary.
Is this just a story to illustrate the invisible God’s authority over the void? Perhaps, on the cusp of modernity, there is even more to this strange figure. And here one risks inviting the ridicule of the New Atheist. It is about perception. In the late Fifteenth and early Sixteenth Century we are at the final waning of the Medieval mind that was able to perceive differently, perhaps perceive more holistically than our nominalist and empirical senses of modernity.
The Medieval man, much like the ancient and classical man existed in a more full world, symbolic and rich with meaning. Everything pointed to God, as we find in the work of the last great Medieval voice as modernity corroded all around him - Dante Alighieri and his masterpiece, the Divine Comedy. Nothing was random or arbitrary; nothing represented the meaningless and random combination of the Spaghetti Monster’s characteristics.
In this symbolic world there was a heightened perception of reality and that which is not palpable. The highest faculty was the mind or the nous - itself invisible and intangible. The ultimate aspiration was the heavenly realm. At the same time the immaterial soul was entirely embodied in physical Creation that was good and, though fallen, pointed to God. There was nothing at all arbitrary about the ancient or Medieval worlds. And we still hold onto much of that immaterial realm, bar the transcendental principle of God upon which these aspects depend - logic, morality, that the cosmos is governed by consistent principles (the Christian idea at the root of science, because empiricism would be meaningless unless rules discovered held and did not change the next day).
Everything in the cosmos pointed to the glory of its immaterial and spiritual Creator. The chasm between Creator and creature was bridged by the Incarnation of the Godhead in the physical reality of Jesus Christ in First-Century Palestine.
It was therefore possible to perceive the world and the particular creatures making it up more holistically and see their spiritual meaning. In that sense it is entirely credible that a strange and exotic deep sea creature might point very clearly to the glory of God. We now would not be capable of perceiving this, existing in a materialist paradigm. The fish is described as looking as though it wore bishop’s vestments, not actually wearing vestments. And in this almost-modern world those who reference this folk tale express some scepticism. Nonetheless, when creatures point to their and our Creator they will do so in the realm of mystery. It will be subtle and only perceived by the spiritually-attuned.
This bizarre story, in which the fluid realm of the unknown, the liminal, the monstrous and the chaotic is shown to have in some sense ecclesiastical orders is an affirmation of order and structure even in the deep. It is an affirmation of the universal governance of God through His Logos.
In that sense this strange Bishop Fish is not an assertion of the bizarre, freakish, and laughably superstitious. No it is an affirmation of the ordering principle of the Logos and the preeminence of the Church as Christ’s body on earth. In that sense it is the very opposite of not only the Spaghetti Monster, but our world of flux, chaos and nihilism - the world of Jackson Pollock and Tracey Emin. A world with no boundaries and no meaning. And yet we moderns and post-moderns have the temerity and lack of self awareness to mock the Bishop Fish. Indeed it seems that the Spaghetti Monster is a far more fitting deity for our post-modern world than it would ever have been for Christendom.
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