Did Augustine believe there were people with no heads and eyes growing out of their shoulders? What about people with dog heads who barked instead of speaking? Or a race of people with only one enormous foot, who supposedly lay on their backs and used that foot as a parasol against the sun? Augustine knew all of these stories, and in The City of God he devoted an entire chapter to them.

His answer is considerably more interesting than either “yes” or “no.” Augustine was skeptical of the reports and explicitly said Christians were under no obligation to believe them. But he also thought simply laughing them away missed the more difficult theological question. If one of these strange creatures really existed, how would we know whether it was an animal or a human being?

And if it was human, Augustine thought the answer to the next question was unavoidable. It belonged to the same human family as everyone else. However strange its body might look, it ultimately descended from Adam.

The Monster Races Were Already Ancient

Augustine did not invent the monster races. By the time he wrote The City of God in the early fifth century, Greek and Roman authors had been repeating stories about strange peoples living at the edges of the known world for centuries. The details changed from author to author, but the same basic creatures kept showing up.

Herodotus, writing in the fifth century BC, placed some of them in the distant regions of Libya. Among the animals and unusual peoples supposedly found there, he mentions “the dog-headed and the headless men that have their eyes in their chests.” Significantly, Herodotus qualifies the claim with “as the Libyans say,” so even this early account comes to us as reported information rather than something Herodotus claimed to have personally observed.

Several centuries later, Pliny the Elder collected an enormous number of such reports in Natural History. His seventh book describes one-eyed peoples, men whose feet turned backward, dog-headed peoples, one-legged peoples, tiny peoples, and people whose eyes were located around their shoulders. Pliny says of the dog-headed race that they “have the heads of dogs” and that instead of ordinary speech “they bark.”

Aulus Gellius encountered essentially the same material in books of marvels. In Attic Nights 9.4, he recounts dog-headed people living in India, one-legged people capable of remarkable speed, people without necks whose eyes were located at their shoulders, and tiny Pygmies. These stories were not an obscure curiosity that suddenly appeared in Augustine. They belonged to a well-established Greek and Roman tradition of writing about distant lands and the strange inhabitants supposedly found there.

That background helps explain why Augustine takes up the question at all. He is not announcing a new Christian teaching about secret populations of monsters. He has inherited a collection of reports from secular literature and is asking how Christians should think about them.

Augustine’s List Gets Weird Quickly

The discussion appears in City of God XVI.8, in a section dealing with humanity after Noah and the dispersion of peoples across the earth. Augustine begins by asking whether the strange races described in secular histories could have descended from Noah’s sons and ultimately from Adam. The position of the chapter is important because Augustine’s subject is human genealogy, not cryptozoology.

Then he runs through the reports. There are people with one eye in the center of the forehead. Others supposedly have feet turned backward. Some have no mouths and breathe only through their noses, while others are extremely small and called Pygmies.

Then come the Skiapods. Augustine describes a people with what amounts to one functional leg and an enormous foot. According to the story, they could move with extraordinary speed, then lie on their backs during the hottest part of the day and hold the giant foot above themselves for shade. Pliny had already recorded essentially the same story, so Augustine is drawing from a much older stock of marvel literature rather than offering an eyewitness report.

Augustine then mentions the people who have no heads and whose eyes are located at their shoulders. Later monster traditions commonly associate this form with the Blemmyes, although Augustine does not use that name in this chapter. He also knew that such beings had entered popular visual culture, because he says that human and quasi-human races were depicted in a mosaic at the harbor area of Carthage.

Finally he comes to perhaps the most famous of the group: the Cynocephali. The name literally identifies them as dog-headed. Augustine describes them as having canine heads and barking rather than speaking, and that particular detail gives him trouble because it raises the question of whether these beings should be classified as humans at all.

Augustine Does Not Just Believe the Stories

At precisely the point where a modern reader might assume that an ancient Christian writer will swallow the whole catalog, Augustine puts on the brakes. He says plainly, “we are not bound to believe all we hear of these monstrosities.” That sentence controls the rest of the discussion.

Augustine therefore should not be cited as if he straightforwardly taught that dog-headed people and Skiapods really existed. He did not claim that. He repeatedly treats their existence as conditional, and near the end of the chapter he reminds his reader that these reports may simply be false.

His suspicion is not difficult to understand. Travelers can misunderstand what they see. Writers can exaggerate. An unfamiliar animal might be described as a strange human, and once the story passes from one writer to another, the error becomes part of an apparently respectable historical tradition.

Augustine specifically raises something like this possibility. Suppose someone had never seen an ape or monkey. An unreliable historian might present such an animal as a strange race of men and congratulate himself on his marvelous discovery. Augustine is not using the modern methods of anthropology, but he clearly understands the basic problem of unreliable reporting.

So Augustine’s position is neither simple credulity nor simple disbelief. He does not know whether the reports are true, and he refuses to pretend that he does.

But What If One of Them Was Real?

Here Augustine changes the question. Instead of asking whether all the travel stories are historically reliable, he asks what would follow if one of the reported peoples actually existed. That distinction lets him separate the uncertainty of the evidence from the theological principle.

Augustine defines a human being, for purposes of the argument, as a “rational, mortal animal.” The word animal here carries its older philosophical sense of a living creature, not the modern contrast in which humans are spoken of as something other than animals. His criterion is therefore not whether a being looks like the Romans Augustine happened to know, but whether it possesses the kind of nature that makes it human.

That is why bodily appearance cannot settle the question. A human being could differ radically in color, movement, voice, physical ability, or bodily structure and still possess a common human nature. Augustine says that the unusual feature must be distinguished from the underlying nature of the creature.

This is also why the Cynocephali are his hardest case. Their dog-like heads alone would apparently not prove anything. Their barking, however, seems to Augustine to indicate that they may lack rational speech, and therefore he says it makes them appear more like beasts than humans.

Modern scholarship has correctly emphasized that Augustine is more interested in the boundary of humanity than in developing a category of “monsters.” Gwendolyne Knight describes him as more concerned with whether these unusual beings belong “to the human category” than with defining a separate monstrous class.

That is exactly the movement of the chapter. Augustine has inherited a monster catalog. He turns it into theological anthropology.

The Strange Body Does Not Cancel Human Nature

Augustine supports the argument by moving from fabulous races to unusual people whose humanity nobody disputes. He knew that individual human beings were sometimes born with bodies that differed dramatically from what was usual. If one unusual body can occur within an unquestionably human family, then physical difference by itself cannot tell us where humanity stops.

He mentions people born with additional fingers and toes. He reports knowing of a man at Hippo-Diarrhytus whose hands and feet were unusually formed and had only two digits each. He also recalls reports of a person born with two heads, two chests, and four hands joined to a single lower body, who lived long enough to be seen by many people.

Augustine’s argument does not depend on determining the medical accuracy of every example. His point is much simpler. Nobody sees an unusual child born to ordinary human parents and concludes that the child belongs to a different created species.

Now expand the example. Suppose an entire population possessed the same unusual physical characteristic. Why should the feature suddenly cease to be a variation within humanity merely because it appeared consistently throughout a population?

That is Augustine’s bridge from unusual individuals to the supposed monster races. A bodily form can be uncommon without being nonhuman. The appearance may be extraordinary; the nature may still be the same.

The Monster Is Only Monstrous From Where We Stand

Augustine then adds a doctrine of providence to the anthropology. Human beings see fragments of creation. God sees the whole, and therefore something that appears misshapen when viewed by itself may have a place within an order too large for us to perceive.

He argues that the Creator knows where and when each creature should exist and how similarities and differences belong within the beauty of creation. Human judgment is limited because we look at the unusual part without seeing the whole to which it belongs. The argument reappears later in City of God XXI.8, where Augustine connects monstra, portents, and other marvels with the freedom and power of the Creator over nature.

We do not have to accept every part of Augustine’s aesthetics of physical difference to see what he is trying to prevent. He does not want unusual embodiment turned into an argument against divine wisdom. Nor does he allow normal human appearance to become the definition of humanity.

That is a more significant conclusion than the catalog of creatures surrounding it. Augustine begins with headless men and people who use their feet as umbrellas. He ends up asking whether human dignity depends upon looking normal.

His answer is no.

If They Are Human, They Come From Adam

The chapter finally comes back to Genesis. Augustine believed that humanity shares a common origin in Adam and, after the Flood, through Noah. Therefore there cannot be an unrelated race of rational human beings existing outside the human family described by Scripture.

Notice the order of his reasoning. He does not say that anything vaguely human-shaped must descend from Adam. He first asks whether the creature really is human. Only after that question has been answered does the genealogical conclusion follow.

This allows Augustine to end with three possibilities. The stories may be false and the races may not exist. The creatures may exist but not actually be human. Or they may exist and really be human, in which case Augustine says they necessarily belong to Adam’s descendants.

That is an unusually careful ending for a chapter about dog-headed men. Augustine preserves the distinction between what he knows and what he is merely considering. He does not allow uncertainty about the reports to produce uncertainty about the principle.

The immediate argument is about genealogy rather than an extended doctrine of salvation. Still, the implication is substantial. There is no second humanity hiding somewhere beyond the borders of the Roman world, created separately because its members look too strange to belong to us.

If rational, mortal beings are human, they are our relatives.

Augustine Was Skeptical Without Being Reductionistic

There is something refreshing about Augustine’s approach to these stories. He does not have to believe an extraordinary report simply because an old book contains it. Ancient authorities can be mistaken, travelers can misunderstand what they encounter, and writers can repeat impressive nonsense.

But skepticism does not give him permission to stop thinking. Suppose, however unlikely, that the report turned out to be true. Christianity would still need an answer.

That combination is probably the most useful feature of the chapter. Augustine distinguishes the historical question from the theological question. Historically, we may not have sufficient evidence to believe in Skiapods or Cynocephali. Theologically, if we discovered a rational race whose bodies differed radically from ours, Christianity already has conceptual room for them.

They would not threaten the biblical doctrine of humanity merely by looking strange.

The Strangest Part of Augustine’s Monster Races

So did Augustine believe in headless men? We cannot honestly say that he did. He knew the reports, considered them possible enough to discuss, and explicitly warned his readers that the stories might be false.

What he could not dismiss was the question hiding underneath them. Where does humanity end? Is it determined by a familiar face, the expected number of limbs, ordinary speech, or the proportions of a body?

Augustine’s answer is considerably more expansive than his ancient monster catalog might lead us to expect. Bodies can be strange. Reports can be unreliable. But if somewhere beyond the edge of the world Augustine knew there really lived rational, mortal beings with one enormous foot, eyes in their shoulders, or even the head of a dog, their strangeness would not create another human family.

If they were human at all, they were children of Adam.

For the primary texts behind the discussion, Augustine’s City of God XVI.8 is freely available through Project Gutenberg, which identifies the edition as public domain in the United States. Pliny’s catalogue can be read in Natural History VII.2, while Herodotus preserves an earlier version of the headless and dog-headed reports in Histories IV.191.

For related material on Fresh Ground Theology, the background of Noah and the strange ancient world connects naturally with the discussions of the Nephilim and the Watchers. The broader supernatural setting is also developed in the overview of the pre-Flood world.