No Dread of the Undead
Robert Hart on Virtues & Vampires
. . . that diabolic aid which is surely to him; for it have to yield to the powers that come from and are symbolic of good. . . . Thus are we ministers of God’s own wish: That the world, and men for whom His Son die, will not be given over to monsters, whose very existence would defame Him. He have allowed us to redeem one soul already, and we go out as the old knights of the Cross to redeem more. Like them we shall travel towards the sunrise; and like them, if we fall, we fall in good cause . . . for the good of mankind, and for the honour and glory of God.
—Dr. Abraham Van Helsing, mustering the courage of
his companions in Bram Stoker’s Dracula
The vampires in the popular TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, I am told, are all evil—except one named Angel. He is a vampire “cursed with a soul.” In other words, he does the same evil things to defenseless people that all vampires do, only we are supposed to accept him because he feels bad about it. What a moral quagmire pop culture can be these days.
In other hands, the vampire has, from being the perfect symbol of evil when Bram Stoker’s Dracula appeared in 1897, become sexy, attractive, and able to laugh in the face of God and man—and even, as in the novels of Anne Rice, sensitive and tragic. Today’s vampire can stare down a man holding a crucifix and he can withstand the Real Presence of Christ in the Blessed Sacrament. (Rice’s vampire Lestat breaks open a tabernacle and takes out “the jeweled ciborium with its consecrated Hosts. No, there was no power here, nothing that I could feel or see or know with any of my monstrous senses, nothing that responded to me.”)
A Loss
Today’s vampire is all the more dangerous for existing in a fictional world that has neither good nor evil in it. One sees a hint of sympathy for the demonic in the revised versions, suggesting a reaction against religion rather than simply a change of taste. This is a loss, for in Stoker’s hands the vampire story was a parable of the mercy of God, a lesson in the reality of the Blessed Sacrament, and an extolment of the Seven Virtues.
Stoker based his vampire upon the genuine superstition of the mountain people of Romania. It had grown up among people who knew that evil—which will be defeated and ultimately destroyed by God and his Church—is inherently weak and unreal. It is not sexy or attractive.
Stoker’s Dracula was ugly, and his breath stank with the foul odor of undead centuries. Being in the grip of evil, he went about spreading his misery by draining the life, the soul of the flesh, which is in the blood, from his victims. The sight of him repelled everyone who suffered the misfortune to behold him. He existed only to perpetuate his unnatural—dead—life.
He is a symbol for everything that sin makes of men, and of the pure evil that ensnares them through it. In the character of Dracula, written to be as minimal as his undead state demands, nothing can be observed except that some of the Seven Deadly Sins had captured his soul. For example, he is quick to wrath so as to be thoroughly exacting in vengeance. He is very proud that he was the greatest of the nobles that his country ever produced, especially in war.
Lust, in a strange undead way, dominates him as well. He keeps three vampire wives, all of whom gain power over their male victims by becoming sexually irresistible. He goes after female victims exclusively. There is no hint that he has charmed or seduced any of them; just the opposite, he is a brute beast, a sort of serial rapist.
Robert Hart is rector of St. Benedict's Anglican Catholic Church in Chapel Hill, North Carolina (Anglican Catholic Church Original Province). He also contributes regularly to the blog The Continuum. He is a contributing editor of Touchstone.
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