“The imagination groups and compares; it never creates,” replied St. Catherine drily.

“They exist already,” continued St. Antony, who would listen to nothing.  “They are called harpies, and they are the most obscene animals in creation.  One day as I was having supper in the desert with the Abbot St. Paul, I placed the table outside my cabin under an old sycamore tree.  The harpies came and sat in its branches; they deafened us with their shrill cries and cast their excrement over all our food.  The clamour of the monsters prevented me from listening to the teaching of the Abbot St. Paul, and we ate birds’ dung with our bread and lettuces.  Lord, it is impossible to believe that harpies could give thee worthy praise.

“Truly in my temptations I have seen many hybrid beings, not only women-serpents and women-fishes, but beings still more confusedly formed such as men whose bodies were made out of a pot, a bell, a clock, a cupboard full of food and crockery, or even out of a house with doors and windows through which people engaged in their domestic tasks could be seen.  Eternity would not suffice were I to describe all the monsters that assailed me in my solitude, from whales rigged like ships to a shower of red insects which changed the water of my fountain into blood.  But none were as disgusting as the harpies whose offal polluted the leaves of my sycamore.”

“Harpies,” observed Lactantius, “are female Monsters with birds’ bodies.  They have a woman’s head and breast.  Their forwardness, their shamelessness, and their obscenity proceed from their female nature as the poet Virgil demonstrated in his ‘Aeneid.’  They share the curse of Eve.”

“Let us not speak of the curse of Eve,” said the Lord.  “The second Eve has redeemed the first.”

Paul Orosius, the author of a universal history that Bossuet was to imitate in later years, arose and prayed to the Lord: 

“Lord, hear my prayer and Anthony’s.  Do not make any more monsters like the Centaurs, Sirens, and Fauns, whom the Greeks, those collectors of fables, loved.  You will derive no satisfaction from them.  Those species of monsters have pagan inclinations and their double nature does not dispose them to purity of morals.”

The bland Lactantius replied in these terms: 

“He who has just spoken is assuredly the best historian in Paradise, for Herodotus, Thucydides, Polybius, Livy, Velleius Paterculus, Cornelius Nepos, Suetonius, Manetho, Diodorus Siculus, Dion Cassius, and Lampridius are deprived of the sight of God, and Tacitus suffers in hell the torments that are reserved for blasphemers.  But Paul Orosius does not know heaven as well as he knows the earth, for he does not seem to bear in mind that the angels, who proceed from man and bird, are purity itself.”

“We are wandering,” said the Eternal.  “What have we to do with all those centaurs, harpies, and angels?  We have to deal with penguins.”