The premise of The Binding of Isaac seems a skewering of religion, as the game parallels the story of Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son, Isaac, with tendencies towards religious mania and child abuse. The game begins by introducing us to a more contemporary version of Isaac and his mother, an avid viewer of Christian television. Believing that she has heard a voice from God that has instructed her to purge Isaac of evil, she aims to do so. This request, to purge her son of evil, is put to her twice before the more ominous command to kill her son is finally given.
Thus begins the game, a shmup and rogue-like that obviously owes something to games like Zelda, Bezerk, and Diablo. Isaac’s attempts to escape his fate lead him to flee down a trapdoor in his room into an underworld full of grotesque monsters that he battles with his own tears (the “bullets” of this shmup).
While some might interpret this re-imagining of the story of Isaac as a deliberate effort to challenge the rationality of following God’s commands and, thus, perhaps, the rationality of the Christian faith itself, in an interview, the game’s designer Edmund McMillen suggests that that is not the underlying interest of the game’s message:
[N]othing in the game is really anti-Christian. It can be taken as that, but it really isn’t, a lot of the stuff in the game is by the book, literally. I think it’s more of a conversation about religion more so than me saying Christianity is bad. It’s more like “Hey, let’s talk about religion, let’s think about it. I’m gonna throw some things out there, give you some context here and there, and let you figure out how you feel about what I might or might not be talking about.” It’s not this literal slap in the face to Christianity in any way. The majority of what I’m drawing on is my experience with Catholicism, the pros and cons, I guess. It [is] honestly me having a conversation with myself about how I felt about religion growing up, and that’s how it came out. (Lewie Procter, ”Interview: Edmund McMillen Spills The Beans on The Wrath Of The Lamb & More, IndieGames, 27 January 2012)
While McMillen claims that his version of the story is “by the book, literally,” some of the motivations for Isaac’s mother are seemingly entirely of McMillen’s own making. The implication that the binding of Isaac is related in some way to purging the boy of evil is not really part of the original story, which seems more dominantly about Abraham and his willingness to commit fully to the will of his God, no matter how arbitrary or difficult the command put to him. The original story doesn’t really raise the question of whether Isaac “deserves it” or not. But by including all of the discussion of Isaac’s corruption prior to the fatal request, it points at some additional theological questions that McMillen wants to talk about.
This interested me in McMillen’s discussion of the game, wherein he explains as “me having a conversation with myself about how I felt about religion growing up.” In that sense, the game’s “theology,” as it is expressed through its imagery, its items, and its gameplay, is less concerned with questioning submission to the will of God than it is about a seemingly deep-seated fear of the body.
As noted, initially Isaac’s mother is merely instructed to purge Isaac of evil. When the player learns of this, he or she is treated to a scene of Isaac’s pants falling down and him looking ashamedly down at his penis. Shame and terrors evoked by the body remains the dominant theme of most of the exclusively narrative bits of the game’s stories, the cutscenes that appear between levels of the dungeon.
Each time that the player manages to enable Isaac to reach the next level of the dungeon that he explores, he or she is treated to a scene of Isaac curled up in a fetal position, crying and recalling in a cartoon thought bubble some horrific (I guess, evil?) memory. These include: Isaac trying to give a girl a present before his pants fall down and she laughs at his exposed penis, Isaac finding himself stranded on a toilet with no toilet paper, Isaac receiving a box of feces from his “friends,” Isaac’s “friends” mooning him, etc. etc. These scenes emphasize an individual that is worried about his body, how it is perceived by others, and others’ bodies, how those bodies “speak” to him of their shame and his own.
Frankly, the whole horrific nightmare world that Isaac explores is just a series of grotesque body horrors. He battles headless corpses, disembodied heads, flies and maggots gathered around excrement, as well as monsters that attack by spewing vomit or menstrual blood or shit, all of the “scary” things that the body produces.
Again, clearly what the game speaks to is a child that has become terrified of his own body and the bodies of others, a child who feels that he must “fight” those things. Oh, and I guess he can’t help crying in fear, in outrage, and in self loathing while doing so.
In this regard, I find that McMillen’s claim that the game expresses ideas that stems from his own experience of Catholicism at once somewhat sensible and at once kind of strange. Of all the forms of American Christianity, Catholicism has a lot to say about the body and especially through the body, so that makes some sense. It is a faith that sees the spiritual world and the physical one as directly connected and that the physical is a direct expression of the spirit (the concept of transubstantiation speaks rather deliberately to this idea, in which, unlike in most Protestant faiths which see Communion as metaphoric, the bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ). Likewise, violent imagery (like some of the scenes that make up the Stations of the Cross) are frequently on display within Catholic churches, with an eye to retelling important stories of the faith in clear, sometimes shockingly visual ways (the sort of art that is often absent from the often less ornate Protestant churches). Both pietas and crucifixes emphasize a body broken for adherents to the faith, unlike the more abstracted, empty cross of Protestantism.
In a sense, Catholicism has frequently been much less terrified of the body (indeed, why should it be if the body is related directly and deliberately to spiritual reality and a means of understanding its realities as the previous examples imply?). Consider the embrace of the physically grotesque as an expression of her own theology in the writings of Flannery O’Connor, for example. McMillen’s vision of evil and the body being almost inextricably linked almost feels more like American Puritanism than Catholicism. Perhaps it is an American Catholicism that binds McMillen’s sense of his Catholic experience to shame expressed through the body (or shame in having a body at all), a version of the faith, perhaps influenced by the other denominations surrounding it in this country. If one were to visit the country with the largest Catholic population in the world, Brazil, one might find that an inherent sense of shame about the body is much less indicative of Catholic theology than one might think on American shores.
Regardless, though, the irony of the theology that informs The Binding of Isaac and seemingly Isaac’s mother (who has also seemingly taught him that the body’s natural processes might indicate evil inside himself) is that all of these “terrifying” processes are already inherently purgative, inherently useful. Whether it be vomit or menstrual blood or shit, these are the products of processes that exist within the body to remove things that would not allow the body to continue to function properly. They are maintenance processes that might seem “icky” but are really fundamentally, well, good. To do away with them would be to allow true corruption, a killing corruption, to grow and fester in the body. These things don’t make us monsters. Instead, it would be monstrous not to vomit, not to menstruate, or not to shit.
The Binding of Isaac may be less of a conversation with Catholic theology or about the theological interpretation of the story of Abraham than it is one about why we are so terrified to consider (or maybe simply misunderstand) a theology that reflects our own selves, selves that exist both spiritually and bodily.