paw publications

copyright

P. A. Watson,

College of York St John,

York

MTH980 Negotiated Study Module for MA Theology

Summer 2003

Index

Introduction 2

Chapter I Flesh abstention in the love myths of Christianity.

Chapter II The language of the flesh and the theme of sacrifice:

a speculative discussion.

Modern Relevance and Conclusions.

Bibliography of Reading, Reference and Abbreviations.

Appendix: Three plates.

No I. Caravaggio, The Sacrifice of Isaac.

No 2. Caravaggio, St. John the Baptist.

                No 3. The Wirksworth Stone

Introduction

In Richard Attenborough’s film ‘Gandhi’ (1982), an Indian declares with certain awe, ‘I know a Christian, she drinks blood, the blood of Christ, every Sunday!’ Behind this ridiculous caricature lies a truth which can only be communicated by those culturally conversant in the symbolic language of Christianity. The Christian model of ‘love’ has a unique agenda with ‘the flesh’, which is simultaneously a sacred theme expressed in sacrifice and a symbol of a fallen world and human fallibility. This language is indebted to the law of the Old Covenant, the flickering Gospel shadows of which are instrumental in knitting this schizoid complex into the unique Christian love-myth. The haphazard and random nature of the Old Testament information base promotes a deep subconscious conditioning in this language, essentially a powerful format of ‘dream-logic’ and taboo that sidelines reason and natural ethics. Out of these chaotic echoes the ‘flesh’ emerges as a constant feature of symbol and law; but significantly in the context of modern sensibilities, however bloody or down-to-earth the Old Testament drama gets, never is the subject politely avoided.

That rude Old Testament honesty is starkly in contrast to the hesitancy of the modern Church. In a rising vegetarian culture, intellectual prevarication by the Church, and refusal to take part in the dialogue, is becoming a hallmark which makes the subject of flesh consumption conspicuous today in Christian life. The Church’s lack of response even to the seasoned arguments of ‘insiders’ such as the Rev. Andrew Linzey, suggest a motivating ‘X’ factor behind the silent protection of ‘things of the flesh’, which remains hidden and unexpressed. Is this a conscious denial or the result of unconscious conditioning over-ruling ethical considerations? The limitations of ethics and justice are demonstrated in many contemporary paradoxes; should this be accepted as the case of the vegetarian issue? Or is flesh consumption an indispensable symbol in the Christian ‘love myth’- an unspoken ‘law’ of Christian identity, against which the questions of ethics are irrelevant?

In the light of these questions, rather than addressing the questions of ethics, the objective of this discussion is to explore some of the a priore assumptions and beliefs governing the killing, consumption and reverence of flesh as manifest in the symbols, ceremonies and scriptures of Christianity.

The approach is essentially an exercise in Christian self-examination, drawing its evidence and interpretations exclusively from the Judeo-Christian context. The theme focuses on both flesh consumption and abstention as uniquely spiritual expressions in Christianity. This exclusivity sets the universal questions of Natural Law and ethics, which are common to all religions and cultures, outside the scope of the discussion.

The relevance of the work is as a preparation for the inevitable day of reckoning when mainline Christianity decides to enter (or is dragged into) the contemporary dialogue. Should the Church wish to develop a clear intellectual position on the subject of flesh consumption, the strength of that position will depend on members’ careful examination of their own baggage of assumption.

Structurally, the body of the discussion is twofold:

Chapter I deals with the evidence of flesh abstention in the Christian myth The evidence was found to be obscure, yet convincing, especially when similar indications arose out of independent sources, for example in the case of the diet of John the Baptist where Mandaean texts, the Gospel of the Ebionites and the analysis of Biblical text substantiated each other. John Davidson’s research, The Gospel of Jesus: In Search of His Original Teachings, was drawn on extensively together with Lady Drower’s Mandaean research.

Chapter II is a speculative exegesis dealing with the way the Judaic cultural ‘language of the flesh’ and sacrifice impact on Christian belief and assumption regarding flesh consumption. Some of the speculations in this Chapter could not be supported by literary cross reference, and it can only be assumed that this path of enquiry has been little trodden. However, the popular book of Rabbi Lionel Blue, My Affair with Christianity, was of immense value in understanding the mind-set of Judaic culture, which was perhaps the most important key challenge in this section.

An extensive literature review was undertaken which was useful as grounding in the general subject areas but unfortunately no contemporary theologian was found overtly defending flesh consumption. The modern Darwinian-styled preoccupation with what almost amounts to the creation of a new Genesis myth (viz. development of global animal ecology, huge amounts of money going into nature programmes on television, etc), is perhaps the reason that anthropology seems to have become the covert forum for, among other socio-political agendas, the question of man’s ‘natural’ diet, which is pursued with an unmistakeable religiosity. Other periphery areas of review were animal ethics, under which the bulk of commentary on dietary issues come. Andrew Linzey and the Anglican Society for the Welfare of Animals are the two most active voices within the Church on the subject but their exclusively ethical approach limited their use in this discussion. For historical background, Colin Spencer’s A History of Vegetarianism was a uniquely objective and comprehensive work of research with good academic bibliography. Other key reading was, Meat, A Natural Symbol by Nick Fiddes. This book considers the essentially symbolic and ritual nature of everyday meat eating and its assumed role in Western culture. Though not considering the subject from an exclusively spiritual point of view, much of Fiddes vision of symbolism and assumption as expressed in apparently everyday habits was invaluable. He considers ‘the very fact that we generally choose not to recognise certain important aspects of the meaning of our words and deeds to be significant in itself.’ His careful observational approach of what was missing or went unsaid was a lesson which could be applied to the Christian context. For textual exegesis, Enoch Powell’s The Evolution of the Gospel was inspirational because of his fearless questioning and lack of religious assumption taken into the translation.

The discussion has not pursued the Christological aspects of the flesh, including the fleshly presuppositions expressed in the resurrection. These areas were treated in previous work (See 'The Christian Doctrine of Reincarnation'.

First, a note about the use of the term ‘myth’. The old dictionary-style understanding of myth as ‘purely fictitious narrative’ seems, by its simplistic black or white assertion of fact versus fiction, to peculiarly reflect the profound intellectual bleakness of early modernism. Things have moved on and a healthy cynicism has developed which views the alliance of Christian realism and scientific objective thinking as something of a philosophical cul-de-sac. This trend is having a positive impact on the appreciation of meaning and value in myth, and it is generally realised, especially as initiated by the work of Jung, that just because myth might operate on a psychological or subjective level, its archetypical truths hold keys to the understanding of the self. So, rather than ‘fictitious’, myth would, perhaps, be better understood as ‘abstract’, its very power lying in its abstract nature, enabling it to remain potent and relevant in its application through changing times and conditions. Myth governs the key presuppositions of world-view relationships upon which the individual ego is built, ‘what and who I am’, and ‘why I am here’. In such a widened definition myth cannot necessarily be narrative. For example, the ancestral myth inherited from generations of kith and kin may be unspoken, yet may govern entirely the way people see themselves and fit into a society.

Applying such meaning, it becomes obvious how the interpretation of the two initial creation stories of Genesis have profoundly influenced modern Christian assumptions and world-views with respect to non-human creature relationships, not to mention those within our own species, but to interpret Darwinian evolutionary theory as a 19^th century myth would generally be considered as a madness reserved for the Creationalists. Yet essentially the belief paradigms contingent with Darwin’s ideas do contain mythical ingredients. These will be considered, but the point here is that it has to be fully understood that belief in its profoundest form is never considered as a ‘belief’ or expressed as a creed. Belief appears to each individual as a reality and this applies equally to myth.

This having been said, clearly myth, legend and history play an indispensable role in the initiation rites of every man or woman into the shared-world of culture. As an initiation rite of ‘beginning’ or ‘conception’ this aspect could be defined as a ‘love myth’, much in the same sense that the ‘myth’ of the spark of love between mother and father becomes the love myth of every child, and the conditioning paradigm of their own love life. The concept of initiation is a relevant one in dietary issues. The sharing and sitting together at meat acts as a sort of ongoing initiation, both unspoken in the family, and ceremonially in religion and culture. Without fail, the question of food arises in very specific dietary formats in every initiation myth or ceremony of man. From a psychological point of view this is hardly surprising since the first immediate event impacting after every birth is the question of nurture. Strange, then, that the idea of creature man as a vegetarian should find a voice in the most fundamental initiation myth of western culture, Genesis, a culture for which high meat consumption has become a symbol of belonging. Yet it does. Juxtaposed alongside God’s first blessing to mankind, his first gift to his new creature is his own unique definition of ‘meat’: the seeds of herbs and the fruit of trees. This theme is reiterated in the ‘second’ creation story and subsequently in the curse delivered on Adam at the Fall from Eden. From square one, therefore, diet becomes a part of the metaphysical language through which the creature relates to his God. Of course, this is the beginning, not the end of the story. There is, for example, the confusing question of Cain and Abel, the covenant with Noah, animal sacrifice and the complexities of the Judaic dietary prohibitions together with various references in the New Covenant. But what is significant here is how the idea of a vegetarian diet appears as a symbol of initiation to an Eden–like return.

The cultural melting pot in which Christianity took birth was extraordinarily dynamic. Echoes reverberate from the prehistoric to that early Christian era in a medley of often-exchanged customs and mythology, with key dramatic characters shifting between boundaries and appearing under new guises. The custom of religious flesh abstention can be traced in Hellenic, Egyptian and Persian/Eastern influences. All these had an immense impact on Judaic thought which was as much a vehicle of influence as the recipient. An obvious example of such, in the context of diet, is the easily recognised parallel prehistoric diet to that of Genesis, recalled by Plato,

‘People kept off meat on the grounds that it was an act of impiety to eat it, or to pollute the altars of the gods with blood. So at that time men lived a sort of Orphic life, keeping exclusively to inanimate food and entirely abstaining from the flesh of animals.’

The Gospel myth also has powerful themes of initiation, the great initiator figure being John the Baptist who is cast with his famous mythical fare of locusts and honey. The figure of John is, of course, alias Elijah / Elias returned, and used as an indispensable vehicle to underwrite the New Covenant with Old Covenant authority. He thereby is uniquely fitted to become the Old Covenant initiator of the Christ. His rough-hewn image, desert abode and diet act as a powerful seal on the emergence of Christ from the desert to his ministry among men. But at first inspection, John’s diet is certainly not a vegetarian one.

However, contrary intimations come from the obscure sect of present day Mandaeans who were extant at the time of Christ. The cultural research and translation work of Lady Ethel Drower place the Mandaeans as an exiled remnant of Judaic gnosticism.. In their mythological history, The Haran Gawaita and Baptism of Hibil Ziwa, John the Baptist features as a redeemer figure. Their distinguishing practice is an ongoing cleansing ritual of baptism in a mythical ‘Jordan’ represented by the baptismal pool attached to each Manda or ritual hut, together with intricate law attached to slaughter/sacrifice. But in the Haran Gawaita, there are references to an ancient tradition that at the earliest times the chosen elect, the Nazoraeans, (extant term for a Mandaean priest) abstained from all flesh. It seems therefore reasonable to at least surmise that John might have followed such a diet. This view is independently supported by textual analysis. Enoch Powell, in his scholarly translation of Matthew, The Evolution of the Gospel, renders Matt 3:4 as, ‘… and his fare was flat cakes and wild honey.’ This conjecture is on the grounds of locusts, akrideV, being scarcely kosher. Since in Exodus 16.31 manna was described as tasting like egkrideV en melitii, ‘wheat cakes in honey’, he suggests an intended allusion to the Israelites being fed on manna in the wilderness.

Powell’s ‘wheat cakes in honey’ also seem peculiarly reminiscent of the description in Plato’s Laws VI,

‘… and there was a time when we didn’t even dare to eat beef, and the sacrifices offered to the gods were not animals but cakes and meal soaked in honey…’

Several traditions are cited by John Davidson in The Gospel of Jesus, In Search of His Original Teachings which consolidate this theme. Without reiterating the whole of his research, which is extensive, a few examples are listed here:

‘And John had a garment of camel’s hair and a leathern girdle about his loins, and his food was wild honey, the taste of which was that of manna, as a cake dipped in oil.’ The Gospel of the Ebionites.

‘The man (John) was brought before Archelaus and an assemblage of lawyers, who asked who he was and where he had been. He replied: ‘‘I am a man called by the spirit of God, and I live on stems, roots and fruit’’ … Wine and strong drink he would not allow to be brought anywhere near him, and animal food he absolutely refused – fruit was all that he needed.’ Josephus in the Jewish War.

It has been said that a diet of locusts refers to the evergreen locust tree or carob (ceratonia siliqua), so called because its pod, often curved, resembles the locust and has traditionally been called ‘St. John’s Bread’.

Luke’s introduction to John the Baptist echoes the ascetic Nazorite vows (seen for example in the myth of Samson). The Nazorites, Epiphanius says, ‘forbid all flesh-eating and do not eat any living things at all’.

Extrapolating on Davidson’s observations regarding the Nazorite’s vows of abstention from flesh, if John the Baptist is to be considered as a possible Nazoraean it is difficult to avoid similar exegesis for Christ from the messianic prophecy claimed in Matthew that, ‘He shall be called a Nazorene’. This title seems further confirmed by the reference to Paul as a ringleader of the sect of the Nazorenes. Wesley Isenberg’s translation of The Gospel of Philip intimates of an early, non-geographical, interpretation,

‘Jesus’ in Hebrew is ‘the redemption.’ ‘Nazara’ is ‘the truth.’ ‘The Nazarene,’ then, is ‘the truth.’

Mandaean literature further provides for the discussion an unrelated but relevant complication concerning ritual sacrifice. Polemics caste Jesus as a false Mandaean prophet who overturns the ritual meals (ritual sacrifice). Against the renegade Jesus is set the figure of Hibil, the spiritual father of the Mandaean race who is a guide, lawgiver and redeemer figure. As the archetypal Nazoraean and initiating instrument behind Mandaean law, inevitably he has to have abstained from flesh. But Hibil turns out to be none other than biblical Abel.

Abel in fact was also held in esteem by the Christian Fathers who regarded him as a Christ type. This seems to be a status suggestive of some lost tradition, because for (at least) popular modern Christianity, the only clues to him lie in the seemingly unintelligible myth in Genesis IV (especially for the vegetarian) where he appears as a sort of symbol of the unreasonableness of God’s favour, and Cain as the real victim of it. Such undeserved success for Abel had obvious implications for both the character of the Old Covenant God and communications with Him through sacrifice. However, the prophetic citing made of Abel by Jesus, ‘that upon you shall come all the righteous blood shed upon the earth, from the blood of righteous Abel …’ definitively castes him as something far more, in fact as the progenitor of martyrdom. Endorsed by Jesus, thereby, as an archetype of self-sacrifice rather than animal sacrifice, the symbolic interpretation of the myth should, perhaps, be reconsidered.

Looking at the symbology of the Cain and Abel myth in the context of the preceding chapter of Genesis, Cain’s ‘fruit of the ground’ was hardly likely to find favour considering the content of the primordial curse on the ground just delivered by God on their father (only a few verses before), ‘in sorrow shall thou eat of it all the days of thy life’. This however cannot be about diet. This is proved by the reiteration of the text at Gen.1:29,30 in 3:18, in which Adam is still to eat herbs after the Fall, but now the herb ‘of the field’ with all the associated responsibilities and cares. Here, the curse consequent on Adam’s hiding from God (loss of ‘Edenic’ innocence) in Gen. 3:10, is now fulfilled in his son Cain in Gen. 4:14, ‘from thy face shall I be hid’. The ‘ground’ has become the symbol of earth-bound creature-man, the suffering victim of his own weakness and independence, and the regeneration of sin from father to son.

To make any sense at all, therefore, the blessing given to Abel must be considered consistently, and not as an adverse comment on a specific diet or even animal. In the two brothers is caste at once the macro-fate of the universal brotherhood of humanity (the regeneration of sin in Cain and the fate of the prophets in Abel), and the schizoid micro-fate of the individual, in the fate of human conditioning: the Cain-self versus the Abel-self, the devil of John 8:44 versus the righteous soul. Cain therefore becomes the sacrificer (of Abel), and Abel the sacrificial lamb.

Regarding this story, it is useful to be reminded that animals have until very recently been thought of as fungible chattels, in other words a form of currency and wealth (and legally in most respects still are). This being the case, the first-born of the flock, i.e. the biggest, most valuable, and first to be slaughtered, becomes the valued symbol of the self, the offering up of which is the self sacrifice required for divine worthiness. At any rate it is clear that the prevalent idea at the time of Christ that divine favours could be bought with propitiatory sacrifice, was not what was in Abel’s mind. As Jesus says, ‘I will have mercy and not sacrifice’.

Isaiah begins and ends supporting this theme, ‘I delight not in the blood of bullocks or of lambs or he goats’ and finally his description of the ‘new heavens and the new earth’ that the Lord will make, in which the notion of spiritual poverty is juxtaposed against animal sacrifice and the ego, ‘I look, even to him that is poor and of a contrite spirit’, followed by, ‘He that killeth an ox is as if he slew a man … yeah they have chosen their own ways, and their soul delighteth in their abominations’.

As in the case of Abel, Jesus makes other use of Genesis as a vehicle to introduce the idea that there is a world of difference between the ideal childlike state of Bereshith and the legalities of Torah. Far from being the ideal the priestly classes would have it be, Jesus, in his teaching on divorce, painted Judaic law as a compromise of the flesh and cited the Genesis creation myth as the unequivocal ideal. Yet if He so enlisted that pre- Fall picture to illustrate His teaching on divorce, why would He not have done similarly with those archaic precepts of diet? After all the subject of diet must have been raised with Jesus since so much of Mosaic Law is itself concerned with diet. It is perhaps not entirely fanciful to muse Him adding, ‘Moses, because of the hardness of your hearts, suffered you certain legal permissions regarding flesh consumption.’

Predictably, modern Christian vegetarians often, but in vain, seek some direct evidence that Jesus himself did abstain from meat. Returning to Davidson, he finds the lack of reference to diet anomalous considering the obviously non-violent ethos of the gospel teachings. He points out the correspondence between reincarnation theology and vegetarianism and considers it possible that they were twin casualties of early orthodoxisation, also drawing circumstantial evidence from literature to support his view including the vegetarian sects on the esoteric fringes of Judaism extant at the time of Christ, the Ebionim (the ‘poor ones’), Nazorenes, Dositheans, the followers of Elchasai, Essenes and Therapeutae. Davidson also cites, most interestingly, several ancient traditions of the disciple’s own vegetarianism:

Peter was described by the Ebionites to have abstained from meat, and spoke out against sacrificial slaughter, ‘When you partook of meat offered to idols you became servants to the Prince of Evil.’ Clementine Homilies and Recognitions.

James according to Hegesippus was a vegetarian, ‘James, the brother of the Lord, … was a holy man from his mother’s womb; and he drank no wine nor strong drink, nor did he eat flesh.’ Eusebius.

Matthew: ‘partook of seeds, and nuts, and vegetables, without flesh.’ Clement of Alexandria.

Thomas: ‘The simplicity and kindness of him and his faith do declare that he is a righteous man … for he fasteth continually and prayeth, and eateth bread only, with salt, and his drink is water.’ The Acts of Thomas.

John (the apostle): ‘His sustenance was from the ninth to the ninth hour once, when he had finished his prayer, bread and herbs with a mess of boiled lentils … and drinking water only.’ History of John.

It is not intended to allow the discussion to turn into a ‘cold’ history of vegetarianism. Colin Spencer in his History of Vegetarianism has done this comprehensively. Suffice it to demonstrate that in both the archaic love-myths absorbed by Christianity, and the Gospel love-myth, literary search reveals flesh abstention as a symbol of lost purity, the loss of which is somehow accentuated by the obscurity of the evidence. Never does it appear in myth as a feature of moral instruction (as of the law) but as a primeval symbol. Nor does it appear as something of the populace but emerges as an ascetic practice confined to an elect. Therefore, it seems a strange paradox that one of the, perhaps, greatest initiator heroes for Western mass culture, Pythagoras, emerged from, and preached, an encratic ideal, which included abstention from flesh in the diet. Yet it seems this was not at all on the grounds of the ‘moral vegetarian’ of contemporary times, such a motivation would have been quite alien to the ancients. The Pythagorean diet, as flesh abstention was known till the 19^th century, appears very much as an internally driven expression, often as a purification, or, particularly in the Gnostic tradition, a dogmatic extrapolation on the transmigration of souls, and possibly transmitted as a part of a secret initiation.

In contrast to the previous chapter, which considered evidence of diet as an expression of a mythical ideal rather than cultural practice, this chapter attempts to follow the pathway by which the Judaic ‘language of the flesh’ is carried over and fulfilled in Christian dogma, ritual and cultural tradition. This is especially expressed in the transposition of the ritual theme of Old Covenant sacrifice into the Gospels and Christian dogma.

First, some introduction is required as to what is meant by ‘language of the flesh’. Stripped of all associations, ‘flesh’ indicates simply the essential functioning substance of ‘bodiliness’. Yet, hardly can the word be uttered before it assumes a mass of complex associations and images. The ‘flesh’ is an impossible-to-pin-down ontological concept. It expresses the human experience as a shifting, not a fixed reality. For example, brainstorming on the word, a variety of images arise: lions (nature); Sunday dinner (togetherness / feasting / celebration); butchers (food, death); sex (love / fertility / procreation / indulgence / sin); knife (surgery / pain / slaughter); sacrifice ( primitivism, animism, ritual, thanksgiving, Eucharist); the body (life / human incarnation / incarnation of Jesus Christ); etc. To be able to appreciate and use such a symbol in any unique configuration, to ‘feel’ what it means, to know that feeling is shared by others, is to be able to talk a ‘language of the flesh’.

The fact that the Old Testament is a cherished racial document, a document of physical family, means it was and always will be, primarily, a myth defining the bond of love between a people. The detached dominion of the Judaic God is a specifically designed background to highlight the intimate earthly character of the Judaic kinship of the flesh. This contrast creates the peculiar Judaic spirituality that on the one hand is full of intimate poetry, yet permeated with suspended animation, and a yearning of the soul that is little short of the yearning of children for the love of a distant or absent father. ‘My flesh crieth out for the living God’; ‘my flesh shall rest in hope’; ‘yet in my flesh shall I see God’; ‘the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together’ etc. What poetic feeling is invoked by such language! Far from conveying a message of carnality, it is the pain of humanness, humility and mortality that comes through. Better than any words, this is beautifully expressed in Yiddish music, especially that of Eastern Europe, where there is a fast and intricate line of joy and laughter permeated by painful minor chords, the whole underlaid with an ancient sadness expressed in the slow return and fall of a subterranean heart-beat. Essentially, for Judaism, the flesh is a painful symbol of separation from God, which endorses earthly brotherhood. Such is, and always has been, the inseparable nature of Jewish religious and life experience, the Judaic ‘language of the flesh’.

To understand the Judaic mind at work is a great advantage in an appreciation such as this. The book of Rabbi Lionel Blue, My Affair with Christianity, provides a special insight in this respect. Regarding the old Judaic world-view he writes, ‘For my grandparents, the written scripture was basic, and they saw their lives as a commentary on it.’

For the mind of the Christian, a constant reminder is required that, before even the emergence of the term ‘Christian’, both Jesus and his audience were themselves steeped in Judaic culture. His teaching appeared in Judaism as an enlightenment movement, not a new religion. Therefore naturally, this view of life as an analogy steeped in symbolic meaning, as Rabbi Blue described of his grandparents, was the way in which Jesus saw his life as a commentary on the Old Testament and the way his life was itself interpreted by his Jewish disciples and celebrated by the first gospel scriptwriters. This was the methodology behind the evolution of the Christian love myth. It was the original form of Realism at work, but paradoxically it was not a Christian Realism. This was the poetic realism of Judaic myth. This exegesis attempts to follow that Judaic mind, and understand the life of Jesus as a commentary on the Old Scriptures. Only by such an exploration can the student of New Testament scripture progress beyond the naïve and uncomfortable feeling of reading a biography modelled around unfolding prophecy, convenient justifications of lineage, and general textual tailoring. None of this problem would ever have existed if the student understood the mind of the artist who painted the gospel picture. For the Jewish follower of Jesus, as it was for Rabbi Blue’s grandparents, the life of Jesus was poetry in action, written exactly as should be, in the language he knew: the reality of the scripture set against the transient and symbolic drama of human life.

The theme of sacrifice is the most important dogmatic thread that ties Old and New Covenant teachings together. But rather than considering sacrifice in general, the evidence of one sacrificial account, that of Abraham and Isaac, will be considered in relation to the New Testament account of the Passover feast held by Jesus. Of all the accounts in the Old Testament the trial of Abraham stands alone as an archetype of sacrifice and sets a definitive precedent. This is, perhaps, because the concept of sacrifice is not complicated by being a subsidiary expression within a story, but the very heart of the story itself. For this reason, the story has caught the attention of Christian commentators since the earliest times. The features that make the intended immolation of Isaac such a paradigm for Christianity are several:

Isaac, the peace loving shepherd, becomes the sacrificial lamb, ‘My son, God will provide himself a lamb …’ The connection is made immediately by the Gospel scriptwriters in their dramatic treatment of the entrance of Jesus heralded by John the Baptist. ‘Behold the lamb of God’. This is underwritten by John the Baptist’s status as an Old Testament prophet. The first to receive news of a birth is a great honour. The shepherds were special symbols, obviously, in that they were capable of appreciating the birth of the new lamb, the Lamb of God.

The sacrifice is human. This connection is in the idea that the crucifixion finally expresses the impossible act that every Old Testament ritual sacrifice had been vainly trying to say. In a psychological sense this is the final lifting of taboo: the ‘real’ paschal lamb, a human one. In a bravely radical way, the Gospel of Philip describes the new concept of sacrifice:

God is a cannibal. Therefore human beings are sacrificed to him. Before human beings were sacrificed, animals used to be sacrificed, because those to whom they were sacrificed were not Gods.

It is a father and son drama. This is also the intimate ethos of the language used by Jesus, through which he defines the quality of the human relationship with, God. Also, Isaac cuts the cloth for Jesus as the ‘only son’. Peculiarly, this configuration castes Abraham in the role of God. But considering the Judaic father-concept of God, in which the archetype of ‘fatherhood’ is, from a mytho-poetic point of view, virtually synonymous with God viz as a spiritual father of the nation, it is perhaps, after all, not so strange. This is further confirmed in Gospel eschatological imagery, e.g., the beggar Lazarus who ‘was carried by the angels into Abraham’s bosom’.

Here it can be seen how the scriptwriter’s celebration of the life of Jesus takes the natural poetic format, as described by Rabbi Blue, in which the life of Jesus is depicted as the perfect enactment of the Judaic ‘Drama of the Lamb’. In this drama Isaac and Jesus can be thought of as two players of the same part (as, for example, required of a drama that spans childhood into adulthood). What is essential here is appreciating the continuity of plot. The lamb is always the same lamb, the real lamb. It is the actors that change. This is the same archaic sacrificial lamb of substitution, which is introduced by John the Baptist, and which is the paschal lamb re-enacted in the crucifixion sacrifice.

Because of the visual nature of the imagery, the transposition of the lamb from Old to New scripture finds an easier and altogether more natural expression in art. Western art has always assumed a certain licence disallowed to the written word, and in it symbolism has often appeared which challenges orthodox boundaries. The sacrificial relationship of Old and New Covenant, as embodied in the lamb, are a case in point. Three images are attached in Appendix 1 to illustrate the sequential continuity of the ‘drama of the lamb’ in which Isaac and Jesus are caste. The first, Carravaggio’s ‘The Sacrifice of Isaac’, sets the scene. The ram lamb, waiting in the wings of the stage, so to speak, willingly offers itself. Far from panic, its face almost seems to express concern for the fate of Isaac. Again, in the second picture, ‘St John the Baptist’, the identical animal appears. Art historian, Timothy Wilson-Smith, says that from the art critics point of view the subject matter of this picture has always been bewildering. But in the light of the discussion this utterly beautiful and intimate picture must surely depict the child John the Baptist at play with the Christ-child. Were the picture understood, Carravaggio would have undoubtedly received a similar art criticism from the Inquisition! Perhaps art as a secret form of expression had a special role in those repressive times. The third image, a carving known as the ‘Wirksworth Stone’, depicts the Paschal Lamb on the Cross. Such images are rare due to representations of Christ under the form of a Lamb, being banned in A.D.692.

In order to complete the transition from Old to New, the Feast of the Passover becomes the stage, as it were, of the final twist in the dramatic plot of Abraham and Isaac. Jesus himself displaces the sacrificial lamb and thereby seals the end of Old Covenant schemes of sacrifice. The Paschal Lamb is a human one. The Paschal human sacrifice is the fulfilment of the old Judaic poetry, ‘he is brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he openeth not his mouth’; ‘neither shall ye break a bone thereof’.

Among other poetic adumbrations, one particularly catches the attention as seeming untidy to the chronological mind. This is the peculiar synchronisation of the ‘Last Supper’ Passover Feast with the Feast of the Unleavened Bread. As Enoch Powell points out, the disciples all will have been well aware of the strict Passover format: the first event must be the slaughter of the Paschal lamb on the 14 Nissan followed by the seven days of unleavened bread. Why at the Last Supper are they not depicted as sharing the flesh of the lamb?

This was no clumsy mistake, but the knowledge of the real implications of the Paschal sacrifice. It must be remembered the chronological mind was not at all the mind of the poetic writers. What seems now anomalous to the chronological mind was, perhaps, intended to convey the most profound of messages. The scriptwriters are depicting here the great initiation event, ‘this month shall be unto you the beginning of months …’, of the church of Christ, at which, according to the tradition laid down in Exodus ‘the whole congregation of Israel’ must partake. No ritual meal is more important in the Jewish calendar. And reflecting that importance the ritual meal the scriptwriters depict is circumscribing the radical new format of Passover. The new Passover meal cannot be the flesh of a lamb. The lamb is to be human, the approaching crucifixion of Jesus. There is no question, therefore of sharing the flesh of a lamb at the last supper: the final act of Jesus seemingly lays down a strict new uniquely Christian ‘law of sacrifice’: that the symbol of Christ’s sacrifice of his own flesh cannot, itself, be flesh. Otherwise it would invalidate his death. This argument is in unavoidable opposition to de fide transubstantiation. The transubstantiation is in Jesus’ substitution for the ritual lamb, not the meal of bread, which, in this interpretation, is solely a symbol of remembrance. Extraordinarily therefore, in the most unexpected place, and against all the odds inherent in the weight of Judaic sacrificial tradition carried into Christian culture, flesh abstention continues to make its appearance in the greatest myth of initiation of Christianity itself, the Eucharist.

This argument does not infer that Jesus, in his everyday life, abstained from flesh, but careful contemplation on it certainly makes it much easier to visualise Him doing so. Such contemplation seems to bring something discordant and uneasy in the image of Jesus partaking of the flesh of the Paschal Lamb; Jesus, the carnivorous Lamb; or the Eucharist being celebrated with flesh. It seems contradictory and false to imagine a ritual action of Jesus which was not reflected in his everyday life. It is easy to ridicule such an exercise, but imagery and intuition have a peculiar honesty.

Certain concluding observations can now be made:

The possibility that out of the tradition of sacrifice, which has left a trail of human and animal blood through the ages, a gentle ideal of flesh abstention could be born, even if only in the ritual context.

The demonstration that the substance of the Eucharistic meal matters; its content of bread means something very positive; it is not a coincidence that it excludes flesh and it proves that the practicing Christian, though quite unawares, is a ritualistic abstainer from flesh, even if in a life where every other meal celebrates the sacrifice of animal life.

Considering the context of the modern ethical vegetarian, it seems significant that an argument for flesh abstention emerges from the concept of sacrifice through a channel of reason quite independent of any ethical structure or argument whatever. It almost comes as a statement about how little room there is for ethics in matters of ‘love’. This is simply the pure arithmetic of an ideal sacrifice.

The fact that the Jewish springtime initiation meal of the Passover, and the Last Supper of Jesus, which were observed as nothing mysterious but as an important symbolic reminder or ‘memorial’, gave way to the mystery philosophy of transubstantiation, can be interpreted as a measure of the hold Judaic practice had, and still has, on the Christian psyche, rather as if the flesh of the ancient sacrifice is ‘bursting’ to manifest itself through the bread. In mundane everyday life the sacrifice of animal life, far from being mere sustenance, is an indispensable outward symbol of cultural eucharist, an ongoing social initiation of the sharing of meat. Just as if it were a Passover, to abstain from such a ritual is to become a heretic and an outcast.

The enormous pressure of cultural tradition, habit and assumption is undoubtedly the most difficult obstacle to clarity of thought over dietary issues, and though there is no direct evidence of the personal diet of Jesus, plenty of circumstantial evidence exists that Jesus was not complacent regarding dietary tradition. The Mandaean polemics against Jesus’ overturning of ritual meals cited in Chapter I provide a snapshot of the seriousness of the dietary dispute between Jesus and the priesthood and match well the faint echoes of the theme in the Gospel texts. For example, the Passover expulsion of the sacrificial oxen, sheep and doves from the temple, or, the polemic of Jesus against dietary ritual in Matthew 15. Enoch Powell describes this latter passage, which originally followed the Eucharistic allegory of the feeding of the five thousand, as ‘boldly broadened into the equivalent of a sweeping repudiation of the Jewish dietary Law, a repudiation so bitter and emphatic as to show the issue was of more than minor importance, as though the attempt to impose Jewish dietary rules threatened to undermine the mission of the gentile church.’

Since the area covered by this discussion has been no more than a tiny comment thrown into a far-reaching debate, a few outline observations on modern western history and contemporary developments may help to set the work in its relevant context.

Ascetic or religious flesh abstention has continued to the present day for example in the Trappist order and Seventh Day Adventists. But this religious theme is a distinctly separate thread from popular vegetarianism. It was not until the birth of the Vegetarian Society in 1847, when the Pythagorean diet officially changed its title to vegetarianism, that the practice of flesh abstention was taken outside of the religious context. This development appears to have remained in isolation for a century as the preserve of various eccentrics. However, since the sixties the West has experienced a general rising tide of global environmental awareness along with specific food related crises, issues of animal welfare, personal health and dietary problems, which have directly implicated meat production methods and its high consumption in the developed world and which has led to the formation of a variety of movements which embrace vegetarianism. These developments were marked in the seventies by best selling publications such as Peter Singer’s angry Animal Liberation or Rachel Carson’s warning against the deafened self, Silent Spring, which were overtly aggressive towards the armchair conservatism that pervaded post-war Britain. However it is perhaps the adoption of vegetarianism as a counter-cultural symbol by individuals and movements not directly involved in meat-eating issues that has had the most profound social influence. In this context Bertrand Russell stands as the great caricature of the old style vegetarian eccentric who, with his involvement in the Ban the Bomb marches of the sixties, carried vegetarianism into the new era as both a symbol of peace yet simultaneously an aggressive symbol of counter-culture. Another example of this indirect adoption of vegetarianism is the feminist movement, many members of which consider meat as a symbol of patriarchy and male domination and a conspiracy in which the male dominated Church is heavily implicated. Similarly, the sixty’s east-west dialogue and contemporary New Age spiritualities have had a powerful impact in sowing cultural and philosophical ideas indirectly associated with vegetarian ideals. Following this, the eighties and nineties have been a period in which many of these once radical issues and movements have become a part of both establishment policy and the body of publicly held assumption. Hence, riding on the back of this process a vigorous and ethically motivated vegetarian culture has developed, which now totals around sixteen percent of the UK population.

What business has Christianity with these developments?

Realisation by the Church of the cost of standing aloof from developments in the contemporary cultural environment has been slow. The consequent increasing social irrelevance of the Church has led, particularly during the last decade, to what amounts to a belated ‘cultural apology’ manifest in an effort to throw off the stereotypes that have led to its alienation. But this apology was not extended to human relations with the animal kingdom. In the Church’s silence neither the arguments of Natural law nor those of the natural order are invoked. If the activities of daily Christian life are to be sanctified as a whole, why should not the rearing, killing of animals, and the consumption of flesh be included in that sanctification? Unlike the abstention-act of vegetarianism, flesh consumption, however habitual, remains a positive act of will, made in full awareness by adult Christians, and therefore with full liability to any consequence. As such, it would be safer properly enclosed as a part of Christian life, supported by a thoroughly Christian theology and capable of answering for itself in the contemporary debate.

Faced with the arguments of ethical vegetarianism, the average Christian is left gaping with very little to say except to weakly raise the white flag of nature and plead, ‘I am a savage, this is the way God made me’.

Such an idea of mankind retrieving a rightful place among God’s creatures does convey a certain celebration of nature. And the ready intellectual gains of claiming to be one with the ‘drama of lion and prey’ are obvious: innocence, the child of nature, no responsibility etc. Also there is the inherent claim to the lion’s privilege of freedom from the laws of ethics. But what is the cost?

The cost is singularly stark and depressing. Clearly Darwin proposed a similarly attractive egalitarian law of nature which enclosed man as just another creature, albeit a remarkably successful one. But by leaning on the Darwinian trump card the modern ‘Christian savage’ is unwittingly buying into a whole world view, not just one convenient part. Unfortunately, Darwin’s revelation of human excellence achieved through the ruthless pursuit of selfish interest conspires intimately with the Genesis ‘Man of dominion’ figure of Christian tradition. Since the sixties, this figure has been increasingly cast as the evil Moriarty who lives in a creature-creation which he believes exists solely for his own purposes. Darwin’s failure to perceive evidence of some underlying divine plan behind a ruthless creature hierarchy has left modern man high and dry in a cold unforgiving world with a god as ruthless and distant as that of the Old Testament. Such a God-concept leads intelligent brains into a depressed, self-obsessed world-view. Scientist Anthony Smith writes, ‘No one and nothing had us in mind.’ … ‘We have just happened, and flesh was made man by a long series of beneficial accidents.’ At the risk of sounding over-prosaic, it almost seems that man has become the fatherless accident-child of Mother Nature consumed with a dread of future nemesis.

The desolation of this world view has an ever-receding horizon. When it is perceived how the ‘eye for an eye’ justice of the Old Covenant is transposed into the cold cause and effect laws of scientism, how the Lord God’s earthly rewards for the god-fearing are the building blocks of the ‘just’ rewards and credit-where-its-due values of materialism, how the ‘children of promise’ are transposed into the covert ‘chosen-race-ism’ of first world culture, how the Israelite conquests transmute into the concept of the ‘Just War’, how the feared Judaic Day of Judgement is transposed into the modern prophesy of environmental doom, how the Lordly dominion of Genesis and ‘the sweet savour’ of Noah’s offering is transposed into the assumed right to sacrifice animal life, then it is also understood how Western culture conspires with, and is a new format for, essentially an Old Covenant world view.

It is unfortunate for the Church that it is automatically implicated in this conspiracy between the God of the Old Covenant and modern culture, and specifically in this discussion with the increasingly problematic relationship with the animal kingdom. The Church cannot disown either its influence on Western culture or its popular reputation which, fairly or unfairly, has not been built on New Covenant values but on the fearful imagery of the Old Testament viz the law, ritual, patriarchy, priesthood, authority, bloodshed, crusade and relevant to this discussion, a vigorous though unthinking culture of flesh sacrifice.

Similarly, it seems a reasonable conclusion that the Christian’s plea ‘I am a savage, this is the way God made me’ is a modern expression of the ancient Judaic spirituality discussed in Chapter II. On the one hand there is the intimate poetry of a child in Nature’s world, on the other the yearning and suspended animation conveyed by the inherent apology of the plea itself, which seems to have the effect of accentuating the underlying feeling of being an exile, ‘cast out’ of nature. This latter image sits in perfect conciliation with the image of Darwinian mutation, the misfit human, the genetic accident of nature.

Without labouring the point further, clearly, before a Christian tackles the court-room debate of animal ethics, or enters into new cultural dialogue, some self-examination of a priore Christian beliefs and assumptions is in the interests of a best-possible judgement. Even the diminutive body of evidence in Chapter I reasonably shows that, like the ancient Jews in Genesis, the unique love-myth of the New Covenant does contain the same old traces in its heroic figures of an Eden-like vegetarian past.

But somehow more fundamental than those evidential considerations is the understanding which Chapter II attempted to convey, that through the New Testament fulfilment of the old love-myth theme of fleshly sacrifice there emerges an inevitable correspondence between Christ’s self-sacrifice and the ‘gentle diet’ of the Eucharist, even if only restricted to ritual. This finding demonstrates beautifully (and surprisingly to me) how the limitations of law and ethical thinking are still fulfilled and superseded by agapaic love: there is no room for ethical thinking in the Eucharist. Yet still a certain sadness arises attached to the fact that in the partaking of the Eucharist there is no popular realisation of the meaning of that act of flesh abstention, the gentle sacrifice, symbolised in the bread, that such suffering and violent death brought about.

It is perhaps through extrapolations on this latter channel that the modern ethicists should be addressed since it is so uniquely Christian. The fossilised whispers of flesh abstention which lie locked in the Eucharist perhaps have the power to demonstrate how the legal and ethical methodology of the Old Covenant world view finally come of age in the sacrificial myth of the New Covenant.

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