The Soulful Eye

Meat Abstinence in the Early Church

Knowing your history is important.   Fitting that history into a larger story is even more important.  Our brains are set up to do this sort of mental work - pattern recognition, narrative bias, gestalt, etc.  Part of the cognitive framing work of Christianity is to get you to recognize you have a story and to learn to think in terms of how that fits into the larger Christian metanarrative; it’s about cognitively placing yourself into that particular story, allowing yourself, your story, to be consumed by the larger narrative.  The big story eats the little story.  The little story is then said to be “in” the big story … while at the same time the individual little stories must be continually fed portions of the big story.  Christianity is replete with consumption, narrative, and food metaphors.  All the while Christians identify themselves as people who don’t think about literal food, because of course, that’s what the Jews did.

Scratch the surface a little though and you’ll see that things aren’t so clear.  Today you’ll notice that giving up meat for Lent is easily recognized as an exercise in spiritual discipline.  Admit to being a vegetarian, and somehow that’s just silly, maybe even a little suspicious.  Apparently part of  knowing how my story fits into the bigger picture requires that I examine that phenomena a bit.  I’ve found an article that sums up much of the other material I’ve been working through.  It’s titled “Strife among the Table-Fellows: Conflicting Attitudes of Early and Medieval Christians toward the Eating of Meat”, written by Dianne Bazell and published in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, volume 65/1, 1997.  I am especially grateful for the author’s efforts in tracing this specific issue through the earlier parts of church history.

It turns out that my personal experience as a non-meat-eating Christian in this age is no different than the experiences of my predecessors across the ages; meat abstinence has, at one time or another, been commended as an act of piety, commanded as an act of discipline, and condemned as a sign of heresy.  If there’s one thing that can be said about the church and how it feels about meat eating – it would seem to be that it’s primarily conflicted.   The first thing Bazell draws to our attention is that contrary to the contemporary notion that Christians are a people who don’t think at all about food, closer examination reveals that throughout our history we’ve thought quite a lot about it.   “… the use of food, and the consumption of meat in particular, commanded extensive attention on the part of early and medieval Christian theologians – monks and canonists, hagiographers and inquisitors – and they often reflect a view of the natural world far less simplistic than that which modern writers generally credit them.”(73)

The Bible

First a very, very brief look at food in the NT itself.  John the Baptist, Jesus, and Paul all embodied food (literal food) themes of one kind or another.  John especially is known for his asceticism.  Jesus is known to have feasted,  fasted, and instructed about food. He changed the focal meal of those that would follow him from one of flesh to one of grain and wine. Paul spends a good deal of time in his letters talking about the various ways of framing food with discussions of not participating in the table of other gods, meat sacrificed to other gods, controlling the bodily cravings for food as training for the spiritual athlete, food used for the eucharist, food in terms of the specific Mosaic dietary laws regarding clean and unclean foods, continuing some of the food laws and not others at the Jerusalem council, and highlighting the importance of not allowing food ways to break community. Literal food is not a non-issue in the NT.

Commended and Commanded

Jump ahead to the monastic period beginning roughly in the 200′s-300′s.  Contrary to contemporary ideas of flesh foods making people stronger, the broader culture in which early monasticism formed “knew” meat very differently.  Meat was a rarity, an item of indulgence associated with political power and wealth, and was thought to make people soft and undisciplined.  Along the same lines, meat was also thought to be literally related to sexual lust.

This is the backdrop against which the asceticism of the monastic life was designed to contrast.  Meat abstinence was practiced as a form of bodily discipline for “As the body grows, the soul becomes weak; the more the body becomes emaciated, the more the soul grows.”(76)  Bazell notes that within the prevailing “humorally-based Galenic medical theroy” of the time, meat was “believed to generate both heat and moisture … (it was) especially useful in combatting impotence and was seen as actually productive of blood and semen.” (77)   Bazell provides the following quote from St. Jerome as epitomizing the general concept behind monastic asceticism:

Great is the soul’s rejoicing when you are content with little: you have the world beneath your feet, and you can exchange all its power, feasts, and lusts, for the sake of which riches are accumulated, for cheap food, and compensate for them with a rough tunic.  Take away the feasts and the excess of lust, [and] no one will seek riches whose use is either in the belly, or below the belly.  (Ad. Jov. 2.11 [PL23:314])

The early monks avoided meat as a matter of spiritual and physical discipline.    There was, however, at the same time an accompanying warning to keep ascetic practices in their place.  To use modern language, it was ok to do it as long as you didn’t think you could ‘abstain’ (work) your way into right standing with God. This other angle, represented by Augustine, developed in which food restrictions, undertaken broadly, were acceptable as an exercise in personal discipline but restricting any one particular food would not serve to strengthen control of the appetites in general.  If you avoided meat and were gluttonous with other foods you were still missing the mark.

We can see that early on food generally, and meat specifically, was an issue within Christianity.  Some people thought they had good reasons to avoid meat in particular, some people thought that meat specifically wasn’t an issue but that excess – of any food – was a problem.  Food was an issue but nobody agreed on what kind of issue it was.  By the 6th century abbots could at the same time declare that to eat flesh is good but to abstain is even better, and those who eat will be separated from those who abstain so as to not sully the purity of the latter. (80)

By the 7th century we see that there are already clarifications being made about how abstinence relates to animals as creatures of God.  If you rejected flesh foods because you thought they were somehow evil, that evil actually resided in the substance of flesh you were said to be denying the goodness of something God created. The author highlights this point though 12th century monastery rulings which included the statement “No [monk] is permitted either to taste or to consume meat, not because we deem any creature of God unworthy, but because abstinence from meat is thought to be useful and appropriate for monks …” (81).   Apparently there’s still enough discussion about what flesh foods are and what it means to eat or not eat them to be clarifying these points in church documents.   By the 13th century “Bonaventure devoted a chapter of his defense of the new mendicant (Franciscan and Dominican) orders to their practice of abstinence from meat, relying heavily on Pauline letters, Jerome, and the desert fathers, linking this discipline to the virtues of chastity, poverty, and obedience (Apol. mend. 5:257-266).(85)

What we have so far then is that there is a long theological history within monasticism of meat-abstinence.  It’s also true that there’s an alternate history that developed along with and against that one.   We’ve seen with the monks how meat abstinence has been commended and commanded, what about condemned?

Condemned

Let’s go back to Augustine around 400.  Augustine felt that it was not so much any physical substance itself that was a problem but whether or not you could control your own appetites.  If you were going to engage in some form of dietary discipline, it should be toward the management of all expressions of appetite and not just those related to one particular food. (79)  Augustine  treated what you ate and what you wore as nothing more than matters of custom.   Customs are customs, take them or leave them, but don’t fight over them because they aren’t relevant to your status in Christ.

Bazell points out that the shift toward the condemnation of meat-abstinence and those who practice it can be seen in Augustine’s idea of “little signs”.   Augustine recognized that having some form of specific behavior in common is important for in-group identity (sacraments and secret handshakes; rituals) and religious affiliation was no different.  Enter the Manichaeans.  Basically, the Manichaeans  believed that the material world, i.e. flesh was completely evil and soul was completely good … a dualist ontology in opposition to the Christian notion that the physical world, including the bodies of all creatures, is good in and of itself.  They also believed that there was special God energy in plants, as well as in the transmigration of souls and therefore did not eat meat.   Augustine had been a Manichaean before he became a Christian.  After his conversion, he used his idea of cultural signals to connect outward behavior (not eating meat) to inward beliefs (dualist, i.e. heretical ontology).   According to Bazell, Augustine “utilized the Manichees’ categorical refusal to eat meat as an objective indication, for the (unintended) convenience of outsiders, of the heterodoxy of Manichaean beliefs and evidence of the speciousness of their reasoning…”(87).   So, basically Augustine introduced the idea of meat-abstinence being an objective sign of underlying false beliefs.  Whereas Paul eliminated food ways as a means of eliminating boundaries, Augustine can be seen as re-introducing food ways as a means of recognizing “outsiders”, whether he meant to or not.

Bazell traces the spread of the association of meat-abstinence with “outsider / otherness” in later Christian writings involving contact with new peoples and highlights that whenever meat-abstinence was encountered it was noticed and noted as a feature of the non-Christian even while within Christianity it was practiced among monks. The association of meat abstinence with heresy began with a specific case of metaphysical error.  By the 12th century meat abstinence had “shifted to the foreground in inquisitorial writings, conspicuously featured on a par with doctrinal stances overtly hostile to Catholic ecclesiastical authority.”(89) The culmination of which came with a Dominican inquisitor, Bernard Gui.  Gui “explicitly treated the category of meat-abstinence as not simply a behavioral trait to be observed among, or merely associated with, those unlikely to be Christian but as a veritable criterion for their identification.”(90)

Bazell’s summary of the development from what Augustine was doing to what Gui was doing is worth quoting in full:

…whereas Augustine, in his treatise against (the Manichees), had defended these (little signs) with respect to their subjective function as group-solidifying mechanisms by which members of a group might present themselves to one another (if not to outsiders), Gui took these “little signs” specifically as devices by which outside observers might distinguish and detect such suspect affiliation – i.e., he used these signs as a means of detecting “Others.”

Conflicted

Shortly after the dawn of the first millenium then, monks were being commended for their meat abstinence while that very behavior, in and of itself, was also being used to condemn others, even to the point of execution.  To some, Christians killed animals and if you didn’t, you weren’t a Christian.  Literally kill or be killed.   Bazell quotes the thirteenth-century historian Stephen of Bourbon describing the Cathars:

I have heard that Catholic soldiers in France examined the heretics in the Albigensian territory in the following way: they gave the suspects chickens or other animals to kill, and if they did not wish to do so, they determined them to be heretics, or followers of them.(92)

Bazell summarizes this ambivalence using Mary Douglas’ grid/group terminology for social constructs:

… when abstinence is viewed as a matter involving Christian participants alone, and when its function seems to have been that of distinguishing exemplary Christians from ordinary ones [hierarchy within the group; i.e. vertical position on the grid] … then abstinence from meat appears to have provided an acceptable standard of assessment ….  On the other hand, when abstinence was observed among those of questionable Christian status, and when the problem seems to have been that of distinguishing Christians from non-Christians [in/out group boundary] … the renunciation of meat itself provided the chief behavioral criterion for exclusion.

The story of vegetarianism is, of course, older than the story of the church with records of western debates about it dating from the 7th century bce.  For as long as people have been thinking about eating and have had other choices there have been people who have chosen to not eat meat.  The story of vegetarianism within the church parallels those broader tensions and adds it’s own distinctive flare.  The Kingdom of God is both not about eating and drinking and yet is described with the language of food; a banquet, a feast. The uniquely Christian problem is that drawing lines based on participation in line drawing is still line drawing.  Gestalt is a hard racket to beat.  Bazell concludes with the following:

The Christian movement was forged together, in part by means of table-fellowship among diners of diverse mores.  It is no small paradox that the efforts exerted to convince these strange table-fellows that no mere dietary practice should divide them, in turn, provided a standard by which to identify and dismiss interlopers at the Christian banquet.