I suppose that I should begin this essay by stating that I am not a vegetarian, although I do regularly abstain from animal products in accordance with the fasting practices of the Eastern Orthodox Church. I am not interested in asserting that no one ought to eat meat under any circumstances, as this would obviously be hypocritical. Rather, I believe vegetarianism offers a valuable locale for contemplating certain facets of nature that are sometimes forgotten by Christians.
Anyone who has been paying attention to contemporary American culture will be aware of the often vitriolic debates surrounding the eating of meat. Both sides of this debate display extremes. On the one hand, there are vegans all too happy to cast judgement upon and picket against anyone who dares suggest that eating flesh is anything but a form of murder. On the other hand are the mobs of internet machismos questioning the virility of anyone unwilling live to off of steak. Such grotesque tribalism is hardly a new reality within American culture, and the lines are characteristically drawn in accordance with the dominant political tribes. It is therefore unsurprising that much of the American Christian world seems to largely side with the meat eaters, to the degree that Christians involve themselves in such debates at all. This is unfortunate, not because I want to see Christian’s protesting butcher stores, but because the debate should be an opportunity for Christians to reflect more deeply on their assumptions regarding the treatment of animals and the natural world, whereas it largely serves as an excuse for conveniently associating a genuine practice (in this case vegetarianism) with the pathologies of the American left.
Of course, there is more involved in Christian attitudes toward the eating of meat than simply the American culture war. As far as I can tell, many Christians instinctively think of the world in terms of human utility and believe that because humanity is the crown of creation, it has a right to nature as a resource. At the worst, passages from Genesis are trotted out in support of this, particularly in reference to “subduing” the earth, the prime value of humanity over other creatures is asserted, and so on. In its milder forms, this perspective views humanity as a gardener, called to care for the creation but given the right to its use as a food source. Such perspectives, however, are deeply erroneous, and they too often amount to a kind of amnesia in which Christianity loses touch with one of its fundamental doctrines: the fall. Christians are far too liable to forget that the brokenness resulting from this catastrophe extends beyond the limits of the human, encompassing all of reality, nature included. The justification of the human dominance over animals thus becomes a mere justification of how things are, as if the conditions under which we currently live are part of God’s plan for his creation, or else degenerates into the most vulgar of anthropocentrism in which the goodness of nature is reduced to the function of serving humanity.
Let us begin by addressing the latter point. This argument essentially holds that because human beings are made in the image of God, they have a natural right to control and dominate the natural world as the sovereigns of creation, and this includes the eating of animals. In the most extreme forms of this perspective, all of the non-human creation is seen as contingent, as existing only for the purpose of serving humanity, through which it attains its value.
This line of thinking is only possible, however, if one is willing to ignore the theological implications of God’s goodness and the repeated assertions of scripture that creation is good in what it is, not for some ulterior purpose. The Christian metaphysical tradition has always asserted that God is the Good, and as such all that he creates partakes of his goodness. Creation is drawn forth from nothingness to partake of God, and thus to partake of goodness. It is precisely this participation in God, who is Being, Goodness, Truth, and so on, that constitutes creation’s existence. Everything that creation is, is borrowed, is a mirror of the divine glory that seeks to share itself in the outpouring of Trinitarian love. This being the case, nothing created can be intrinsically evil. If this were possible, then God would have to be at least partially evil himself, and so the assertion of the essential baseness of anything is tantamount to blaspheming the creator. In the same way, to hold that any created being is good in a merely derivative sense is to implicitly deny God’s goodness. To be is to partake of God and thus all existing things must be good; they cannot be neutral.
It should be clear that I am not asserting that the goodness of created beings belong to them intrinsically. As already noted, the goodness of creation is borrowed from God, as is its existence. At the same time, however, it is not possible that the existence of any being, as contingent upon God as it is, can be anything other than good, although this goodness does not belong to it inherently. To be anything at all is to be a reflection of God, to be the finite realization of what God is in a limited form. This is what Nicholas of Cusa refers to as “contraction.” One may think of this in terms of the reflection of light through a prism. God is the fullness of being, an infinite living actuality essentially good, existing, and so on. God is essentially Goodness, Infinity, Truth, Beauty, etcetera, and even more, for he is infinitely more good than goodness as we understand it, and so on for any label that may be cataphatically applied to him. In creating, then, he shares himself by calling forth creatures out of nothing to be reflections of this infinite light. Being created, however, these beings are not infinite and thus cannot reflect the full splendor of the divine. Rather, they reflect God’s light in terms of their particular finite borders or boundaries, just as the structure of a crystal limits the expression of white light, which is the combination of all color. The limits of created beings, however, are themselves God-given, representing the unique instantiation of what each thing is, its unique capacity to reflect God, and thus the beauty of its nature. Thus, to be created is to be contingent, to have nothing that is one’s own, to be, in fact, nothingness, but a nothingness that has become glory by partaking of the falling rays of God’s self-outpouring love. The neutrality of any given being is therefore impossible, and must be rejected.
Such metaphysical thinking is profound, but one need not look far to notice that scripture, upon which such metaphysical thinking is largely based, is unequivocal in its assertions of creation’s goodness. And this is true apart from any reference to humanity. God does not wait to declare his work good until humanity has been brought forth from the dust. He does not state that it is good for the creature that he will make on the sixth day. God’s work are good, and they must be so for the reasons outlined above. In relation to the treatment of animals, moreover, it is worth remembering that humanity was not given leave to eat the flesh of animals until after the flood: “Dread fear of you shall come upon all the animals of the earth and all the birds of the air, upon all the creatures that move about on the ground and all the fishes of the sea; into your power they are delivered. Every creature that is alive shall be yours to eat” (Genesis 9:2). Rather than being seen as an inherent privilege, the Fathers tend to read this as a dispensation for human weakness, as a furtherance of the estrangement of the human and natural worlds. Moreover, God does not forget the animals in his covenant, as if they were irrelevant to his plans or creative will. Rather, he makes his covenant with them as well as with humanity: “God said to Noah and to his sons with him: ‘See, I am now establishing my covenant with you and your descendants after you and with every living creature that was with you: all the birds, and the various tame and wild animals that were with you and came out of the ark with you” (Genesis 9:8–9). The animal world is thus deemed worthy not only to be called good, but to have a direct relationship with God, a spirituality, a conscious place within God’s plan for the salvation of his creatures.
All of this should quite forcefully remind us that the conditions under which humanity and nature currently exist, and in which the eating of flesh is permissible (if not ideal), are not part of God’s original plan. This brings us to the first perspective outlined above, in which the fall is forgotten. It is far too common for Christians to attempt to exonerate the conditions of reality as it currently exists, as if those conditions were not the result of an ongoing rebellion against God and his creative will. This has two possible outcomes: one may either distort one’s moral vision and bury conscience until the world appears just and good in all its horrific vagaries, or one can simply ignore the horrors of reality and pretend as if the cosmos is perfect. One either hardens one’s heart or buries one’s head. It’s difficult to tell which of these options is worse. Luckily, this is not the Christian account of things, and I have come to believe that it is only the Christian account (as well as whatever analogous accounts may be found) that is capable of balancing hopefulness with a stark realism.
As far as the excessive romanticization of nature is concerned, the remedy is simple: one need only spend a modicum of time studying the processes of the natural world and the animals therein. Nobody familiar with the habit of male bears to eat the offspring of females to induce estrus or who contemplates the in utero fratricide of sharks can possibly look upon nature as a place of idyllic peace. Even the plant world is marked by brutality; trees, for instance, regularly starve their siblings of sunlight, reducing them to humus that will ultimately feed the survivors’ roots.
Every ecosystem is intrinsically interwoven with death. It is for this reason, at least in part, that so many religions in the past have seen animal or human sacrifice as a means of averting disaster or appeasing the gods. It does not take much observation to see that the entire balance of nature is one that requires death, that for one generation to succeed another, for each species to survive, and for the perpetuation of life in general, death is necessary. Death is therefore an essential component of the world’s present economy, a force that has the power to sway and balance the pendulums of reality. In the face of this fact, many cultures have sought to integrate death into themselves as natural or as a tool of maintaining balance. Wars may be fought precisely for the purpose of appeasing the world’s thirst for blood, for eliminating problematic populations, or for the perpetuation of economic prosperity. Vast swaths of humanity may be sacrificed upon the altar to appease to bloodthirstiness of the archons. For such cultures, death is something to be reconciled to, not to be overcome. It is intrinsic to the functioning of the world, and one is meant to feel a degree of peace in the face of the all-devouring maw of nature, to build one’s cultures and sense of belonging upon this vision.
Yet it is not so for the Christian. The Gospel account is one in which God is born into the world for the express purpose of destroying death. Like a bolt of lightning to the bottom of the abyss, Christ breaks open the gates of Hades and reveals the emptiness of death and all the systems—human, natural, daemonic—that have been built upon it. Christ declares death his enemy and breaks through it, transforming it into a path, a road to new life where death is no more.
This was, moreover, always the point of the doctrine of the fall: death is unnatural. It was born from an insufficiency, a shattering of the proper order of things. And this is true not just for humanity, but for the cosmos as a whole. The necessity by which life eats life is fundamentally perverse. Such necessity arises precisely because creation has lost its connection to the divine. It is God, after all, who is Life, and thus the source from which all creation receives life. With the rebellion of creatures, the connection to this source was stifled, constricted, and the entire economy of the cosmos changed as a result. What was once harmony and immortality has been transformed into discord and corruptibility.
There is another component of this story that should be mentioned, and which is developed by a number of the Church Fathers: it was with the fall of humanity that the natural world came to exist in its current state. This is strange, for scripture is clear the human beings were not the first to fall. After all, it was the serpent (understood by tradition to be Satan) who tempted them. Nevertheless, it is not until after the expulsion of Adam and Eve from paradise that the downward spiral of all things into death and animosity begins. For Gregory of Nyssa and Maximus the Confessor after him, this is because humanity is a mirror through which the divine cascades down to the sensible world. Humanity is the methorios, the border or frontier, between God and the material. It is in humanity that the natural world is summarized as a microcosm, and it is thus in humanity’s being joined to God that nature partakes of the divine. The fall of human beings was the catalyst for the degeneration of nature.
It is for this reason that the common secular alternative to the excessive valorization of human dominance, namely the demotion of human beings to just another ape among the teeming hordes of ultimately circumstantial species, is equally unacceptable (which is not, I should be clear, to renounce our kinship with the apes). Humanity does have a unique place within the world, is in a certain sense the center of the world, a miniature world in itself and the link by which God communicates himself to the “lower” orders of creation. What this implies, however, is not humanity’s right over nature as a kind of divine king, but rather its immense responsibility as the priest and caretaker of nature, as its embodiment and the channel of its nourishment. This view also demands a recognition of humanity’s immense failure to appropriately live up to this responsibility, for it is from humanity that the vast and interlocking systems of death in which all creation now groans came into being.
The only reasonable response to this is to seek to extricate oneself from these systems as much as possible, and vegetarianism is a means to doing precisely that. This may be partly why so many religious traditions have encouraged their members to abstain from animals products, either for seasons or permanently. Of course, for Christianity, fasting has always been a means to deepening prayer. The devils also fast, after all, and so simply abstaining from certain kinds of food, or limiting ones food altogether, is insufficient. Rather, it is seen as producing psychophysiological change (which is of course intertwined with the spiritual) that allows one to enter more deeply into communion with God. But perhaps the reasons for this change lie precisely in the deracination of the self from death. The further one is from darkness, the more clearly will one be able to contemplate the light. Vegetarianism may therefore be both a moral ideal and a tool for spiritual growth, and both may be founded on the same principle: the abstaining from participation in death.
Yet it is ultimately impossible to remove oneself from the systems of death that run rampant in the cosmos. Even the vegetarian is not free, as meritorious as his actions may be, since his life depends upon the death of vast herds of the vegetal kingdom. Indeed, the very act of existing is already an act of consumption intertwined with the death of other beings. To move about in the world is to kill. We can only limit the extent of our participation in this killing so far, for it is intrinsic to the fallen world. This is the sobriety of Christianity, a dark truth that must be faced before one can understood the gravity of Christian hope. For this is not the end of the story, and in the illuminations of the resurrection, we see the beginnings of a new cosmos, the cosmos that God has planned since before the foundation of the world. Christians must balance these two perspectives, seeing simultaneously the intrinsic goodness of creation and the cracks that everywhere distort it. It is only when these two truths can be held together that one can grasp what has been lost and what the resurrection indicates. It is only in such moments that we may understand the implications of the God who dies as a man and is raised from the dead to sit upon the throne. For it is only the world to come that properly constitutes the true creation, and until then we dwell in the shadow of death.