A garden, not a jungle

I've often toyed with writing a post about how pets, at least the better sort, like dogs, parakeets, and horses, and even (I'm gulping hard here) cats are an important part of the theology of nature. How raising pets is in some sense participating in Adam's command, his naming of all the animals. How it is only in that way that we achieve our right relation with the non-human world, and the non-human world receives some surcease, a drop of water in their ceaseless toil of want and ignorant sufferings.

But I don't have to write it because Stephen Webb just wrote it for me -- and thanks to Lee at verbum ipsum who brought it to my attention:

It starts off slow. The first half is stuff that is good and right to say, but has been said before. But the second half gives voice to things I've never heard anyone say before:

As I mentioned at the beginning of this essay, I was never a nature lover. I began my thinking about animals, in fact, purely by happenstance. I had a dog, a dachshund named Marie, and I loved her more than my friends thought I should have. . . .

In Marie’s eyes I saw the glimmer of freedom, the first movements of spirit emerging from matter, wounded by what we humans had demanded of her species. Her eyes demanded responsibility, and even more, mutuality. Howard, our cat, would only glance at me, while Marie stared. Cats have a haughtiness that makes them hard to understand. They embrace their animality in spite of their freedom. Dogs plead, and thus risk losing everything. Dogs demand; cats indict, and turn away. Dogs are creatures in transition, incomplete without us. To hold a dog’s gaze is to set the dog free. The fragility of this dependence is easily abused, of course, but I was convinced that dogs say something not only about us but also about the origin and destiny of all animals.

. . . Perhaps Hegel spoke more truly than he understood when he argued that Schleiermacher's famous definition of religion as `absolute dependence' turned the dog into the best Christian. I too wanted to write a theology for the dogs.

I probably loved Marie too much, but then again, there is something excessive in all true love. I was convinced, in fact, that excessive love is what enabled both humans and dogs to overstep their species boundaries in the adventure that we call domestication. . . . Dogs made humans out of us, just as we have gone a little way toward making honorary humans out of dogs. . . .

I know that many of you will suspect that my relationship with Marie was more pathological than the typical environmentalist’s love for nature. Nonetheless, it seems to me that loving individual animals—and loving them for what they will yet become, rather than pretending that they are enough like us to merit equal consideration—is a more Christian gesture than loving nature as a whole.

. . .

Getting kicked out of my own organization only confirmed for me that Christianity was right to value vegetarianism in monasteries and on fast days but not to require it for everyone. For Christianity, compassion should be rooted not in dogmatic claims about the equality of humans and animals, or in an escapist flight from the realities of this world, but in our ability to be compassionate, to reach out and care for another being. Loving a dog, to return to my relationship with Marie, would not be such a bad way to begin and practice that compassion. Until the church can articulate an alternative to the modern animal rights movement, Coetzee's story demonstrates that the gnostic version of vegetarianism is still very much alive and well.

. . .

Christians have no business promulgating the aesthetic appreciation of coherence—a part of the whole is good as long as it contributes something to that whole—which reflects the old idea that this is the best of all possible worlds. The world is fallen, and nature is not what God intended it to be. The violence of nature is not all our fault, either, because the world into which Adam and Eve were expelled was already at odds with the peaceable harmony of Eden. If nature is fallen and its fall preceded our own, then there is little we can do to change nature in any dramatic way. Yet we can, like Noah with his ark, save a few fellow creatures from suffering as we try to warn others about God’s impending judgment.

. . . .

Nature cannot be a source of Christian morality, but it can be an object of Christian compassion. Yet it is impossible to have empathy for all of the animals that must become meals for others. Such sacrifices are biologically necessary, and to mourn necessity is foolishness. Perhaps this is why so many people today admire wild, carnivorous animals. It is easier to admire predators than their victims when there is nothing that we can do to change the one and save the other. Besides, wild animals confront us as something inassimilable to human measure, caring not for our help or sentiment. These animals follow their nature in beautiful, effortless and dignified ways, so that our inability to make moral judgments about them tempts us to romanticize them instead. The Christian idea that God sides with the victims somehow gets lost when we watch nature documentaries, wincing but marveling at a fearsome display of power that seems innocent and natural.

. . .

Traditionally, Christian theology portrays heaven as a garden, not a wild jungle, a place, like the original Garden of Eden, where God allows life to grow without the countless sacrifices of violent death. It is thus possible to argue that pets are the paradigm for the destiny of all animal life. In other words, according to the Christian myth, animals were originally domesticated, in the sense of being nonviolent and being in a positive relationship with us, and they will be again.

Small Isn't Always Better

There's a great post on the Walmart good/bad issue at Lone Prairie. Julie Neidlinger's comment stand out by their resolute determination to stay focused on what she knows personally to be the case. (Wow! What if we all confined our arguments to that? Well, we're all supposed to "Think globally, act locally" - - in other words, figure out how the world works on the basis of vast abstractions and fourth and fifth hand generalizations, and then impose that almost certainly WRONG understanding on the neighborhood you actually live in.) I love the quotation from the mom of a mom and pop store who works nights at Walmart because she enjoys it and that way she can get health insurance (!)

This goes the same way with animals too. I'm not a vegetarian, I believe that God has indeed given man dominion over the animal kingdom (Gen. 9:1-7). I won't call cruel or unclean what God has called clean (Acts 10:15, 1 Tim. 4:3). Still I've gotten a little bit more "pro-vegetarian" since learning about this, and one thing I hate is cruel practices in raising animals. I almost don't want to read books like this (written by a former speech writer for President Bush), it's so painful. Some friends of ours are big chicken raisers, and when I mentioned that I only buy eggs laid by cage-free organic chickens, they warned me that that's no guarantee the chickens are being raised humanely. Maybe they have no cages and no antibiotics, but they might have gross and painful medical conditions going untreated, etc. People on non-technological farms can make animals' lives as miserable as big operations - - and if the farms are small enough, they have a much better chance of slipping in under the radar of state inspection for sanitary and humane conditions. Small and organic isn't necessarily better.

Sleepless Vegetarians

One of the pitfalls in studying the early church is the "denominational diversion," that is the attempt to wrest every issue into a "why 'we' are right and 'they' are wrong" polemic. While this is a necessary part of church history, which must include evaluation of true apostolicity and the legitimacy of the trends that develop or depart from that, it can distort the issues and lead us to focus only on issues that separate denominations today. Meanwhile, facets in the early church that are irrelevant from all of today’s Christians tend to get neglected.

As an interesting example, there is the strong current of vegetarianism in the early church. This trend was there from the beginning, when Daniel and the youths refused the meats and wine of the pagan king. To many their healthy appearance after a week of vegetarianism (Dan. 1:12-16) was a display not only of the blessings of obedience, but also of the dietetic benefits of a teetotaling vegetarian diet. The same beliefs continued in the New Testament, as Paul writes:

Him that is weak in the faith receive ye, but not to doubtful disputations. For one believeth that he may eat all things: another, who is weak, eateth herbs. Let not him that eateth despise him that eateth not; and let not him which eateth not judge him that eateth: for God hath received him.

As is often pointed out, since meat in the markets was involved with pagan sacrifices, it was hard for Christians to find "legal" meat. But for many, including many completely orthodox early Christians, vegetarianism, along with teetotaling and abstention from sex formed a constellation of expected discipline. As a result the idea that eating red meat is un-Christian flourished into the era of the Christian emperors. You see this in Prudentius, the Spanish Christian poet born in AD 348. In his poem on the "Daily Round" he describes all the foods given by God: birds ensnared in cunning traps, fish caught in nets and on rods, the rich crop in grains,the vine, the olive, milk, honey, and the fruits of the orchard. But he cautions his reader:

All this abundance is in the service of Christ’s followers and supplies their every need. Far from us be the appetite that would chose to slay cattle and hack their flesh to make a bloody feast. Let tribes uncivilized have their savage meals from the slaughter of four-footed beasts: as for us, the leaves of greens, the pod that swells with beans of diverse sorts, will feed us with an innocent banquet. (vol. I, p. 22-23)

One may well wonder, what happened to this theme that red meat is dubious for a Christian? Well it appears to have disappeared when the "tribes uncivilized" became the ruling classes all over Europe, even in his native Spain. Not only was meat the essential food group for Germanic, Slavic, and Central Asian peoples (as a token of which "meat" in the King James Version today means just "food"), but cutting the meat and supplying pieces to the guests in proper order of precedence had a deep significance in politics and etiquette among them all. (The importance we place on the carving of the turkey on Thanksgiving is an remnant of this archaic custom.) This aspect of Mediterranean Christian practice thus fell by the wayside, with only abstentions of Lent and Friday remaining of what was once a common (although certainly not universal) belief that red meat was always bad.

And what about sleep? Prudentius again speaks of sleep as a likeness of death and an overcoming by sin:

It is late to spurn the couch after the shining sun is up, unless by adding a part of the night thou hast given more hours to toil. The loud chirping of the birds perched under the very roof, a little while before the light breaks forth, is a symbol of our Judge. As we lied closed in by foul darkness, buried under the blankets of sloth, He bids us leave repose behind for day is on the point of coming; that when dawn besprinkles the sky with her shimmering breath she may make us all, who were spent with toil, strong to embrace the hope of light. This sleep that is given us for a time is an image of everlasting death. Our sins, like foul night, make us lie snoring; but the voice of Christ from the height of heaven teaches and forewarns us that daylight is near, lest our soul be in bondage to slumber, and to the very end of a slothful life sleep lie heavy on a heart that is buried in sin and has forgotten its natural light. They say that evil spirits which roam happily in the darkness of night are terrified when the cock crows, and scatter and flee in fear; for the hated approach of light, salvation, Godhead, bust through the foul darkness and routs the ministers of night. (vol. I, pp. 7-9)

Read in this light suddenly we see more meaning in the disciples’ sleeping in the Transfiguration and in the Garden of Gethsemene, and Paul’s contrast of sleeping and waking and light and darkness:

And that, knowing the time, that now it is high time to awake out of sleep: for now is our salvation nearer than when we believed.

and

For ye were sometimes darkness, but now are ye light in the Lord: walk as children of light . . . And have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather reprove them. For it is a shame even to speak of those things which are done of them in secret. But all things that are reproved are made manifest by the light: for whatsoever doth make manifest is light. Wherefore he saith, Awake thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light.

While physical preparation for Easter is now focused on fasting, in the ante-Nicene church it was primarily a vigil, a repression of the sloth and dissipation of slumber (cf. Acts 20:7-12). Now Edison did his part to remove from us this horror of darkness, but that sleeping is like death and an overcoming by sin; where did that go? I have no idea, but since it is something that because both Catholics and Protestants today share it is little remarked on.

So we will continue to read church history for clues as to who's right and who's wrong, but one learns even more, by also keeping one's eye open to how different the ideas and concerns of Christians, especially not famous-theologian Christians like Prudentius, were from ours today. They are not always right and we're not always wrong, but as C.S. Lewis said, their errors are unlikely to harm us, being obvious, but their virtues will be unexpected to us.

Originally posted at Here We Stand

UPDATE: An old post about Jerome I now recall touched on the same issue, where he praises Hindu vegetarianism: What the Brahmans in India and the Gymnosophists in Egypt observe on their diet of only porridge, rice, and fruit, why should not Christ’s virgin do altogether? Jerome's rejection of bourgeois family life and advocacy of "tune in [to Christ's call for asceticism], turn on, and drop out [into a monastery]" only add to the "early Christians had a good long streak of hippie-ism in them" conclusion.