CHRISTIANITY AND THE CARNIVOROUS PRINCIPLE

Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

                                                                                               Blake

 

Blake presumably asked his question to his Tyger in a rhetorical sense.  I want to ask it quite literally.

Lamb is my favourite meat; provided that I don’t think about the source while I am eating it. 

     In our neigbouring field there are currently two lambs.  They chase each other in the sheer joy of living.   I have seen one of them feeding from its mother, and wagging its tail in delight.  To think about the probable fate of both of them puts me off eating lamb. 

     On the other hand, lamb was a key ingredient of the Passover Meal.  Animals sacrificed in the Jerusalem Temple were then eaten, with God’s blessing.  Christ is the Sacrificial Lamb, and the Lamb in Revelation has on it the marks of slaughter.  The sacrificed lamb is an integral part of the Christian tradition. Clearly, I am wrong to feel the way I do about my youthful neighbours. 

 

I believe the Bible to be divinely inspired: that is to say, I believe it is it is not simply human guesswork, but what God has chosen to reveal.  It contains what is necessary for our salvation: other data, we are intended to work out for ourselves; for that seems to me the intention behind the command in Genesis to “subdue the earth”. 

     We know, by using our brains and researching the rocks, that there were dinosaurs that pre-dated the arrival of humans, and we know that some of them were carnivorous.  That seems to render inadmissible the old idea that animals became carnivorous only after the Fall; although it does not rule out an initial vegetarianism before carnivorousness arose among the dinosaurs.  There can, after all, be herbivores without carnivores: but not the other way round.

     The Genesis account of things – which I take to be actual history in a concentrated and poetic form – does seem to imply just such a universal original vegetarianism.  The King James version, ambiguously perhaps, says “’the fruit of a tree bearing seed; to you it shall be for meat’”.   The same is true for animals:  to birds and beasts alike, ‘”I have given every green herb for meat.’”  A more modern version will substitute ‘food’ for ‘meat’, but the sense is the same: you can eat the products of the trees, and so can the animals.  And that is all you can eat.   If Adam can name the animals, he cannot eat them.  After the Fall, however, God clothes Adam and Eve in skins.  Who killed the animals, and for what purpose?  Was it just for clothing? 

     After the Flood, God makes a new covenant with Noah.  As the NEB expresses it: “’Every creature that lives and moves shall be food for you; I give you them all, as once I gave you all green plants.’”  Presumably the same now applies to animals: to stay alive, some animals will have to eat other animals. 

     Nowhere after Genesis can the case be made for vegetarianism.  Animals must be cared for, true – a working animal must have a day of rest, like its human owner – but they can be eaten.  Dietary restrictions imposed on the Jews are for health reasons, and for their spiritual discipline.  In the New Testament Mark says that Christ “declared all foods clean”, and Peter has a vision of animals suggesting that the old food restrictions no longer apply. 

     Where do we go from here; for the carnivorous principle seems to have unequivocal divine sanction and approval?

 

 The poet A E Housman blamed God for making him a homosexual and then condemning him.  More to the point, Housman didn’t believe in God; but had God existed, such would have been the case, which was why Housman didn’t believe in Him. Housman felt himself victimized by those who did believe in God, but in doing so he was ignoring the whole doctrine of sin: whereby we are all in the same boat in our unredeemed state.  Despite the impression given by the social gospel of liberal theology, the central message of Christianity is not that we should all be nice to one another because we are all the children of God.  If you go by what the Bible says, we are clearly not all the children of God.  We may become children of God only if we repent and are born again, and are transformed by the indwelling Holy Spirit into the sort of beings we were originally meant to be.  The Christian message about humanity is the flat opposite of Rousseau’s: we are not born good and are made bad by society; we are born bad, but may become good through divine grace.

     The point I am trying to make from all this is that we are not delivered perfect from the hand of God.  Human nature, according to Christianity, has gone radically adrift, is not the way it was meant to be, and is need of being redeemed.   And what is true of human nature may then be equally true of Nature itself. Nature, too, is spoiled and fallen: “abnormal” as Francis Schaffer used to describe it.  If such should be the case, is the carnivorous element in Nature a part of that corruption, and – if so – at what stage of history did it happen? 

       In the left-hand panel of Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights, we are shown a cat carrying a rodent in its mouth; for Bosch, the carnivorous principle was there from the beginning.  Milton, who came later than Bosch, gives a perhaps more biblical view.  Only after the Fall were animals changed: “to graze the herb all leaving, Devour’d each other.”  ( Paradise Lost, Book X, line 711)

     In some sense, both are right.  Bosch is in line – although he didn’t know it – with the evidence of the carnivorous dinosaurs; and Milton is in line with the intensification of natural corruption that would inevitably have occurred in the wake of the Fall. 

     My own  tentative: view – and I stress tentative because it is inevitably speculative, and I would be willing to be found in error  –  is that natural corruption probably began not after the human Fall, but after the angelic Fall that preceded it.  In ancient tradition, Lucifer was the angel in charge of matter; and along with his rebellion would have gone a perversion of his area of responsibility.

     I would like to digress at this point to counter those why say that they believe in God but cannot believe in the Devil. 

     I can respect strict materialists; although I believe them to be mistaken: matter is all there is; those believing in spirit are the victims of a delusion. 

     But if you profess belief in a God that is anything more than a pantheistic life force,  then you admit the spiritual world.  And if the spiritual world exists, there is no reason why, in addition to God, it should not contain angels; as Thomas Aquinas argued, there is nothing inherently improbable about them.  And if there are obedient angels, there might equally be rebel angels: the chief of whom is Satan.  (Or the satan, the adversary). 

     And if Satan delights in spoiling the handiwork of God, then the malevolence might extend to enjoying the sufferings of animals as much as the sufferings of humans.

     I recently watched a wildlife programme focused on a waterhole.  A herd of wildebeest came to drink, and one of them – after a long and weary journey – was taken by a crocodile.  Its death – for it resisted being killed – seemed a cruel process.  But what was either participant to do?  The one had to drink, and the other had to eat: the blame lay with whoever or whatever had devised the process in the first place.  A related programme featured a family of meercats.  When the eldest kitten was taken by a bird of prey, the others gave sounds of distress; and I do not believe it unduly anthropomorphic to think that they were grieving.

     Descartes believed that animals had no souls and were therefore just machines.  You could therefore experiment on them without reference to the sounds they made.  Descartes began the divorce of body and soul which led to the modern materialism that retains the body and abolishes the soul altogether.

     I don’t agree with Descartes.  I don’t know whether animals have their own sort of souls that would enable them to recognize their Creator[1], but I don’t believe for a moment that animals don’t feel pain and fear.  Take a cat to the vet, and then look at the sweaty paw prints when you lift it off the table.  But the very same cat later went after a bird, and took out its eye.

     If this is the God-ordained order of things, then why are we told in Isaiah 11, that the leopard shall lie down with the kid?  Is the carnivorous principle, then, only a part of the current travail from which the whole world longs to be released? If that is so, then my regrets at the death of the lambs are not so far out of line after all: rather, a sort of response ahead of time to what will happen when the world is changed. 

 

Since animals are part of the created world, and since the created world is to be made anew, we may hope that there will be animals in the New Creation.   And since there will be no more death we may hope that the carnivorous principle will have gone forever, along with all the other evils of this current world, and that the words of Isaiah will be true and the lion – its digestive system duly changed – will, indeed, eat straw like the ox.

     And we may hope, too, that  the ox – a beast of burden no longer – will become the bull that it was always meant to be.

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[1] In C S Lewis’ Prince Caspian, even the trees respond to Aslan by bowing down to him.