Abstract
In the kitchen of a house I once shared as a student, a poster of the cartoon cat Garfield admonished us: ‘You are what you eat’. In those days I had no idea that Garfield was quoting Ludwig Feuerbach; clearly there was more to that cat than met the eye.
David Grumett and Rachel Muers do not quote Garfield in this book, but their Preface does refer to Feuerbach’s aphorism, along with some remarkable invective from Clement of Alexandria against ‘hissing frying-pans’, the ‘useless art of making pastry’ and the immorality of indulging in luxurious foods such as lampreys, kids, oysters and even ‘the beetroot of the Ascraeans’ (p. vii). Clement, they suggest, understood the importance of dietary practice for Christian life and faith better than many modern theologians and ethicists. This intriguing book is an attempt to correct that modern neglect, engaging in a kind of ethical reflection that begins with what the authors describe as ‘extensive’ Christian practice (pp. 142–43): that which is concerned with the everyday business of eating and drinking, as distinct from moments of ‘intensity’ such as worship and the Eucharist.
The book has its origins in a research project entitled ‘Vegetarianism as Spiritual Choice in Historical and Contemporary Christianity’. At the outset, however, Grumett and Muers seem rather cagey about the book’s point of departure in modern vegetarianism. While—as I shall suggest later—this occasionally leads to a rather awkward dialogue between the study’s contemporary preoccupations and its historical focus, it does have the undoubted merit of re-locating present-day Christian ethical debates about food and diet in the context of a much more expansive historical Christian tradition of practice, taking that tradition on its own terms rather than simply interrogating it for what it will tell us about ‘vegetarianism’ today.
The sheer strangeness and unsettling character of parts of that history emerge vividly in what follows. The first four chapters trace the history of asceticism—as a major locus of Christian dietary practice—from the early monasticism of the third century to modern times. The story is carefully documented from a wide-ranging, interdisciplinary literature and is compellingly told. It begins with the harshly ascetic dietary practices of the anchorites in the Egyptian, Palestinian and Syrian deserts, and relates how these extreme forms of abstinence gave way to the moderated regimes enshrined in the rules of the emerging monastic communities, such as those of Pachomius, Basil, and later Benedict. Grumett and Muers are at pains to take these practices of abstinence on their own terms, resisting the temptation to force them through any simplistic modern interpretative grid. Tracing the development of monastic abstinence through the Middle Ages, they show how the ascetic practices of the monasteries came to influence the wider society, particularly the increasingly complex pattern of fasts through the liturgical year. A related aspect of the story tells how seasonal and occasional fasts served political purposes, not only during the Middle Ages but well into modern times in Protestant as well as Catholic contexts. Moreover, fasting could not only be used by those in political authority but could also serve as a form of prophetic witness and resistance to authority—a tradition that Grumett and Muers strikingly trace through Irish history from St Patrick to the Republican hunger-strikers of the 1980s in Belfast’s Maze Prison.
Alongside the story of the evolving influence of Christian asceticism on the life of the polis runs the equally long and complex tale of ‘[t]he process by which dietary discipline ceased to be a primary means of expressing Christian identity’ (p. 36). While the anchorites were said by contemporaries to try to outdo one another’s feats of extreme asceticism, the development of cenobitic monasticism required a more moderate and uniform practice, and some monastic rules expressly forbade individual monks from practising more rigorous abstinence than the rule enjoined on the whole community. Grumett and Muers remark on the vital role of common dietary discipline in fostering communal identity at a time when doctrinal identity was still evolving and contested. Later, the growth and development of monastic orders during the Middle Ages witnessed various pressures that tended to reduce the rigour of dietary ascesis: the needs of the young, old and sick in the community, the duty of hospitality to guests, and the increasing frequency of gifts from lay people to supplement the community’s normal provision for feast days. The rise of the mendicant orders, with their immersion in secular society and their dependence on alms, required a more flexible approach to diet and abstinence. After the Reformation and into the modern era, the story includes the increasing extent to which fasting and dietary discipline became matters of personal choice, and physical health became increasingly prominent alongside spiritual discipline as a motivation for moderation in one’s diet. The involvement of Christian groups such as Methodists, Salvationists and Adventists in the beginnings of the modern vegetarian movement is noted, and chapter 4 ends with a brief discussion of the ambivalent relationship between contemporary vegetarianism and the churches.
Following this extended historical narrative, the next three chapters take up particular themes and trace them across the span of Christian history. One is the division of animals into ‘clean’ and ‘unclean’: Grumett and Muers trace the ongoing influence of Israelite food laws on the New Testament and later Christian practice, giving the lie to any over-simple assumption that Israel’s dietary laws were just set aside by the Church. A second theme is the place of diet as a definer of community identity, including as a marker of the boundary between orthodoxy and heresy. This story begins with Augustine’s complex attitude to dietary abstinence as a result of his Manichaean past, and includes episodes—such as the suppression of the Cathars—when abstention from meat became a mark by which heretics could be identified. Dietary aspects of the relations between Christians, Muslims and Jews are also explored, including troubling examples of anti-Jewish Christian rhetoric and practice from the early Middle Ages to the twentieth century. The final one of these thematic chapters is in some ways the most arresting, dealing as it does with themes of sacrifice and slaughter. Here too, the notion that Christianity simply abandoned inherited traditions of animal sacrifice is challenged by evidence and examples of the persistence of this into the twentieth century.
In the final main chapter, the focus shifts to constructive theological reflection on the themes explored in predominantly historical mode in previous chapters. Some fascinating and fruitful connections are made here. For example, the refusal of meat sacrificed to idols, traceable back to Paul’s instructions to the Corinthians, is compared to the modern refusal of factory-farmed meat because it has been sacrificed to the ‘idol of profit’ (p. 133). Secular and theological critiques of vegetarianism are also explored in this chapter, and vegetarians defended in a nuanced manner against charges of hubris, utopianism and denying the goodness of creation.
Only in a short concluding chapter do Grumett and Muers discuss their method, locating their work within a post-MacIntyrean approach to Christian ethics ‘which takes practice seriously as a source of theological understanding, not merely as their [sic] result or expression’ (p. 142). What they believe distinguishes their work from much done in this vein, as I noted earlier, is their focus on what Daniel Hardy called ‘extensity’: ‘the ways in which Christianity is lived out and reflected on in the multiple changing contexts of everyday life’ (pp. 142–43). One feature of their study, they observe, is the theological ‘generativity’ of the practices they have studied: these practices resist tidy theorisation, not because they are unintelligible, but because they generate a surplus of explanation. That very fruitfulness makes possible a rich and evolving range of connections between contemporary Christian living and historical traditions of practice, as later chapters demonstrate to good effect.
Given a method that begins with careful attention to practice and acknowledges its resistance to theorisation, it is perhaps fitting that methodological reflections are reserved for the conclusion rather than introduced at the outset. Yet this does risk a certain loss of sense of direction on the part of the reader—all the more so since attention to those historical Christian practices calls for a thoroughly interdisciplinary approach. The authors achieve this interdisciplinarity admirably, but one effect is that it is not always clear what disciplinary conversation or conversations are being contributed to. I was sometimes unsure whether I was reading history, anthropology, religious studies, theology or some combination of them. Perhaps a few more methodological pointers at the outset would give unwary readers a useful navigational aid without compromising the integrity of the book’s approach.
A related difficulty, as I hinted earlier, arises from the authors’ quite proper wariness about letting modern vegetarian preoccupations shape their reading of the historical narrative. In places during the early chapters, that present-day point of departure disappears from view, and then surprises the reader by being suddenly re-introduced as a point of comparison in the midst of an historical narrative. For example, an extended discussion of the mendicant orders is followed by a short paragraph remarking that modern vegetarians might find the friars wanting for their lack of dietary rigour, but their more flexible approach to asceticism could offer ‘an alternative for people today who do not wish to espouse complete vegetarianism’ (p. 49). These abrupt modern connections sometimes give the impression of simply mining the historical tradition for examples and precedents to support different forms of contemporary practice. By contrast, later in the book—particularly in the thematic chapters—the conversation between historical and contemporary practice gets more comfortably into its stride. The awkwardness practically disappears, and some nuanced, fruitful and provocative connections result.
The reader might note one other limitation—hardly a criticism, since one book can only cover so much ground: the story Grumett and Muers tell is a good deal more Western Christian than anything else. From its beginnings in the Eastern Mediterranean, the focus shifts quite quickly to Western Europe. A good part of the narrative is still more specifically focused on the British Isles and, from the nineteenth century, North America. The most significant exception is the chapter on ‘sacrifice and slaughter’, where examples of animal sacrifice from several Eastern Orthodox and African contexts are drawn into the picture. But, as I say, one book can only do so much, and this one is an impressive achievement. By re-connecting contemporary Christian arguments about vegetarianism and diet with such a varied, complex and sometimes downright perplexing tradition of embodied practice, the authors have offered rich and (to use their word) generative ways to inform and renew that practice in the present. Any reflective Christian who eats should be willing to find this book interesting.