MODERN VEGANISM AND ORTHODOX CHRISTIANITY: ALLIES OR RIVALS?
Modern Britain, as well as the entire global village, is witnessing an exponential growth of veganism. One cannot help but notice similarities between veganism and fasting in the way it is practised in the Orthodox Church today. Yet there exists a great deal of mutual suspicion. Veganism, following Lynn White Jr and Peter Singer, often blames Christianity for the plight of the environment, and accuses it of being indifferent to animal suffering. Orthodox Christians can regard veganism as a spiritual imposter, even as a cult, an alternative spirituality which cannot ultimately deliver on its promises of life without cruelty, but rather distracts people from the true faith. An analysis of the similarities and differences between the two thus may have some useful implications for both pastoral and missionary endeavours.
The Vegan Society in the UK defines veganism in the following way, "Veganism is a philosophy and way of living which seeks to exclude—as far as is possible and practicable—all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose."[1] Unlike vegetarianism, which presupposes only the giving up of meat, veganism involves abstaining from all products derived from animals, such as eggs, milk and other dairy products, the production of which includes harming and/or killing animals. For example, male chicks are often killed as part of egg production, and dairy calves are separated from their mothers shortly after birth.
The giving up of animal products is something that sounds very familiar to all active Orthodox Christians. In dietary terms, it is the very definition of modern fasting. But this similarity is deceptive. Orthodox fasting is primarily an ascetic practice, part of one’s spiritual development. Writers of The Philokalia, a collection of spiritual guidance text written between the fourth and fifteenth centuries, repeatedly emphasize the need for fasting precisely in this context. “Fast before the Lord according to your strength, for to do this will purge you of your iniquities and sins; it exalts the soul, sanctifies the mind, drives away the demons, and prepares you for God’s presence.”[2] These words belong to Evagrios the Solitary, but it is indeed hard to find a father who did not recommend fasting in the strongest possible terms.
Much of classical Orthodox teaching on fasting is based conceptually on the Platonic doctrine of the tripartite soul. Plato’s philosophical system deals with the soul as consisting of three parts: (1) the appetitive part, responsible for physical desires (for food, sex, etc.), (2) the incensive part (the drive, or the spirit, in the sense in which a horse can be spirited), responsible for some strong emotions, (3) the intellectual part, which should be in charge. For the person to flourish, the three parts need to be in harmony, with the intellectual part in control - as shown in the extended metaphor of Plato’s Republic.
This idea was “baptised”, as it were, into Christian thinking: in order to function properly as a psycho-somatic unity, the person need to first of all take charge of their physical desires. As St John of the Ladder put it, the person needs to “control that clamorous mistress, the stomach”. Hence fasting becomes an integral part of the way to theosis, to deification. Following the logical principle of the higher being unable to stand without the lower, the Fathers would argue that, unless we learn to control our physical desires, we have no hope of conquering the more difficult-to-fight sins of anger, pride, vainglory, that have to do with the functioning of the other parts of the soul. The writers who particularly link their teaching on fasting to the tripartite doctrine of the soul are, among others, St Hesychios the Priest, St Philotheos of Sinai, Ilias the Presbyter, St Peter of Damascus, as well as Evagrios, quoted above. For example, the tradition ascribed to St Anthony the Great teaches that, “When the soul endowed with intelligence firmly exercises her freedom of choice in the right way, and reins in like a charioteer the incensive and the appetitive aspects of her nature, restraining and controlling her passionate impulses, she receives a crown of victory; and as a reward for all her labours, she is granted life in heaven by god her Creator.”[3]
Veganism, on the other hand, does not claim any ancient philosophical roots, does not make reference to personal asceticism, and presents no spiritual aspirations. It is interesting to note that it could have claimed ancient lineage, bearing in mind such classical authorities as Pythagoras, with his doctrine of the transmigration of souls (in consuming animals, ancestors might be consumed), as well as Porphyry and Plutarch, with their philosophical justification of veganism. Interestingly, some of Orthodox questioning of veganism stems from the suspicion that veganism does rely on pagan metaphysics and on Gnostic texts.
This suspicion is largely unjustified. Although vegans in theory could claim ancient pagan authority for their behaviour, in practice they do not. A study of the founding documents, the memoranda and articles of association (as presented to the Charity Commission for England and Wales[4]) of major vegan organisations operating in the UK, namely PETA, Viva, the Vegan Society, Animal Aid, Veganuary, Animal Equality, the Humane League UK, Friends of the Earth UK, reveals no reference to metaphysics, or to any type of spirituality. Nor are there any such references found on their websites or in their social media narratives and campaign statements. One exception is the 2023 film Christspiracy, which does mention Gnostic texts. The context for these, however, is a wish on the part of the film creators to proselytise, to convince Christians that they should be vegan because their own tradition demands it. The Christian tradition is clearly misrepresented in the film, since the Fathers of the Church, notably St Irenaeus of Lyons, draw a clear line of demarcation between Orthodox and heretical teachings. A fortiori, the film itself is not significant enough in the vegan movement to postulate Gnostic connections for veganism as a whole.
The motivation for most people to go vegan is neither metaphysical nor spiritual, but rather ethical, which is an important distinction to make. According to the Vegan Society data, the driving factors for giving up animal products are compassion towards the animals and concern for the environment, because intensive farming in seen as contributing significantly to environmental damage.[5] These are modern ethical concerns. As the definition of veganism quoted at the beginning of the chapter shows, modern veganism sees itself as a lifestyle that aims to be as compassionate and as responsible as possible. The diet is only part of it, and it is strictly a means to an end, a part of holistic morality. At this point Orthodoxy and veganism can converge. Vegans could be said to be involved, in the only way they know how, in the practice of the virtues, and, as such, resemble not so much spiritual rivals, but the Gentiles of St Paul’s day, who, without the Law, by nature do things contained in the Law (c.f. Rom.2:14). For this reason, the vegan movement is capable of presenting a missionary opportunity for the Church. To put it quite simply, vegans need Christianity.
First and foremost, they need it in the way that all secular humanists do, since, just as any number multiplied by zero is zero, any meaning in life multiplied by death, by annihilation, is meaningless. It is self-evident that even if every human being stopped eating animals, experimenting on them, killing them for pleasure, etc., the animals would still die of natural causes, as well as kill each other in the most brutal way. Which should be a logical problem for vegans, and a significant demotivator for their lifestyle. Without Christ’s triumph over death veganism becomes vacuous, in the way any other stand-alone moral effort is vacuous.
Another reason for vegans to need Orthodoxy is the fact that modern veganism either lacks proper metaphysical underpinning, or offers metaphysical justification that is self-contradictory. In order to elaborate on this point, three secular apologies for veganism can be considered, namely the Darwinian evolutionary theory, Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation and Tom Regan’s The Case for Animal Rights.
In justifying their ethical choices vegans often, consciously or unconsciously, rely on the Darwinian evolutionary theory, and on such an interpretation of it that maintains that humans are all basically animals. The initial reaction to this idea might indeed motivate the person to stop eating whom they consider to be their own kind. But, on the basis of the same premise, it can equally be argued that, since animals kill and eat each other, and since humans are also animals, it is perfectly acceptable for humans to kill and eat other animals. Thus a contradiction is arrived at very quickly.
Another example, perhaps the best known one, of a philosophical underpinning of animal protection in general and veganism in particular, is the seminal work by the Australian ethicist Peter Singer, entitled Animal Liberation. The problem, however, is that Peter Singer constructs his argument from an explicitly utilitarian position. The morality or immorality of an action is judged by the amount of good it does, with the good being measured as either pleasure or satisfaction of interests of individuals. The individuals are taken as discrete units, and, following the founder of utilitarianism Jeremy Bentham, “each counts for one and none for more than one”. At first glance, it seems to be a very fair system, and, because the calculation can also include animals, it seems to be very useful for vegans. But “seems” is the operative word. A counter-example can be considered, in the form of a quick thought experiment in which many people decide to eat one cow. It is the death of only one cow, counted against the pleasure of many people. The utilitarian calculation works out against the cow and is incompatible with veganism.
Furthermore, Peter Singer’s system is geared towards the elimination of suffering, but not necessarily of death, especially in the case of animals who, in his opinion, have no strong sense of self or a conception of their future, and can therefore be killed, provided it is done humanely. “… in the absence of some form of mental continuity it is not easy to explain why the loss to the animal killed is not, from an impartial point of view, made good by the creation of a new animal who will lead an equally pleasant life”[6]. Regardless of how tenable this position may or may not be in general, it is incompatible with veganism, which opposes all killing of animals, and would actually often maintain that, in the words of a popular chant, “Humane slaughter is a lie, animals do not want to die!” Thus Animal Liberation turn out to be no more of a secure philosophical basis for veganism that the Darwinian theory is.
A far more philosophically rigorous secular justification for veganism appears in The Case For Animal Rights, by the American philosopher Tom Regan. In this book, almost Eleatic in its thoroughness, the author builds his case for animal rights initially on the analogy with marginal human cases, e.g. new-born babies, elderly people with dementia, severely mentally handicapped people. Cognitively, many animals are superior to them. Tom Regan then hangs his argument on a very thin thread, namely our instinct to compassion, our primary moral intuition not to harm. “This principle states that we have a direct prima facie duty not to harm individuals”[7]. And the extraordinary thing is, this thin thread does not break. The author builds argument after argument on it, in fact, about four hundred printed pages worth of argument. And the thread still holds, and the argument holds. But what the reader is not informed about is the origin of this moral imperative not to harm, and why it is capable of supporting so much ethical weight. If this is a metaphysical foundation for veganism, it is precisely the “meta” that is missing from Tom Regan’s metaphysics; he does not explain where the human morality, so vital to his overall system, comes from, but rather takes is as a given. Which is why it can be contested that even a philosophical justification of veganism as sophisticated as his still needs Christianity.
What Christianity can offer, specifically in relation to vegan ethical aspirations, is complicated and involves a significant change of direction before reaching the telos, the final goal. Several highlights of the narrative can be traced in Biblical history and the rest of Orthodox Tradition. The original diet established by God for the human beings is described in the book of Genesis as plants and fruit, a vegan diet. Genesis 1:29 states, “And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat”. (Meat meaning food in Early Modern English). In the story of the Flood, however, humans are given the permission to eat animal flesh. In Genesis 9:3-4 Noah and his descendants are told, “Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you; even as the green herb have I given you all things. But flesh with the life thereof, which is the blood thereof, shall ye not eat.” Fear of humans is put into animals at the same time. A nadir of human/animal relationship seems to be reached thereby.
But the story does not end there. It must be remembered that Orthodox saints do not eat meat. One could, of course, argue that this has nothing to do with animals, and is an ascetic practice. One important factor, however, puts animals back firmly on the Christian agenda: animals themselves are not afraid of saints, sharing their dwellings, asking them for help, communicating with them. We can safely assume that it was not the case that the saints, having become bored of prayer, decided to tame wild animals. Their relationship with animals could rather be seen as evidence of the advanced existential status of the saints. Animals have various instincts (to built nest, to look after their young, etc.), and, as the 7th century Syrian theologian St Isaak the Syrian pointed out, they also seem to have an instinct to recognise sainthood, “If a person of humility comes near dangerous wild animals, then the moment these catch sight of him, their ferocity is calmed: they come up to him and attach themselves to him as though he were their master, wagging their tails and licking his hands and feet. This is because they smell that fragrance which emanated from Adam when he named the animals in Paradise before the Fall: this fragrance was taken away from us at the Fall, but Christ gave it back to us at his coming.” The same idea is found in The Hexaemeron by St Basil the Great, and is attested by numerous stories of holy men and women throughout the lands and throughout the centuries.
The full Orthodox narrative can be summed up in the following way: a vegan diet was part of God’s original plan for humanity; permission to eat animals was given after the Flood; the accompanying fear towards the human was then put into animals; Christian saints do not eat animals, and animals are not afraid of them, sensing their sainthood. This allows one to suggest that permission to eat animals was temporary and correlated to sin.[8] And, because all Christians are ultimately called to sainthood, this is where the vector seems to be pointing, to veganism as part of Orthodox sainthood.
It would, however, be rash as well as illogical to draw the conclusion that all Christians should go vegan as soon as possible. Veganism is a correlative of sainthood, not an end in itself. The Orthodox approach presupposes a hierarchy of values, where one’s relationship with God always comes first. It also offers an analysis of the current ecological crises that goes much deeper than attributing it to mere immoral behaviours of the current inhabitants of the planet. The Basis of the Social Concept of the Russian Orthodox Church, the official guiding document on various social issues, and part of the curriculum of theological studies, contains a section on ecological issues. The roots of ecological problems are identified in the following way, “Relations between man and nature were broken in pre-historic times because of the fall of man and his alienation from God. Sin that was born in the soul of man damaged not only him himself, but also the entire world around him”[9]. Maintaining the principle of the interconnectedness of human, animal and plant life, the document points out that the solution to the problem should not be conceived in a purely humanistic, but in a Christian way. Bearing in mind the subject of our discussion, the inference can be made that a mere vegan lifestyle is not going to solve the tragic predicament that animals are in at present. “The anthropogenic background of ecological problems shows that we tend to change the world around us in accordance with our own inner world; therefore, the transformation of nature should begin with the transformation of the soul”[10]. If our goal is theosis, and a life in Christ, ethical issues would slot into the right place and the right context, and this includes our relationship with animals.
A paradigmatic illustration to sum up the discussion might be a desert tory that His All-Holiness the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew retold on at least one occasion. In the story, some Saracens were returning home from war, and got lost in the desert. Fortunately, they came across a hermit, who lived in the desert near a spring of water, and ate berries that were so bitter than even the camels would not eat them. He gave the Saracens water and pointed them in the right direction, but he could not share his food with them, because the berries were too bitter for them to eat. So he said to them, “When you go over the hill, you will see a herd of wild goats. You can kill and eat one, it will be enough for you to get home”. So they set off, and saw the goats, as the hermit had said; and shot one. But then they thought, “Maybe we’ll kill another one, just in case”. And, as one of them pulled the bow, the bow broke, literally back-firing. So they hurried back to the hermit, confessed what they had done, and returned home to tell the tale. What is significant about this story is the fact that it presents a spectrum of human condition, and the hearer can decide where he or she is at. Do we, as most of our race, identify with the Saracen who, out of fear and greed, is taking more from the environment than he needs, and suffers the consequences? Or are we taking only what we need? Or are we approaching the existential status of the hermit, who not only does not eat animals, but does not even compete with them for food – the berries that he eats are too bitter for the animals to eat? Because ultimately he must be the ideal of humanity.
[1] https://www.vegansociety.com/go-vegan/definition-veganism accessed 14/12/2024
[2] The Philokalia, The Complete Text, vol. 1, comp. St. Nikodimos of the Holy Mountain and St. Makarios of Corinth, trans. G.E.H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard, and Kallistos Ware (London: Faber and Faber, 1995), 36.
[3] The Philokalia, The Complete Text, vol. 1, comp. St. Nikodimos of the Holy Mountain and St. Makarios of Corinth, trans. G.E.H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard, and Kallistos Ware (London: Faber and Faber, 1995), 351.
[4] https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/charity-commission accessed 14/12/2024
[5] https://www.vegansociety.com/go-vegan/why-go-vegan/animals accessed 14/12/2024
[6] Peter Singer, Animal Liberation, (London: Penguin Random House, 2015), 229.
[7] Tom Regan, The Case for Animal Rights, (California: University of California Press, 2004), 187.
[8] This conclusion is drawn, among others, by Dr Nellist in her recent work Animal Suffering in the Eastern Orthodox Tradition.
[9] https://russianorthodoxchurch.ca/en/social-concepts-index/the-church-and-ecological-problems accessed 15/12/2024
[10] Ibid.