From Simply Heavenly forward

[Guest guest]

This passage is interesting, and it includes a quote from an Aramaic

version of Luke that supports vegetarianism. I'm not intending to

promote any form of Christianity with this - I'm not a Christian

myself. I was interested in this passage for it's piece of

vegetarian history. I am interested in finding other references to

the Evangelion Da-Mepharreshe, so if anyone has leads on that, I

would appreciate them. When I typed this out, I included author

Burke's emphasises in italics, but those weren't preserved when I

copy and pasted, so I also posted this passage on my blog

(http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?

fuseaction=blog.view & friendID=26883157 & blogID=53612025 & Mytoken=254AC6

D4-C5DF-4E82-B50AB4F7790C01432597156625) where the emphasises are

preserved.

 

 

Originally Christians – like their Jewish spiritual antecedents, the

Essenes – were vegetarians, but in time the insistence on a

vegetarian diet became confined to the monasteries. One of the most

interesting monastic " relics " of the early Christian era is a letter

written by a monk of Egypt to one of his disciples who had gone to

Alexandria on some project and there had begun to eat meat. Learning

of this, the monk immediately wrote to him, exhorting him to return

to his vegetarian ways, reminding him that in Paradise Adam and Eve

had been told: " 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 " (Gen. 1:29). This being so, the monk wrote, those who aspire

to return to that pristine state of purity and communion with God

must eat the diet of Paradise while on the earth in order to prepare

themselves to regain that lost blessedness.

 

Although at times – especially in the West – this ideal was

forgotten, whenever there was a resurgence of spiritual

consciousness and reform among the monastics the absolute first

principle would be that of total abstinence from animal flesh

(including eggs) in all forms. Usually this abstinence would be

extended to dairy products as well.

 

In the Eastern and Oriental Orthodox Churches this principle is

still evident in the requirement for all Orthodox Christians – lay

as well as monastic – to totally abstain from meat, fish, eggs, and

dairy products on nearly all Wednesdays and Fridays as well as all

days in the seasons of abstinence such as the forty days of Lent and

Advent. In the Oriental Orthodox Churches these days of abstinence

comprise more than half of the calendar year.

 

But many of the Eastern Christian monastics – and some non-monastics

as well – prefer to observe this abstinence all the time. This is

because in the Eastern Church such abstinence is not regarded as

penitential self-denial or " mortification of the flesh, " but rather

as an aid to interior prayer (Hesychia – The Silence). The Fathers

of the East taught that diet had a formative influence on the mind –

which they saw as a field of energy, not merely the physical brain,

which they considered to be only the organ of the mind. They

observed that some foods made the mental processes (movements of

noetic energies) heavy, whereas other foods made the mind light and

quick in movement. Topping the list of " heavy " foods were all animal

proteins, including dairy. In contrast, vegetables, grains, and

fruits – the food of Paradise – were seen to make the mind fluid and

able to grasp the subtleties of spiritual thought and experience

(theoria).

 

In this approach to vegetarianism they were maintaining the

principle to be found in the Aramaic text of the Evangelion Da-

Mepharreshe, the oldest text of the Gospels known to exist. There,

in the Gospel of Luke (21:34), Jesus says most forthrightly: " See

that you do not make your minds heavy, by never eating meat or

drinking wine. " In our own century, Saint John of Kronstadt (+1908)

wrote that the more we live in the spirit the less will we live on

animal flesh – the implication being that those who live fully in

the spirit abstain completely from animal food. Saint John, a non-

monastic parish priest, insisted that his spiritual children abstain

at all times from animal foods, thus keeping a perpetual lent. Those

priests who were under his spiritual aegis did the same in relation

to those under their spiritual care.

 

Now that more detailed – and honest – research and information

regarding diet and health are becoming widely spread, many clergy

and laity of the Orthodox Church who had previously held an

indifferent attitude toward observance of the traditional rules of

abstinence are realizing the wisdom of the ancient ways.