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The Ethics of Diet. Howard Williams
Читать онлайн.Название The Ethics of Diet
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isbn 4057664648310
Автор произведения Howard Williams
Жанр Языкознание
Издательство Bookwire
X.
CHRYSOSTOM. 347–407 A.D.
THE most eloquent, and one of the most estimable, of the “Fathers” was born at Antioch, the Christian city par excellence. His family held a distinguished position, and his father was in high command in the Syrian division of the imperial army. He studied for the law, and was instructed in oratory by the famous rhetorician Libanius (the intimate friend and counsellor of the young Emperor Julian), who pronounced his pupil worthy to succeed to his chair, if he had not adopted the Christian faith. He soon gave up the law for theology, and retired to a monastery, near Antioch, where he passed four years, rigidly abstaining from flesh-meat and, like the Essenes, abandoning the rights of private property and living a life of the strictest asceticism.
Having submitted himself in solitude to the severest austerities during a considerable length of time, he entered the Church, and soon gained the highest reputation for his extraordinary eloquence and zeal. On the death of the Archbishop of Constantinople, he was unanimously elected to fill the vacant Primacy. The nolo me episcopari seems, in his case, to have been no unmeaning formula. His beneficence and charity in the new position attracted general admiration. From the revenues of his See he founded a hospital for the sick—one of the very first of those rather modern institutions. The fame of the “Golden-mouthed” drew to his cathedral immense crowds of people, who before had frequented the theatre and the circus rather than the churches, and the building constantly resounded with their enthusiastic plaudits. He was, however, no mere popular preacher; he fearlessly exposed the corrupt and selfish life of the large body of the clergy. At one time he deposed, it is said, no less than thirteen bishops, in Lesser Asia, from their Sees; and in one of his Homilies he does not hesitate to charge “the whole ecclesiastical body with avarice and licentiousness, asserting that the number of bishops who could be saved bore a very small proportion to those who would be damned.”[91]
At length, his repeated denunciations of the too notorious scandals of the Court and the Church excited the bitter enmity of his brother-prelates, and, by their intrigues at the Imperial Court of Constantinople, he was deposed from his See and exiled to the wildest parts of the Euxine coasts, where, exposed to every sort of privation, he caught a violent fever and died. So far did the hostility of the Episcopacy extend, that one of his rivals, a bishop, named Theophilus, in a book expressly written against him, amongst other vituperative epithets had proceeded to the length of styling him “a filthy demon,” and of solemnly consigning his soul to Satan. With the poor, however, Chrysostom enjoyed unbounded popularity and esteem. His greatest fault was his theological intolerance—a fault, it is just to add, of the age rather than of the man.
The writings of Chrysostom are exceedingly voluminous—700 homilies, orations, doctrinal treatises, and 242 epistles. Their “chief value consists in the illustrations they furnish of the manners of the fourth and fifth centuries—of the moral and social state of the period. The circus, spectacles, theatres, baths, houses, domestic economy, banquets, dresses, fashions, pictures, processions, tight-rope dancing, funerals—in fine, everything has a place in the picture of licentious luxury which it is the object of Chrysostom to denounce.” Next to his profession of faith in the efficacy and virtues of a non-flesh diet, amongst the most interesting of his productions is his Golden Book on the education of the young. He recommends that children should be inured to habits of temperance, by abstaining, at least, twice a week from the ordinary grosser food with which they are supplied. As might be expected from the age, and from his order, the practice of Chrysostom, and of the numerous other ecclesiastical abstinents from the gross diet of the richer part of the community, reposed upon ascetic and traditionary principles, rather than on the more secular and modern motives of justice, humanity, and general social improvement. So, in fact, Origen, one of the most learned of the Fathers, expressly says (Contra Celsum, v.): “We [the Christian leaders] practise abstinence from the flesh of animals to buffet our bodies and treat them as slaves (ὑπωπιάζομεν καί δουλαγωγοῦμεν), and we wish to mortify our members upon earth,” &c.
Accordingly, the Apostolical Canons distinguished, as Bingham (Antiquities of the Christian Church) reports them, between abstinents, διὰ τὴν ἀσκησιν and διὰ τὴν βδελυπίαν, i.e., between those who abstained to exercise self-control, and those who did so from disgust and abhorrence of what, in ordinary and orthodox language, are too complacently and confidently termed “the good creatures of God.” This distinction, it must be added, holds only of the prevailing sentiment of the Orthodox Church as finally established. During several centuries—even so late as the Paulicians in the seventh, or even as the Albigeois of the thirteenth, century—Manicheism, as it is called, or a belief in the inherent evil of all matter, was widely spread in large and influential sections of the Christian Church—nor, indeed, were some of its most famous Fathers without suspicion of this heretical taint. According to the Clementine Homilies, “the unnatural eating of flesh-meat is of demoniacal origin, and was introduced by those giants who, from their bastard nature, took no pleasure in pure nourishment, and only lusted after blood. Therefore the eating of flesh is as polluting as the heathen worship of demons, with its sacrifices and its impure feasts; through participation in which, a man becomes a fellow-dietist (ὁμοδίαιτος) with demons.”[92] That superstition was often, in the minds of the followers both of Plato and of St. Paul, mixed up with, and, indeed, usually dominated over, the reasonable motives of the more philosophic advocates of the higher life, there can be no sort of doubt; nor can we claim a monopoly of rational motives for the mass of the adherents of either Christian or Pythagorean abstinence. Yet an impartial judgment must allow almost equal credit to the earnestness of mind and purity of motive which, mingled though they undoubtedly were with (in the pre-scientific ages) a necessary infusion of superstition, urged the followers of the better way—Christian and non-Christian—to discard the “social lies” of the dead world around them. At all events, it is not for the selfish egoists to sneer at the sublime—if error-infected—efforts of the earlier pioneers of moral progress for their own and the world’s redemption from the bonds of the prevailing vile materialism in life and dietary habits.
We have already shown that the earliest Jewish-Christian communities, both in Palestine and elsewhere—the immediate disciples of the original Twelve—enjoined abstinence as one of the primary obligations of the New Faith; and that the earliest traditions represent the foremost of them as the strictest sort of Vegetarians.[93] If then we impartially review the history of the practice, the teaching, and the traditions of the first Christian authorities, it cannot but appear surprising that the Orthodox Church, ignoring the practice and highest ideal of the most sacred period of its annals, has, even within its own Order, deemed it consistent with its claim of being representative of the Apostolic period to substitute partial and periodic for total and constant abstinence.
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