Animals and the Resurrection

by KARL STEEL

In my conference paper on meat and the resurrection, I quickly treated the question of animal resurrection in mainstream Christian doctrine: the answer? They don't. Since then, I've been caught in a kind of research loop....

In between bouts of teaching and grading and committee-meeting [but, happy to say, not job-hunting: I hereby offer my support and encouragement to any of our readers interviewing at the MLA in a couple of weeks. All best!], my blog post-cum-book section swelled up into what could have been 3,000+ words: more an accidental conference paper than food for the blog. I realized I needed to limit myself, in part out of consideration for your time, but also to rein in this material. Even so, it's probably too long for the blog. My apologies.

In Genesis 1:31, having finished his work, God gives his creation one last approving look. According to J. Edward Wright, this look inspired “a longing to return to this 'very good' mythical place, the place where humans existed before evil, pain, and suffering were introduced into our existence” (189); hence, as Wright suggests, the popularity of the conception of heaven as a garden. Yet something is missing: the renewed creation can scarcely be called a "garden." Where are the animals? Where are the plants? They might be saved, but nowhere does Wright indicate that animals or plants ever found a place in heaven. I do not mean to single out Wright: his work, otherwise excellent, is typical of celestial studies in his non-acknowledgment of animal or other worldly nonhuman life (e.g., Peter Toon, Heaven and Hell: A Biblical and Theological Overview; Clifford Davidson, ed.,The Iconography of Heaven; Jan Swango Emerson and Hugh Feiss, eds, Imagining Heaven in the Middle Ages; Colleen McDannell and Bernhard Lang, Heaven: A History; Carolyn Muessig and Ad Putter, eds, Envisaging Heaven in the Middle Ages).

But regardless of what Aquinas might say (see here and, for the Latin, here), regardless of the gaps in celestial studies more generally, plants and animals do sometimes appear in the future paradise. Verdant, bucolic heavens appear as early as 2 Enoch 8:1-3 and, in more mainstream works, in Jeremiah 31:12 and Isaiah 11:6-9 and 65:25 and in Revelations 22:2, which finds a place for the tree of life in the Eternal City. The twelfth-century De contemptu mundi of Bernard of Cluny pictures a heaven in which the saints will “stroll and dance amidst holy lilies and blooming flowerbuds” (21); the Elucidarium pictures a world freed of the postlapsarian curse, in which “odoriferis floribus, liliis, rosis, violis immarcessibiliter” (PL 171:1168D; unfading, sweet-smelling flowers—lilies, roses, violets) bloom in a world without thorns; and Pearl famously imagines the afterlife as a garden thronged with the souls of the saved. There's also this painting, which, if you're feeling generous, can stand in for any number of sylvan depictions of paradise.

Giovanni di Paolo's painting takes the floral luxury of the Elucidarium one step further by granting animals a place in paradise. They find a place, too, in Savonarola's Compendium of Revelations, where “mild animals, like white sheep, ermines, rabbits, and harmless creatures” frolic in a meadow, although Savonarola effaces their animal existence by glossing them as representing "Christians engaged in the active life." However, in a much earlier work, Irenaeus's Against Heresies 5.33.4, actual animals resurrect to live again as they did in Eden:

the resurrection of the just [shall also apply] to those animals mentioned. For God is rich in all things. And it is right that when the creation is restored, all the animals should obey and be in subjection to man, and revert to the food originally given by God (for they had been originally subjected in obedience to Adam), that is, the productions of the earth. But some other occasion, and not the present, is [to be sought] for showing that the lion shall [then] feed on straw. And this indicates the large size and rich quality of the fruits. For if that animal, the lion, feeds upon straw [at that period], of what a quality must the wheat itself be whose straw shall serve as suitable food for lions?

To the best of my current knowledge, Irenaeus's point here had little effect on medieval Christianity. Various apocryphal stories (discussed ably by Christopher R. Matthews in this anthology) were as uninfluential: in a version of the story of Androcles and the lion, the apostle Paul is saved in the arena by a lion he once baptized (Jerome, who himself records talking centaurs and all manner of pious animals, sniffed at the story: what nerve!); in the Acts of Philip, Philip and his entourage baptize a goat and a leopard, both of which eventually transform into humans in order to receive the Eucharist and thus, presumably, become suited for the resurrection. As stillborn as were these stories, tantalizing evidence of hope for animal life occasionally appears in later texts. Students of Middle English will remember the church founded at the end of Bevis of Hampton to pray for the souls of Bevis, his wife Josian, "And also for Arondel, / Yif men for eni hors bidde schel" (4616-7). In Les Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles (in a version of a tale also told by Rutebeuf), a poor village priest buries his beloved dog in a churchyard (and manages to dodge the avarice of his bishop by convincing him that the dog had set aside a fund for its own burial).

Yet the mainstream exegetical reaction to Romans 8:19-23 is telling. Paul writes:

For the expectation of the creature waiteth for the revelation of the sons of God. For the creature was made subject to vanity, not willingly, but by reason of him that made it subject, in hope: Because the creature also itself shall be delivered from the servitude of corruption, into the liberty of the glory of the children of God. For we know that every creature groaneth and travaileth in pain, even till now. And not only it, but ourselves also, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for the adoption of the sons of God, the redemption of our body.

Paul is otherwise scornful of animal life (see 1 Corinthians 9:9-10). But here, if “the creature” that groaningly awaits delivery from “corruption” into another more perfect existence is understood as distinct from the “ourselves” and “we” awaiting the “redemption of the body,” then Paul is suggesting that nonhuman life will resurrect. The possibility, only a possibility because of Paul's typically obscure prose, becomes glaringly apparent in the reactions of medieval exegesis. Rabanus Maurus feels compelled to assert that “creaturam, ut pote rationabilem, habere exspectationem quamdam” (PL 111:1454C; “the creature,” insofar as it is rational, has this expectation). A late antique commentary on the Epistles (ascribed by the PL to Jerome but likely by Pelagius) explains that Paul's promise of redemption could apply only to humans and then reemphasizes the proper dominance of humans over the worldly creation: “Exspectatio creaturae, de rationi creatura sermonem fecit, et non sicut quidam existimant, de irrationali, vel insensibili, quae ad servitutem hominum creata est” (PL 30: 683A; "The expectation of the creature": he said this about a rational creature, and not as some think, about an unreasoning creature, or an insensible one, which was made to serve man). Augustine's exegesis in the Refutation of the Priscillianists and Origenists and in question sixty-seven of the Miscellany of Eight-Three Questions proved to be the foundational approach to the verses (see the commentaries by Lanfranc, PL 150:132A-B; Hervé de Bourg-Dieu, PL 181: 710D-11C; Hugh of St. Victor, PL 175:481D; William of St.-Thierry, PL 180:634D-635A; and Peter Lombard, PL 191:1442B-1444C). Countering the purportedly Origenist notion that the stars and other celestial bodies might resurrect, Augustine argued that Paul referred only to humans. As he explained, all creation may be understood as present in humans, since humans are a microcosm: they are rational, like angels; they can sense, like animals; they have life, like trees, which, like our hair, can grow without being aware of its own growth. Moreover, the four elements are present in humans: they are made from earth, heat is required for bodily life and “light shines forth from our eyes”; the lungs are filled with air; and the flow of blood is evidence of the presence of moisture. Haymo of Auxerre (in a commentary the PL ascribes mistakenly to Haymo of Halberstadt) directly asserts what is only hinted at by other exegetes, namely, the gross error of any reading of the passage that “comprehenderit...bestias” (PL 117:432B,; understood it as being about beasts) rather than as about men, who can stand in for all creation. For, in Haymo's citation of Gregory the Great wrote, humans “esse cum lapidibus, vivere cum arboribus, sentire et [0432D] vivere cum animalibus; intelligere, id est rationabilitatem habere, cum angelis” (PL 117:432D; have being as do stones, live as do trees, sense and live as do animals, understand, that is, have reason, as do angels).

To sum up: the most doctrinally orthodox Christianity reserved the afterlife for rational beings only: humans, God, and angels. Only animals and other worldly nonhuman life, as I have argued elsewhere, could be said to die; humans suffered, at worst, an interruption. Nonetheless, we can still glimpse witnesses to the love of humans for at least individual animals; in a point I hope to talk about further, we can also witness the difficulty of imagining human life unworlded. The gardens of paradise, I think, are not just returns to Eden; they are not just fantasies of an elite in love with their own Springtime. Ralph Acampora has argued that the primacy of being "always already caught up in the experience of being a live body thoroughly involved in a plethora of ecological and social interrelationships with other living bodies and people" (5). It requires a vigorous effort, the effort of high, professional doctrine, to sustain the imagination of a future in which humans exist as themselves, with their God and with the angels and with each other, but without anything else; it requires an effort as vigorous as any effort, Cartesian or otherwise, of "dissociation and nonaffiliation" (5) with the world. Failures of that effort, or what might better be called refusals to unrecognize being a worlded (human) creature, can be witnessed in those visions of paradise that are worlds, like this one, but better, of humans and plants and animals and rocks and wind and the smell of flowers, all with each other. To fail the philosophical project of Aquinas and others is, as Acampora might write, to sustain oneself in the hope of the presently existing paradise that we could make paradise if only we knew our place in it.

The Return of the Pig?

by KARL STEEL

I'm told that I've been away for too long. What brought me back, today, and I hope again and again, is a dispensation sealed with a promise. Various people, bless their hearts, wanted to bi- or even tri-localize at SEMA Saturday morning, and I convinced them to leave my panel alone by promising to load down the blog with my conference paper. ITM wouldn't suffer too much, after all, since chunks of what I gave at SEMA I've done in some version before.

But, my friends, by missing my paper, you also missed a very alimentary journey from eating to digestion to excretion to more excretion (yes, twice, for what is shit but excess?): Fabienne Michelet on the OE Andreas, a favorite poem around these parts; Michael Johnson, on a chain of shitty asses in Provençal lyric; and Susan Morrison, Charlotte Allen's bête noire, who, in granting us a glimpse of her fecopoetics, refused play the hoarder (a favorite piece from her paper: the 15th-century travel guide that describes the habitus of the committed shipboard shitter in a bit too much detail: remember how the reluctance to pray is overcome by habitual kneeling? How habitual kneeling itself makes prayer sincere? Now imagine unbuckling your cloak, 3 times a day, to trick your Jerusalem-bound bowels into sliding past their ironic refusal to engage).

Away from St. Louis, having given your Saturday morning to other pleasures, weep for your loss, charissimi, if you can, but not so hard you can't track what follows. Pour yourself a cup of tea, put up your fuzzy slippers, and read on.

The earthly material out of which men’s mortal bodies are created never perishes; but though it may crumble into dust and ashes, or be dissolved into vapors and exhalations, though it may be transformed into the substance of other bodies, or dispersed into the elements, though it should become food for beasts or men, and be changed into their flesh, it returns in a moment of time to that human soul which animated it at the first, and which caused it to become man, and to live and grow.

This argument for the persistence and return of the human body, taken from Augustine's Enchiridion, might have been drawn from any medieval explanation of Christian resurrection doctrine. The doctrine was well suited for alleviating concerns over catastrophic change and the total disappearance of the body. Shipwrecks and anthropophagous animals, deaths in the arena or at the stake, putrefaction, dessication, and dispersal: none of this actually destroyed the body. There could be nothing simpler than coping with catastrophic destruction, but life itself proved an almost insoluble problem. During their life, humans grew, and eating, digestion, and assimilation—apparently—caused this growth. Life means change. If the human body changed as a result of things it consumed, what could be identified as the original body? What if the inhuman substance of food supplanted rather than merely supplemented the resurrectable human body? What if, as Peter Lombard wondered (see Bynum Resurrection 124), eating and digestion gradually transformed human bodies into bread or roast pig? What of the human would remain?

Peter Lombard's anxiety about bread is unusual. Typically, resurrection doctrine focused on the problem of meat. Another twelfth-century theologian, Master Martin, offered the argument that the

meats of animals and fish that are fit for the table of humans turn into the flesh of the eater. All the flesh of humans will resurrect, therefore the flesh of these animals, having been made human, will resurrect. Also, the flesh of humans crosses over into the flesh of a wolf [that has eaten humans] and thus the flesh of the wolf will resurrect since the flesh of humans, which has crossed over into the wolf, will resurrect.

Similarly, Gilbert of Poitiers argued that if what humans ate turns into human flesh, then “pig flesh would resurrect”; and an anonymous twelfth-century Summa wondered whether “man, in eating beast flesh, turns it into his own flesh and that conversely a beast eating human flesh turns it into its own flesh, and thus the flesh of a beast having been converted into human flesh or having been made human will resurrect” (see Richard Heinzmann, Die Unsterblichkeit der Seele und die Auferstehung des Leibes 211). These questions all implied the possibility of a paradise thronged with human-animal hybrids. In a sense this was a best case scenario, as the “chain consumption” problem suggested that some unfortunate humans might not be able to resurrect at all. In a typical chain consumption scenario—such as that found in Julian of Toledo's seventh-century Prognosticon or its thirteenth-century Anglo-Norman translation—a wolf kills and eats a man, and then a lion kills and eats the wolf, and then dies shortly afterwards. I'll quote from the translation: “The carcass lay on the ground and entirely rotted and turned to earth: where could the man be found in here? Know, indeed, that I do not believe at all that this man could be recuperated from death into life, because the earth that was the man cannot be divided from that which became the beasts'!”

Resurrection doctrine focused particularly on animal flesh because of the essential role played by the resurrection in distinguishing human from merely animal life. The Christian tradition almost universally asserted that the afterlife would be without plants and animals. Irenaeus's Against Heresies argues that immortal, resurrected humans would spend eternity with animals—including straw-eating, vegetarian lions; there is also the common medieval story about Judas's rooster [e.g., Cursor Mundi, Horrall ed., III.15985-93], which springs back to life to mock Judas's declaration that Jesus could no more resurrect than the rooster in his pot; but, to the best of my knowledge, Irenaeus's conception of heaven as an exact restoration of the Edenic paradise did not take root in medieval Christianity, and Judas's rooster, after all, was presumably resurrected only to end its existence, once again, in the soup. The main literary tradition on the resurrection, The Fifteen Signs of the Last Judgment, shows humans entering into eternity and animals, if it acknowledges them at all, as only mourning as their complete destruction approaches. Christian scholars generally insisted that the souls of animals did not outlast animal life. And Aquinas explained that since “in that final renewal of the universe...the body will rise not natural but spiritual...animals and plants will...cease to exist then.” Both humans and animals had bodies that were born, that grew and ate, and that underwent pain and putrefaction, but resurrection did away with these resemblances by breaking human life entirely from any shared bodily existence with animals. Furthermore, since humans would resurrect, only animals could really die; humans experienced what might better be called a temporary setback, or a preparatory stage for a more perfect existence. Resurrection would fail as an ultimate guarantee of difference, however, if the doctrinal worries about digestion proved justified. If animals that were eaten by or ate humans could enter into eternal life, if humans might enter eternal life as hybrid human-animals, and if humans eaten by animals might, through digestion, become animal flesh and thus be unable to resurrect, then to quote once more the question from the Dialogue of St. Julian, “where could the man be found in here?” With every bite, the human would gradually meld with the animal and be given over to death.

There is at least one additional complication to the utility of the resurrection for separating humans from animals: the resurrection is the promised, eternal demonstration of the distinction between humans and animals, while the worldly, present-day guarantee of difference is the human subjugation of animals. In a process that Derrida termed carnophallogocentrism, humans establish themselves retroactively, through this subjugation, as uniquely possessing “speech or reason, the logos, history, laughing, mourning, burial, the gift, and so on”: had Derrida extended his analysis to the Christian Middle Ages, his “and so on” would have included the immortal soul. The human consumption of animal flesh is the central act of domination by which animal life is denigrated and human life exalted and thereby created as human life. In this system, no human can be slaughtered and eaten, at least not legitimately, whereas no form of Christianity could deny the legitimacy of eating animals without incurring the suspicion of heresy. A human death might be murder, but an animal death at the most would be only a property crime. With a few notable exceptions, any claim that an animal might possess more than merely instrumental life was self-evidently absurd: this explains, in part, the humor of the Testamentum porcelli and the Stultus Stultorum, and the scorn of the Apostle Paul and Guibert of Nogent for the Deuteronomic verses that call for kindness towards animals.

If the human establishes itself as human by dominating animals, then, in another instance of the key insight of any number of postmodern philosophies, there is no essential human identity; there is only a fundamental conflict. The human is both a structural position and an ongoing event that seeks to produce both the human and the animal by elevating one and denigrating the other. It might be expected that this conflict could end once humans resurrected into an afterlife populated only by God, angels—or demons—and by other humans, where humans will have assumed their perfected bodies, freed from all flux. By passing through death, humans finally realize their distinction from nonhuman earthly life, and, in an afterlife lacking any lifeforms that can be dominated, they should be freed from the necessity of conflict. This peaceful end might be understood as the point when the human at long last comes into its own. But if the meat-eating by which the human struggles to be human contaminates the human body, if the pork we eat resurrects with us, then that struggle will be marked on the human body for eternity. Rather than finally arriving at an identity, the human will permanently display a corporeal reminder of its systemic antagonism; rather than transcending flux, flux would be fixed in the human forever. The truth of human nature—its contingency, its inessential relationality—will be irrepressible.

Christian thinkers countered this truth of human nature by proposing another truth. Only what belonged to what they called the veritas humanae naturae, “the truth of our human nature” would resurrect. In effect, this clarification set aside a portion of the human body as essentially human, rendering the rest of the body a kind of inhuman supplement unfit for resurrection, associated rather than joined with the truth of body. Philip Lydon Reynolds's Food and the Body: Some Peculiar Questions in High Medieval Theology tracks the doctrinal debates over whether food could contribute to the truth of human nature. Theologians like Peter Lombard and Master Martin answered no. Proof texts for this position included God's creation of Eve from Adam's rib, the feeding of the 5,000 from the 5 loaves, the resurrection of infants into adult bodies, and Matthew 15:17, “Do you not understand, that whatsoever entereth into the mouth, goeth into the belly, and is cast out into the privy?” Thus, the human would be preserved from its own eating; pig flesh, as Gilbert of Poitiers wrote, would not resurrect ["Die Sententie Magistri Gisleberti Pictavensis Episcopi (II). Die Version der Florentiner Handschrift." Archives d'histoire doctrinale et littéraire du moyen âge (AHDLMA) 46 (1979): 45-105]. While this solution required that human growth take place miraculously rather than naturally, while it cut off the human from any alimentary interaction with the world, it had the advantage of simplicity on other points: nothing essential in the human body was subject to change.

Later theologians promoted a naturalistic explanation for human growth. The aforementioned anonymous twelfth-century Summa, which, after wondering whether animals might resurrect, provides several options, the first two miraculous, and the latter at least tending towards a naturalistic explanation of growth:

Neither human flesh turns into that of a wild beast or the other way around, but...one nourishes the other and makes it grow . . . Or, if it is allowed that one is converted into another, it is not however converted into the truth of human nature or the other way around. Or, however, if they are converted the Lord will know one from another and in the resurrection will separate them.

Another anonymous treatise, De novissimus, argues that pork eaten by people

is not pork but is transformed into human substance to be resurrected, and so will not be unsuitable, just as the mud of the earth is not simply mud, but, having been transfigured into the human form, will arise with Adam. [Edited in Odon Lottin, Psychologie et morale aux XIIe et XIIIe siècles, 6 vols. (Louvain,: Abbaye du Mont César, 1942), Vol. V, 396.]

Chain consumption arguments, like that in the Prognosticon, always ended by asserting that God would sort things out. The Elucidarium explains:

What was the flesh of the man will resurrect; what is of beasts will stay behind. For He knows well how to separate these, who knew how to make everything from nothing. Therefore, whether they are devoured limb by limb by beasts or by fishes or by birds, all will be reformed in the resurrection so much so that not one of their hairs will perish.

Finally, Aquinas, like De novissimus, asserts that “although that part of matter which at one time was under the form of bovine flesh rises again in man under the form of human flesh, it does not follow that the flesh of an ox rises again, but the flesh of a man: else one might conclude that the clay from which Adam's body was fashioned shall rise again.”

The double argument that food contributed to human growth and that only the human body could resurrect granted humans a monopoly on constructive earthly violence. Animals' own meat-eating could have no long-term effect: animal flesh consumed by other animals might assimilate to the carnivore's body, or it might pass out of its body, but both eater and eaten were destined for the same end to which all nonhuman animals were subject. Human flesh consumed by animals might become part of their bodies, for a time, but God will separate human from animal flesh for the resurrection, so ordering animals and humans into their own proper destinies.

Barring the cannibal consumption of unensouled fetuses—which I won't get into today—the violence of the human consumption of animals is the only violence that might transform flesh into a substance fit for the Eternal City. No pig or cow could become immortal, but by suffering the violence of humans, either might contribute to an immortal substance. What could be put to use would be, and the rest would be discarded. The life of an animal was only a means, never an end.

Yet even while belittling animals, theologians nonetheless commemorated animal life and death, as the peculiar attention to meat in these debates itself attests to the value of animal life. It is that moment prior to the final belittlement, the moment the life of the pig enters the theologian's consciousness, the moment prior to the declaration that the pig will not resurrect, the moment before the theologian announces that God cannot think the life of a pig worth preserving, on which I want to linger as I continue to think about these matters.

Bits and pieces on anthropophagous animals

Many illustrations of the Last Judgment and Resurrection depict animals regurgitating human parts (the illustration for this post, taken from the nineteenth-century tracing of the Hortus deliciarum, is one such image). In these depictions, humans – or parts of humans – emerge only from animal mouths; they do not emerge from animal anuses, nor are they shown to be exuded or otherwise reconstituted from animal flesh. Regardless of what might have been thought to happen to human flesh during the term of the anthropophagous animal’s life, in the visual representations, humans have not passed through digestive tracks; they have not been assimilated; their flesh remains their own, promised to them for the coming Eternity. Seemingly like the en-whaled Jonah, they rest unaltered, if not wholly intact, in the belly of the beast until the Creator sees fit to undo the eating by bringing them back out the way they went in.

* * *

In the early second century, Ignatius of Antioch penned his Epistle to the Romans, a brief work in which he enthused over his coming martyrdom, eagerly hoping that the beasts of the arena would do their duty and devour him:

Suffer me to become food for the wild beasts, through whose instrumentality it will be granted me to attain to God. I am the wheat of God, and let me be ground by the teeth of the wild beasts, that I may be found the pure bread of God. Entice the wild beasts, that they may become my tomb, and may leave nothing of my body; so that when I have fallen asleep, I may not be found troublesome to any one.

This passage has been interpreted as one in which Ignatius turns his body, through martyrdom, into the Eucharist; Bynum tracks its efforts to promise continuity of self even in those moments when it seems to be in danger of utter dissolution (Resurrection 27). Ignatius pictures the “breakings, tearing . . . . separations of bones[,] . . . . cutting off of members[, and] . . . bruising to pieces of the whole body” that he will undergo. Yet Ignatius describes his final end also as something far more mundane: he is wheat turned into bread; he has, in a common image, fallen asleep; he is the body laid to rest in the tomb of these beasts. The latter image is especially arresting. He hopes that nothing will remain of him – no relic – over which any Christian might expend any care. Presumably such a hope would be vain for the arena, given that even the most ravenous -- or fastidious -- of beasts leave behind scraps of carrion; but it would not be a vain hope for a burial, as even the sloppiest of burials tend not to leave pieces behind. Although Ignatius will be devoured by beasts, he resists the wildness of it by imagining what is meant to be a humiliation as a banal, albeit pious, terminus of his life. He undoes the coming dispersal of his limbs into multiple animal stomachs through a metaphor that transforms these numerous temporary receptacles into a single tomb that will preserve his remains until the Last Judgment. In a manner of speaking, that burial is precisely what happened. After his martyrdom, nothing remained of him “but the harder portions of his holy remains,” which “were conveyed to Antioch and wrapped in linen, as an inestimable treasure left to the holy Church by grace which was in the martyr.” His humble request that he not be preserved in the form of relics has not been honored, but the fact of his having been killed and consumed by animals is at least counterbalanced by his osteal preservation. He has been reassembled preparatory to the coming resurrection, and until then, his remains, his self partially in abeyance, will be preserved by the church. This end and enduring postmortem existence is presumably what he would have come to even if he had not been consumed by animals: his flesh would have turned to dust, his bones kept.

The above story is the Greek version of Ignatius's death. Some, but not all, versions translated into Latin (beginning with the Elogium ex Martyrologiis Adonis, translated into Latin by Bede) conclude differently. A typical version of this tradition follows:

Finally, after this, that he had been tormented by fire, and by beating and prison, the emperor did send for the Romans in a place and there did do set S. Ignatius, and did do bring thither two lions for to devour him. But he had never dread for death ne for other torments, of which he had suffered many, but was always comforted for to die for the love of Jesu Christ. And he said at the last: I am wheat of Jesu Christ, which ought to be grounden between the teeth of these beasts, by which I may be pure bread for to be presented to my Lord; and anon the lions came and strangled him without tearing of his flesh, or anything hurting it (in the Latin, præfocauerunt eum tantummodo, & non tetigerunt carnes eius), wherefor Trajan had great marvel and departed from the place.

What was originally a story in which a saint triumphs over eating is eventually altogether purged of eating. It becomes one of the many stories in which large predatory animals, otherwise notoriously anthropophagous, refuse to eat saints: e.g., the story of Cerbonius, Bishop of Populonia, who, in Gregory the Great’s Dialogues, is condemned to be eaten by a bear, but the bear only licks the saint’s feet and hands, acting “with a heart almost human”; or the stories of Vincent, Gordian, Primus, Felicianus, and Justina in the Golden Legend, all of whose exposed bodies remain uneaten by animals; or, even, although this is somewhat far afield, the assertion by a fourteenth-century cynegetic manual that Acteon’s dogs, even though their master had been transformed into a stag, refused to eat him. Both versions of Ignatius's martyrdom essentially tell the same tale of the failure of animal violence: in each, Ignatius resists being eaten and incorporated, in one by imagining his own swallowed body as a buried body, in the other by showing, even before the resurrection, the perdurability of flesh promised him for Eternity: subject to the power of God, the lions may only smother, so respecting the integrity of the sacred body. In the earlier narrative they may tear the saint to pieces, but nevertheless his relics persist. At any rate, what the lions ate would cease to be theirs once the lions passed into the nothingness of a merely animal death. Animals may be able to eat humans, digestion might join human with animal flesh, but this transformation is temporary: they cannot retain this human as their own flesh. Because the animal was temporary, and the human eternal, the devouring lions of the earlier legend might as well be the smothering lions of the Golden Legend.

Oh, and there's this meme thing over at Scott E. Kaufman's blog.

Life is simply taking and not giving, or, Long Live the New Flesh

A post inspired in part by the recent enthusiasm of Americans for torture.

Humans and animals have in common bodies subject to growth, injury, bleeding, and putrefaction. I have argued that the human domination of animals is the central act in making a human. Meat-eating is surely the most overt act of human dominion over animals, but, because digestion assimilates consumed animal bodies to human bodies, the meat-eating that helps create the human has a side effect: a body, because made of flesh, much like the one consumed. Given my flesh, what can be the difference between the steak I eat and the steak I am except perhaps my (temporary) mobility? Worse yet, because mainstream medieval Christianity demanded that the entire human body be resurrected, animals, joined to us by digestion, might be resurrected too; or, if animal carnivores killed and ate us, our bodies might join theirs, at least until they died, at which point our corpses, mingled with their carcasses, might remain inert dust forever; even worse still, anthropophagous animals, transformed by their partially human diet, might be resurrected into a Paradise thronged with zooanthropomorphic hybrids, an Eternal City of Dr. Moreau.

Doubt.

A man was passing through a wood and a wolf came from the wild forest; the wolf was indeed large and strong, and it ate all the flesh of the man, and then it left, going on its way. A lion came searching for its prey, and found no other animal [but the wolf]. It took the wolf by the head and strangled it to death. It ate the wolf entirely, leaving nothing behind. The lion died soon afterwards. The carcass lay on the ground and entirely rotted and turned to earth: where could the man be found in here?

Bonjour, Adrien, ed. Dialogue de Saint-Julien et son disciple: poéme anglo-normand du XIIIe siècle, Anglo-Norman Texts Series 8. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1949, ll. 1768-81.

Also, the meats [carnes] of animals and fish that are fit for the table of humans turn into the flesh [in carne] of the eater. All the flesh of humans will resurrect, therefore the flesh of these animals, having been made human, will resurrect. Also, the flesh of humans crosses over into the flesh of a wolf [that has eaten humans] and thus the flesh of the wolf will resurrect since the flesh of humans, which has crossed over into the wolf, will resurrect.

Treatise by Master Martin, perhaps Martinus de Fugeriis From Richard Heinzmann, Die Unsterblichkeit der Seele und die Auferstehung des Leibe, Münster: Aschendorff, 1965, 181.

Belief.

For they say that it is impossible that pig flesh will be purified on the Day of Judgment and should possess the Kingdom of God. The notion they believe is resolved: for [mainstream Christianity says] that pork even now is not pork but is transformed into human substance to be resurrected, and so will not be unsuitable, just as the mud of the earth is not simply mud, but, having been transfigured into the human form, will arise with Adam.

On the Last Things (12th century), from Odon Lottin, Psychologie et morale aux XIIe et XIIIe siècles. 6 vols. Louvain: Abbaye du Mont César, 1942., Vol. V, 396.

But it is opposed that man, in eating beast flesh, turns it into his own flesh and that conversely a beast eating human flesh turns it into its own flesh, and thus the flesh of a beast having been converted into human flesh or having been made human will resurrect. I respond that neither human flesh turns into that of a wild beast or the other way around, but that one nourishes the other and makes it grow . . . Or, if it is allowed that one is converted into another, it is not however converted into the truth of human nature or the other way around. Or, however, if they are converted the Lord will know one from another and in the resurrection will separate them.

An anonymous 12th-century Summa. Heinzmann, Immortality Doctrine, 211

While some theologians worried about whether or not bread would arise in the resurrection, most anxieties of food found their voice in worries, like those above, about meat. Whatever the responses to the anxiety (which were multiple, as Philip Lyndon Reynolds showed in Food and the Body: Some Peculiar Questions in High Medieval Theology (Brill, 1999)), each response declared that only what should resurrect would resurrect. Resurrection, in a way, was therefore less a reconstitution than a recognition of something that had never ceased to be, the human, the sole worldly thing destined for postmortem continuity.

Animals must suffer violence to be made meat (indeed, the penitentials proscribed the meat of animals dead from disease or accident); humans too must suffer violence to be made meat (notably, resurrection anxieties center around wolves and lions (and cannibals: more soon), not the worms of the De Contemptu tradition). In the eschatological systems of digestion and meat, animal violence must always give way to the perdurability of the human. Human violence that turns animals into food might have no long term effect whatsoever, since the pigs and oxen humans devour might simply pass through us, digested but not assimilated, leaving what is essentially us unchanged; other doctrines allowed the devoured pigs and oxen to transform into resurrectable flesh. But regardless of the scholar, they all, more or less implicitly, agreed that animal violence can never have any long-term effect: no animal can keep our flesh, or the flesh of its fellow animals, forever. The resurrection will make things right; its promise, perhaps, insured that even what happened here below was already right. No matter how similar the bodies humans shared with animals, no matter how similar their struggles in eating, digestion, and death, the violence of human eating is the only meat-eating that might transform flesh into a substance fit for the Eternal City. Our violence, not theirs, has meaning in the long run. Our violence can also make the law that justifies or requires it; it can free us from discovery of ourselves in the slaughtered bodies of animals; our violence can free us from the futility of making nothing but bodies joined by suffering. Or so runs the hope.

(fixed, as always, a bit after the original posting, for my usual mistakes and some vagueness: apologies)

Final Update: I wrote my post before I read this, but, as so often, Amanda Marcotte hits the points I would have wanted to make (or would have wanted myself to make) so well. Read it.