Clean and Unclean Animals

Most holy brothers, I long for the day your letters and writings reach me, and I count it among the chief days and the happiest — for what else is there now to make me more glad? And yet I think a day is no less worth marking, and belongs among the special days, when I send the same back to you, with the love I owe you, and write to you with the same eagerness. For nothing binds me so tightly, most holy brothers, and nothing stirs and wakes me with such a goad of care and worry, as the fear that you might think you are the worse off because I am not there. That is what I work to remedy: I labor to show myself present with you by writing often. [a]

And so, although the duty I owe, the charge I have taken up, and the very office of service laid on me already require this necessity of writing letters, you press it on me further by rousing me to write through your own steady stream of letters. Inclined as I am to these regular exchanges of love, you urge me all the more by showing that you stand firm in the good news without let-up. The result is that my letters do not so much teach you, who already know, as spur you on, who are already ready. You hold the good news pure, scrubbed of every stain of twisted teaching, and you teach it vigorously besides; so you are not looking for a human master, since by these very things you show yourselves to be teachers.

So: you are running, and I cheer you on; you are keeping watch, and I rouse you; you are fighting “the spiritual forces of wickedness,” and I speak to you; you are pressing on “toward the prize of your calling in Christ,” and I urge you forward. Trample down and throw off both the sacrilegious slanders of the heretics and the idle stories of the Jews, and hold to nothing but what Christ handed down and taught, so that you may rightly claim the authority of his name as your own. How twisted the Jews are, and how far from understanding their own law, I have shown fully, I believe, in two earlier letters, where it was proved beyond doubt that they do not know what the true circumcision is, or the true sabbath. Their blindness only grows, and this letter answers it: here I have set out briefly what is to be said about their foods, since it is on those that they suppose that they alone are holy and everyone else defiled.

So the first thing we must make use of is that saying: “the law is spiritual.” If they deny that it is spiritual, they are certainly speaking against God; and if, to avoid that, they admit that it is spiritual, then let them read it spiritually. Divine things have to be taken in a divine way, and they must certainly be held as holy. A serious charge is branded on anyone who fastens earthly, human teaching onto sacred and spiritual words, and we must be careful not to do it. [g]

And we must watch this too: that nothing God ordained is handled in a way that seems to lessen his authority — that by calling some of it impure and unclean we do not turn the arrangement itself into an insult to the one who arranged it. For in rejecting what he made, he would seem to have condemned his own works, which he had approved as good; and either way he would be made to look changeable, which is exactly what the heretics want. Either he blessed things that were not clean, or he later rejected as not good the creatures he had blessed as both clean and good. The outrage and the contradiction of it will stand forever if that Jewish teaching is kept up. We must get rid of it with everything we have, so that whatever they have handed on out of order may be taken away by us, and his works may be set in their proper order again, and the divine law given its fitting, spiritual application.

But let me begin at the beginning of things, where I ought to begin. The only food of the first human beings was fruit and what the trees produced. Later, human sin moved that need from the fruit trees to the crops of the ground — and the very posture of the body showed the state of the conscience. While their conscience was good, innocence lifted them up toward the sky to pick their food from the trees; but once sin was committed, it bent them down toward the earth and the ground to gather its grain. Afterward the use of meat was added, God’s kindness supplying for human needs the kinds of food that fit each occasion. A softer food was needed to feed people who were themselves soft and untrained; and yet even that food could not be got ready without work — for their own good, so that they would not find pleasure in sinning again, if the labor laid on sin did not urge them toward innocence. And since it was no longer a garden to be tended but a whole world to be farmed, the sturdier food of meat is offered, so that for the sake of the work something more might be added to the body’s strength. All this, as I said, came by grace and by God’s own arrangement: the strongest food was not to be given in too small a portion to keep people going, leaving them too weak for labor; nor the softer food in too great a portion, so that they would be weighed down past their strength and unable to bear it.

But the law that came later laid down rules about meat with a distinction: some animals it gave and granted for use, as clean; others it forbade as not clean, and as passing their pollution to anyone who ate them. It marked out the clean ones this way: those that chew the cud and have a divided hoof are clean, and those that do neither are unclean. With fish too the law said that those covered with scales and fitted with fins are clean, and those that are otherwise are not clean. It also drew a line among the birds and set down which were to be counted detestable and which clean. So the law required very fine distinctions to be drawn among the animals that the older arrangement had gathered together under one form of blessing.

What, then, are we to say? Are the animals unclean, then? But what does calling them not clean mean, except that the law has set them apart from being used as food? And what about what we said a moment ago? On that showing, God is the one who arranged things that are not clean, and the blame laid on the things made rebounds onto their Maker, who did not produce them clean. To say that is sheer, extravagant folly: it accuses God of having created unclean things and charges the divine majesty with the guilt of having made things that are detestable — especially when they were pronounced “very good,” and, as good, received the blessing from God himself “that they should increase and multiply.” What is more, at the Creator’s command they were kept safe in Noah’s ark for the sake of their offspring, so that by being kept they might be shown to be needed, and being needed, shown to be good — even though there too a distinction is attached. And yet even then the whole creation of those very creatures that were not clean could have been wiped out, if it had needed wiping out on account of its own pollution.

How far, then, must that law — which is spiritual, as I have shown on the apostle’s authority — be taken spiritually, if the divine and certain intent of the law is to be carried through? First, we must hold that whatever God ordained is clean, made pure by the very authority of his creating it, and that it must not be reproached, or the reproach falls back on its Author. Next, that the law was given to the children of Israel for this purpose: that they might gain by it and go back to the good ways of living which they had received from their fathers but had spoiled in Egypt through mixing with a foreign people. Finally, that the ten commandments on the tablets teach nothing new; they remind them of what had been rubbed out, so that the righteousness in them, which had been put to sleep, might come back to life at the breath of the law, the way a smothered fire does. [n]

They could gain from seeing this: the faults most to be avoided in people are the ones the law condemned even in animals. For when an animal without reason is rejected on some ground, what is really being condemned is that same thing in the human being, who does have reason. And if something an animal has by nature is marked out as a defilement, that same thing deserves far more blame when it is found in a human being, against his nature. So the livestock were censured in order that people might be made clean — that is, so that people with the same faults would be reckoned on a level with the animals. The result is that the animals were not condemned by their Creator through any fault of their own; rather, people were to be taught by the animals to return to the unspotted nature they were created with.

We have to look at how the Lord separates clean from not clean. The clean creatures, it says, both chew the cud and have a divided hoof; the unclean do neither, or only one of the two. All of them were made by one Craftsman, and the one who made them blessed them himself. So I regard the making of both kinds as clean, because the one who created them is holy, and the things created are not at fault for being what they were made. It has never been the custom for nature to bear the blame for guilt, but for a twisted will.

What, then, is going on? In the animals it is human character, human doings, and human wills that are being pictured. They are clean if they chew the cud — that is, if they always have God’s commands in their mouth as food. They have a divided hoof if with the firm step of innocence they tread the ways of righteousness and of every good quality of life. For creatures whose foot is split into two hoofs always walk strongly: if one half of the hoof begins to slip, the firmness of the other holds it, and the step stays solid. So those who do neither are unclean: their walk is not firm in what is good, and they do not digest the food of God’s commands the way that chewing of the cud does. And those who do one of the two are not clean either, since they are crippled in the other and complete in neither. There are those who do both, as believers do, and they are clean; those who do one of the two, as Jews and heretics do, and they are blemished; and those who do neither, as the Gentiles, and so they are unclean. Thus in the animals the law sets up a kind of mirror of human life, where people may look at the images of their punishments; so that everything faulty in people, since it is done against nature, may be condemned all the more, when even these traits — natural though they are in animals — are held against the animals themselves.

For in fish the roughness of scales is what counts as their cleanness — and in people, rough, rugged, unpolished, solid, serious ways are approved; while fish without scales are unclean, because ways that are trivial, unsteady, unreliable, and soft are not approved. And what does the law mean when it says, “You shall not eat the camel”? Only that by the example of that animal it condemns a life that is limp and bent crooked with crimes. Or when it forbids the pig to be taken as food? It certainly rebukes a life that is filthy and foul, that takes its pleasure in the garbage of vice and puts its highest good not in a generous mind but in the flesh alone. Or when it forbids the hare? It rebukes men remade into women. And who would use the body of a weasel for food? Yet here it reproves theft. Who would eat a lizard? But it hates a life that wanders with no aim. Who a gecko? But it curses stains on the mind. Who would eat a hawk, or a kite, or an eagle? But it hates plunderers and violent people who live by crime. Who a vulture? But it holds accursed those who look for plunder in the deaths of others. Or a raven? But it holds accursed crafty intentions. When it forbids the sparrow, it condemns the lack of self-control; when the owl, it hates those who flee the light of truth; when the swan, the proud with their necks held high; when the gull, a tongue that runs on without restraint; when the bat, those who look for the dark of night and of error alike. These things, then, and things like them, the law holds accursed in animals — though in the animals they are not blameworthy, since they are born in that condition. In a human being they are blamed, because they are gone after against his nature: not by his making, but by his own going wrong.

To the considerations I have set out, then, other reasons were added for which many kinds of food were withheld from the Jews. To that end many things were called unclean — not because they were condemned in themselves, but so that the Jews might be held to the service of the one God; for plain living and a moderate appetite suited people chosen for that purpose. And such moderation is always found to lie close to the worship of God — closer than that: a relative, so to speak, and next of kin to it. For extravagance is the enemy of holiness. How will it spare the worship of God, when it does not spare decency? Extravagance keeps no fear of God: pleasures hurry it along, and it is carried on into whatever its desires dare. The reins are dropped, and it piles up expense without measure, as though spending were its food, running past its inheritance and its decency alike — or like a torrent pouring down from mountain peaks, which not only leaps over what stands in its way but sweeps those obstacles along with it to wreck other things. [s]

So these remedies were sought to hold back the people’s lack of self-control, so that as extravagance shrank, good character might grow. For what else did they deserve — people who dared to prefer the cheapest food of the Egyptians to the divine banquets of manna, and the juicy meats of their enemies and masters to their own freedom — than to be held back from the use of every kind of food? They fully deserved that the slavery they had longed for should be the thing that fed them well, if food that was better and free displeased them so much.