The Herbivore Family
Introduction: The Ancient Roots of Vegetarianism
It’s becoming more and more common today to see restaurants offering significant vegetarian and vegan options. As a non-meat diet is increasing in popularity, products and alternatives that fit this lifestyle have naturally evolved too. But this is nothing new. In fact, people have been vegetarian for thousands of years and in different cultures and parts of the world. Famously, in India, many of the religious traditions even encourage a vegetarian diet. But what about further West, in places like Europe and regions dominated by the Hellenic and Roman cultures? In fact, vegetarianism was quite common in this culture too, and it was often associated with significant religious and philosophical communities and traditions like Pythagoreanism, as well as being in conversation with other topics like animal sacrifice and animal rights. Perhaps even so today, I thought we’d explore this topic a bit deeper by looking at how the ancients tackled this question of vegetarianism, the morality and ethics around it, as well as animal sacrifice and animal rights more generally, particularly by looking at the writings of one very fascinating philosopher.
Animal Sacrifice in the Hellenic World
The Hellenic world was, of course, varied, spanning different continents and many different cultures that mingled with the original Hellenic one. So to say anything generalizing about such a vast topic is therefore pretty difficult. Even when it comes to religion, we can’t really say that there was a “Hellenic religion,” at least in the sense that we understand religion today. But most of us, of course, know about the Greek Olympian Pantheon of gods and the cults associated with them. This was indeed a staple of this culture, and the relationship between the gods and people was an important aspect of life. When it comes to the religious cult and its rituals, there’s no doubt that for most of history, animal sacrifice played a very central role. We find very clear evidence of this as early as in the epic poems of Homer; we see in The Iliad and The Odyssey how people will sacrifice oxen to Zeus and to other gods before going on a journey—all these kinds of things. Animal sacrifice is all over these old texts, as well as in many other sources describing how people would sacrifice different animals as offerings to the gods. During the big religious festivals, an important ritual was precisely the sacrificial offering: the inedible parts of the sacrificed animal would be offered to the gods, and the edible parts would be cooked and shared by the community as a meal.
Pythagoras and the Pythagorean Way of Life
Now, in a culture where animal sacrifice was this important for the religious rituals and cults, we might not expect vegetarianism to be that common. But in fact, this is not necessarily true. Vegetarianism and a vegetarian lifestyle, so to say, was something that was associated with and was an important aspect of certain communities and traditions. Perhaps most famously and significantly, some of the so-called mystery cults, and even more famously among those, the so-called Pythagoreans. Pythagoras is, in fact, a significant part of this story. While it is uncertain exactly when or even if he lived, it is believed that he was active between the 6th to 5th centuries BC. After settling in the Italian city of Croton, he gathered a group of followers—what became known as the Pythagoreans—that shared secret esoteric teachings and became known especially for a certain lifestyle, a quote “Pythagorean way of life,” that involved, among other things, a vegetarian diet.
As the centuries went on and the original Pythagoreans ceased to exist as a coherent group, their cultural memory still remained. Pythagoras became seen in some ways as the first philosopher and as one of the originating figures of an esoteric philosophical lineage—a lineage that was claimed especially by Plato and the Platonists. It is significant to note that a lot of what we associate with Pythagoreanism is probably a kind of Platonism that was projected back onto Pythagoras and his original community. But regardless, in later antiquity, there seems to have been a resurgence of this school in the form often known as Neo-Pythagoreanism, especially by the first couple of centuries AD. Aside from speculation about numbers and mathematics and how the world is all mathematics, this Pythagoreanism was especially associated once again with the Pythagorean way of life. To be a Pythagorean for the most part meant adhering to certain rules of conduct and behaviors. The Pythagorean way of life in late antiquity often involved sporting a beard—something that was pretty taboo in the Roman culture that had come to dominate at that time, which very much favored having a clean-shaven face—as well as dressing in rags and things like this. It is kind of similar to the image of modern-day hippies; this is what these Pythagoreans or Neo-Pythagoreans would be associated with. And again, being a Pythagorean and adhering to this way of life also usually involved being a vegetarian.
Neoplatonism and the Ascetic Life of Plotinus
As we saw, Pythagoreanism was perhaps especially connected with Platonism, and many of these significant Platonist philosophers lived according to “Pythagorean principles.” This becomes especially clear with the emergence of what is often called Neoplatonism, or sometimes Late Platonism. The foundational figure of this school, Plotinus, is probably one of the most influential philosophers in history. He lived in the 3rd Century AD, was originally from Alexandria in Egypt, but spent most of his philosophical career in Rome. Here he taught many students and composed the treatises that would eventually make up the Enneads, a masterpiece of Platonist thought. We don’t know that much about Plotinus’s personal life, but he seems to have lived a relatively ascetic lifestyle. It’s reported that he didn’t eat much and, importantly for our discussion today, he followed the Pythagorean ideal of having an exclusively vegetarian diet when he did eat. To people like Plotinus and others, vegetarianism was an important part of living a philosophical life—a kind of self-negation and asceticism that helped the soul focus less on the desires of the body and more on the inner life of the soul and the intellect, which is our true and real identity.
The Metaphysical Framework of Neoplatonism
It’s very hard to summarize Neoplatonism in short terms, and I advise you to check out my full introductory episode on the topic to get a better overview. But in short, it is a philosophy primarily concerned with bringing the individual soul back in line with the Divine, the absolute reality, and to unite with it. Plotinus and the Neoplatonists conceive of reality through different hypostases; this can be translated as realities and maybe levels of reality. At the core of all things is The One (To Hen), the absolute from which all things emerge and sort of come from. The One then emanates or flows over in different stages, starting with the Nous, which is translated with things like Mind, Intellect, sometimes Consciousness. This is followed in emanation by the Soul, and lastly, our physical universe of Nature which comes about after—or from—Soul, the World Soul. Now keep in mind that this is all an integrated whole; all of this takes place within the Nous and even within the One in a certain sense. But these are the different hypostases.
The human being or the philosopher is then asked to turn his gaze back upward, or should I say inward, and contemplate his true Noetic reality: to return back up the ladder from the material to the Nous, where he becomes united or realizes his union with it, and can even become united with the One itself. And this also comes, as it often does, with a set of principles in terms of how to live and how to be in this world, which we will see in this discussion. For someone like Plotinus, this involved ideally a vegetarian lifestyle. But this abstinence of meat wasn’t just for ascetic purposes; there were ethical and even metaphysical factors at play here, and this becomes especially clear in the writings of Plotinus’s most famous disciple and student, Porphyry.
Porphyry: The Disciple and His Asceticism
In fact, Porphyry is so significant for this topic that most of this episode will be dedicated to exploring his ideas and writings. Porphyry was born in the city of Tyre in what is today Lebanon, or possibly in Syria. He came from a Phoenician Semitic background; his actual birth name was Malchus, but he was eventually deeply Hellenized and took on the nickname Porphyry, which means something like “one clad in purple,” which is the imperial color of the Roman Empire (in Greek the name was Porphyrios). Eventually, Porphyry traveled to Rome and there he became a student of the great Plotinus, even if his own words are to be believed, eventually becoming his kind of closest and chief student. Indeed, Porphyry is central to the surviving legacy of Plotinus and the Neoplatonist school, as he is the person who actually collected and compiled the many writings of Plotinus into the so-called Enneads that we know today.
Significantly, Porphyry also wrote The Life of Plotinus, a biography of his master which he attached as a kind of prologue to the Enneads and which still serves as our main source for information on Plotinus’s life. In this work, we also get some information about Porphyry himself. For example, that he occasionally suffered from a crippling depression. In one instance, he tells his teacher Plotinus about his state of mind—that he’s feeling depressed, he’s feeling terrible—to which Plotinus says that he kind of just needs to go on a vacation. He says, “You need some new scenery, go to Sicily or something,” basically just, “Yeah, just go on a vacation, you’ll feel better.” It also becomes clear from his different writings that Porphyry took his asceticism very seriously. Indeed, Porphyry comes off as unusually extreme in terms of his ascetic lifestyle and ideas in his Platonist context. Sure, Platonism did teach that you should turn away from the desires of the body and focus on the intellectual, the Noetic reality of our soul, but there was usually a kind of balance between this contemplation and an active participation in the world.
In Porphyry, however, we find a sort of neurotic obsession with purity where basically all forms of involvement in bodily things, from food to sex, is to be avoided as much as possible to purify the soul and the intellect from all things material, which he seems to view as impure and dirty in some way. This is not the view of Plotinus; the material world is not Gnosticism, very importantly. Plotinus very clearly criticizes the Gnostics, among other things, for their negative view of the physical world. Plotinus sees the physical world as a beautiful reflection of the Noetic world and the Platonic Forms, even though it is sort of on a lower level than the Noetic reality; the physical world still has a sort of nobility to it. Porphyry, I think, would agree with Plotinus, but from his writings, he seems to be a lot more sort of obsessed with impurity—that all these bodily needs and bodily desires and things that we experience (sensory pleasure, sensory experience) are somehow impure and dirty to Porphyry. He seems to want to avoid these things to an extreme degree, even more so again than Plotinus, at least as much as I interpret Plotinus.
The Treatise on Abstinence from Eating Animals
There could be different reasons for this extreme asceticism in Porphyry. One could be precisely the fact that he obviously suffered from things like depression and might have generally suffered from mental health problems. Was he just, for example, a more emotionally sensitive person having a hard time controlling his desires and emotions, thereby forcing him to be more strict about his renunciate lifestyle to stay away from everything that he considered impure and that affected him so much? This could be one reason. Another explanation might be the increasing popularity and spread of Christianity at this time, which obviously had a much more extreme ascetic and world-renouncing character. Porphyry might have adapted a more strict asceticism in order to sort of compete with Christianity in a way.
In any case, Porphyry wrote several significant and important works of philosophy himself, some which have survived to us today. Speaking of Christianity, one of his most famous works is a direct critique of this new religion called Against the Christians. This is one of the most significant and scathing attacks on Christianity from antiquity and remains a really fascinating read even today, even though it only exists in fragments. There are many other works of his as well, but for our discussion today there is one single text that is especially relevant, namely the treatise On Abstinence from Eating Animals, known in Latin as the De Abstinentia. This text, in the form of a letter to his philosopher friend Firmus Castricius, is essentially dedicated to arguing for why one should be a vegetarian, as well as why animal sacrifice is morally and metaphysically wrong. In terms of historical arguments against meat consumption and violence against animals, this work is one of the most significant ever written. And while a lot of this is, of course, of its time, so to say, some of its key arguments are still relevant and used by people today.
As I mentioned, the work is in the form of a letter to a friend and fellow philosopher, Castricius, who for whatever reason seems to have gone back to eating meats after being a vegetarian for a long time. In four books or sections (the end of the last one being lost, sadly), Porphyry presents several arguments in favor of eating meats and animal sacrifice from several different schools, including the Stoics and the Epicureans, and then he presents counterarguments and refutations, often through quoting other earlier philosophers too. The arguments can essentially be divided into what I’m going to be calling ethical, ascetic, and metaphysical ones, although they often also overlap.
The Goal of the Philosopher: Returning to the Self
Book One is primarily dedicated to presenting the arguments for meat consumption which will then be refuted, but he also discusses the ascetic or philosophical reasons in favor of a vegetarian diet. According to his Neoplatonic worldview, the true home of a human being lies in the immaterial Noetic world, in the Nous with the intellect, the mind. While they reject a radically negative view of the physical world such as that of the Gnostics, it is still considered to be at the bottom of the chain of existence, being the furthest away, so to say, from the Nous and the One, the Divine World (sometimes even called God). In one sense, there is no place that is away from the Divine because everything takes place within the Nous, and we are right there right now, but we are misled by the physical world and the human body which pulls us downward into the material, into confusion and duality. The true Platonist who has chosen a life dedicated to philosophy—and remember, philosophy at this time was not just speculation about arguments about reality in the world; philosophy was a whole way of life that included practices and ways of living and eating, so the borders between things like philosophy and religion were basically non-existent—so the dedicated philosopher renounces as much as he can the bodily desires and pleasures of this world, especially in the more extremely ascetic perspective of Porphyry.
With this in mind, eating meat was seen as a kind of luxury, especially at this time, and thus to abstain from meat was an important part of the abstinent philosophic life that Porphyry asks us to live. If we want to become united with the Divine and our true self, we can’t participate too much in the life of the body. Porphyry says: “For the return is to one’s real self, nothing else, and the joining is with one’s real self, nothing else, and one’s real self is the intellect, so the end is to live in accordance with the intellect.” Our goal is to become like God, who is transcendent of the physical, so we are to emulate that by turning away from the material and contemplating our true inner reality, and this includes abstaining from meat which is not only hard on digestion and increases our animalistic nature according to Porphyry, but also for ethical reasons that we will explore soon. He says: “If we are to speak frankly, concealing nothing, there is no other way to achieve our end than by being riveted, so to speak, to the God and unfastening the rivet of the body and the pleasurable emotions of the Soul which comes from the body. Security comes to us by actions, not just by listening to lectures. It is not possible to be familiar with a God, not even with one of the particular Gods, let alone the God who is singly above all and higher than incorporeal Nature, by following just any lifestyle, especially a flesh-eating one. One can hardly, even with all kinds of purifications of soul and body, become worthy of awareness of the God, that is if one has a fine nature and lives a pure and holy life.”
Porphyry makes it clear thus that when he urges his readers to abstain from meat, he is talking specifically to people who have chosen the life of the philosopher, one who wishes to return back to his true divine self. As for people like athletes or heavy laborers who, at least at this time, certainly needed meat in order to perform well, things are very different.
Ethical Arguments: Do Animals Have Rationality?
Now, despite this particular point which is very important for his perspective and for the better sort of overview of what he’s saying here, a lot of the arguments that he does give are still very much relevant. To a modern reader, it is probably especially his ethical arguments that resonate the most because it speaks about the actual rights of the animals themselves. It talks about whether it’s morally right to hurt and eat animals on the basis of their sort of self-worth. In a sense, it is especially Book Three that is dedicated to this argument and essentially asks the question whether justice should be extended to non-human animals and thus if it is justified to kill them and to consume them. At the core of the debate is the issue of rationality: are animals rational creatures? In other words, do they have logos? Many, including the Stoics, would say that they are not rational, thus fundamentally unlike human beings and thus not deserving of justice in the same way. Animals, according to this logic, can thus be used freely for the benefit of human beings; we can sort of use them for labor, for consumption, whatever, because they’re not rational animals, they don’t deserve justice in the same way that we would extend justice to other fellow human beings.
But Porphyry disagrees, instead arguing that animals definitely have rational souls, albeit not as rational as human beings. He says: “Animals are taught some things by each other and others, as we have said, by people. Animals have memory, which is of prime importance in the acquisition of reasoning and wisdom. There are also vices and grudges in animals, even if they are not so overflowing as in humans. Who does not know that animals that live in groups observe justice toward each other? Every ant does, every bee, and so do creatures like them. Who has not heard of the marital chastity shown by female ring doves who, if they have been seduced, kill the adulterer if they catch him? Who has not heard of the justice which storks show to their parents?” He goes through many arguments and examples, including how animals are praised by the gods and the ancient peoples, and thus reaches the conclusion that they are indeed rational and for that reason worthy of justice. He says: “These arguments show that animals are rational. In most of them, logos is imperfect, but it is certainly not wholly lacking. So if, as our opponents say, justice applies to rational beings, why should not justice for us also apply to animals?”
This is a profound argument, especially from the time and place where it was written, as it basically points to the feeling and well-being of the animals as an argument against hurting them—a point that hits home the strongest. As he says: “It is the nature of animals to have perceptions, to feel distress, to be afraid, to be hurt, and therefore to be injured.” There’s value in the feelings of the animals, thus also making a clear distinction here between animals and, for example, plants. He says: “Plants have no perceptions, so nothing is alien or bad to them; nothing is harm or injustice, for perception is the origin of all appropriation and alienation.” The only time when killing animals is justified, he says, is in self-defense. This is essentially the same argument that many vegetarian and vegan representatives will make even today, and it’s really fascinating to see it argued in a text from the 3rd Century.
The Question of Animal Sacrifice
But all this also has metaphysical implications. If you remember his argument from before that if you want to become closer to God you have to become like God, which involves being uninvolved as much as possible with material things, this leads him very conveniently to the discussion about animal sacrifice. This is the main topic in Book Two. He says: “But people might still be puzzled why we count abstinence as holiness, although we slaughter sheep and cattle in sacrifice and reckon this rite to be holy and pleasing to the gods. So because the resolution of these questions requires a long discussion, the matter of sacrifice requires a fresh start.”
Now, as we said before and as Porphyry alludes to himself here, animal sacrifice was a central and very important part of the religious cult in the ancient Hellenic world. It was a key aspect of how good relations were upheld between the gods and humans. So how can abstaining from eating and even killing and hurting animals at all be a sign of holiness? Well, surprisingly, Porphyry argues that animal sacrifice is not only morally wrong but even useless in a metaphysical sense, and this discussion takes us into central debates and features of Neoplatonic philosophy. According to Porphyry, animal sacrifice is actually a kind of perversion of an older true Hellenic religious tradition. The only reason to him that people started sacrificing animals was due to different crises; then people turned to animal sacrifice in periods of crisis to try to solve these difficulties. Indeed, animal sacrifice doesn’t even make sense in his form of Neoplatonism. The gods are immaterial, they are intellectual and super-intellectual principles and beings; they have no use or interest in material offerings since they transcend the material entirely. It’s almost offensive to Porphyry that one would offer things like flesh to God, and he includes a quite long paragraph going through the appropriate forms of sacrifice that one should direct at the different Divine realities.
True Sacrifice vs. Demon Worship
He says: “So we too shall sacrifice, but we shall make, as is fitting, different sacrifices to different powers. To the God who rules over all, as a wise man has said, we shall offer nothing perceived by the senses either by burning or in words, for there is nothing material which is not at once impure to the immaterial. So not even logos expressed in speech is appropriate for Him, nor yet internal logos when it has been contaminated by the passion of the soul. But we shall worship Him in pure silence and with pure thoughts about Him. We must then be joined with and made like Him and must offer our own uplifting as a holy sacrifice to the God, for it is both our hymn and our security. This sacrifice is fulfilled in dispassion of the soul and contemplation of the God. As for his offspring, the intelligible Gods, hymn singing in words should be added, for sacrifice is an offering to each God from what he has given, with which he sustains us and maintains our Essence and being. So as a farmer offers corn ears and fruits, so we offer them fine thoughts about them, giving thanks for what they have given us to contemplate and for feeding us with the true food of seeing them present with us, manifesting themselves shining out to save us.”
The only being that actually wants animal sacrifice as an offering are the Daimones, a lower level being existing between gods and humans and which are morally ambivalent. It is thus quite different from the Christian concept of demons, even though etymologically it’s probably the same word. It is particularly greedy and malevolent Daimones that pretend to be gods and thus to receive material and fleshly offerings. This gives them power to cause more havoc in the world through sickness, famine, and much else. So by offering to these pretend gods, we are actively hurting the world and helping to spread evil in a certain sense. So no actual Gods want sacrifice at once; animal offering, because it is material—relatively, remember, it’s not Gnosticism, but relatively it is dirty compared to the intellectual world—is inappropriate. There are the Intelligible Gods, which would probably be, in terms of mythology and religion, most of the sort of Pantheon of gods; we sacrifice to them, we offer to them hymns and words of praise. And then the High God, God with a capital G so to say; even hymns and words don’t do it justice. The only thing we can offer, according to Porphyry here, is sort of to offer ourselves—contemplate ourselves and to become like God, to become united with God, maybe to sort of interpolate from Plotinian ideas about Union with the One for example—even to become annihilated in a sense, to disappear into the One into God. This seems to be kind of what they are hinting at here. That is the only thing that we can do in terms of sacrifice to the High God. And the only creatures that want animal sacrifice and offerings are the Daimones; they’re not real Gods, they are pretending to be Gods, but really they are mostly greedy and malevolent beings that sort of trick us into giving them offerings. This is what Porphyry is arguing here.
The Divergence: Porphyry vs. Iamblichus
This is, of course, a very interesting argument and also connects to wider discussions within early Neoplatonism. Often when we talk about this philosophical school, we divide it into two different varieties: on the one hand, there is the, let’s call it, “original” Neoplatonism of Plotinus and Porphyry himself, and on the other hand, there is the Theurgic variety of people like Iamblichus and later on Proclus. Now, the Neoplatonism of Plotinus and Porphyry is special in a few different ways. In general terms, the focus here is definitely on contemplation, a turning inward into the deep recesses of the mind and soul in order to unite with our higher realities. Plotinus and Porphyry famously taught the doctrine of the “Undescended Self”—that there’s a part of us, of our soul or our self perhaps, that is always in the Nous, it’s always in the Divine world, and we are all there right now. This focus on contemplation of and return to our undescended self and to unite with the One naturally led them to be relatively uninterested in the material world. Again, and I can’t stress this enough, this is definitely not like Gnosticism where the material world is seen as evil, but external practices and rituals definitely take a kind of backseat in the Neoplatonism of Plotinus and Porphyry.
In the Life of Plotinus, there is the famous story where, when asked about going to worship the gods during a festival, the great Master says that “they should come to me, not I to them,” very clearly showing that Plotinus saw himself as being occupied with something higher than religious rituals and the Gods. In Plotinian and Porphyrian Neoplatonism, there isn’t much at all in terms of practices or rituals and things like this, and there’s a much starker contrast between the Noetic/Intellectual/Immaterial world and the Material. It’s also much less focused on quote-unquote “religion” and the cult in general. Plotinus talks about God and identifies God with the Nous and with the One sometimes, but in terms of the classic traditional Pantheon of gods and the cults of these gods, there isn’t much here at all to hold on to. He is focused on higher realities, on personal contemplation, not on outward practices.
Now, Porphyry is definitely more interested in religion than Plotinus. He does like to talk about the myths and gods and discusses other religious groups like the Hebrews or Jews, who he likes quite a bit, and the Christians, whom he famously didn’t like at all. But in terms of his metaphysics and philosophy as such, he sticks pretty closely to his teacher Plotinus. His rejection of animal sacrifice as metaphysically useless is thus a natural extension of this form of Neoplatonism.
Now strangely, this was to become quite an important debate slightly later in the school. The great Neoplatonist Iamblichus, who was probably Porphyry’s student, would take the school in a very different direction. He would instead argue in favor of rituals like animal sacrifice and actually saw them as central, as foundational aspects of philosophy. To him, the soul wasn’t undescended at all but is, you could say, stuck in a sense in this lower level. The material plays a much more important role in reality to Iamblichus (although his supposed non-dualism in contrast to the dualism of Plotinus is very much overstated in a lot of publications). But to him, in order for us to reach higher states and to receive blessings, we need to call upon the gods through a practice known as Theurgy. This was a fundamental shift in the approach of the school to rituals and religion generally, and this becomes most famously expressed in Iamblichus’s surviving work called On the Mysteries, which is actually in the form of a response to Porphyry’s letter to Anebo where these exact topics are being discussed. So we’re really getting a glimpse straight into some of the most heated philosophical debates in late Antiquity here. Iamblichus’s form of Theurgic Neoplatonism eventually became the most favored in places like Athens and was adopted by great minds like Proclus (and we will dedicate a future episode entirely to Theurgy and this particular form or school of Neoplatonism, so stay tuned for that).
Conclusion
Anyway, this has been a very short and brief discussion about the De Abstinentia (On Abstinence), the famous work of Porphyry, and through that work also a wider discussion about questions of vegetarianism, animal sacrifice, and again maybe animal rights in the ancient Hellenic world—a topic that is really interesting and not maybe discussed as much as it should be. Porphyry is also a very interesting philosopher, a very important philosopher, not as famous as he maybe should be; he’s overshadowed by Plotinus, perhaps understandably and perhaps rightly so, but we shouldn’t forget him.
