Eat God or Eat Others

The spiritual practice of consumption. Death. Entropy.

For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God. For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. (Romans 8:19-21, ESV)

The second law of thermodynamics states that in an isolated system, entropy always increases. Entropy is a measure of chaos, that is, of energy distributed into amorphous homogeneity; a lack of order. The infamous implication of this simple statement is that the universe will eventually suffer a “heat death,” wherein all energy spreads out into a thermal equilibrium that prevents star formation and all forms of life. Things are always coming apart. The order we impose on our world is destined to unspool, and the equations tell us that the very attempt to order things only quickens the universal decay. We are eating our world. 

It seems to be a mark of evil beings that they are deeply consumptive. A classic monster of Christian lore is the vampire, which uniquely characterizes evil as understood in Christian theology and stands as an image of the anti-Christ. Christ resurrected in the fullness of his glorified living body; the vampire rises from death into a half-life, and its sleep is death. Christ gives his blood to be our life; the vampire takes mortal blood to be its life. The real mockery of it is that mortal blood is not enough to sustain it forever, but rather serves as one pithy meal among many that briefly animates the corpse into a puffy doll, turgid with stolen life. The demons themselves go further than this, preying not merely on our blood but on our very souls. John Milton popularized the idea that Satan and his army seek human destruction out of covetousness and spite, and while sadism is certainly a feature of the deepest evils, it is not probably the whole motivation. Demons differ from us in that we are both spirit and body, while they are pure spirits. Our bodies may linger on and enjoy the fruits of creation even as our souls are alienated from their loving Creator, but the demons have no such recourse. “These are waterless springs and mists driven by a storm. For them the gloom of utter darkness has been reserved” (2 Peter 2:17). When the merely spiritual fall, they fall entirely with nothing but the pit left to them. We are their spiritual food, but only a rotten one that, though immortal, can never satisfy. 

Why then do they enter into our world and cause us suffering? These are two different questions, but both may be answered in the following passage:

And when Jesus had stepped out of the boat, immediately there met him out of the tombs a man with an unclean spirit. He lived among the tombs. And no one could bind him anymore, not even with a chain, for he had often been bound with shackles and chains, but he wrenched the chains apart, and he broke the shackles in pieces. No one had the strength to subdue him. Night and day among the tombs and on the mountains he was always crying out and cutting himself with stones. And when he saw Jesus from afar, he ran and fell down before him. And crying out with a loud voice, he said, “What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? I adjure you by God, do not torment me.” For he was saying to him, “Come out of the man, you unclean spirit!” And Jesus asked him, “What is your name?” He replied, “My name is Legion, for we are many.” And he begged him earnestly not to send them out of the country. Now a great herd of pigs was feeding there on the hillside, and they begged him, saying, “Send us to the pigs; let us enter them.” So he gave them permission. And the unclean spirits came out and entered the pigs; and the herd, numbering about two thousand, rushed down the steep bank into the sea and drowned in the sea (Mark 5:2-13, ESV).

These spirits are clearly afraid of Jesus, concerned that he will torment them. The passage suggests that the torment itself is that they would be unattached to a living thing. For a demon, it seems that to possess a person is to avoid complete torment for a time - to be in its normal state (that is, merely spiritual) is to be in a state of torment. Possessing people or pigs is an opportunity to taste God’s goodness again. But demons, being especially alienated from God, cannot positively relate to His goodness. Therefore they torture those bodies they possess, because they cannot live peaceably in them without relating positively with God. This may also help to explain why people who live in sin tend to take on the marks of it, showing physical ugliness and poor health given enough time. Spiritual alienation from God leaves one remaining good, and that is His created matter, but to actually enjoy that good matter requires a wholesome relationship with the one who made it. “But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you” (Matthew 6:33, ESV).

So the significance of the Eucharist begins to take special shape. If the demons desire the spiritual food of our rotten secondhand souls, then we too require a spiritual food to bring life back into us. This then correlates to the glorification of our bodies. Paul notes in Romans that all the old covenants required blood, and a link may be drawn to physical food, which requires a death of one sort or another. Even before the Fall, we killed flora for sustenance. So what is our spiritual food? The body and blood of our Savior:

As the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever feeds on me, he also will live because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven, not like the bread the fathers ate, and died. Whoever feeds on this bread will live forever.” (John 6:57-58, ESV)

It is here, notably, that some of the issues with the doctrine of transubstantiation rear their heads. Biblically, the Eucharist is given for our spiritual regeneration which then enables our physical regeneration:

If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit who dwells in you. (Romans 8:11, ESV)

Therefore it is a spiritual meal not essentially dependent on the physical nutrition of the Lord’s sinews. But it is entirely necessary for our spiritual, and finally our physical, regeneration.

Evil things consume much and grow little. Christ gives once and regenerates all. This is a principle of the divine, that God, the first mover, multiplies two fish into five thousand, one body into the lives of 144,000, and mere words into full creation. The fire that does not consume, who brings children to barren women, is our direct sustenance for all time.

A world lingering on without its God in communion is destined for heat death. Entropy may always increase in a system, but order may still abound so long as a wellspring of infinite energy feeds it. It is impossible in this universe - glorious though it is - in which energy is finite: eventually, our sun will die along with all others.

And the city has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and its lamp is the Lamb. By its light will the nations walk, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it, and its gates will never be shut by day—and there will be no night there (Revelation 21:23-25, ESV).

He never ends, never fails, lights all, energizes all. Entropy is irrelevant. Christ is king.

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We were put on this earth to steward it, and that mostly means working against the effects of entropy. We sweep our floors, make our beds, slow erosion in our ditches, reform our schools, and plant our tomatoes. These things are ever a reminder that God is not wholly with us, that our work is hard because the ground is dying. Yet He will be with us, so close that our work will become easy, and sometimes we see the reminders even here: with corn rows that grow almost on their own for a season, stuccoed walls that don’t crumble as quickly as expected, and churches that grow vigorously in short spans. Everything is entropy, a chasing after the wind. But soon it won’t be.