#eucharist

I will make your oppressors eat their own flesh, and they shall be drunk with their own blood as with wine. Then all flesh shall know that I am the Lord your Saviour, and your Redeemer, the Mighty One of Jacob (Isaiah 49:26 NRSV)

Oh Good Lord I love this. I’m actually curious about this because it’s a far more “naturalistic” (so to speak) image than usual: often, God speaks of leviathan being slain and fed to the righteous as a feast (Sts Asaph and Enoch said eat the rich!); here however, we get a more direct reversal of the accursedness of Judah: as her people were laid to such waste and destruction that they ate their own children (Deuteronomy, Jeremiah, Lamentations), here God will do to their oppressors even worse: they won’t even have children to eat, they’ll cannibalize themselves. They destroy their own bodies and consume their own life. They annihilate themselves.

It’s the natural consequence of incurvatus in se: we naturally desire because we are erotic beings, hungering beings. Fr De Young has mentioned before that the desire for glory, for immortality, is actually good because it is the desire for God, for theosis. Problems arise when we take the desire to commune with the Absolute Other and distort it into the an action of consuming the Other. This distortion begins with a curving inwards of the heart naturally oriented outward towards God. But as the selfish, conceited Ego will annihilate the Other, so will the selfish and conceited Ego annihilate the Self if/as God abandons us to our own self-destructive cravings and behaviors and those cravings consume us. The Fathers calls, what I call “cravings” and what Aristotle calls “appetites”, “passions” for a reason: the pathê make us pathētikoi as we paschein them. That is to say, the passions make us passive/pathetic as we suffer them. And this suffering is not the theotic decreation which is in the name of Beauty, Goodness, and Truth, but is the demonic decreation which is ultimately meaningless, telos-less, and absurd.

As politics is, as I’ve said repeatedly, an upscaling of interpersonal ethics, just as an individual’s cravings will cannibalize themself, so also will a nations. Babylon the Great, Vampire that she is, drunk on the blood of the innocent among the believing and unbelieving a like, will eventually be destroyed by the very devouring that destroyed her neighbors. This is hell: to be abandoned by God to your own decreative and ultimately autophagous cravings, suffering powerlessly as the violence you enacted upon the most vulnerable among you is brought back upon you ten-thousandfold.