Dipping into Perspective

I take it from the framing of the following case that the authors of The Abuse of Casuistry: A History of Moral Reasoning, Albert R. Jonsen and Stephen Toulmin, are not vegetarian or Christian vegetarians.

Other cases may appear to us as trivial: the Council of Ancyra (A.D. 314), for example, required Christians who favored vegetarianism to dip vegetables occasionally into meat gravy, so as to show that their dietary practice was based on personal preference, not on any Christian principle.

For some reason (Eucharistic echos?), there appears to be a hint of the sacramental in the image of abstainers dipping morsels of food into liquids extracted from meat. The images come together in a kairotic effect.

Some chapters earlier in Jonsen and Toulmin provided a neat encapsulation of the meanings of kairos which it is timely to recall:

The Sophists thus put great weight on the timeliness of acts. Their word for "opportune occasion" (kairos) was a rhetorical term of art: a speaker must recognize from his audience's reactions the right moment (kairos) to introduce a fresh point. [...] It was used in theory of poetry, referring to the moment when the hearer recognizes the intimate connection between two images.

And so for day 188
20.06.2007