Celsus on abstaining from sacrificial meat

Let us set out the next passage as well, and once again examine it as best we can. It runs as follows: “If, by some ancestral custom, they abstain from certain sacrificial victims of this kind, then they must surely abstain from eating any animal at all, as Pythagoras too thinks, who honours the soul and its instruments. But if, as they say, it is so that they may not feast with demons, I congratulate them on their wisdom, that they are slow to see that they are always the table-companions of demons. They guard against this only when they see a victim being sacrificed. But when they eat bread and drink wine and taste fruits, and drink even water itself and breathe the very air, do they not receive each of these from certain demons, to each of whom the care of his own share has been assigned?”

I do not know how he came to think it follows from this that those whom he described as abstaining from certain victims by some ancestral custom must abstain from eating any animal at all. And we do not say this as though the divine word did not also counsel such things, and did not say, for the sake of a safer and purer life: “It is good not to eat meat or drink wine or do anything by which your brother stumbles” (Romans 14:21); and again: “Do not by your food destroy the one for whom Christ died” (Romans 14:15); and again: “If meat makes my brother stumble, I will never eat meat, so that I may not make my brother stumble” (1 Corinthians 8:13).