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MY CHRISTIAN VAMPIRE STORY
..So when Anne Rice steals my idea, I can claim I got there first. Because this universe has been percolating in my head for years.
In fact it started when I was still going to communion classes, and I realized that the way to solve the transubstantiation question once and for all was to see if a vampire could survive solely on the wine of the Eucharist. It ought to work if Real Presence is valid. Vampires clearly live on some sort of non-physical essence in the blood, because any cursory look at the ecology reveals that, physically speaking, vampires could not live on blood alone, and even if they could, they couldn't take enough prey to sustain themselves. So they ought to be able to live on the *substance* of blood in the Eucharist even though it maintains the *character* of the wine. And even give that they also need to kill their victim - which is really the only way to make the rules to make it not incredibly wussy - the blood of Christ in the wine does carry the essence of the moment of death, because Christ is outside time and his death is always present. So it ought to work.
The problem with running this experiment, of course, is that (in our postulated world where theology is metaphysics is magic is science) vampires can't take communion in churches which follow the doctrine of Real Presence. First because they're creatures of evil and the consecrated Host can be used as a weapon against creatures of evil, and second, because you're required to be in a state of grace in order to recieve the benefits of communion, which means a) not killing people, and b) sincerely promising you'll never do it again.
But, okay, let's postulate a vampire who *has* sincerely given up killing, and done proper penance for previous sins. It's not like such vampires are thin on the ground in literature, so it seems like one of them would have tried converting before, and figured this out long ago. But maybe it still didn't work, because if it was that easy everybody would be doing it. Okay, in order to recieve communion in pretty much any church, you also need to be baptised. Most vampires were probably baptised in life (though not all, since dying unbaptised is a good way to rise again), but let's say that coming back from the dead as an undead creature is a rebirth of its own sort and a vampire would need to be re-baptised in its new life.
Of course, baptism requires getting holy water poured on your face. In the shape of a cross. :D
So we've got to have a vampire who has repented and abjured all sin and death, and is therefore practically dead anyway; who gets itself invited into a church, and is either sufficiently not-evil that it is immune to holy things, or sufficiently masochistic that it goes for the baptism/horrific facial scarring anyway (and either way, is desperate enough to take the risk), gets catechized and shriven, and it now eligible to partake of the Holy Feast, which is luckily being offered to laity at one of the masses celebrated after dark.
It *still* doesn't get any blood to drink, because for most of the heyday of vampires, the Catholic church didn't offer communion under both kinds to the laity, which means no wine. If they got anything, it would've been intiction, but alas! Bread dipped in blood is a pre-Christian specific against the undead, so you're still stuck. (Crosses are pre-Christian too of course, but they had so many meanings that it should be possible to work out a way around that issue.)
Ah, but! Martin Luther to the rescue! The early Protestant churches insisted on communion under both kinds! But they also didn't have Confession as a sacrament, which makes it less likely that our vampire could become sufficiently (ritually) shriven to handle holiness en masse. And their version of Real Prescence is a lot wobblier that the Catholic.
So I guess we need a vampire who was baptized into the Catholic church, and somehow managed to live a reasonably sinless life while still surviving on human death, and then later became a Lutheran/Protestant and discovered that the Blood of Christ in wine was sustaining and was able to live the rest of its (un)life as a good Christian.
...hmmm. You know, there was a giant world war right during the Protestant Reformation. Lots of death and upheaval, good for vampires, easy to switch churches...
Crap, I'm going to have to get a history degree in 17th century Germany and a doctorate in Reformation theology. D:
I mean, I do have an actual story to go with this - there are vampire prostitutes who hire themselves out to women who want their philandering husbands dead, there are ghouls and white horses and a Christian witch and a Romani sorcerer and blood-sucking undead watermelons and a vampire cult that's adopted the New Testament as *justifying* the blood-sucking life and the Mass of St. Secaire and rakish con-man werewolves and crossdressing clergy and pre-Marxist communism and stuff. But I always get to the point where I go "OMG, the historical research!" and give up.
I bet Anne Rice doesn't do any historical research.
In fact it started when I was still going to communion classes, and I realized that the way to solve the transubstantiation question once and for all was to see if a vampire could survive solely on the wine of the Eucharist. It ought to work if Real Presence is valid. Vampires clearly live on some sort of non-physical essence in the blood, because any cursory look at the ecology reveals that, physically speaking, vampires could not live on blood alone, and even if they could, they couldn't take enough prey to sustain themselves. So they ought to be able to live on the *substance* of blood in the Eucharist even though it maintains the *character* of the wine. And even give that they also need to kill their victim - which is really the only way to make the rules to make it not incredibly wussy - the blood of Christ in the wine does carry the essence of the moment of death, because Christ is outside time and his death is always present. So it ought to work.
The problem with running this experiment, of course, is that (in our postulated world where theology is metaphysics is magic is science) vampires can't take communion in churches which follow the doctrine of Real Presence. First because they're creatures of evil and the consecrated Host can be used as a weapon against creatures of evil, and second, because you're required to be in a state of grace in order to recieve the benefits of communion, which means a) not killing people, and b) sincerely promising you'll never do it again.
But, okay, let's postulate a vampire who *has* sincerely given up killing, and done proper penance for previous sins. It's not like such vampires are thin on the ground in literature, so it seems like one of them would have tried converting before, and figured this out long ago. But maybe it still didn't work, because if it was that easy everybody would be doing it. Okay, in order to recieve communion in pretty much any church, you also need to be baptised. Most vampires were probably baptised in life (though not all, since dying unbaptised is a good way to rise again), but let's say that coming back from the dead as an undead creature is a rebirth of its own sort and a vampire would need to be re-baptised in its new life.
Of course, baptism requires getting holy water poured on your face. In the shape of a cross. :D
So we've got to have a vampire who has repented and abjured all sin and death, and is therefore practically dead anyway; who gets itself invited into a church, and is either sufficiently not-evil that it is immune to holy things, or sufficiently masochistic that it goes for the baptism/horrific facial scarring anyway (and either way, is desperate enough to take the risk), gets catechized and shriven, and it now eligible to partake of the Holy Feast, which is luckily being offered to laity at one of the masses celebrated after dark.
It *still* doesn't get any blood to drink, because for most of the heyday of vampires, the Catholic church didn't offer communion under both kinds to the laity, which means no wine. If they got anything, it would've been intiction, but alas! Bread dipped in blood is a pre-Christian specific against the undead, so you're still stuck. (Crosses are pre-Christian too of course, but they had so many meanings that it should be possible to work out a way around that issue.)
Ah, but! Martin Luther to the rescue! The early Protestant churches insisted on communion under both kinds! But they also didn't have Confession as a sacrament, which makes it less likely that our vampire could become sufficiently (ritually) shriven to handle holiness en masse. And their version of Real Prescence is a lot wobblier that the Catholic.
So I guess we need a vampire who was baptized into the Catholic church, and somehow managed to live a reasonably sinless life while still surviving on human death, and then later became a Lutheran/Protestant and discovered that the Blood of Christ in wine was sustaining and was able to live the rest of its (un)life as a good Christian.
...hmmm. You know, there was a giant world war right during the Protestant Reformation. Lots of death and upheaval, good for vampires, easy to switch churches...
Crap, I'm going to have to get a history degree in 17th century Germany and a doctorate in Reformation theology. D:
I mean, I do have an actual story to go with this - there are vampire prostitutes who hire themselves out to women who want their philandering husbands dead, there are ghouls and white horses and a Christian witch and a Romani sorcerer and blood-sucking undead watermelons and a vampire cult that's adopted the New Testament as *justifying* the blood-sucking life and the Mass of St. Secaire and rakish con-man werewolves and crossdressing clergy and pre-Marxist communism and stuff. But I always get to the point where I go "OMG, the historical research!" and give up.
I bet Anne Rice doesn't do any historical research.
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