Trudy Eden
For many people, the phrase the lord’s supper may bring forth an image of the Last Supper (such as fifteenth-century mural by Leonardo da Vinci), with Jesus sitting at the center of a dining table and his twelve disciples seated on either side of him. The men are about to share a meal. This images evokes the powerful story of the last hours of Christ’s life, depicting the first Eucharist and contrasting the commensal solidarity of those seated at the table with the impending betrayal by one among the group, Judas Isacariot. Betrayal and the love and forgiveness with which Jesus responded to it are, of course, at the center of Christianity. So, too, is the Eucharist. As such, they have been the subject of much study by a wide variety of people, not the least of whom are scholars of numerous academic disciplines.
Another aspect of this image, that of the table laid for a meal, has received little scholarly attention. Yet food and the act of eating, particularly group eating, are potent forces in human culture. No one in any culture sits at a table to share a meal without a complex set of understandings that influence their behavior at the table as well as away from it. It is these understandings and behaviors in the context of Christian culture that this volume seeks. With its focus firmly on the meal, its antecedents, and its consequences, this collection asks the central question: Have Christians used food and its associative practices to shape, strengthen, and/or spread their faith? The answer is a resounding yes. The following essays show that Christians have done so in an astonishing variety of ways from the fourteenth century to the present and around the world. These practices, while retaining a definite Christian character, exhibit a great deal of flexibility. Their rich diversity distinguishes Christian food customs from the more codified traditions of other major religions such as Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, or Buddhism. Food has been, and still is, useful to and powerful for Christians.
This wide array of people, places, and foods in time is woven together by four underlying themes: commensality, fasting, the sacrament, and bodily health. Although modestly defined as “the habit of eating together,” commensality entails much more.1 When a group of people sit together and eat the same food, they create or strengthen physical and social bonds. The type and strength of the bonds varies depending on the circumstances of the meal. Physical bonds arise when people eat the same food, which their bodies metabolize and turn into flesh. They become, if only in part and only temporarily, made one and the same. In earlier times and places, this distinction was important, as it underlay human identity.
Social bonds develop for different reasons. In the premodern and early modern periods in England, for example, people often didn’t just “eat together.” Depending on the size and nature of the group, eaters were often arranged together to eat. The root word commensal means eating at or pertaining to the same table.2 Soldiers, for example, ate with men of the same rank. Nonmilitary diners at banquets sat at tables with people of the same social rank. In both cases the different tables received different kinds and amounts of foods. Commensality, then, ordered as well as bound social groups. Everyone who attended a meal bonded with the larger group but were divided and joined to their smaller group (called the mess) at the same time by the acts of eating the same food and of socializing during the meal.
Commensal has a third definition, as a noun, that developed in the nineteenth century but most certainly has roots in human dining customs. A commensal is an animal or plant which is attached to another and shares its food but is not a parasite.3 When applied to human activity, this definition suggests the strongest and healthiest of communities, for it is one thing to take from a group and quite another to share with it.
These several meanings of commensal and commensality appear throughout this volume. Church suppers were, and still are, a common commensal practice, an example par excellence of which are the nineteenth-century love feasts of the Brethren in Christ Church of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, as described by Heidi Lee. Similarly driven by commensal power were the highly successful early twentieth-century efforts of the Missouri-based Unity School of Christianity to first sponsor free vegetarian meals and then build a vegetarian restaurant within the church itself, as analyzed by Trudy Eden. Several essays show that comensal bonds developed among people who, even though they never sat at the same table, adhered to the same philosophy of food. An excellent example is the adherence to the Rule of Saint Benedict. Richard Irvine’s twenty-first century monks are bound by their acceptance of the Rule as are Sydney Watts’s French monks of the eighteenth century, and both are similarly tied to Salvatore Musumeci’s fourteenth-century Italian monastics. Another example is found in the Greek Orthodox practices as described by Antonia-Leda Matalas, Eleni Tourlouki, and Chrystalleni Lazarou. Although adherents were not all seated at the same meal, their strong philosophy on what should be eaten when and by whom created a commensal community of believers and eaters.
The most sacred, and arguably most powerful, commensal activity in both Catholic and Protestant communities is the taking of the sacrament. It produces bonds resulting from group consumption as well as from group beliefs. The “meal” is a simple one: bread and wine. The symbolic and real beliefs attached to both, and to the actual act of consuming them, lie at the heart of Christianity. Several of the following chapters analyze the meaning of the sacrament as a meal. Heather Martel explores its implications for religious identity in her study of the meaning of bread and wine and how Christians in seventeenth-century Spanish America reacted to the sacramental use of native breads, with its attendant fears of the ingestion and assimilation of foreign, not to mention impure, food. While not specifically about the sacrament, Hazel Petrie’s chapter on the English missionaries’ use of wheat and bread in proselytizing New Zealand Maori relies heavily on the association of bread with the sacrament. The consumption of wheaten bread by the Maori symbolized a new Christian, civilized, and subjected identity for and to those who converted. Highlighting a different approach to the sacrament, Trudy Eden’s chapter on the Unity School of Christianity suggests that, although the sect dispensed with the actual ritual of communion, it fully employed the concept of transubstantiation in its belief in the physical and spiritual benefits of vegetarianism.
A vegetarian diet, in the premodern and early modern eras, was a form of fasting. All fasts were believed to have spiritual benefits. Whether recognized or not at the time, they had social benefits as well. Ken Albala describes the role of fasting in religious reformation in Europe as one of individual spiritual cleansing through mortification of the flesh and actual physical cleansing. At the same, fasting by Protestants performed a spiritual cleansing of another type—that of the church itself. Furthermore, fasting as an activity performed by a group, whether formally or informally, proved to be a useful tool for shaping group and personal religious identity. As Johanna Moyer demonstrates in her chapter on the sumptuary provisions of Catholics and Protestants during the Reformation, differences existed between the two groups. Catholics saw fasting as a path to salvation, hence, those who practiced it could live with that assurance. Protestants, assuring their salvation through faith alone, saw their fasting as a marker of group identity. The same was true of Benedictine monks in the fourteenth and twenty-first centuries, who, as Salvatore Musumeci stated of his late-medieval monks, turned the entire year into Lent, a practice, among others, that set them apart from the lay persons in their communities. Fasting of one kind or another provided identity markers for a quickly growing group of “others” who disdained animal flesh. Defining what exactly was meat and what was not, however, could be difficult, as the chapter by Sydney Watts on the scientific debate over whether puffins were fish or flesh in eighteenth-century France shows. The presence of so many chapters from such various backgrounds allows us to see a direct line between fasting in the early modern period to dieting in the postmodern period. Both involved abstention from certain kinds of foods at specific times of the year, for a period of time or for a specific purpose. By the end of the twentieth century, as argued by Samantha Kwan and Christine Sheikh, Christians of varied denominations bound themselves together with their dieting practices, all seeking acceptance and salvation.
Closely connected to the subject of fasting is bodily health. The Rule of Benedict itself, as discussed by Musumeci, Watts, and Irvine, has certain connotations for health. Religious reform through or characterized by fasting, as discussed Albala and Moyer, elided concepts of the ill body and the diseased body politic. Fasting, of course, was thought to cure both. Health, illness, purity, and impurity, as well as the physical and spiritual effects of “dirty” foods, concerned Heather Martel’s sixteenthcentury Spanish and Catholics in North America just as they did Hazel Petrie’s nineteenth-century Maori who regarded wheat with a strong sense of taboo and impurity, the Unity vegetarians examined by Trudy Eden, and the Greek Orthodox adherents who practiced what became the popular, secular Mediterranean diet in the chapter by Antonia-Leda Matalas, Eleni Tourlouki, and Chrystalleni Lazarou. This theme reaches its most complex stage in the late twentieth century with the appearance of the fast-growing and powerful Christian diet phenomena, as told by Samantha Kwan and Christine Sheikh, an elaboration involving the body and its health, Christians versus non-Christians, purity and taboo, sin and redemption, beauty and ugliness, exteriority versus interiority, and the presence or absence of divine grace.
These four main themes—commensality, the sacrament, fasting, and bodily health—intertwine among each other as they bind the following chapters, which are arranged in chronological order. Starting with the culinary life of Italian monks in the fourteenth century, the chapter topics move on to fasting and sumptuary laws in the Reformation, food taboos in early America, and the impact of enlightenment science on lenten food classifications in the eighteenth century. Nineteenth-century topics focus on the use of food by Protestants to proselytize in New Zealand and to solidify congregational bonds in Pennsylvania. Chapters on the twentieth century examine the binding strength of food restrictions from vegetarianism to periodic fasting to dieting in Europe and the United States. Finally, the volume ends as it began, with the culinary life of monks, this time in early twenty-first century England. Altogether these chapters open up for examination the topic of food and Christianity and show how Christians used food and its associative practices to shape, strengthen, and spread their faith.
Notes
1. Oxford English Dictionary, “commensality,” http://dictionary.oed.com.proxy.lib.uni.edu/cgi/entry/50044904?query_type=word&queryword=commensal&first=1&max_to_show=10&single=1&sort_type=alpha; accessed October 7, 2010.
2. OED, “commensal,” http://dictionary.oed.com.proxy.lib.uni.edu/cgi/entry/50044902?query_type=word&queryword=commensal&first=1&max_to_show=10&single=1&sort_type=alpha; accessed October 7, 2010.
3. Ibid.