HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
TO FOOD AND CHRISTIANITY
Ken Albala
Most of the world’s major religions have adopted, if not an explicit code of food taboos, then a conscious attitude toward modes of eating and rituals surrounding consumption and prescribed forms of sacrifice. We find complex rules of kashrut at the core of Judaic worship, veneration of the cow among Hindus, set periods of fasting and forbidden foods among Muslims, and vegetarianism among devout Buddhists. Food prohibitions and celebrations serve many functions: to distinguish believers within defined communities and to cement their social bonds through common ritualized practice, to purify the body and soul through abstinence, or simply to offer up one’s own sustenance to the gods as an act of worship. It should come as no surprise that food, being at the center of every human’s daily experience of life, should be firmly embedded in every faith’s definition of religiosity.
The act of ingestion and digestion involves the incorporation of food into our own flesh. What we eat literally becomes us, and we become it. Logically, therefore, food is among the most powerful expressions of identity, both for the individual and the group. Controlling one’s diet and restricting intake can be a direct parallel of the effort to control other aspects of one’s life and often comprises an entire ideology of consumption, a regimen or lifestyle that is a direct expression of one’s values and worldview. How we eat, what we eat, and with whom are the most fundamental reflections of who we are physically, emotionally, and spiritually. Religions have devised dietary codes based on criteria such as these, defining food as clean and unclean, edible and abhominable, sacred and profane. Such rules may distinguish individuals on the basis of social standing, kinship solidarity, and, of course, religious affiliation. Most importantly, these modes of eating define the relationship of humans to nature as well as to God.
Food has almost always been integral part of religious practice, stemming from the earliest fertility cults to various forms of sacrifice and harvest celebrations; religious rituals are fundamentally agricultural in nature and follow the cyclical rhythms not only of the birth and death of plants and animals but of human life itself. Expressions of faith naturally retain elements of these earliest forms of worship; even after practices are codified and evolve, food remains central to all forms of religiosity.
While Christianity as a whole never espoused a set of explicit and permanent rules governing food, it nonetheless, in the course of its twothousand-year development struck many varied attitudes toward consumption, ranging from near complete liberty to extreme asceticism, with practically every possible variety of feast and fast in between, including some unique food codes among individual sects or among particular religious orders. Christianity has also set the occasions on which familial celebrations have been held, times for gathering together, sharing traditional recipes, and handing down traditions.
The food ideologies of both early and medieval Christians have received ample scholarly coverage.1 The present volume has been conceived in an effort to address the relative lack of synthetic studies of the early modern and modern eras, the last five hundred years, especially in comparing developments among varied sects from the Reformation onward, on both sides of the Atlantic and to some extent across the globe. With the splintering of various denominations within Western Christianity, the entire question of the believer’s relation to food was opened anew, as it was at the advent of Christianity as an organized religion. Most importantly, the complex laws governing Lent and fasting in the medieval era were reexamined in light of new conceptions of salvation and the role of works in attaining it. The value of self mortification was questioned as well as the panoply of celebrations such as saint’s days which filled the medieval calendar with celebratory feasts. These practices were of course investigated with a keen eye to upholding scriptural authority, but also with a sensitivity to the value of traditions, many of which stretched back to practices of the early Church. That is, each denomination carefully reassessed what it took to be its own history and the correct interpretation of food practices as dictated by the New Testament and the Church fathers. That they seldom agreed about how Christians should eat makes this a particularly rich and diverse field of investigation.
Counter to what one might expect, post-Reformation-era attitudes do not shift away from food, they merely redirect attention to other aspects of consumption: toward commensality, bodily image, the nature of self-restraint and control. These, among other issues, will be addressed in this book.
In light of this historically minded reassessment, this collection of essays must open with an overview, albeit brief, of food practices in the first millenium and a half of Christianity and the several strands that influenced Christian attitudes toward food, even when they were rejected. First, it is important to recognize that Christianity was profoundly influenced by both Judaism and Greco-Roman thought. In some respects earlier practices were adopted or continued, in others Christian practice was defined in conscious distinction to what had gone before. This is epecially true of Judaism, from which Christianity sprung.
At the dawn of the common era, Judaism was a sacrificial religion: insofar as Jews had access to the Temple in Jerusalem, they were required by law to make offerings either of animals without blemish or other food-stuffs, portions of which would be burned on the altar within the Temple precincts by priests. This practice stretched back, at least in the biblical account, to Noah who made an offering to the Lord after the flood, being careful to pour out the blood, which was said to belong to God. This practice was formally prescibed in the books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy as part of the Law given to the Jews by God via Moses.2 Its function was to expiate the sins of the community, the lamb being punished in place of the guilty souls who had transgressed God’s commandments. By the time of Roman occupation, however, many Jews lived far from the Holy Land and were scattered in communities throughout the Mediterranean where Temple sacrifice was impossible. In reconsidering ways each community could replace sacrifice, these Jews had already opened the question of what exactly God demanded in terms of sacrifice, in ways that would not only determine Jewish practice after the destruction of the Temple but would, inadvertently, influence Christianity as well. Does God require sacrifice or righteousness? Is food really so important after all? Or can fasting and prayer take the place of sacrifice for the expiation of sins?
Paul devised an ingenious solution to the question of sacrifice by asserting that Jesus dying on the cross was himself the sacrifice, the lamb of God or scapegoat for the sins of humanity. Thus, while the Jewish sacrificial laws were abrogated, they were also in a very real way fulfilled in a different form, now that the era of Grace had superceded the era of Law. Forgiveness comes as a free gift to the faithful, and the outward ritual forms are no longer necessary. Most Jewish rituals were thus reinterpreted in light of this new era of human history.
The complex food prohibitions of Judaism were, however, much more difficult to deal with. Not wanting to restrict Christianity to Jewish converts alone, it is understandable why Paul and others sought to abolish the kosher laws outright. These laws were essentially a way for Jews to avoid eating carnivorous animals and those which appeared to defy the system of classification devised by the Levitical priests. The taboo against pork, for example, was not, as some have contended, a practical solution to avoiding trichinosis, nor a way to maximize economic benefits by focusing on animals well suited to desert conditions.3 Quite simply the rule to eat only animals which chew their cud and have a cloven hoof was intended to be a short handway of recognizing ruminants, those untainted by murder, which we must recall was forbidden since the time of Eden. The sin of carnivorous animals is unexpiated by sacrifice, and thus they are unclean. The concept of creatures considered unclean extends also to those which appear to either defy classification or move in ways which appear unsuited to their medium. Birds must have feathers, fish fins and scales, land animals four legs. Thus shellfish, snakes, and the like are also unkosher.4 The concept of clean and unclean thus has little to do with our modern concept of hygiene; locusts, for example, are kosher.
Judaism had several other prohibitions, such as the mixing of milk and meat in the same meal, for one should not eat a “kid boiled in its mother’s milk,” as well as a prohibition against consuming blood and the ritual slaughter of animals, by severing the jugular vein so they feel the least pain possible, accompanied by a prayer of thanks. There was also one biblically commanded day of ritual fasting on the Day of Atonement or Yom Kippur as well as numerous examples of both personal and corporate fasting to atone for sins or avert God’s wrath during impending disaster. The Old Testament also contains examples of miraculous fasting; Moses, for example, fasted for forty days on Mount Sinai.
As the early Christians began to define their practices in opposition to Judaism and in an effort to draw adherents from among Gentiles, they first adopted a position of complete liberty toward food. “It is not what enters into the mouth that defiles the man, but what proceeds out of the mouth” (Matthew 15:11). There are other episodes: when Peter has a dream of a giant net teeming with every imaginable creature, clean and unclean, over which God commands, “Up Peter, kill and eat” (Acts 10:10–16). For these early Christians, this was but another era among several food dispensations demanded of the faithful stretching from fruitarian Eden to the postflood concession, whereby God allowed humans to murder whatever they liked for food, to the era of Mosaic kosher laws. This new dispensation was conceived as the final stage when faithful humans no longer needed complex laws since their sins were forgiven by Grace.
Though the kosher laws had been repealed, there were other aspects of Judaic practice that were retained. One was the ritual celebration of eating together, commensality, or, as the early Christians called it, a love or agape feast designed to strengthen social harmony and brotherhood. This was an opportunity to express solidarity as well as a time to exercise charity, although, if the apostolic accounts are accurate, they could also degenerate into luxurious potluck suppers. The practice gradually fell into abeyance, though it was often revived among Protestant sects such as the Moravians and Methodists.
Regarding charity, the practice among Christians was directly analogous to the Jewish performance of good deeds or mitzvot—giving to the needy, especially of food, was carried on directly in the Christian commandment to break bread with strangers. The Sabbath, or day of rest, was another food-related ritual retained, though moved to Sunday, to commemorate the Resurrection. In the Christian tradition, Sunday is thus never a day of fasting.
The Jewish Passover was also retained, but in severely modified form, as the basis for the ritual at the very center of Christian worship—the Eucharist or communion. The rite originates with words spoken by Jesus at the Last Supper, a celebration of Passover. While reclining, drinking the requisite four glasses of wine, and eating unleavened bread, Jesus remarks to his apostles that the bread they eat is his body, the wine his blood, and asks them to remember him when they eat or drink. This statement could be taken literally, as when decided by the Lateran Council in 1215 that the bread and wine miraculously transform into flesh and blood in a process called transubstantiation whereby the “accidents” or external form appear to be bread and wine while the “substance” become Christ’s flesh and blood. Or it could be taken metaphorically, the eating of bread to serve only as a memorial or a means whereby grace is infused into the supplicant, a position adopted in the Reformed tradition. In either case, the real presence would be the great dividing issue of sixteenth-century denominations at the start of the early modern period.
The fast as a way to purify the soul and show God one’s sincerity and contrition was another practice retained in early Christianity. Jesus and his apostles had fasted, which in this case meant total abstinence from food; Jesus fasted for forty days in the desert. While these forms of abstinence were considered beyond the power of ordinary mortals, the ideal would remain, and in the waves of persecutions among early Christians the fast would also become a communal means of atonement, just as it had been in the Old Testament.
The New Testament is rich with food references and metaphors. Jesus himself, considering his audience, often spoke in terms they could understand, and so we find parables drawn from farming and fishing practices as well as several food miracles. The fact that Jesus himself would provide festivities with loaves and fishes or a wedding with an endless supply of wine is evidence that Jesus and the first Christians’ attitude toward food was much like that of other Jews. Sensual pleasures were not in and of themselves suspect; if consumed in the right context under the right circumstances, they were to be considered gifts of God and enjoyed as such. As we will see, in light of subsequent developments, Christians of later eras would have a difficult time reconciling their own urges toward control with what were clearly joyous festivities in the Old and New Testaments.
The last book of the Bible, the Revelations of Saint John, also prompted another unique attitude toward food. Preparation for the apocalypse, the final judgement when sinners would be separated from saints, and humans would return to an era of edenlike peace when Christ would rule on earth, led many Christians to adopt a simple meat-free diet.5 Eschatological concerns and the coming of a Messiah were equally rooted in Judaism, appearing, for example, in Isaiah and the book of Daniel, but they took a different turn among many Christians who believed that in the New Jerusalem the faithful would no longer need to eat as before. Fruits would become, as they had been in Eden, enough nourishment to survive. Feeding would become more angelic, in a sense, and, just as the lion would lay down with the lamb, man would no longer have to kill for sustenance. In preparation for this new era, if not to actually hasten it, many Christian thinkers espoused vegetarianism—despite the clear passages in the New Testament that allow all foods for the faithful. Vegetarianism was not essentially inspired by concern for animal welfare, at least not among medieval Carthusians, nor among seventeenth-century Boehmenists, or even Seventh Day Adventists in the modern era.6
The inheritance of Greco-Roman culture is a little more complex. For one, certain pagan food rituals might potentially conflict with presumably taboo-free Christian food ideology. The pagan Greeks and Romans also performed ritual sacrifices, which served a celebratory function. Citizens were expected to participate in these great communal barbecues, which expressed both the largesse of the state and belonging to a defined group. Opting out, as vegetarians like Pythagoras had done, was in effect a form of social and political protest. But were Christians, as citizens, also expected to partake? Was it all right to consume meat that had been sacrificed to pagan gods? Technically, yes, was the answer Paul gave to the Corinthian community, but, lest one’s neighbor be led astray and fall into error regarding the meaning of such a sacrifice, it would be best for Christians to abstain if possible.
More importantly, there was a particular attitude toward eating among many Greeks and Romans that had a long lasting impact on Christianity. Among philosophers of the Stoic school, as well as many Platonists, it was believed that in order to attain virtue the needs of the body should be adequately met but never exceeded. Bodily functions were considered a distraction from the higher operations of the intellect and soul.7 Thus gluttony, and even excessive feasting on particular occasions, was seen as base and brutish. Rather, the virtuous individual should maintain an abstemious diet, avoiding luxuries, which only weaken and ennervate the mind, and stick to a constant regimen year round. Even the Epicureans, despite the ignominy later attached to their doctrines, maintained that the greatest pleasure could be attained by avoiding suffering, including that derived from not getting those delicacies to which one might be accustomed. Rather than feel the pain of such desire, it is best to live a simple, frugal life, free of excessive needs. The call for a regular frugal diet may be traced directly from classical philosophers to the early Christians, especially in their attacks on gluttony. Stoicism in particular had an impact on the thought of sixteenth-century reformer Jean Calvin, who sought to introduce a sober regime year round, one that has come to be associated with Puritanism.
The concern with gluttony, however, was expressed through all forms of Christian morality. In fact, it was considered the very first sin, stemming from Eve’s eating the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden. Thence proceed all other cardinal sins as well: avarice, or the failure to practice charity with surplus food; pride, in showing off one’s bounty; sloth, in the consequent torpor that derives from overeating; envy, from the desire to obtain luxuries enjoyed by others, and, most importantly, wrath and lust, which were considered the physiological by-products of gourmandism.
Among the early Christians there was a strong medical logic to this call for simplicity and abstinence.8 The body becomes overtaxed by excesive feeding, the humors become corrupt, and the spirits surrounding the brain foul and thick. Thus the thoughts are disturbed. Moreover, an overly nourished body, especially one fed with meat, was thought to produce a plethora of blood, which would be subsequently converted into sperm (in both males and females), signaling the libido and thus readying the body for procreation. It is precisely for this reason that many early Christian writers counseled their celibate brethren and sisters to eat very sparingly, to avoid flesh, as well as to subject their bodies to various means of cooling off the ardor which leads both to bodily heat and moisture and the proclivity to sin. Among ascetics, this medical logic, ultimately inherited from authors such as Galen of Pergamum, dictated extreme abstinence.
The early Church is rife with examples of asceticism, which originally meant a form of physical “exercise” that was meant to subdue the urges of the flesh so as to strengthen the soul.9 Rather than a strict dualistic opposition of body and soul, the ancients believed that humans are composed of a systemic psychosomatic whole in which the affections of the mind influence the body, particularly in the production of humors, and the disposition of the body equally influences the mind and soul. For example, an excess of black bile, the cold and dry humor, leads to the psychic condition of melancholy; excess choler leads to wrath: excess phlegm to laziness and apathy. Thus physical distemperatures can exacerbate mental states and incite the individual to sin. These ideas inspired many ascetics to control various aspects of regimen, including food intake, in order to maintain homeostasis but also prevent overnourishment and excessive hot and moist humors. Thus we find cooling and drying regimens for early monastics.
With or without this rationale, there were also what might be called heroic ascetics, those who wandered into the Egyptian desert like Saint Anthony or Saint Simeon atop his column.10 Such ascetics might live solitary or hermetic lives, but just as often they came into communities as monks, whose food habits were governed by an official rule. That written by Saint Benedict in the sixth century set the pattern for Western monasticism, and, while it provides relatively meager meals, it also makes concessions for the sick and visitors who might be allowed meat or a third dish in a single meal. Most interestingly, in consideration of current habits, and not without certain reservations, Benedict allows his monks a hemina of wine daily (about 10 ounces), though he admits wine is really not for monks. For future generations of ascetics, there was this constant tension between the great heroic examples provided by the early Christians and the practical realities of maintaining health. To willingly damage the body or inadvertently kill onesself was considered a mortal sin, and thus we find constant exhortations to monks and nuns not to fast excessively. This was precisely the trouble Saint Jerome found himself in after the daughter of his friend Paula died from excessive fasting. On the other hand, monastic orders could just as easily grow wealthy, eating and drinking without restraint, as numerous examples of corpulent monks through medieval literature attest. This probably accounts for the recurrent tendency for zealous individuals to break from their lax monastic order to adopt a more austere lifestyle, sometimes forgoing meat altogether, as did the Carthusians, which led their being suspected of heresy.
In the course of the early Middle Ages, the ascetic ideal spread to the lay community as well. Yet, in consideration of the need to work, procreate, and carry on with daily life, fasting was limited to specific days, normally Friday and Saturday and, in some places, Wednesday as well. There were also fasts on the vigils of the most important saint’s days, as well as the so-called quatuor tempori—four times of the year on solstices and equinoxes. Lent was the most important fast, a forty-day period preceding Easter during which abstention from solid foods was required until sundown, thus partaking in one meal a day for the entire period with the exception of Sundays. Rather than leave the exact dictates of these fasts to parishioners, church officials gradually codified fasting practice in the course of the early middle ages so that all animal products, such as butter, cheese, and eggs, would be forbidden to all healthy adults, with various exceptions made for pregnancy and, in some cases, heavy labor. These regulations would last directly up until the early modern period and thereafter among Roman Catholics until the Vatican II Council in the 1960s. The majority of people for a good proportion of the year subsisted on vegetables, bread, and fish—which were considered cold and moist and suitable for a fast. Individuals might, nonetheless, purchase dispensations, and sometimes whole towns could obtain the right to eat butter or some other animal product.
Before the Reformation for all Christians, and among Catholics thereafter, religion and fast days also directly influenced the development of gastronomy. Chefs were inspired to create elaborate fish and vegetable dishes for their patrons, not perhaps in the spirit of fasting, but technically adhering to the letter of the dietary law. In medieval cuisine, for example, almond milk was widely used as a substitute during fast days, and could even be made into imitation butter and cheese. Other mock meat dishes were made, in fascinating ways prefiguring those of the industrial era.11
These fasts days were starkly contrasted with feasts, in particular Carnival, directly preceding Lent. Mardis Gras, or Fat Tuesday, was a day not only to consume all remaining meat before Ash Wednesday but in general a day of licence in food, drink, and bodily pleasures. It was said that the world turned upside down on this day, and inferiors were allowed to openly mock their superiors, albeit masked, in rituals of subversion. Thus there were mock weddings, mock trials, and the lowest person might be crowned king for the day. Rather than pose a threat to the structure of society, it has been suggested that this one day of ritual subversion actually strengthened the social order as a kind of safety valve—allowing people to blow off steam and then return to their proper stations the rest of the year. The closing down of Carnival celebrations in both Protestant and Catholic countries in the sixteenth century suggests that ritual subversion gradually gave way to real violence and disorder. 12
Protestants, in particular, in keeping with their aim to purge ritual practice of anything not found in Scripture, began to abolish celebrations whose origin they considered too pagan. That is, in the process of conversion centuries before, many pagan holidays had been “accommodated” to Christian worship by renaming for saints or, in the case of Saturnalia, being changed into Christmas. Puritans in seventeenth-century England, for example, abolished it along with many saints’ days. In so doing they radically reduced the number of holidays and opportunities for festive communal meals. Similar processes took place elsewhere in Europe. Although many factors were involved, dining became more privatized, along with other ritual celebrations as high culture gradually distanced itself from popular culture. Rather than gathering en masse regardless of social class on set occasions such as church-ales (a variety of traditional feasts), individuals increasingly retired into commerical establishments such as taverns and pubs, while elites ate and drank in their own homes.13 Holidays such as Christmas were still, of course, celebrated, but the focus increasingly became the family unit rather than the community. The division of the Catholic Church into a multitude of denominations played a large role.
Another perspective from which we might assess the influence of Christianity on foodways concerns the construction of the body in a sociohistorical context. In other words, how did individuals conceive of their own bodies and what foods did they eat or avoid in order to achieve the desired physical outcome? In the ascetic tradition, an outward excess of flesh was seen as a sign of inward moral weakness, yet we might also see the ideal of a slim body and consequent dieting in the modern era as a comparable manifestation of the power of ideas to shape and control intake. Such ideas are not only influenced by medical concerns, but they might also be tempered by social construction of beauty and a conflation of those ideals with holiness and maintaining the Temple of the Body. The practice of dieting has become inextricably entwined with conceptions of bodily purity, and there are many ways in which the modern pathology of anorexia is prefigured by women who starved themselves for Christ.14 Although the context and milieu may have changed radically over the centuries, the motivation among women to control their own bodies in a world that denied them all access to power is fundamentally, psychologically, tantamount.
This collection is designed to explore the many ways Christian doctrine has influenced consumption patterns and sometimes explicit dietary codes in the past five hundred years in Europe, America, and around the world. Each article addresses a particular way of eating or attitude toward food: vegetarianism, fasting and inedia, weight loss and health regimes, commensality, and so forth. All the chapters also fit into a broader theme: Christianity, no less than any other religion, has, despite its founding tenets of food freedom and the reiteration of this ideal in many reform movements, nonetheless led directly to several unique food ideologies and practices which bear the stamp of religiosity. Christianity continues to influence the way people eat, just as it has done for the past two millennia, as a “civilizing” force among missionaries around the world, as an inspiration for weight loss, as a means of addressing the ethical concerns raised by doctrines of nonviolence and environmental stewardship. That is, Christianity has had a profound impact on what we eat, though how this has happened has never received comparative analysis across the globe and over a long time span.
Notes
1. Feeley-Harnik, The Lord’s Table; Grimm, From Feasting to Fasting.
2. John Cooper, Eat and Be Satisfied: A Social History of Jewish Food (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1993); Arthur Greene, Jewish Spirituality: From the Bible Through the Middle Ages (New York: Crossroad, 1986); Samson Raphael Hirsch, Horeb: A Philosophy of Jewish Laws and Observances (New York: Soncino, 1997). For the impact of these practices on modern times, see Leonard Greenspoon, Ronald A. Simkins, and Gerald Shapiro, Food and Judaism (Omaha, NE: Creighton University Press, 2005).
3. Harris, Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches; Simoons, Eat Not This Flesh.
4. Jan Soler, “The Semiotics of Food in the Bible,” in Carole Counihan and Penny van Esterik, eds., Food and Culture: A Reader (New York: Routledge, 1977); Douglas, Purity and Danger.
5. Muers and Grumett, Eating and Believing.
6. For a good general overview see Spencer, The Heretic’s Feast.
7. Deane W. Curtin and Lisa M. Heldke, Cooking, Eating, Thinking: Transformative Philosophies of Food (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992); John M. Wilkins and Shaun Hill, Food in the Ancient World (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006); and Andrew Dalby, Food in the Ancient World, from A–Z (New York: Routledge, 2003).
8. Shaw, The Burden of the Flesh.
9. Vincent L. Wimbush and Richard Valantasis, eds., Asceticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).
10. For the classic primary sources, see Owen Chadwick, ed., Western Asceticism (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1958).
11. Fagan, Fish on Friday: Feasting and Fasting; and Henisch, Fast and Feast.
12. Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (New York: Harper, 1978); and Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Bloomington: University of Indiana, 1984).
13. Bennett, Ale, Beer and Brewsters in England; Richard W. Unger, Beer in the Middle Ages and Renaissance (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); and A. Lynn Martin, Alcohol Violence and Disorder in Traditional Europe (Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2009).
14. Bell, Holy Anorexia; Joan Jacob Brumberg, Fasting Girls: The History of Anorexia Nervosa (New York: Vintage, 2000); Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast; and Vendereycken and van Deth, From Fasting Saints to Anorexic Girls.