The Murderous Gullet

Against the Soulish.

I would be surprised at the Soulish if they were slaves to pleasure alone — the thing that drives them into marriage after marriage — and were not bursting with gluttony as well, the thing that makes them hate fasts. Lust without greed for food would certainly be counted a freak of nature. The two are so bound together and grown into one that, if there had been any way of prying them apart, the private parts would not have been fastened to the belly itself rather than somewhere else. Look at the body: the region is one and the same for both. In short, the order of the vices matches the arrangement of the organs. First the belly; and then immediately the raw material of every other kind of wantonness lies subordinate to good eating. Through love of food, love of filth finds its way through. So I recognize the Soulish faith by its care of the flesh, which is all it consists of — as ready for many meals as for many marriages. No wonder it accuses the spiritual discipline, which opposes it as far as it can, in this kind of self-restraint too: the discipline that puts reins on the appetite by taking sometimes no meals, sometimes late meals, sometimes dry meals, just as it puts reins on lust by allowing only one marriage. [b]

It is genuinely tiresome to have to deal with such people. One is genuinely ashamed to squabble over subjects whose very defense is an offense against decency. For how am I to protect chastity and sobriety without bringing a charge against their opponents? And what those opponents are I will say once and be done with it: they are the Soulish man’s sausages, the outer and the inner. These are the things that pick a quarrel with the Paraclete. These are why the New Prophecies are rejected — not because Montanus and Priscilla and Maximilla preach a different God, nor because they cut Jesus Christ off from God, nor because they overturn any particular rule of faith or hope, but plainly because they teach fasting more often than marrying. On the limit of marrying we have already published a defense of one marriage only. Our battle now is over the second kind of self-restraint — or rather the first — in the matter of chastening the diet. They charge us with keeping fasts of our own; with drawing our station-days out, as a rule, into the evening; with keeping meals of dry food as well, our food untouched by any meat, by any juice, by any specially succulent fruit; and with eating and drinking nothing that has a taste of wine about it; and, to match the dry diet, with staying away from the bath. So they are forever reproaching us with novelty, and about the unlawfulness of novelty they lay down a rule of prescription: either it must be condemned as heresy, if the point in dispute is a human invention, or else pronounced false prophecy, if it is a declaration of the Spirit — provided that either way we who protest hear the sentence of anathema.

For as far as fasts go, they set against us the fixed days appointed by God. In Leviticus, for instance, the Lord lays on Moses the tenth day of the seventh month as a day of atonement, saying, “Holy shall the day be to you, and you shall afflict your souls; and every soul that has not been afflicted on that day shall be cut off from his people.” In the Gospel, at any rate, they think the days appointed for fasts were precisely those in which “the Bridegroom was taken away,” and that these are now the only lawful days for Christian fasts, since the antiquities of the Law and the prophets have been done away with — for wherever it suits them, they know perfectly well what is meant by “the Law and the prophets until John.” And so, they think, as regards the future, fasting was to be kept up under the New Discipline as a matter of choice, not of command, according to each person’s own times and needs. This, they say, was the apostles’ practice as well: they laid on no other yoke of set fasts to be kept by everyone alike, and none of station-days either — which they grant do have days of their own, Wednesday and Friday, but which nevertheless range widely according to a man’s own judgment, tied neither to the law of any given command nor to be drawn out beyond the last hour of the day, since even prayers are generally brought to a close by mid-afternoon, on Peter’s example as it is recorded in the Acts. As for meals of dry food, they take that to be a newfangled name for an affected duty, very close kin to pagan superstition — like the strict abstinences that purify an Apis, an Isis, or a Great Mother by a restriction laid on certain kinds of food. Faith, on the other hand, being free in Christ, owes no abstinence from particular foods even to the Jewish Law, since the apostle admitted it once and for all to the whole range of the meat market — the apostle, I say, who detests men who tell us to keep away from foods God created, in just the same way as they forbid marrying. And so they think we were the very people marked out beforehand as “in the last times departing from the faith, giving heed to spirits that lead the world astray, having a conscience branded with the teachings of liars.” Branded? With what fires, pray? The fires, I suppose, that drive us to contract marriages over and over and to cook dinners every day! In the same way they fling it in our teeth that we share with the Galatians the apostle’s stinging rebuke, as “observers of days and months and years.” Meanwhile they blow in our faces the fact that Isaiah too has declared with authority, “Not such a fast has the Lord chosen” — meaning not abstinence from food but the works of righteousness that he goes on to list there; and that the Lord himself in the Gospel gave a short answer to every kind of scruple about food, “that a man is not defiled by what goes into the mouth, but by what comes out of the mouth,” while he himself ate and drank until he got a name for it: “Look, a glutton and a drinker.” And finally that the apostle likewise teaches that “food does not commend us to God, since we neither have more if we eat nor less if we do not eat.” [i]

By means of these passages and others like them they work their way subtly to this point at last: that anyone with the least leaning toward his appetite can treat the duties of abstaining from food, or cutting it down, or putting it off, as superfluous and not so very necessary — because “God,” if you please, “prefers the works of righteousness and of innocence.” And we all know the quality of these pep talks on behalf of the conveniences of the flesh, and how easy it is to say: “I must believe with my whole heart. I must love God, and my neighbor as myself — for on these two commands the whole Law hangs, and the prophets. Not on the emptiness of my lungs and my guts.”

So before going any further we are bound to settle this principle, which is in danger of being quietly undermined: how much this “emptiness” you speak of is worth in God’s sight, and, first of all, where the whole rationale of earning God’s favor this way came from. For the necessity of the practice will be admitted once the authority of a rationale dating from the very beginning has come into view. [q]

Adam had received from God the law of not tasting “of the tree of the recognition of good and evil,” with death to follow on the tasting. But even Adam himself, at that moment, dropped back into being a Soulish man after the spiritual ecstasy in which he had prophetically interpreted that “great mystery” with reference to Christ and the church, and was no longer “able to take in the things that are the Spirit’s.” He gave way to his belly sooner than to God. He paid attention to the food rather than to the command, and sold salvation for his gullet. In short, he ate, and he died — when he would have been saved if he had preferred to fast from one little tree. So even from this early date the Soulish faith may recognize its own seed, tracing from that point onward its appetite for the things of the flesh and its refusal of the things of the Spirit. I hold, then, that from the very beginning the murderous gullet was to be punished with the torments and penalties of hunger. Even if God had laid down no fasts by command, still, by pointing out what it was that killed Adam, the one who showed what the offense was had left the remedies for the offense to my own intelligence. Unbidden, in whatever ways and at whatever times I could, I would have made a habit of reckoning food a poison and taking hunger for the antidote — purging by it the original cause of death, a cause handed down to me along with my very begetting. I would have been sure that God wills the thing whose opposite he refuses to will, and confident enough that the care of self-restraint would please the one from whom I had learned that the crime of incontinence stood condemned. And further: since he both commands fasting himself and calls “a soul utterly crushed” — crushed, of course, by strictness of diet — “a sacrifice,” who will doubt any longer that this has been the rationale behind every wearing-down of the diet? That by a fresh ban on food and a keeping of the command the first sin might now be paid off; that man might give God satisfaction through the very same material by which he had offended, that is, through a ban on food; and that so, matching like with like, hunger might rekindle salvation just as fullness had put it out — giving up many lawful things for the sake of the one unlawful thing.

This rationale was constantly before the eyes of God’s providence — which adjusts everything, as it does, to what the times require — so that nobody on the other side, wanting to demolish our position, could say: “Why, in that case, did God not lay down some definite restriction on food straightaway? Why, on the contrary, did he actually widen his permission? For at the beginning it was only the food of plants and trees that he assigned to man: ‘Look, I have given you every grass fit for sowing, seeding seed, which is upon the earth; and every tree that has in itself the fruit of seed fit for sowing shall be food for you.’ Afterward, though, having listed for Noah the subjection of ‘all the beasts of the earth, and the birds of heaven, and the things that move on the earth, and the fish of the sea, and every creeping thing,’ he says, ‘They shall be food for you: just as with grassy vegetables, I have given them all to you; but flesh in the blood of its own soul you shall not eat.’ For by this very fact, that he exempts from eating only the flesh whose ‘soul’ has not been poured out through its ‘blood,’ it is plain that he has granted the use of all other flesh.” To this we answer that it was not fitting for a man to be loaded with any further special law of abstinence when he had only just shown that he could not put up with so light a ban — a ban on one single fruit. Having had the rein slackened, he was to be strengthened by that very freedom. And equally after the flood, in the remaking of the human race, one law — abstaining from blood — was enough, the use of everything else being allowed. For the Lord had already shown his judgment by the flood, and he had likewise issued a threatening warning through “the requiring of blood at the hand of a brother and at the hand of every beast.” And so, serving up the justice of judgment first, he issued the raw materials of liberty: preparing an undergrowth of discipline by way of allowance; permitting everything with a view to taking some things away; meaning to “demand more” because he had “entrusted more”; meaning to command abstinence because he had sent indulgence on ahead — in order, as we said, that the first sin might be the more thoroughly paid off by the working of a greater abstinence in the very midst of an opportunity for greater license. [t]

At last, when a people of his own began to be chosen by God for himself, and the restoration of man could be attempted, then all the laws and disciplines were imposed — including the ones that cut back food, with certain things forbidden as unclean, so that a man, by keeping a permanent abstinence in certain particulars, might in the end bear absolute fasts more easily. For the first People too had reproduced the first man’s crime, being found readier for their belly than for God. Pulled out of the harshness of Egyptian slavery “by the mighty hand and the uplifted arm” of God, they saw themselves masters of it, bound for the “land flowing with milk and honey.” And yet at once, tripped up by the sight of a bare desert all around them, sighing after the enjoyments they had lost in Egypt, they grumbled against Moses and Aaron: “If only we had been struck to the heart by the Lord and had died in the land of Egypt, when we used to sit over our pots of meat and eat bread to the full! Why have you led us out into these deserts, to kill this whole assembly by famine?” And it was out of that same preference for the belly that they were destined at last to mourn the loss of those same leaders of their own, the eyewitnesses of God’s power, whom they were forever exasperating with their homesick craving for meat and their memories of Egyptian plenty: “Who will feed us with meat? Now we remember the fish we used to eat free in Egypt, and the cucumbers, and the melons, and the leeks, and the onions, and the garlic. But now our soul is dried up: our eyes see nothing but manna!” So they too, like the Soulish, used to find the angels’ bread of dry eating unpleasant. They preferred the smell of garlic and onion to the smell of heaven. And that is why everything more pleasant and appetizing was withdrawn from men so ungrateful — at once to punish gluttony and to exercise self-restraint, so that the one might be condemned and the other learned by practice. [v]

Now if there has been any rashness in tracing the reasons back to those first experiences — the reasons why God laid restrictions on food, and why we for God’s sake ought to lay them — let us consult the common conscience. Nature herself will tell you plainly what she is always accustomed to find us equipped with when she sets us, before we have taken food and drink and while our saliva is still in a virgin state, to the transacting of business, and above all by the sense with which divine things are handled. Is it not with a mind much more vigorous, a heart much more alive, than when that whole dwelling of our inner man — stuffed with meat, flooded with wine, fermenting for the purpose of its own drainage — is already being turned into a rehearsal room for the latrine? And there, plainly, nothing follows so immediately as a relish for wantonness. “The people ate and drank, and they got up to play.” Understand the modest language of Holy Scripture: had “play” not been indecent, it would not have been reproved. On the other hand, how many are there who keep religion in mind when the seats of memory are occupied and the limbs of wisdom blocked? No one will remember God suitably, fittingly, usefully, at the very hour when a man is in the habit of forgetting his own self. All discipline food either kills or else wounds. [y]

I am a liar if the Lord himself, when he reproaches Israel with forgetfulness, does not put the blame on “fullness”: “My beloved has grown thick and fat and bloated, and has quite forsaken the God who made him, and has gone away from the Lord his Savior.” In fact, in that same Deuteronomy, when he tells them to take precautions against that same cause, he says: “Lest, when you have eaten and drunk and built excellent houses, and your sheep and oxen have been multiplied, and your silver and gold, your heart be lifted up and you forget the Lord your God.” He put the enormity of gluttony ahead of the corrupting power of riches — and riches are the very things that procure it. It was through riches, that is, that “the heart of the People had been made thick, so that they should not see with the eyes, or hear with the ears, or understand with a heart” blocked by the “fats” he had expressly forbidden them to eat, teaching man not to be a devotee of his stomach.

Now take the other man — the one whose “heart” was habitually found lifted up rather than fattened up, who for forty days and as many nights kept a fast beyond the power of human nature while spiritual faith supplied his body with strength. He both saw God’s glory with his eyes, and heard God’s voice with his ears, and understood God’s law with his heart. And God was teaching him even then, by experience, that man does not live on bread alone but on every word of God — seeing that the People, fatter than he was, could not look steadily even at Moses himself, fed as he had been upon God, nor at his leanness, filled full as it had been with God’s glory. Deservedly, then, even while still in the flesh, the Lord showed himself to him — the partner of his own fasts — no less than to Elijah. For Elijah too had already devoted himself sufficiently to fasts by this very fact, that he had called down a famine: “The Lord lives, before whom I am standing in his sight, if there shall be dew in these years, or a shower of rain.” Afterward, fleeing from Jezebel’s threats, and after one single meal of food and drink that he found when an angel woke him, he too arrived at Mount Horeb over a space of forty days and nights, his belly empty and his mouth dry. And there, when he had made a cave his lodging, with what a familiar meeting God received him! “What are you doing here, Elijah?” That voice was much friendlier than “Adam, where are you?” For the second was uttering a threat to a man who had eaten; the first was soothing a man who was fasting. Such is the prerogative of a restricted diet: it makes God share a tent with man — peer, in truth, with peer. For if the eternal God will not go hungry, as he testifies through Isaiah, then this will be the time for man to be made equal with God: when he lives without food.