Eating to Live

Keeping to our aim, then, and picking out the passages of Scripture that bear on the usefulness of training for life, we now have to describe, in short compass, what the man who is called a Christian ought to be through the whole of his life. We have to begin with ourselves, and with how we ought to regulate ourselves. Keeping the proportions of this work in view, we have to say how each of us should conduct himself with respect to his body — or rather, how to regulate the body itself. For whenever a man has been drawn away by the Word from outward things, and from attention to the body, over to the mind, and gains a clear view of what happens in a human being according to nature, he will know that he is not to busy himself about outward things but about what properly belongs to a man: to cleanse the eye of the soul, and to make his flesh holy as well. For a man who is thoroughly rid of the things that still make him dust — what does he have that is more serviceable than himself for walking the road that leads to the understanding of God? [a]

Some men, in truth, live so that they may eat, like the unreasoning animals — men “whose life is their belly, and nothing else.” But the Instructor commands us to eat so that we may live. Food is not our business, and pleasure is not our aim; both exist for the sake of our life here, which the Word is training up toward immortality. So judgment has to be used about food. It should be simple, genuinely plain, exactly suited to simple and unaffected children — food that serves life, not luxury. And the life it serves consists of two things, health and strength; plain fare suits both, being good for digestion and for lightness of body, and out of these come growth and health and the right kind of strength — not the strength that is misdirected and dangerous and wretched, like the strength athletes get by forced feeding.

So we have to turn down the many varieties of food, which breed all kinds of mischief — a corrupted state of the body and disorders of the stomach, the sense of taste being prostituted by an ill-starred art, the art of cookery, and by the useless art of making pastry. People dare to give the name of food to their dabbling in luxuries, which slides off into harmful pleasures. Antiphanes of Delos, the physician, said that this variety of dishes was one of the causes of disease. There are people who dislike the truth, and who through all sorts of absurd notions renounce moderation in diet and put themselves to endless trouble to get delicacies from overseas.

For my part I am sorry for this disease, while they feel no shame in singing the praises of their delicacies. They take enormous trouble to get lampreys from the Straits of Sicily, eels from the Maeander, kid goats from Melos, mullet from Sciathus, mussels from Pelorus, oysters from Abydos — not leaving out the sprats of Lipara, and the Mantinean turnip, and the beets that grow among the Ascraeans. They hunt for cockles from Methymna, turbot from Attica, thrushes from Daphnis, and the reddish-brown dried figs on account of which the ill-starred Persian marched into Greece with five million men. Besides these they buy birds from Phasis, Egyptian snipe, and Median peacocks. They alter all of it with seasonings, and the gluttons gape after the sauces. “Whatever earth, and the depths of the sea, and the unmeasured space of the air produce” — they cater it for their greed. In their appetite and their fussing they seem to be dragging a net across the whole world to gratify their expensive tastes.

Surrounded by the noise of hissing frying pans, wearing their whole life away at the pestle and mortar, they cling to matter the way fire clings to fuel. More than that, they unman plain food — bread itself — by sifting off the nourishing part of the grain, so that the one necessary food becomes something luxury sneers at. There is no limit to fine eating among men. It has driven them to sweets and honey cakes and candied fruit, inventing a crowd of desserts and chasing after every kind of dish. A man like that seems to me to be all jaw and nothing else.

“Do not crave rich men’s delicacies,” says the Scripture, for they belong to a false and low way of life. Such men share in luxurious dishes which a little later go out to the dung heap. But we who are looking for the bread of heaven have to rule the belly, which is under heaven, and much more the things that please it, which “God will destroy,” says the apostle, rightly cursing gluttonous cravings. For “food is for the belly,” and on food this truly fleshly and destructive life depends.

That is why some people, with unbridled tongue, dare to give the name love to pitiful suppers that reek of steam and sauces. They dishonor the good and saving work of the Word, the consecrated love feast, with cooking pots and poured-out gravy; and by drink and delicacies and smoke they desecrate that name. They are deceived in their idea, having expected that God’s promise could be bought with dinners. Gatherings held for the sake of good cheer, and the entertainments we ourselves hold, we rightly call suppers and dinners and banquets, following the Lord’s own example. But such entertainments the Lord has not called love. He says somewhere, “When you are invited to a wedding, do not recline on the highest couch; when you are invited, take the lowest place.” And elsewhere, “When you give a lunch or a dinner.” And again, “When you put on a reception, invite the poor” — and it is chiefly for their sake that a dinner ought to be given. And further, “A certain man gave a great supper, and invited many.” But I can see where the plausible name for these suppers came from: “out of the gullets and the raving love of suppers,” as the comic poet has it. For in truth, to many people many things happen on account of the supper.

They have not yet learned that God provided food and drink for his creature — man, I mean — for support, not for pleasure, since the body gets no advantage out of extravagant dishes. Quite the opposite: the people who use the most frugal fare are the strongest and the healthiest and the noblest. Household slaves are healthier and stronger than their masters, and farm workers than the landowners; and not only sturdier but wiser, in the way philosophers are wiser than rich men. They have not buried the mind under food, nor cheated it with pleasures.

But love is in truth the food of heaven, the banquet of reason. “It bears all things, endures all things, hopes all things. Love never fails.” “Blessed is the one who will eat bread in the kingdom of God.” The hardest case of all is for love, which never fails, to be thrown down from heaven above to the ground and into the middle of the sauces. Do you imagine I am thinking of a supper that is going to be cleared away? “For if I give away everything I own,” it says, “and do not have love, I am nothing.” On this love alone hang the law and the Word. And if you “love the Lord your God and your neighbor,” that is the festival in the heavens. But the earthly one is called a supper, as has been shown from Scripture. The supper is made for love; the supper is not love. It is only a proof of mutual and answering kindness.

“So do not let what is good for you be spoken of as evil, for the kingdom of God is not food and drink,” says the apostle — so that the meal in question may not be taken for something that lasts a day — “but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit.” Whoever eats of that meal, the best of all, will possess the kingdom of God, fixing his gaze here on the holy gathering of love, the church in heaven. Love, then, is something pure and worthy of God, and its work is sharing. “And the care of discipline is love,” as Wisdom says, “and love is the keeping of the law.” And these joys draw their breath of love from the food we share in common, which trains us for delicacies that last forever. Love, then, is not a supper. But let the entertainment depend on love. For it is said, “Let the children whom you have loved, Lord, learn that it is not the growing of crops that feeds a man, but it is your word that preserves those who trust in you.” For “the righteous will not live by bread.”

Let our diet be light and easy to digest and suited to keeping us awake, not mixed up out of many varieties. This is not a matter outside the reach of discipline. For love is a good nurse of sharing, and its rich provision is having enough. Having enough presides over a diet measured out in due amount, handles the body in a healthy way, and gives out something from its resources to those near us. But a diet that goes past enough injures a man, spoils his spirit, and leaves his body ready for disease.

Besides, those dainty tastes that fuss over rich dishes drive people into disreputable habits: finickiness, gluttony, greed, voracity, an appetite that nothing satisfies. The fitting names for people who indulge that way are flies, weasels, flatterers, gladiators, and the whole monstrous tribe of parasites — one class surrendering reason, another friendship, another life itself, for the gratification of the belly. They crawl on their bellies, beasts in human shape after the image of their father, the ravenous beast. People first gave the abandoned the name asotoi, and in doing so they seem to me to be pointing at how such men end, meaning by it asostoi, the unsaved, with the s left out. For men who are absorbed in cooking pots and exquisitely prepared trifles of seasoning — are they not plainly abject, earthborn creatures, living a life that lasts a day, as if they were not going to live afterward?

The Holy Spirit, through Isaiah, denounces such men as wretched, quietly stripping them of the name of love, since their feasting was not according to the Word: “But they made merry, killing calves and slaughtering sheep, saying, Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.” And that he reckons such luxury to be sin is shown by what he adds: “And this sin will not be forgiven you until you die.” He does not mean that death, which takes away sensation, is the forgiveness of sin, but that death of salvation which is the wage of sin. “Do not take pleasure in a little luxury,” says Wisdom.

At this point we also have to take up what are called things sacrificed to idols, and show why we are told to keep away from them. Polluted and abominable those things seem to me — to the blood of which fly “souls out of Erebus, of lifeless corpses.” “For I do not want you to have fellowship with demons,” says the apostle, since the food of those who are being saved and the food of those who are perishing are separate. So we have to abstain from these dishes: not out of fear, since there is no power in them, but on account of our conscience, which is holy, and out of loathing for the demons they have been dedicated to; and further, on account of the unsteadiness of people who look at many things in a way that makes them liable to fall — “whose conscience, being weak, is defiled: for food does not commend us to God.” “For it is not what goes into a man that defiles him, but what comes out of his mouth.” The natural use of food, then, is a thing indifferent. “For neither if we eat are we the better,” it is said, “nor if we do not eat are we the worse.” But it is against all reason that people who have been counted worthy to share in divine and spiritual food should share in the tables of demons. “Do we not have a right to eat and to drink,” says the apostle, “and to take a wife along with us?” But by keeping pleasures under command we head off cravings. See to it, then, that this right of yours never “becomes a stumbling block to the weak.”

It would not be fitting for us to be like the rich man’s son in the Gospel and squander the Father’s gifts as prodigals. We should use them without being attached to them, as men who have command of themselves. We are told to reign and rule over food, not to be its slaves. So it is an admirable thing to lift our eyes up to what is true, to depend on that divine food above, to fill ourselves with the inexhaustible contemplation of what really is, and so to taste the one delight that is sure and pure. That is what love is, and the food that comes from Christ shows that this is what we ought to share in. But it is altogether unreasoning and pointless and beneath a human being for people of the earth to fatten themselves like cattle and feed themselves up for death — looking down at the ground, forever bent over tables, leading a life of gluttony, burying all the good of existence here in a life that will shortly end, courting nothing but greed, in respect of which cooks are held in higher esteem than farmers. We are not abolishing social life. We are looking with suspicion at the traps custom sets, and treating them as a disaster. So finickiness is to be avoided, and we are to take a few necessary things. “And if one of the unbelievers invites us to a meal and we decide to go” — for it is a good thing not to mix with the dissolute — the apostle tells us to “eat whatever is set before us, asking no questions for conscience’ sake.” In the same way he has told us to buy “whatever is sold in the meat market,” without inquisitive questioning.

We are not, then, to abstain from every kind of food, but only not to be preoccupied with any of it. We are to eat what is set before us, as befits a Christian, out of respect for the man who invited us, taking part in the gathering in a harmless and moderate way, and treating the lavishness of what is on the table as a matter of indifference, thinking little of the delicacies since in a little while they will be gone. “Let the one who eats not despise the one who does not eat, and let the one who does not eat not judge the one who eats.” A little further on he gives the reason for the command, when he says, “The one who eats, eats to the Lord, and gives God thanks; and the one who does not eat, does not eat to the Lord, and gives God thanks.” So the right food is thanksgiving. And a man who gives thanks does not spend his time on pleasures. And if we want to win any of our fellow guests over to virtue, that is all the more reason to keep away from those dainty dishes, and so to show ourselves a bright pattern of virtue, the pattern we ourselves have in Christ. “For if any such food makes my brother stumble, I will not eat it as long as the world lasts,” he says, “so that I may not make my brother stumble.” I gain the man by a little self-restraint. “Do we not have a right to eat and to drink?” And “we know” — he speaks the truth — “that an idol is nothing in the world, but we have only one true God, from whom are all things, and one Lord Jesus. But,” he says, “through your knowledge your weak brother perishes, the brother for whom Christ died; and those who wound the conscience of the weak brothers sin against Christ.”

So the apostle, in his concern for us, draws a distinction where dinner parties are concerned, saying that “if anyone called a brother is found to be sexually immoral, or an adulterer, or an idolater, with such a man do not even eat.” We are to join with such people neither in talk nor in food, looking with suspicion on the pollution that comes from it, as we do at the tables of the demons. “It is good, then, neither to eat meat nor to drink wine” — a thing both he and the Pythagoreans acknowledge. Meat-eating is more the mark of a beast, and the fumes that rise from meat, being thick, darken the soul. If a man does eat it, he does not sin. Only let him eat with restraint, not dependent on it, not gaping after fine fare. For a voice will whisper to him, “Do not destroy the work of God for the sake of food.”

It is the mark of a silly mind to be amazed and struck dumb by what is set out at ordinary banquets, after the rich fare there is in the Word; and sillier still to make one’s eyes the slaves of the delicacies, so that a man’s greed is, so to speak, carried around the room by the waiters. And how foolish it is for people to raise themselves up on the couches, all but pitching their faces into the dishes, stretching out from the couch as out of a nest, according to the common saying, “so that they may catch the wandering steam by breathing it in.” And how senseless to smear their hands with the sauces and be forever reaching for the gravy, cramming themselves without measure and without shame — not like people tasting, but like people snatching. You can see such people, more like pigs or dogs in their gluttony than like men, in such a hurry to fill themselves that both cheeks are stuffed out at once, the veins about the face standing up, and the sweat running all over them as they strain with their insatiable greed and pant with their excess, the food shoved down into the stomach with unsociable haste, as if they were stowing away supplies for a journey and not eating for digestion. Excess is an evil in everything, but where food is concerned it deserves the most blame of all. Gluttony, called opsophagia, is nothing but excess in the use of relishes, opson. Laimargia is madness with respect to the gullet. Gastrimargia is excess with respect to food — madness with respect to the belly, as the name shows, since margos means a madman.

The apostle, checking those who go wrong in their conduct at these gatherings, says: “For each one goes ahead and eats his own supper, and one is hungry and another is drunk. Do you not have houses to eat and drink in? Or do you despise the church of God and shame those who have nothing?” And among those who do have, the ones who eat shamelessly and are never satisfied shame themselves. Both parties act badly: the one by hurting those who have nothing, the other by exposing their own greed in front of those who have. So necessarily, against those who have thrown off shame and abuse meals without sparing — the insatiable, for whom nothing is ever enough — the apostle goes on and breaks out again in a voice of displeasure: “So then, my brothers, when you come together to eat, wait for one another. And if anyone is hungry, let him eat at home, so that you do not come together to be condemned.”

From all slavish habits and all excess we must keep away, and touch what is put in front of us in a decent manner, keeping hand and couch and chin free of stains, keeping the look on the face undisturbed, committing no indecency in the act of swallowing, but stretching out the hand at intervals and in good order. We have to guard against saying anything while we are eating, for the voice becomes unpleasant and unclear when it is hemmed in by full jaws, and the tongue, pressed by the food and hindered in its natural work, gives out a squeezed sort of speech. Nor is it fitting to eat and drink at the same time. It is the very extreme of intemperance to run together two times whose uses do not agree.

“And whether you eat or drink, do everything to the glory of God” — aiming at true frugality, which the Lord too, it seems to me, hinted at when he blessed the loaves and the cooked fish with which he feasted the disciples, bringing in a beautiful example of simple food. And the fish that Peter caught at the Lord’s command points to food that is digestible and God-given and moderate. By those who rise up out of the water to the bait of righteousness, he warns us to take away luxury and greed, the way the coin was taken from the fish, so that he might do away with empty pride; and by giving the stater to the tax collectors, and “giving back to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s,” might keep “for God the things that are God’s.” The stater will bear other explanations, which we know, but this is not the right occasion to work them out. Let what we have said for our present purpose be enough; it is not unsuited to the flowers of the Word. We have often done this, drawing the most useful spring of water to the pressing point of the question, in order to water those who have been planted by the Word.

“For if it is lawful for me to share in all things, still all things are not expedient.” Those who do everything that is lawful quickly fall into doing what is not lawful. And just as righteousness is not reached by greed, nor self-control by excess, so neither is the way a Christian lives formed by indulgence; for the table of truth is far from wanton delicacies. Though it was chiefly for man’s sake that all things were made, it is not good to use all things, nor at every time. The occasion, the time, the manner, and the intention all weigh heavily on the question of what is useful, in the judgment of a man who has been rightly instructed. That is fitting, and it does something to put a stop to a life of gluttony, which wealth is prone to choose — not the wealth that sees clearly, but the abundance that makes a man blind where his belly is concerned. No one is poor as regards necessities, and no man is ever overlooked. There is one God who feeds the birds and the fish and, in a word, the unreasoning creatures, and not one single thing is lacking to them, though “they take no thought for their food.” And we are better than they are, being their lords and more closely related to God, since we are wiser; and we were made, not so that we might eat and drink, but so that we might give ourselves to the knowledge of God. “For the righteous man who eats is satisfied in his soul, but the belly of the wicked will be in want” — filled up with the appetites of insatiable gluttony.

Lavish spending is fitted not for enjoyment by oneself but for sharing with others. So we have to guard against the kinds of food that talk us into eating when we are not hungry, putting a spell on the appetite. Is there not, inside a temperate simplicity, a wholesome variety of things to eat? Bulbs, olives, certain green herbs, milk, cheese, fruit, every kind of cooked food without sauces; and if roast or boiled meat is wanted, let it be shared. “Do you have anything to eat here?” the Lord said to the disciples after the resurrection; and they, taught by him to practice frugality, “gave him a piece of broiled fish.” And having eaten in front of them, Luke says, he spoke to them what he spoke. Besides these things, it should not be passed over that those who eat according to the Word are not shut out from delicacies in the shape of honeycomb. Of foods, the most suitable are the ones fit for immediate use without fire, since they are readiest; and second to these are the simplest, as we said before. But those who bend around tables that inflame them, feeding their own diseases, are ruled by a most greedy demon, whom I will not blush to call the Belly-demon, the worst and most abandoned of demons. He is exactly like the one people call the Ventriloquist-demon. It is far better to be happy than to have a demon living with us. And happiness is found in the practice of virtue.

And so the apostle Matthew lived on seeds and nuts and vegetables, without meat. And John, who carried self-control to the extreme, “ate locusts and wild honey.” Peter kept away from pork; “but a trance fell on him,” as it is written in the Acts of the Apostles, “and he saw heaven opened and a vessel let down to the earth by its four corners, and in it all the four-footed beasts and creeping things of the earth and the birds of heaven; and a voice came to him: Rise, kill and eat. And Peter said, Not so, Lord, for I have never eaten anything common or unclean. And the voice came to him a second time: What God has cleansed, do not you call common.” So the use of these things is a matter of indifference to us. “For it is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a man,” but the empty opinion about uncleanness. For God, when he created man, said, “All things shall be food for you.” And, “Herbs with love are better than a fattened calf with deceit.” That is a good reminder of what was said above — that herbs are not love, but that our meals are to be eaten with love; and in these matters the middle state is the good one. In everything, in fact, this is so, and not least in the preparation made for a feast, since the extremes are dangerous and the middle courses good. And to be in want of nothing necessary is the middle. For the desires that are according to nature are bounded by having enough.

The Jews had frugality laid on them by the law in the most systematic way. For the Instructor, through Moses, deprived them of the use of countless things, adding reasons — the spiritual ones hidden, the fleshly ones plain, and it is the plain ones they have trusted. Some animals were forbidden because they did not part the hoof, others because they did not chew the cud, others because alone among water creatures they had no scales, so that altogether only a few were left suitable for their food. And of the ones he did let them touch, he forbade any that had died of themselves, or had been offered to idols, or had been strangled; touching these was against the law. Since it is impossible for people who use delicacies to keep from eating them, he appointed the opposite way of life, until he should break down the leaning toward indulgence that comes from habit. Pleasure has often produced harm and pain in men, and full feeding breeds in the soul uneasiness and forgetfulness and foolishness. And they say that the bodies of children, when they are shooting up in height, are made to grow straight by a shortage of nourishment: the spirit that runs through the body to make it grow is then not checked by an abundance of food blocking its free course.

That is why Plato, that truth-seeking philosopher, fanning the spark of the Hebrew philosophy, says, in condemning a life of luxury: “On my coming here, the life which is called happy in this place, full of Italian and Syracusan tables, pleased me not at all — being filled twice a day, and never sleeping alone at night, and whatever else goes along with that way of living. For not one man under heaven, brought up from his youth in such practices, will ever turn out a wise man, however admirable the natural genius he has been given.” For Plato was not unacquainted with David, who “set the sacred ark in his city in the middle of the tent,” and, telling all his subjects to rejoice “before the Lord, distributed to the whole host of Israel, man and woman, to each one a loaf of bread, and baked bread, and a cake from the frying pan.”

That was sustenance enough for the Israelites. But the food of the nations was far too much. No one who uses it will ever take pains to become self-controlled, burying his mind in his belly as he does — very like the fish called the ass, which, Aristotle says, alone of all creatures has its heart in its stomach. Epicharmus the comic poet calls this fish “monster-paunch.” Such are the men who believe in their belly, “whose god is their belly, whose glory is in their shame, who mind earthly things.” The apostle predicted nothing good for them when he said, “whose end is destruction.”