Feasting, Fasting And Holiness In The Early Middle Ages

Fasting, Feasting and Holiness in the Early Middle Ages

"The full soul loathes a honeycomb; but to the hungry soul every bitter thing is sweet." Proverb 27:7

Introduction

There is nothing quite as nourishing, as culturally defining, as joyous in its plenty and devastating in its absence, as food. A society's attitude to this basic necessity is as valuable as any artefact or book in revealing its cultural, economic, and religious history. This paper will trace the movement of the 'symbolic desert' from East to West through the cultural paradigm of consumption. By focusing on feasting and fasting in the lives of the Desert Fathers in the 3rd and 4th centuries and the religious communities of Merovingian Gaul, ideas about society, the body and the holy will be explored and uncovered.

Recent studies on the spread of monasticism from East to West have focused on the reshaping of asceticism to a new model of communal religious life. Studies have focused on how the prescri ptive texts such as The Sayings of the Desert Fathers took the physical realities of the desert and created a set of rules that could be scaled down and applied to everyday life in the religious communities of Merovingian Gaul. In order to understand the shift between the physical desert and the metaphorical one, historians have focused on the power relations of the religious communities themselves and how the travelogues, sayings and prescri ptions of the Desert Fathers translated into Merovingian life. However, one source that has been greatly neglected in forming a picture of the lives of these two models of holiness is food. Medieval historians' dismissal of eating habits as nothing more than a novel historical stage setting is addressed by Bonnie Effros. In Creating Community with Food and Drink in Merovingian Gaul, Effros sees individual consumption as an expression of wider social experience. Through studying the rituals of feasting and fasting she draws a connection between consumption and the consolidation of community. Effros' historical approach uses the unique but effective lens of 'orifice history' to build a picture of Merovingian Gaul; her aim is to piece together a picture of macro society by studying it from within, starting from the 'orifice'.

Although Effros' study forms a picture of how food helped shaped Merovingian Gaul, what her approach focuses less on is how a changing religious theology shaped attitudes towards food and holiness. This historical study does not necessarily have to derive its focus from the 'orifice' and conclude with the community: theological developments, demographic evolvement and social change all filtered down to affect attitudes towards consumption. The transmission of theology did not take a direct route from Bible to plate, or desert to Gaul; instead it was an osmotic process. Therefore, by studying the complex flow of ideas surrounding fasting as well as feasting I hope to gain a better understanding of the larger theological and physical shift from the Desert to Gaul.

Theological Discussion

It is a rare occurrence that the mundane aspects of human's existence transcend beyond anything more than bodily necessities. When magic does happen, it is through turning the ordinary on its head. Jesus' miracle of turning water into wine was holy because it not only defied the laws of physics, but also turned a basic resource into a drink loaded with spiritual and cultural meaning. In the same way of course, bread - the constant of most societies' diets - becomes holy in the Eucharist. In the Bible miracles are often sourced from the mundane, but it is the physical hand of God that brings holiness. Thus, the question arises, how can holiness be achieved when there is no physical presence to turn water into wine? The Desert Fathers' answer to this question was asceticism: the straining and suppression of the body to allow the presence of God to flood the soul. In order to derive holiness from the mundane, the individual had to stretch the ordinary so far that it became exceptional. In a similar way to saintly miracles, fasting pushed the boundaries of human physicality to produce an invitation for God's presence. Scholars offer differing explanations for fasting's role for both society and the individual. The question of whether fasting should be an act of gratitude or penance arises throughout theological thought in the Early Middle Ages. On the one hand, abstention can be seen as a way of orientating gratitude towards God, whilst on the other, Old Testament models of fasting are most often interpreted as acts of reparation for worldly sins. In this interpretation, humanity is burdened with innate sin and an eternal debt to the Creator - a vulnerability that is recognized and protected through the act of fasting. Additionally, attempting to control the weaknesses of the human condition was a way of transcending the physical boundaries of the human flesh. Veronika Grimm explains that through depriving the body of the pleasure of food, the eventual experience of eating becomes almost unworldly in its intensity. The complexity of ideas concerning the purpose and effect of fasting is telling of the numerous roles played by food. On the one hand, fasting is a way of recognizing the vulnerability of our existence, whilst on the other it enables an individual to transcend the banalities of the human condition to become closer to God. Abstention from food is so symbolic in itself that historians and theologians often fail to record the holiness of consumption. Bread, for example, has become a symbol of power in itself through the frequent mentions of its consumption in the Bible and its form as the Eucharist. Grimm interprets the breaking of the bread as having both a symbolic and functional purpose: on the one hand, it is a devotion to the simple common meal and on the other it represents the original ritual of the Christian daily service. Regardless of whether a person was sitting down to a feast or merely sharing bread, the act of eating brought together communities in mutual thanks.

Faced with such colourful images of ascetic holy men and woman, it is common for historians to neglect the fact that for the majority of people, such behaviour was both unattainable and undesired. Instead, one can identify the integration of modest feasts and fasts into everyday religious life. Michael Mann identifies the ideological power that converted fasting into a religious statement that connected together cultural communities. As highlighted by Gannon and Traub, these symbolic acts had to combine with worldly experience so that God did not become another scrap of mysticism. Thus, the fast became more than a sign for individual ascetic virtue - it served as a physical symbol of a communal religiosity.