Page 2 – Food and Faith in Christian Culture
Besides the medical assumptions behind fasting practices, several essays draw attention to the shifting theological understandings of fasting during the Reformation, particularly between Protestants and Catholics. During the medieval period, fasting was understood as a form of self-mortification: the body was deprived so that the spirit could flourish. Fasts were prescribed by the Church, and the observation of the fasts merited salvation. In the sixteenth-century, Reformers began to question the medieval logic of fasting. Albala reminds us of the importance of food in this period by beginning his essay on the ideology of fasting in the Reformation era with the story of Christoph Froschauer, the Swiss printer who openly violated the Lenten regulations by eating a plate of sausages with his workers in 1522. As Albala and Johanna Moyer, in her essay on sumptuary laws in the Reformation, observe, Protestant leaders such as Luther and Calvin were less concerned with the types of food consumed – fish or fowl – than with manner of consumption. Drawing on ancient stoic traditions, the Reformers preferred a moderate diet devoid of excess and extravagance to the feast and fast regimen of the Catholic calendar. Moreover, while Catholics tended to see fasting as a path to individual salvation, Protestants regarded their fasts as a marker of their separatist identity. Fasting was a communal rite which served to bind the community together (75). Thus, Protestants adopted an ad hoc practice of fasting during times of adversity, rather than observing the calendric fasts mandated by Rome. The English Parliament and the American Congress both regularly declared public fasts during times of national crisis as an act of contrition. Over time, as the locus of Christian practice shifted from the Church to the State to the Home, fasting became a private matter for the majority of Protestants, and once again a matter of individual spirituality.
For groups on the margins of the Reformation, fasting assumed a variety of meanings. Among Anabaptists, fasting was always voluntary and understood as a means of spiritual cleansing in preparation for the Second Advent of Christ. Some Anabaptists even adopted a perpetual fast of vegetarianism in anticipation of the millennial kingdom, where the lion eats grass like the ox. For other groups, feasting was more central than fasting, as is evident from Heidi Oberholzer Lee’s detailed study of the agape meals of the Brethren in Christ Church in the modern U.S., which like the Anabaptists drew on the model of the eschatological banquet. Trudy Eden’s documents a similarly understanding among adherents of the Unity Society of Practical Christianity, a twentieth-century New Thought movement in the midwestern U.S. whose adherents regularly engaged in elaborate vegetarian banquets.
Food practices not only defined social bodies, but also introduced and maintained distinctions within the body politic. Moyer writes about the “food police” who enforced sumptuary laws which were enacted “to protect the distinctions between the estates or to preserve the wealth of certain social groups” (60). Sumptuary laws dictated what types of foods could be eaten by various classes, as well as restricting fashions and luxury items. Similarly, Matalas, Tourlouki and Lazarou investigate fasting habits of Greek Orthodox Christians in Greece and Crete in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They conclude that across time, the wealthier, urban elite were significantly less likely to observe the Church’s fasting guidelines.
Finally, several essays reflect on the sacramental, almost magical understanding of food in this period. Heather Martel describes how early modern Europeans in New Spain were suspicious of indigenous American foods, fearing that such foods “might transform them, altering their physiology and thus their spiritual identities in a real or cultural death” (86). Their fear led them to avoid using native maize for Eucharistic bread. Hazel Petrie illustrates the same principle from the opposite perspective in her examination of indigenous bread production in New Zealand. She shows how the European-style cultivation of wheat and the consumption of “white bread” was assumed to make the Maori more civilized, morally and spiritually better. Just as Europeans feared being contaminated by consuming foreign grain, they believed that indigenous people could be transformed by eating European food, particularly the Eucharist.
The stories represented in Food and Faith in Christian Culture remind us of the centrality of food within the Christian tradition, of its potential to unify as well as separate. Lent is the perfect time to read through this collection and reflect not only on our own food ideologies and habits, but also on the practices and logic of those who came before us. One comes away from this collection with a deeper appreciate for the cornucopia of Christian understandings of this most basic human element.
C. Christopher Smith is the founding editor of The Englewood Review of Books. He is also author of a number of books, including most recently How the Body of Christ Talks: Recovering the Practice of Conversation in the Church (Brazos Press, 2019). Connect with him online at: C-Christopher-Smith.com
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