The Theology of Food E-Book

Angel F. Méndez-Montoya

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Serie: Illuminations: Theory & Religion
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Seitenzahl: 386

Beschreibung

The links between religion and food have been known for centuries, and yet we rarely examine or understand the nature of the relationship between food and spirituality, or food and sin. Drawing on literature, politics, and philosophy as well as theology, this book unlocks the role food has played within religious tradition. * A fascinating book tracing the centuries-old links between theology and food, showing religion in a new and intriguing light * Draws on examples from different religions: the significance of the apple in the Christian Bible and the eating of bread as the body of Christ; the eating and fasting around Ramadan for Muslims; and how the dietary laws of Judaism are designed to create an awareness of living in the time and space of the Torah * Explores ideas from the fields of literature, politics, and philosophy, as well as theology * Takes seriously the idea that food matters, and that the many aspects of eating - table fellowship, culinary traditions, the aesthetic, ethical and political dimensions of food - are important and complex, and throw light on both religion and our relationship to food

Leseprobe

Contents

Foreword

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction Food Talk: Overlapping Matters

1 The Making of Mexican Molli and Alimentary Theology in the Making

1 Doña Soledad’s Mole

2 A Gastronomic Miracle

3 Molli: Food of the Gods

4 Alimentary Hybridization, or the Craving for Spice

5 Subversive Molli

6 Making Molli and Alimentary Theology in the Making

7 Body and Flesh: Incarnation and Alimentation

8 Daily Bread and Daily Hunger

2 Sabor/Saber : Taste and the Eros of Cognition

1 Food as a Sensual Medium of Communication

2 Bodily Cognition and the Construction of Meaning

3 Cognition as Relationality, Intimacy, and Participation

4 Eucharistic Desire and the Eros of Cognition

5 Gastroeroticism and Eucharistic Semiotics of Excess

6 Conclusion

3 Being Nourished: Food Matters

1 Eating the Forbidden Fruit

2 Schmemann: Food and the Cosmic Sacrament

3 Bulgakov: Food and the Communism of Being

4 The Sophianic Banquet

5 Being Sophianic: Being Nourished

Conclusion

4 Sharing in the Body of Christ and the Theopolitics of Superabundance

Introduction

1 Babette’s Transformative Sharing

2 Manna from Heaven: Sources of Divine Sharing

3 Sharing in the Divine Edible Gift, Becoming Nourishment

4 Sharing in the Body of Christ: The Theopolitics of Superabundance

Conclusion

Conclusion Food Notes: Prolegomenon to a Eucharistic Discourse

Index

Praise forThe Theology of Food

“This is a book to be savoured like a beautiful meal. Its understanding of the Eucharist springs from both a profound study of the Scriptures and the traditions of the Church, and also a sensuous delight in that most intimate and sustaining of human activities, cooking and eating. This nourishing theological work also challenges us to build a society in which all of humanity shares at the common table of God”.

Timothy Radcliffe, OP, Blackfriars – Oxford University

“This book deserves to be widely read and, if you will forgive the metaphor, digested.”

Christian Century

“Montoya’s book is a delight to read, and is a significant contribution to the effort to apply theological thinking to the everyday realities of embodied life.”

Modern Theology

“For all its erudition, this book is more complex and valuable than a simple examination of Christian consumption. It offers rich reflection on the prophetic and generous ways in which Christianity might still disciple consumers who desire the superabundant grace made material in the flesh of Jesus Christ.”

Theological Book Review

“This much-needed book takes seriously the Churches’ unique contribution to understanding the importance of food.”

Church Times

“A thought provoking and engaging work on the role of the Eucharist in Christian life.”

CHOICE

Illuminations: Theory and Religion

Series editors: Catherine Pickstock, John Milbank, and Graham Ward

Religion has a growing visibility in the world at large. Throughout the humanities there is a mounting realization that religion and culture lie so closely together that religion is an unavoidable and fundamental human reality. Consequently, the examination of religion and theology now stands at the centre of any questioning of our western identity, including the question of whether there is such a thing as “truth.”

ILLUMINATIONS aims both to reflect the diverse elements of these developments and, from them, to produce creative new syntheses. It is unique in exploring the new interaction between theology, philosophy, religious studies, political theory and cultural studies. Despite the theoretical convergence of certain trends they often in practice do not come together. The aim of ILLUMINATIONS is to make this happen, and advance contemporary theoretical discussion.

Published:Sacrifice and Community: Jewish Offering and Christian EucharistMatthew Levering

The Other Calling: Theology, Intellectual Vocation, and TruthAndrew Shanks

The State of the University: Academic Knowledges and the Knowledge of GodStanley Hauerwas

The End of Work: Theological Critiques of CapitalismJohn Hughes

God and the BetweenWilliam Desmond

After Enlightenment: The Post-Secular Vision of J. G. HamannJohn R. Betz

The Theology of Food: Eating and the EucharistAngel F. Méndez-Montoya

This paperback edition first published 2012© 2012 Angel F. Méndez-Montoya

Edition history: Blackwell Publishing Ltd (hardback, 2009)

Blackwell Publishing was acquired by John Wiley & Sons in February 2007. Blackwell’s publishing program has been merged with Wiley’s global Scientific, Technical, and Medical business to form Wiley-Blackwell.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Méndez-Montoya, Angel F.

Theology of food : eating and the Eucharist / Angel F. Méndez-Montoya.

p. cm. – (Illuminations)Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4051-8967-5 (hardcover : alk. paper) – ISBN 978-0-470-67498-7 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Lord’s Supper–Catholic Church. 2. Food–Religious aspects–Catholic Church. 3. Catholic Church–Doctrines. I. Title.BX2215.3.M463 2009234′.163–dc22

2008047633

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Foreword

When the World Began

In the beginning was the Word. It was only when human beings appeared that the Word became food on a table. We know that language allows us to understand each other and to express what we think and feel. We humans, however, are more than language. We humans are cookingage, i.e., that which allows us to prepare the food with which we can nourish not only our body, but also our spirit. It was when we started to cook our first meals and when we started to conjugate the incarnate Word that we noticed that we were human. Both table and Word humanize us. No wonder it is essential that the table on which our meals are served be conjoined with good conversation: at the table, the word is essential.

Although plants must have been the main ingredient of primitive diets, through a series of leaps forward – from when people began hunting to the agriculture of the Mesopotamian lands with their spices and seasonings – we arrived at the delicious dishes served at feasts, with their exotic fruits and roast meats. Thus food came to be not only our physical sustenance, but also part of the customs and rites of the peoples of the world.

Today, I face the marvelous challenge of inviting readers to journey through the pages of this book, which Angel Méndez, a Dominican friar and doctor in philosophical theology, sets before us. Page by page, it leads us along a pathway that is deeply committed to history and to our ancestors’ way of life: those who filled our lives with flavor, from the primitive gatherings round cooking fires to the dinner-party table, turning each meal into a celebratory rite.

Friar Méndez, with his profound knowledge of alimentary theology, will make us re-create the fact that mole may well act as a pathway to love. This link, out of which the spirit of love gradually emerged – a spirit that must be present whenever we sit down to eat – means that in eating we satiate not only the hunger of our stomach, but also the hunger of our spirit in the very act of sharing. It’s true, however, that the presence of love is often lacking at the table, even though the abundant dishes laid on it are excessive. The amalgamation of food and love, manifested in the act of sharing and celebrating a eucharistic meal, is becoming less and less common.

I cherish the hope that we will be able to make each one of the ingredients that Friar Angel shows us and teaches us about grow in shared love, and that we may thus offer them to the Almighty Maker, without keeping them to ourselves in our insecurity – as the ancient Israelites tried to do with manna. The deep commitment, of body and soul that Friar Angel thus has to the perfect culmination of a holy day in his delectable contemplation of the Eucharist will help us achieve that state of ecstasy which engages all our humanity – physical and spiritual.

Dearest reader, you are welcome to wander along the marvelous, winding path that takes the form of sentences, history, and the exposition of ways of life and faith. With love and mastery, Friar Angel Méndez introduces us to a gastronomic experience that takes us to the very roots of the holy everlasting supper.

Our table is a table of hope and charity – or caritas, as Friar Méndez notes. Wherever hope is great, caritas should be even greater. The more we love what we trust, the more we love what we hope for. Just as our bodily eyes see through the sunlit air, so caritas makes spiritual use of its qualities through hope, and hope through charity.

A wise man once said, “Goodness and gluttony are opposites within the individual in which they exist because goodness preserves the self whereas gluttony destroys and corrupts it. They nevertheless exist in the same individual. If goodness, a virtue, and gluttony, a vice, therefore coincide within the same individual, how much more convenient that goodness be something within which there is no vice, something that cannot be vice.” The Supreme Maker did not distance Himself from our brothers, our friends, ourselves, not even when each one of us – we who have turned the holy moment of our meals into the mere pleasure of gluttony – renounced the wholeness of spirit and the communion of a whole people.

It is a great joy for me to enter into the spirit and customs of what used to be called New Spain. It is from here, however, that is, from the Old World, from the very entrails of the dust-ridden lands of the Manchegan gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha, that I – like Don Quixote riding the run-down Rocinante – with great interest and deep pleasure am attempting to delve into the realm of mole. However, all the dishes at Camacho’s wedding would have little worth if we did not fill them with the love and rites of the Holy Supper. Let us, then, accompany Friar Méndez through these pages, close to mole sauces, turkeys, partridges and lamb, with some castrated cockerel, and on feast days some beef from our larder, and, like good old Sancho Panza, some stigmas of saffron and some chunks of onion for a better burp. May they trigger love and dialogue at the table, in good spirits and unending company, like that of our armed knight. In each corner of our selves such feasting touches our deepest feelings, sustaining not only the body but also the soul, and thus, step by step, in perfect harmony, achieving communion in wholeness just like the holy universal supper.

I would once again like to express my gratitude to Angel Méndez for such a marvelous work that will constantly sprout, generation after generation, like grains of wheat or kernels of maize. It is my deepest hope that these lines will nourish us with charity and hope and that this compendium will fill our saddlebags as we walk towards the plenitude of the Holy Table with our brother and theologian, Angel Méndez.

Joaquín Racionero PageOn the Day of St. Fermin, the Year of Our Lord 2008, MadridTranslated by Leslie Pascoe Chalke

Preface

In general terms, food matters. It displays a complex interrelation between self and other; object and subject; appetite and digestion; aesthetics, ethics, and politics; nature and culture; and creation and divinity. In particular, this reading of food can cast light on what it means to practice theology, and why it so relevant for theology to be attentive to matters regarding food, and also the lack thereof. For, from a Catholic perspective, this book envisions God both as superabundance and intra-Trinitarian self-sharing of a nurturing Love, Truth, Goodness, and Beauty. God’s gift is further shared with creation and humanity. Creation is a cosmic banquet and interdependent network of edible signs that participates in God’s nurturing sharing. The Incarnation is a continuation of God’s kenotic sharing, that, at the eucharistic banquet, performs a more radical form of self-giving by becoming food itself with the purpose of incorporating humanity into Christ’s body, which already participates in the life of the cosmos and of the Trinitarian community. Because food matters, theology’s vocation is thus to become “alimentary,” reorienting the interdependency between human communities, humanity with the ecology, and all creation with God.

By looking at some cultural and material practices and food narratives this book creates a dialogue that constructs a multifaceted eucharistic discourse, arguing that food is not “just food.” At the end, however, since this book envisions God as the ultimate source that nurtures all theological practice, and since this same God exists as surplus of meaning, the book situates itself within a milieu of mystery. For this reason it is only a prolegomenon to a eucharistic discourse: perpetually open to yet more elaboration, and responsive to the touching, tasting, and nourishment of God’s superabundant self-giving.

Acknowledgments

For me, writing this book was an experience of true communal table fellowship. There are many people whom I want to thank for their support and encouragement, suggestions, inspiration, and prayers, all of which kept me moving forward. I cannot take full credit for what I hope might be a good end-product, but only for any errors that may remain.

An earlier version of this book appeared in the form of a doctoral dissertation in philosophical theology at the University of Virginia, but the actual process of writing took place in three different locations. Besides Virginia, I also wrote some of the book in Mexico City, while the last stage of writing took place in Cambridge, UK, where I was scholar in residence at the university there. Thus, I first want to express my gratitude to the Dominican community of Charlottesville, Virginia, that hosted me while I was studying for my doctoral degree. I then lived for six months in Mexico City, where I mainly concentrated on researching the Mexican dish called molli. I am very grateful to my Dominican brothers at the Comunidad de Santa Rosa de Lima, in Mexico City, who hosted me during this research period. Finally, I want to thank my brothers at Blackfriars in Cambridge, who very generously hosted me in their community, where I did most of my writing until the book’s completion. Writing this book in the midst of fraternal communities provided me with an environment of daily prayer and eucharistic practices, as well as enabling me to share communal meals, all of which became true food for thought in my writing on food and theology.

I also want to thank the several benefactors who so generously supported me during the process of studying, researching, and writing. First, the brothers from my own Dominican province, the Province of St. Martin de Porres (Southern Dominican Province, USA), for their support and trust. The Dominican community of Austin, under the leadership of Father James McDonough, OP, was also tirelessly generous and supportive, and I am forever grateful to them. Also, I could neither have started nor finished my doctoral work without the generous support of two scholarships: the Arts and Sciences Doctoral Scholarship from the University of Virginia, and the Hispanic Theological Initiative, sponsored by the Pew Charitable Trust. I also want to thank Delores Hoyt and Mary Hults for their generous support and continual prayers.

Several people also became key participants in helping me shape my thoughts. I first want to thank Professor John Milbank for always giving me direction, support, and helpful criticism. I enjoyed meeting with him, his wife Alison, and their children at their lovely home in England, usually around delicious meals prepared by Alison. There were also key readers of my drafts to whom I want to express my profound gratitude for their comments and wise suggestions. These wonderful table fellows are Catherine Pickstock, Larry Bouchard, Peter and Vanessa Ochs, Eugene Rogers, James Alison, Joel Marie Cabrita (the main proof-reader of earlier versions of this book), Aaron Riches, Anthony Baker, Mayra Rivera, and Roberto Goizueta.

When I was writing this book at Cambridge I was truly nourished by the participants in a series of Bible discussion groups I directed at Fisher’s House Catholic Centre at the university there. Their fresh ideas and suggestions regarding the sacred Scriptures and the issues surrounding food were often discussed in these enjoyable sessions. I am thankful to each one of them for providing material that nurtured my research.

Since this book is mainly about food, eating, and cooking, I made an effort to improve my culinary skills. I want to thank those mentors who are excellent cooks and taught me the delights of cuisine and self-sharing. They are also very close friends who exemplify hospitality and nourishing love: Rodney Adams, Israel Ramirez, Raúl Parrao, Carlos Marquez Peralta, and Benito Rodriguez.

My dissertation has become a book thanks to the encouragement of Rebecca Harkin at Blackwell Publishing. I am very grateful to Rebecca and her staff – particularly to Janet Moth, the project manager – for approving its publication and helping produce a more polished version of my work.

Finally, I want to express my most profound gratitude to the primary providers and source of inspiration of my work. They are my father, Vicente Méndez Dominguez, and my mother, Ofelia Montoya de Méndez. Although they did not live to see its publication, they were always somehow present in the shaping of this book, for they were great cooks and a great example of love and hospitality. My earliest experience of the joy of cooking for others, which for me is a form of theological rejoicing, was learned from the example of my parents. I dedicate this book to them.

Introduction

Food Talk: Overlapping Matters

“Comer: nada más vital, nada más íntimo.” There is nothing more vital and intimate than eating, Claude Fischler tells us in L’Homnivore.1 Eating is vital, for without food we perish. In one way or another, all living organisms need to eat or ingest a substance for their growth and survival. To eat – in its many forms and fashions, including drinking, absorbing a substance, and the like – is a way of being incorporated into the micro and macro organic cycle of life. Eating is a primal mark and act of life that evokes the cosmos as a great cosmic banquet. While being so vital, eating is also an experience of extreme nearness, even intimacy, as Fischler puts it. When we eat, we are literally “intimate” with food by physically bringing it near the body, lips, and mouth. The ingested substance breaks the conventional boundaries of inside and outside, oneself and alterity, and infiltrates the body with a variety of scents, textures, flavors, and substances, until the ingested food is incorporated into the body through a complex metabolizing process that transforms – transfigures – its initial consistency into calories, vitamins, proteins, and so forth. Deane W. Curtin rightly remarks that “our bodies literally are food transformed into flesh, tendon, blood, and bone.”