Last week when I was in Egypt a young earnest Anglican asked me how Anglicans fast.
I was giving nine lectures on Anglicanism to sixty Egyptian Anglican bishops, priests, deacons, and their wives at a Coptic retreat center outside of Cairo. Bishop Mouneer Anis, bishop of Egypt and leader of the Global South, was my host.
I told this young man and the audience that Anglicans have fasted in different ways in their long history, but that a common standard was three-fold:
- no food before Sunday morning Eucharist,
- no food on Fridays before 5 PM, and
- going without alcohol, meat, and desserts during Lent.
The audience laughed and laughed.
“Why are you laughing?” I asked.
No one wanted to answer.
After my talk was finished, I approached an Egyptian priest and asked him to tell me the reason for the laughter.
“They laughed because your tradition seems so easy. Most Christians here don’t drink at all. Meat is very expensive and so rare. And desserts are a luxury.”
This priest’s response has reverberated in my head over and over ever since, as I walk the Lenten pilgrimage trying to join Jesus in his forty days of fasting to prepare for his public ministry. Especially when I think about gluttony, one of the seven deadly sins. My new Anglican friends in Egypt have given me more reason to take this sin seriously.
Gluttony in the Bible
I’ve been somewhat surprised to discover that gluttony is all over the Bible.
It’s right at the beginning, involved in the Fall. Eve took the forbidden fruit because, among other reasons, it was “good for food.” As the later tradition concluded, this was an instance of gluttony because it was the quintessential example of what gluttony is—an irrational consumption of food. Irrational in this case, and to the utmost degree, because God had threatened death to anyone who ate it.
The Book of Proverbs suggests that gluttony leads to deception, disgrace, and poverty.
“When you sit with a ruler, put a knife to your throat if you are given to gluttony. Don’t crave his delicacies because that food is deceptive” (23.7).
“A companion to gluttons disgraceshis father” (28.7).
“Be not among drunkards or gluttonous eaters of meat, for the drunkard and the glutton will come to poverty, and slumber will clothe them with rags” (23.20-21).
For the prophet Ezekiel, gluttony is connected to lack of concern for the poor. The sin of Sodom was that the residents of that cursed city were “overfed and unconcerned—they did not help the poor and needy” (16.49).
In the gospels Jesus was accused of being a drunkard and a glutton (Matt 11.19). His apostle Paul treats gluttony as a kind of idolatry and worldly-mindedness. He talks about “enemies of the cross of Christ [whose] god is their stomach. Their glory is in their shame, and their minds are set on earthly things” (Phil 3.19).
In his second letter to Timothy, Paul does not mention gluttony by name but identifies what for the medievals was its chief characteristic: love of pleasure. Paul implies the danger that this love will substitute for love for God. “In the last days people will be lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God” (2 Tim 3.4).
What is gluttony?
As was so characteristic of him, Thomas Aquinas subjected gluttony (which both pictures and legend suggest was a temptation for him) to precise analysis. He said gluttony is an inordinate desire for food. Inordinate because it is contrary to reason. So when a man eats more than what the body reasonably needs, and when he does so simply to satisfy the desires of his palate, he risks gluttony. (All of what follows is from Summa Theologica 2.2 Q148.)
Thomas said there are three kinds of gluttony.
- The first kind lusts for food that is prepared “too nicely or daintily,” which seems to mean refusing to eat anything other than the most carefully prepared delicacy. The Caroline divine Jeremy Taylor provides us with two examples of this: the sons of Israel who got sick of manna and demanded flesh, and the sons of Eli who were not satisfied with boiled meat and demanded roasted meat (Holy Living chap. 2, sect. 2).
- The second kind of gluttony is eating too much, and
- third is when we gobble our food down in a rush or with greed, failing to take the time to appreciate it and fellowship with others.
Why is gluttony bad?
Thomas said that gluttony is a deadly sin if someone is willing to disobey God’s commandments in order to obtain these pleasures. But if he eats too much or greedily yet would never do so if he knew he was breaking God’s law, it is only a venial sin.
Thomas added that the sins of the flesh are less serious than the sins of the spirit. Adam was guilty of both pride and gluttony at the Fall, but it was his pride not his gluttony that got him expelled from the Garden.
But Thomas detailed all the dangers that come with gluttony. At this point he added immoderate drinking to immoderate eating, as the Bible often does.
- First, gluttony and drunkenness dull the understanding. He cites Ecclesiastes 2.3 to say that fasting increases wisdom.
- Second, they lead to unseemly joy, where everything is always a joke and nothing is serious.
- Third, they lead to excessive talking, and fourth, to immoderate behavior because they loosen one’s inhibitions.
- Finally, he says, it leads to uncleanness of body (nocturnal emissions and vomiting).
If even half of this is true, what does it say about the explosion of food fetishes all around us? By that I mean the obsessive way that some of us have of insisting on eating only gourmet food, refusing to eat anything but “clean” food or organic food, or living with the overarching goal of always finding the positively best way of cooking the most exquisite ingredients.
In other words, what should we say about being a foodie?
Can we be foodies without being gluttons?
Here’s a shot at answering the question. Jesus often went to parties and banquets, told parables about banquets, invited his apostles to a last supper before he died, and said that the new earth would be dominated by a wedding feast. Yet he also said the Kingdom of God is not about food and drink (Rom 14.17).
Augustine seems to sum up the proper balance: food is not the problem, but how we seek it and why can be problems. We should eat for nourishment and also for community and friendship. The best eating is when we combine the two. Eating for pleasure alone can make us a slave of food (Meilaender, “Sweet Necessities: Food, Sex, and Saint Augustine”).
Keeping this balance in mind can help us avoid the deadly sin of gluttony. That is food for thought during Lent.
Thank you for this article! I’m curious to know what Lenten fasting looks like for the Egyptian Anglicans you met. (And, as a side note, “Anglican Lenten Fasts Throughout the World” would be an interesting article for this site.)
There is a story about an Armenian prelate visiting Oxford in the 18th century, and when shown the Table where him and his hosts were to be dining, an apology was made for the meagre offerings, saying “this is our Lenten table” to which the Armenian bishop replied, “Your fasting table here in England looks like our feasting table!”
A similar anecdote to Fr. Gerry’s students in Egypt. But this is no cause for discouragement. Standardized, corporate fasts (such as Lent, or Fridays), are always to be judged in relation to the Cuture that is hosting them. A wealthy, luxurious culture like America will have a fast that is still strict by American standards, even if laughable to Egyptian. But if the Egyptian fast were to be taken up publically and corporately over here, it would be far too severe and intimidating for the average Christian to attempt, and thus fail at its job: Of inviting people into more self-discipline.
It is the case that, as each individual Christian grows up into the full stature of Christ, her/his self-discipline and acts of self-denial will become more profound and more consistent, and that, the saints that have emerged in every time and place have had similar degrees of self-imposed austerity. But this is the accomplishment of the Few, whereas the standard, corporate called-fasts are a sort of base-line minimum for the Christian faithful in the culture in which they are situated.
The masters of the spiritual life say that it is only pride that would seek to begin with great acts of self-denial. It is the much better and spiritually safer way to follow the fasts prescribed by the Church. Show me a Christian in America who actually does all of the fasting that Fr. Gerry mentioned at the beginning, with total consistency, and I will show you a person who is on their way to glorifying God in profound ways, and who knows, perhaps even sainthood.
My several food restrictions (allergy/other health reason) have caused me to examine and reexamine my relationship with food, and it’s a practice I’d commend to all Christians as some part of our walk with Christ. My relationship with food seemed straightforward and uncomplicated until I had to permanently give some things up, when I discovered that there were all kinds of tangled roots of desire related to my eating. But here’s what’s interesting: I have never been a foodie. To the contrary, I made many, many lunches composed entirely of “healthy” snack foods because I didn’t want to bother to cook. My sin was (/is) primarily in treating food as totally utilitarian and refusing to acknowledge it and the experience of eating it as a gift. I wanted to chow down my fuel (which I took for granted) and move on with my life because, hey, I have much more important things to do than eat! While there’s a level on which this is true, allowing this to be the prevailing attitude ultimately led me to health problems related not just to WHAT I was eating, but HOW. When we eat in a hurry, we don’t digest properly. When we eat supposedly “healthy” foods but restrict them to a very small variety eaten in haste, our bodies don’t receive the wealth of nourishment God has already provided for us (here in the States and in many other agriculturally prosperous regions). Receiving His gifts with gratitude is an act of humility, and to refuse what He is offering to sustain our life is pride.
My experience above prompts me to gently critique your lumping in “clean” or “organic” eating with food fetishes. Please don’t collapse these categories, because the reasons people pursue “clean” eating vary as widely as the hearts of humankind. I don’t like the term “clean” eating because I think it’s disingenuous and adds an unnecessary dimension of worthiness vs. unworthiness to what is primarily a pragmatic issue. But God gave me a body that requires food with nutritional density and minimal industrial contamination. If I don’t eat this way, I get sick. For me and for many others with chronic digestive issues, the desire to eat what is most ready to hand – rather than the fully nourishing food God provides from the earth (often labeled “clean” or “organic”) – is a sinful desire, rooted in laziness, pride, or – gluttony.