Eating Beauty: The Eucharist and the Spiritual Arts of the Middle Ages

By Ann W. Astell

"The enigmatic link between the natural and artistic beauty that is to be contemplated but not eaten, on the one hand, and the eucharistic beauty that is both seen (with the eyes of faith) and eaten, on the other, intrigues me and inspires this book. One cannot ask theo-aesthetic questions about the Eucharist without engaging fundamental questions about the relationship between beauty, art (broadly defined), and eating."—from Eating Beauty

In a remarkable book that is at once learned, startlingly original, and highly personal, Ann W. Astell explores the ambiguity of the phrase "eating beauty." The phrase evokes the destruction of beauty, the devouring mouth of the grave, the mouth of hell. To eat beauty is to destroy it. Yet in the case of the Eucharist the person of faith who eats the Host is transformed into beauty itself, literally incorporated into Christ. In this sense, Astell explains, the Eucharist was "productive of an entire 'way' of life, a virtuous life-form, an artwork, with Christ himself as the principal artist." The Eucharist established for the people of the Middle Ages distinctive schools of sanctity—Cistercian, Franciscan, Dominican, and Ignatian—whose members were united by the eucharistic sacrament that they received.

Reading the lives of the saints not primarily as historical documents but as iconic expressions of original artworks fashioned by the eucharistic Christ, Astell puts the "faceless" Host in a dynamic relationship with these icons. With the advent of each new spirituality, the Christian idea of beauty expanded to include, first, the marred beauty of the saint and, finally, that of the church torn by division—an anti-aesthetic beauty embracing process, suffering, deformity, and disappearance, as well as the radiant lightness of the resurrected body. This astonishing work of intellectual and religious history is illustrated with telling artistic examples ranging from medieval manuscript illuminations to sculptures by Michelangelo and paintings by Salvador Dalí. Astell puts the lives of medieval saints in conversation with modern philosophers as disparate as Simone Weil and G. W. F. Hegel.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: Feb 9, 2016
• ISBN: 9781501704543

Ann W. Astell

Ann W. Astell is professor of theology at the University of Notre Dame. She is the author of many books, including Eating Beauty: The Eucharist and the Spiritual Arts of the Middle Ages, and the editor of Saving Fear in Christian Spirituality.

Book preview

1 : TASTE AND SEE

The Eating of Beauty

Human beings can only say good to eat when they mean beautiful.

—Virginia Woolf

The great trouble in human life is that looking and eating are two different operations.

—Simone Weil

Smell, taste, and touch are excluded from the enjoyment of art.

—G. W. F. Hegel

Eating beauty. The title of this book is intentionally ambiguous. It carries, on the one hand, a sinister meaning, for the eating of beauty denotes its frightening, mythic consumption, whether by cunning serpents, monstrous beasts, cannibals, or machines. It recalls the vicious abuse of food and drink and the concomitant destruction of health and humanity, emblematically represented in the gaping glutton and the drunkard sprawled on the sidewalk. Finally it evokes the devouring mouth of the grave, the sepulcher that swallows every beautiful person and thing (in Latin, pulcher), and the horrific mouth of Hell. On the other hand, the title Eating Beauty awakens an almost magical hope. What wonders would occur if beauty could be eaten, beauty imbibed, beauty absorbed, without ever ceasing to be beauty! How beautiful we would be and become! Are we not, after all, what we eat?

The title is ambiguous in its very grammar. Is eating adjectival? That is to say, does it describe Beauty as a subject—Eating Beauty (like Sleeping Beauty)? If so, who is this Beauty who eats, and what does Beauty eat? Or is eating verbal, with beauty as its object? Who or what, then, eats beauty, and why and how is beauty to be eaten? In considering Eating Beauty, are we to think of beauty and the feast instead of Beauty and the Beast, or is the topic closely tied to such tales of threatened, monstrous consumption, which end (perhaps) with the transformation of beasts into handsome princes?

And yet eating, it would seem, is an enemy to beauty, whether natural or artistic. Nicholas of Cusa (1401–1464), that great herald of modern science and learned student of Albertus Magnus and Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, gives voice to a long aesthetic tradition, traceable back to the Enneads of Plotinus (AD 205–270) and forward to the lectures of Hegel (1770–1831), which defines the theoretical opposition between the two. In a sermon delivered in 1456 on the Feast of Mary’s Nativity, Cusanus honors the beautiful Virgin (Tota pulchra es) with a series of reflections on pulchritude. He first defines the beautiful through etymology, explaining that what is beautiful (kallos, in Greek; formosus, in Latin) is so because it calls and attracts us to the good, and because it has a visible form, a definable, proportionate, and pleasing shape. He continues:

And if we pay attention, making use of the more spiritual senses (since it is through these that doctrines are grasped), then we understand by that very means what is beautiful. For we say that color and shape have beauty and, similarly, voice, song, and speech; thus vision and hearing in different ways comprehend the beautiful. We do not call a scent beautiful, nor a taste, nor anything that we touch, because those senses [smell, taste, touch] are not so near the rational spirit; for they are purely bestial or animal. For all properly human senses are nobler than those of brutes, by reason of union with the intellectual spirit.¹

Beauty, then, must be seen or heard, because only the senses of sight and hearing can apprehend form, which appears from a contemplative distance. It cannot be eaten, for if it is eaten, Nicholas implies, it is thereby destroyed by the beasts or bestial people who consume it. What is eaten is too close, too immediate to a purely physical appetite, and thus lacking a spiritually apprehensible form. Humans do not eat beauty, insofar as they are truly human.

The coincidence of opposites that patterns the thought of Cusanus allows, however, for an important counterstatement. Beauty may and must be eaten in the Eucharist. In a vernacular homily on the Lord’s Prayer, Nicholas explains that Christ is our bread and a spiritual food for our soul in his agile, glorified, resurrected body, which shines under the form of bread with an incomprehensible spiritual splendor, the claritas or brightness of unchanging Beauty.² We should beg daily for this bread, Nicholas says, for it is necessary daily, if we are to go on living the life of grace and thus to attain eternal life in Heaven, where our bodies, joined to our souls, will also be beautiful, well-formed, and radiant.³

Nicholas expresses here the familiar, orthodox teaching and belief of the medieval church. But how are we to understand this eucharistic eating? Is the eating of the Eucharist a wonderful, unique exception that only proves the rule that beauty should not be eaten, or does it practically undermine that prohibition?

The medieval practice of spiritual Communion confirms the association of sight with the apprehension of beauty. A devout, intent gazing upon the consecrated Host at its elevation during Mass was often regarded as a substitute for the sacramental consumption of the Eucharist. Even to begin to answer the question why is, however, already to deconstruct the simple, aesthetic binary that separates looking from eating; the higher senses of sight and hearing from the lower, bestial senses of touch, taste, and smell. Understood in the context of medieval popular visual theory and piety, to see the Host was to touch it. One could eat it, touch it, taste it, with one’s eyes. Gazing upon the Host in adoration meant a real, physical contact with it, a touch, as light rays emanating from the Host beamed into the eye of the adorer; and vice versa, as rays from the beholder’s eye extended themselves in a line of vision to the Host.⁴ Touch (in Latin, tangere, tactum), the basic sense of contact with the world, was held to be the "common term or proportion of the other senses, Thomas Ryba explains, making them all a species of touch.⁵ As a form of touch, vision was thus the strongest possible access to [the] object of devotion, Margaret R. Miles asserts. [It] was considered a fully satisfactory way of communicating, so that people frequently left the church after the elevation."⁶

But seeing the Host was not merely a physical act; it simultaneously involved all the spiritual senses, which take as their proper objects spiritual realities.⁷ To see the consecrated Host for what it was—Christ—was to see it with the eyes of faith; to hear, to smell, to taste, and ultimately to touch Christ and to be touched by Him. At the base of all the physical senses, touch was paradoxically at the pinnacle of the spiritual senses in the view of medieval mystics like St. Bonaventure (1221–1274), who associated it with the dark, imageless state of contemplative union, a knowing and intimacy without mediation that marked and effected what Ryba calls a complete transformation of the will in love, its beautification and beatification.⁸

Through a complex interaction of the physical and spiritual senses, eucharistic eating suggested to mystics like Bonaventure that the exercise of the spiritual senses could in fact alter the physical ones, increasing one’s power to apprehend the hidden beauty, visible and invisible, in all things. But how? With their different objects, the spiritual and physical senses would seem to be parallel powers—analogous to rather than continuous with one another. From the time of Origen, dualistic theologies have in fact tended to keep the two sets of senses separate, whereas mystical experience, sacramental reception,⁹ liturgical practice, and the doctrine of the resurrection of the body have worked to confirm a mystical continuity between the senses of body and soul,¹⁰ as well as their power to affect one another.¹¹ If the soul in glory is to effect a transfiguration of the body joined to it, thus allowing for its participation in the four qualities of Christ’s resurrected body—claritas, subtilitas, agilitas, and impassibilitas—then, theologians reasoned, the spiritual and physical senses must somehow be connected. Christ’s glorified body and soul, received in the Eucharist, were believed to nourish this human capacity for transfiguration and to guarantee its fulfillment in the life to come.

The mysterious relationship between the physical and spiritual senses—a connection intrinsically linked to the perception of the literal and spiritual meanings (senses) of the sacred scriptures—determines, however, that the eucharistic beauty that is eaten and that eats cannot be identified exclusively with Christ’s divinity, nor with the properties of Christ’s glorified, human body. It must extend to the outward signs of the sacrament; to the plain letter of the scriptures; to the simple forms of bread and wine; to the ritual actions of eating and drinking; to the remembrance of Christ’s torture, deformity, and death; and thus to the absolute disappearance of beauty. But is this not a contradiction in terms? If beauty must appear, be visible, in order to be beauty (in Latin, species), then beauty cannot disappear, cannot be deformed and hidden, cannot be eaten.

The Eucharist seems indeed to have been a source of tension within medieval aesthetics. Umberto Eco, who has taught us so much about the aesthetics of St. Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274),¹² implicitly associates the aesthetic decline of the late Middle Ages not only with the havoc wreaked by late Scholasticism . . . upon the metaphysics of beauty, but also with an excess of eucharistic cult and a crisis in mysticism: "The Victorine aesthetic [had been] a fruitful and forceful one. But how can anyone contemplate the tranquilitas ordinis, the beauty of the universe, the harmony of the divine attributes, if God is seen as a fire, an abyss, a food offered to an insatiable appetite?"¹³

As if in answer to Eco, the mystic and philosopher Simone Weil (1909–1943) describes the beauty of the world as the mouth of a labyrinth, at the center of which God is waiting to eat the lovers of beauty, but only to transform them: [They] will have become different, after being eaten and digested by God.¹⁴ God’s eating of us and our eating of Him in the Eucharist are not destructive of beauty, she insists, but rather a way to participate in Beauty itself, the same Beauty that expresses itself in obedience to God’s law of charity. (Charis in Greek, like gratia in Latin, connotes what is graceful, pleasing, and seemly; it belongs, as the medieval exegetes understood, to the very meaning of Eucharist.)

There are two ways to eat beauty, according to Weil. One way destroys the beauty of the world and the beloved; the other preserves and enhances it. The great trouble in human life is that looking and eating are two different operations, she muses.¹⁵ Alluding to Adam and Eve’s devouring of the forbidden fruit, she observes, Vice, depravity, and crime are nearly always, or perhaps always, in their essence, attempts to eat beauty, to eat what we should only look at.¹⁶ Only in the sky, in the country inhabited by God, she writes, are [looking and eating] one and the same operation.¹⁷ Weil found in the Eucharist a sacramental foretaste of, and guarantee for, that heavenly looking and eating. It was, she thought, a means properly available to Christians at a certain height of spirituality. Finding herself inadequate to its sacramental reception,¹⁸ she feasted on the Host ardently with her eyes in adoration, practicing as a paradoxically non-Christian Christian what medieval believers called spiritual Communion and daily drawing transcendent energy from it.¹⁹

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The Eucharist, Eating, and Art

The enigmatic link between the natural and artistic beauty that is to be contemplated but not eaten, on the one hand, and the eucharistic beauty that is both seen (with the eyes of faith) and eaten, on the other, intrigues me and inspires this book. One cannot ask theo-aesthetic questions about the Eucharist without engaging fundamental questions about the relationship between beauty, art (broadly defined), and eating. The anthropocentric analysis of the Eucharist ought not to be overlooked, theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar rightly insists, because Christ’s Last Supper is the consummation of all sacral and cultic meals of mankind, which has always realized the naturally mysterious character of eating and drinking . . . and has consequently assigned a cultic form to this sign.²⁰

A painting (ca. 1535) by Lucas Cranach the Elder (plate 1) illustrates some of the anthropological issues.²¹ Titled Madonna and Child, it represents Mary and Jesus without halos. The young mother holds in her left hand a cluster of grapes before her breast, pressing her child’s rounded chest with her right hand, to support him as he stands, naked, before her, one of his feet resting on a tabletop. The child holds a grape to his mouth with his left hand, while his right rests on an apple, which sits upon his plump knee, at the side of his navel and penis, exposed frontally as traditional emblems of Christ’s humanity.²² The mirroring, bodily gestures of mother and child and their similar facial features evoke not only the close physical connection between them, but also the specific nourishing function that makes the mother’s body food for the child, the grapes at her breast recalling an earlier breastfeeding with milk. A glass of water and a second apple on the altar-like table recall simultaneously the eucharistic chalice and Host and the Edenic fruit. Even as Adam once ate the fruit presented to him by Eve, now the Christ eats the fruit given him by Mary, assuming human flesh from her, the New Eve. The child himself, however, also resembles food, his plump body like the rounded apple (and the circular Host). Holding him up in a gentle elevation, the priestly mother presents the child to view. Withdrawn from the world of consumables, the food of the painting represents at once a beauty to be seen and not eaten, and a beauty to be received in Communion.

A number of major theorists have associated the very origins of human art with eating. In his lectures on aesthetics, delivered in Berlin in the 1820s, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel imagined a prehistoric age when human beings were merely sensuous creatures, who desired and consumed the objects within their reach. The emergence of artwork coincided with the development of the human spirit, as humankind contemplated and represented in painting, sculpture, and words what it had previously only eaten. The greater the distance (spatial, temporal, and conceptual) that separated human eaters from the edible objects of their physical desire, the more homo sapiens became capable of savoring its own thoughts, drawing spiritual nourishment from its own ideas.²³ Sensuous in its origins as a representation of the edible, art continues to appeal to the physical senses, but only to the higher, theoretical senses of sight and hearing, which distinguish humans from other animals. According to Hegel, "Smell, taste, and touch [Geruch, Geschmack, und Gefühl] remain excluded from the enjoyment of art."²⁴

Hegel’s emphasis on the enjoyment of art, rather than its ritual use-value, has inspired trenchant criticism. Artistic production begins, Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) writes, with ceremonial objects designed to serve in a cult,²⁵ which often included sensory experiences of taste, touch, and smell. These objects possessed aura, according to Benjamin, for a number of related reasons. They possessed distance, because they had been consecrated and set aside for a ritual use. They were unique and permanent, because they were original, hand-crafted objects that could not be exactly copied. They were, moreover, located in a specific time, place, and community, and imbedded in the fabric of tradition.²⁶ This aura decays, Benjamin argues, when art becomes detached from its cultic context, is used for exhibition purposes, and begins to be mechanically reproduced (through printing, photography, film). Exhibition and mechanical reproduction free art from a parasitic attachment to religion and grant it a supposed autonomy (art for art’s sake), but they also put art covertly at the service of politics, either as an illusory screen for the economic interests of the elite classes, or as a didactic means (in accord with Bertolt Brecht’s epic theatre) for a Marxian revolution.²⁷

Benjamin illustrates the transition from one kind of art to another by pointing to Raphael’s Sistine Madonna, which was originally . . . painted for exhibition at the obsequy of Pope Sixtus.²⁸ Contrary to the usual practice and indeed in violation of church law, the painting was later used as an altarpiece. The law, Benjamin explains, effectively devalued Raphael’s painting and other artworks produced for exhibition, reserving the highest honor for those originally intended for ritual use.²⁹ Although Benjamin does not explicitly refer to the Eucharist, his example of the altarpiece suggests the centrality of the sacrament and of the Mass to the artworks of the Middle Ages.³⁰

In an endnote to this essay, Benjamin calls attention to his departure from Hegel. Hegel’s idea of beauty, he observes, comprises these polar opposites [of cult and exhibition value] without differentiating between them.³¹ The aesthetics of [Kantian] Idealism simply could not recognize the fundamental differences in use-value that separate premodern from modern art, and yet, Benjamin concedes, Hegel had a limited awareness of this polarity.³² In support of this claim, Benjamin cites a passage from Hegel’s Philosophy of History where Hegel acknowledges the existence from earliest times of sacred objects used in worship and distinguishes them from the (necessarily beautiful) works of fine art. As a second proof, Benjamin quotes the following sentence from Hegel’s Aesthetics: We are beyond the stage of reverence for works of art as divine and objects deserving our worship.³³ In this way, Rainer Rochlitz observes, Benjamin traces the awareness of a crisis in the aura back to Hegel.³⁴

Whereas Benjamin worries concerning Hegel’s thesis about the decline and imminent end of art, others have been troubled by Hegel’s account of its beginning. Hegel’s idealist account of the historical development from eaters to artists raises the troubling question of what exactly was being eaten to occasion such a transition. Sigmund Freud (1856–1930) did not hesitate to place an act of cannibalism—the eating of the Father by the primal horde of his sons—at the start of human civilization.³⁵ Revising Freud’s psychoanalytic thesis and correcting the structuralist account of Claude Lévi-Strauss, René Girard has argued that ancient societies secured their communal survival through the operation of the so-called victimage mechanism, whereby the expulsion or murder of a human scapegoat served to reunite competing groups, whose members then expressed and secured their restored unity through an often cannibalistic feast. Girard observes: The eating of sacrificial flesh, whether animal or human, can be seen in the light of mimetic desire as a veritable cannibalism of the human spirit in which the violence of others is ritually devoured. . . . [T]he victim is eaten only after he has been killed, after the maleficent violence has been completely transformed into a beneficent substance, a source of peace, strength, and fecundity.³⁶

The various art forms—dance, drama, music, poetry, scene painting, sculpture, architecture—are closely tied in their origins to religious feasts of sacrifice, according to Girard, because artistic mimesis is structurally adequate to other forms of mimesis (educative, acquisitive, competitive, contagious). Art provides the community with a means, first, to free itself from guilt by displacing it through a mythic narrative onto the polluted victim; then, to harmonize the conflict of doubles in symmetrical representations (including the mirror-like movements of dance); and thus to ward off, by means of a ritualized reenactment and surrogate victim, the actual repetition of the real violence that is regularly precipitated by a mimetic crisis.³⁷

Anthropologists affirm both the historical reality of cannibalism and its cultural extension (via projection) in the form of persecutory charges against any minority group that is perceived by the dominant society to be threatening.³⁸ Whereas Girard proposes his adaptable, mimetic theory as a single explanation for different forms of cannibalism, other theorists seek to delineate a range of possible causes that take into account what Peggy Reeves Sanday, in her study of 156 societies, calls the diversity in the cultural content of cannibal practice.³⁹ Drawing upon Paul Ricoeur’s The Symbolism of Evil, Sanday does not hesitate, however, to reduce this cultural content to a dichotomous variable.⁴⁰ Distinguishing between the exocannibalism (the cannibalism of enemies, slaves, or victims captured in warfare) and endocannibalism (the cannibalism of relatives), Sanday conceptualizes cannibalism as a cultural system, that is, a system of symbols and ritual acts that provides models of and for behavior.⁴¹ Predicated upon a dialectal opposition between self and other, cannibalism seeks to resolve that opposition either by synthesizing the other as part of the self [endocannibalism] or by negating the other in the self [exocannibalism].⁴² To practice eucharistic Communion rather than cannibalism, Sanday suggests, is to provide a different model for human behavior and civilization, one based on reciprocity, paradox, and mediation.⁴³

Tracing the many metaphors of incorporation, Maggie Kilgour has shown that countless artists have used images of eating, chewing, digestion, cooking, and alchemical sublimation to describe the material base . . . of [their] artistic creation in its relationship to the world of nature.⁴⁴ Her constant theme is that such images, like actual eating, undermine the binary distinction between things "inside me or outside me and thus between self and other.⁴⁵ Such dualisms, she argues, depend on a promise of a false transcendence or sublimation, the end of all opposition, which is in fact achieved through the cannibalistic subsumption of one term by the other.⁴⁶ Eating becomes a way of absorbing everything greedily and defensively into oneself. While Kilgour acknowledges that there is a potential for cannibalism in the sacrament of the Eucharist, she emphasizes that communion sets up a more complicated system of relation in which it becomes difficult to say precisely who is eating whom.⁴⁷ As an act of reciprocal incorporation, Communion provides the beginnings of a model for relations that go beyond the binaries that lead to cannibalism.⁴⁸ Unfortunately, Kilgour concludes, in the historical struggle . . . between communion and cannibalism, cannibalism has usually won, one product of that victory being the identity of the modern subject or individual who desires to eat without in turn being eaten."⁴⁹

Whereas cannibalism aims at the loss of the Other (either through the Other’s absolute destruction or through his absorption into the eater), Communion aims at the loss of the I in either the you or the we. Commenting on this inversion of cannibalism, Karl F. Morrison emphasizes the mimetic element in the Eucharist, wherein the human communicant eats God, and God eats him or her to achieve a mutual in-one-anotherness, which is the precondition for empathetic understanding.⁵⁰ Such a sacramental assimilation, Morrison writes, was of primary importance to the biological paradigm of empathy, but it also contributed to esthetic paradigms of assimilation, involving either the wholeness of a single composition or the bonding through feelings of a viewer with something in the work of art.⁵¹ Derived from the primordial distinction between body and soul, and between the two corresponding ways of giving form—procreation and composition, the paradigms drawn from biology and art converged repeatedly, Morrison writes, in the historical discussions of topics like the Eucharist, where things seen and unseen, physical and spiritual, are conjoined.⁵² Thus the biological and esthetic facts of human existence were woven into broad theories about the cognitive evolution of society through struggle, and indeed, into the movement of that evolution itself.⁵³

Philosopher Leon Kass also links eating and art with evolutionary patterns in human history. Defining the human being as Omniverosus erectus, he charts the close connection of eating with the spiraling forms of human civilization—hunting and agriculture; the ethics involved in distributive justice and especially in hospitality toward the stranger-guest (the inverse of which is cannibalism);⁵⁴ table etiquette; the arts of conversation, including philosophical symposia; and religious feasts and fasts. Kass argues that the human eating of bread, rather than Edenic fruit or the meat of hunters (neither of which require extensive preparation), is coincident with an evolutionary moment when the human becomes an artist in the full sense of that word: A transformer of nature, a practitioner of art, a restrainer of his own appetites, a settled social creature soon with laws and rules of justice, poised proudly, yet apprehensively between the earth and the cosmic powers—man becomes human with the eating of bread.⁵⁵ Kass regards this artistic development as a proof that the Fall—Adam and Eve’s eating of the forbidden fruit—was indeed fortunate: "The expulsion from the garden is coupled with a shift from fruit to bread [cf. Genesis 3:19], the distinctly human food, and marks the next step toward humanization through civilization.⁵⁶ The making of bread from grain, after all, is a complex process in many stages that requires an artistic transformation" of raw materials.⁵⁷ The same community that works together to produce bread is strengthened, in turn, through meal-sharing and companionship on life’s journey.

In a concluding chapter, Kass shows the formative power of the biblical dietary rules in Leviticus in the life of observant Jews and elucidates their proper meaning in restoring the created order described in Genesis.⁵⁸ Their observance, he writes, affects the total form of Jewish communal life and push[es] back in the direction of the ‘original’ ‘vegetarianism’ of the pristine and innocent Garden of Eden.⁵⁹ Kass’s identification of bread as the distinctively human food in the post-lapsarian order neatly corroborates the patristic and medieval Christian opposition of the Eucharist and the apple, discussed in chapter 2 of this book. Fittingly chosen by Christ as a sign of human art, the bread becomes through consecration the appearance of Beauty itself, the sacramental form of Christ, the Word through whom God the Father created all things (cf. John 1:1–3).

For a human society normed by the Eucharist, therefore, cannibalism stands as a particularly horrible symbol of evil. Reay Tannahill insists that Christians have viewed human sacrifice and cannibalism in fundamentally disproportionate horror, due to the spiritual importance of the human body in Christian thought and the doctrine of bodily resurrection.⁶⁰ Geraldine Heng, for her part, emphasizes that medieval Christian culture as a whole found its apotheosis in the Eucharist, which unified its members in the one church, fostered their personal and communal salvation, and provided a means for their actual divinization through union with godhead.⁶¹ European Christendom therefore suffered an unspeakable cultural trauma, she asserts, when Christian soldiers in 1098 reverted to cannibalism at Ma’arra, Syria, during the First Crusade, eating the decayed bodies of the Saracen dead and thereby becoming identical with the monstrous Other. This historical trauma, triggered by a horror unspeakable in itself, gave rise, in turn, to artistic forms—romance as a genre, the legends of the Grail, the imagery of courtly love—all of which, Heng argues, gave the cannibalistic experience of the Crusades a displaced expression and a means of redress: "For romance does not repress or evade the historical—as has sometimes been claimed—but surfaces the historical, which it transforms and safely memorializes in an advantageous form, as fantasy."⁶² In the chivalric rescue of beautiful maidens from flesh-devouring monsters and their ilk, according to Heng, one finds the allegorical, metaphoric transformation of a cultural memory of dehumanizing cannibalism, pollution, and cross-cultural contamination.⁶³

Whereas Heng finds a eucharistic narrative displaced and embedded in the exoticism of romance, I find a more wondrous romance in the medieval lives of the saints (legenda), which were often explicitly eucharistic in content, recounting miracles and visions associated with the Host in the larger context of narratives of personal and communal conversion. These stories, in turn, became part of the eucharistic celebration as they were retold in homilies on the saints’ feasts and depicted in painted icons, stained-glass windows, reliquaries, and statues in churches. The moral and spiritual miracles of changed lives were thus linked metonymically to transformative meditation on the scriptures (traditionally imaged as a chewing and savoring of the text), to the transubstantiation of bread and wine, to sacramental Communion, and to artistic production, including the writing of legenda.

What the chivalric romances and the eucharistic legenda share is the tale of a quest or a journey, which can be a way of holiness. Alasdair MacIntyre has taught us that every particular view of the virtues is linked to some particular notion of the narrative structure or structures of human life.⁶⁴ This book argues that the Eucharist established for the people of the Middle Ages distinctive schools of sanctity, whose members were united by the scriptural Word and the eucharistic sacrament that they received as the strengthening food of wayfarers (viaticum). Their narratives of these distinct ways begin with different interpretations of the first sin and thus of the virtues necessary for beauty’s restoration. The particular paths of holiness they pursued were marked, first, by the unique images of Christ they followed, which were embodied for them in the Eucharist; and second, by the corresponding virtues, received in the Eucharist, which were necessary for the journey’s continuation and completion. Eating the Eucharist was thus simultaneously to see Christ and to touch this vision, to reach out for it, and to embody it virtuously. More basically it was to be seen and eaten by Christ, drawn to Him, and incorporated into Him as the way, the truth, and the life (John 14:6). Eating the Eucharist was, in short, productive of an entire way of life, a virtuous life-form, an artwork, with Christ Himself as the principal artist.

Caroline Walker Bynum’s important Holy Feast and Holy Fast, to which this book offers a delayed response, gives no account of the crucial, rich, theo-aesthetic discourse of the virtues in medieval eucharistic piety. Inspired in part by the work of anthropologist Victor Turner, Bynum has argued that medieval women, because of their societal role as food preparers, and also because of their bodily identification with food as mothers and nurses, identified closely with Christ in the Eucharist. This identification expressed itself metaphorically in their almsgiving, fasting, and religious writings; in the works of visual art that were inspired by their eucharistic piety; and in their visionary encounters with Christ.⁶⁵ They gloried in the pain, the exudings, the somatic distortions that made their bodies parallel to the consecrated wafer on the altar and the man of the cross.⁶⁶ Bynum finds beauty and hope in this embodiment,⁶⁷ and she illustrates Holy Feast and Holy Fast with many reproductions of medieval artwork, but she does not speak of beauty per se, nor does she emphasize the aesthetic dimension of the formal parallels she observes. Her thesis of a feminine, eucharistic identification does not, moreover, manifest itself in the same way or to the same degree in all women saints and mystics, as she herself acknowledges. Recovering the discourse of the virtues allows us to differentiate among the various eucharistic receptions according to the life-forms of distinct spiritualities.

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Spiritual Arts and Life-Forms

In the epilogue to Holy Feast and Holy Fast, Bynum quotes the words of Simone Weil about the temptation to eat beauty, highlighting the resonant phrase that inspired the title of this book. Like Weil, I take my bearings from two ways of eating beauty. The first, manifestly destructive way is represented in the Judeo-Christian tradition in the biblical story of the Fall of Adam and Eve, who ate the forbidden fruit and suffered the loss of Eden, the loss of paradisiacal beauty, as a consequence. As I show in chapter 2, medieval exegetes interpreted this first sin in different ways: as pride, avarice, gluttony, and disobedience. The Eucharist, identified with Christ as the Tree of Life, was understood to be mystically present already in Paradise; that same life-giving food—sacramentally present in the scriptural Word of God and in the eucharistic Host—was received by Christian wayfarers, exiled from Eden, as an antidote for the poisonous effects of the apple. To eat the Eucharist was, therefore, to implant in the very ground of one’s soul the seed of the Tree of Life, the embryonic beginning in Christ of all personal virtue, and the actual potential through Him for a new, everlasting Paradise. Medieval saints, such as St. Catherine of Siena (1347–1380), saw this new Paradise blossoming within themselves through visions of beautiful orchards, filled with trees of life and virtue, on which they fed and from which they plucked luscious fruit for others.

Given the remedial and restorative quality of the Eucharist, Christ was received in the sacrament under the aspect of different root virtues, depending on the interpretation of the first sin: humility (to counteract pride), poverty (to eradicate avarice), preaching and abstinence (to atone for gluttony), and obedience (to conquer disobedience). Thus the one Christ took form (the essential quality of the beautiful) through divine grace and human striving in four different ways of holiness during the Middle Ages, each of them aimed at the artistic restoration of God’s likeness in humanity: (1) the monastic way of humility and self-knowledge, exemplified in this study by the Cistercians; (2) the Franciscan way of poverty; (3) the Dominican way of fasting and preaching; and, at the very end of the Middle Ages, the Ignatian way of Christlike obedience.

These four medieval spiritualities—Cistercian, Franciscan, Dominican, and Ignatian—differ in their respective, eucharistic answers to the related questions, What was the first sin, and how may its effects be reversed? The four spiritualities have, of course, often been studied individually. They have never, however, been grouped together as an array of possible answers to the single question of the first sin, nor have they been interrogated from the perspective of their distinctive understandings of beauty, insofar as an ideal of beauty is inseparable from the ardent pursuit of holiness. Assembling them, as I do, allows for a comparative treatment of them as forms of Christian life, as distinctive ways of eating beauty.

My approach throughout this book may be described as theo-aesthetic, in keeping with Richard Viladesau’s broad understanding that theological aesthetics . . . comprises both an ‘aesthetic theology’ that interprets the objects of theology . . . through the methods of aesthetic studies, and a more narrowly defined ‘theological aesthetics’ that interprets the objects of aesthetics—sensation, the beautiful, and art—from the properly theological starting point of religious conversion.⁶⁸ It thus participates in a growing movement of scholarship that, building upon the theoretical insights of Karl Barth, Gerardus van der Leeuw, and Hans Urs von Balthasar, seeks not only to redress the neglect of the category of the beautiful within theology itself, but also to bridge the gap between philosophical aesthetics, theology, ethics, and practical art criticism.⁶⁹

My concern is to see the four aforementioned spiritualities (Cistercian, Franciscan, Dominican, and Ignatian), as they are realized in the lives of particular saints, as distinctive life-forms or (to echo the title of Richard Rolle’s medieval treatise on contemplative prayer and asceticism) forms of living⁷⁰ that allow us to grasp the incarnation of God’s glory, and the consequent elevation of man to participate in that glory.⁷¹ Connecting such life-forms in their sensuous concreteness with Beauty itself, Balthasar asks, What is a person without a life-form, that is to say, without a form which he has chosen for his life, a form into which and through which to pour out his life, so that his life becomes the soul of the form, and the form becomes the expression of his soul? . . . To be a Christian is precisely such a form, a conformity with Christ, and an imitation of him.⁷²

Given the indispensable importance of particular saints to the forging of the different ways of holiness studied in this book, I discuss the various spiritualities (for the most part) not in accord with their abstract presentation in the Rules and Constitutions of the respective Orders, but rather from the lives (biographical and autobiographical) of the charismatic men and women who gave these ways a living form through their eucharistic eating. If these legenda are themselves artwork (as indeed they are), so that all the saints’lives are always already interpreted and mediated for us, this artwork fittingly reverences, responds to, and thereby bears witness to a perceived, historical beauty in the saints themselves, art answering to art.

The saints, upon whose lives I reflect in this book, frequently seem to have been conscious of themselves as artists at work to carve, polish, and refine their very selves through an imitable asceticism into the particular forma of Christ to which they were drawn through the Eucharist. St. Francis of Assisi (ca. 1182–1226), for example, went out into the winter cold one night and, laughing, fashioned snowmen in order to cool his desires.⁷³ St. Rose of Lima (1586–1617) designed her own instruments of penance, which cut into her flesh, and she saw herself in vision as a sculptor in an artist’s studio, weeping as she carved.⁷⁴ The frequency, moreover, with which sacramental works of art—icons, statues, crucifixes—both mediated the religious experience of the saints and recorded them for others not only confirms a metaphoric analogy between the saint’s life, on the one hand, and the aesthetic object, on the other, but also suggests a metonymic relationship between them, whereby the artwork actually participates instrumentally in the theo-aesthetic work of saintly formation.

Noting the modern survival of asceticism in art and criticism, Geoffrey Galt Harpham has called attention to a close connection between asceticism and aesthetics.⁷⁵ Whereas Harpham emphasizes the ascetic’s own creative efforts, however, in order to argue for asceticism as a historical constant rather than a transcendental event,⁷⁶ I call attention to the virtuous activity of Christ Himself, present in the Eucharist as a work of aesthetic re-creation aimed at beautifying the communicant, the community, and indeed the cosmos. If Stephen Greenblatt is correct in noting in the sixteenth century . . . an increased self-consciousness about the fashioning of human identity as a manipulable, artful process, that increase in self-fashioning may reflect, in fact, a reduced faith in the formative, artistic power of the Eucharist.⁷⁷ The reciprocal relationships of mutual in-dwelling and co-operation established by eucharistic reception allow for both human and divine activity and complicate the analogies between the ascetic and the artist to which Harpham points, because the artists (divine and human) in this theo-aesthetic, sacramental scheme are also artworks, even as the eaters are simultaneously eaten. Structures of difference (subject/object) and discontinuity become structures of mutual identification, participation, and continuity.

The words of the first canon of the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) give dogmatic expression to this mysterious reciprocity, emphatically linking Christ’s incarnation to His death and resurrection, to eucharistic transubstantiation, and ecclesial Communion: "[In] this church, Jesus Christ is himself both priest and sacrifice, and his body and blood are really contained in the sacrament of the altar under the species of bread and wine, the bread being transubstantiated into the body and the wine into the blood by the power of God, so that to carry out the mystery of unity we ourselves receive from Him the body He himself receives from us."⁷⁸

Medieval formulations of eucharistic doctrine are, I hope to show, strikingly aesthetic, expressed in a paradoxical vocabulary that both echoes and revises classical notions of the beautiful. Chapters 2 and 7 provide a theo-aesthetic frame, medieval and modern, for chapters 3 through 6, which deal with the four spiritual ways and their respective, virtuous arts of humility, poverty, preaching, and obedience. In these framing chapters I address aesthetic questions and interests specifically as they arise in doctrinal contexts, in an attempt to grasp the perceived, theoretical relationship between beauty and the sacrament.

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The Beauty of the Eucharistic Christ: Form and Deformity

Because the whole Christ (totus Christus) was understood by orthodox medieval Christians to be present in the Host, the questions concerning eucharistic beauty are inevitably Christological and ecclesial. They address the beauty of Christ in His divinity as the Son of the Father and the preexistent Logos, through whom all things were made (John 1:3) and are refashioned. They meditate on Christ’s beauty in His humanity—born of Mary, morally just, cruelly crucified, and radiantly risen. They consider the beauty of the Lord in His salvific, spousal relationship to the church and to the individual soul. Finally they regard the beauty of the sacrament itself as an artwork instituted by Christ and enacted by the church through consecration, adoration, Communion, and charitable service.

Although these reflections on eucharistic beauty show a definite development during the Middle Ages, reaching a certain climax in the thirteenth century with the institution of the feast of Corpus Christi, they all refer back in various ways to the Augustinian question (discussed in chapter 2) of the Christus deformis. Like Hegel after him, St. Augustine, who was well versed in neo-Platonic aesthetics and Ciceronian stylistics, recognized that Christian revelation challenged classical notions of the beautiful. Expressed in biblical terms, how was Christ as the prophesied Suffering Servant of Isaiah 53:2, in whom there is no beauty, to be reconciled with Christ as the messianic prince of Psalm 44:3, who is fairer in beauty . . . than the sons of men ?⁷⁹ How was the beautiful form of Christ’s divine nature to be reconciled with the crucified form of a human slave (cf. Phil. 2:5–8)? How was the verdant Tree of Life to be identified with the bloody wood of the cross? How, in short, could a manifest deformity—the wounds of Christ and the loss of integritas (inviolate wholeness) they represent—be beautiful (as indeed they must be, since the God-Man never ceases to be God, who is eternal Beauty)? What about the apparent deformity of the biblical plain style, which is so inadequate to the beauty of the revealed truth it conveys?⁸⁰ And what of the deformity whereby the God-Man takes the form, the appearance, of the Host?

Although Augustine