Ethiopian Orthodox Feasting and Hospitality

Though a period of fasting is now upon the Church, it is never a bad time to think of feasting. Indeed, fasting often enough, of course, heightens our thoughts about feasting ("Lent" being, of course, an old and untranslatable Indo-Norse word for "agonizing period of endless fantasizing about bacon and beer"), and a new book will reward and edify those thoughts further still, adding to a growing scholarly understanding in English at least of the Ethiopian Orthodox tradition: The Stranger at the Feast: Prohibition and Mediation in an Ethiopian Orthodox Christian Community by Tom Boylston (University of California Press, 2018), 194pp.

About this book the publisher tells us:

The Stranger at the Feast is a path-breaking ethnographic study of one of the world’s oldest and least-understood religious traditions. Based on long-term ethnographic research on the Zege peninsula in northern Ethiopia, the author tells the story of how people have understood large-scale religious change by following local transformations in hospitality, ritual prohibition, and feeding practices. Ethiopia has undergone radical upheaval in the transition from the imperial era of Haile Selassie to the modern secular state, but the secularization of the state has been met with the widespread revival of popular religious practice. For Orthodox Christians in Zege, everything that matters about religion comes back to how one eats and fasts with others. Boylston shows how practices of feeding and avoidance have remained central even as their meaning and purpose has dramatically changed: from a means of marking class distinctions within Orthodox society, to a marker of the difference between Orthodox Christians and other religions within the contemporary Ethiopian state.

Fearful of My Food

As the pre-Christmas fast begins to wind down, and we prepare for the feast, I've just come across a new book that raises interesting questions, some of which I examined here before. The relationship between food and feasting today has become a fraught one, alas--even for Christians. Parish potlucks used to be a lot of fun, but now for many they are occasions for anxiety--will there be gluten? what about Joey's peanut allergy? is there high fructose corn syrup in that? Too many of us are "fearful of my joy" based on the constant bombardment about fads, diets, health crazes, and the results of science which change at a pace and in a manner many find bewildering and thus fit to be dismissed. Certainly our over-investment in and credulity in the face of claims that "a study found" X, Y, or Z about coffee or red meat deserves all the mocking Neil Postman can bring in his Technopoly. 

Concerns about food and its potential to form us for good or ill are not new ones, as anyone with passing familiarity with the New Testament can tell you--or, now with early Christian history, as well, so well told in John Penniman's Raised on Christian Milk: Food and Formation of the Soul in Early Christianity (Yale UP, 2017), 352pp.

About this book the publisher tells us:

A fascinating new study of the symbolic power of food and its role in forming kinship bonds and religious identity in early Christianity

Scholar of religion John Penniman considers the symbolic importance of food in the early Roman world in an engaging and original new study that demonstrates how “eating well” was a pervasive idea that served diverse theories of growth, education, and religious identity. Penniman places early Christian discussion of food in its moral, medical, legal, and social contexts, revealing how nourishment, especially breast milk, was invested with the power to transfer characteristics, improve intellect, and strengthen kinship bonds.

Who Doesn't Like a Good Feast?

As a Chestertonian of the strict observance, following as I do his dictum that "Catholicism is a thick steak, a frosted stout, and a good cigar," I am always scrupulous about observing the feasts of the liturgical year even if there is not a commensurate level of fastidiousness about the fasts! But the whole logic of feasting and fasting makes Christianity incredibly attractive precisely for its domesticity and the clear links between home and Church--to say nothing of cult and culture, which Josef Pieper has explored so wonderfully in his masterful Leisure: the Basis of Culture. 

All this is by way of preface to a notice about a new book released this year: Fritz Graf, Roman Festivals in the Greek East: From the Early Empire to the Middle Byzantine Era Cambridge UP, 2016, 380pp.

About this book the publisher tells us:

This study explores the development of ancient festival culture in the Greek East of the Roman Empire, paying particular attention to the fundamental religious changes that occurred. After analysing how Greek city festivals developed in the first two Imperial centuries, it concentrates on the major Roman festivals that were adopted in the Eastern cities and traces their history up to the time of Justinian and beyond. It addresses several key questions for the religious history of later antiquity: who were the actors behind these adoptions? How did the closed religious communities, Jews and pre-Constantinian Christians, articulate their resistance? How did these festivals change when the empire converted to Christianity? Why did emperors not yield to the long-standing pressure of the Church to abolish them? And finally, how did these very popular festivals - despite their pagan tradition - influence the form of the newly developed Christian liturgy?

"Fearful of My Joy"

By dint of familial circumstance, I needed to begin to cook when I was 12, at first very ploddingly and dutifully obedient to every dictate of simple recipes. Later and more recently cooking has become far more adventuresome and a great joy. I involve my children when possible: they love to help with the chopping and stirring and smashing and peeling, and I like to think I am imparting some skills to them that will be of use later in life, especially in what Eric Schlosser has written about so alarmingly and depressingly: our Fast Food Nation.

Cooking (which, bizarrely, people watch constantly on TV but rarely do themselves) is of course far more than a utilitarian necessity. It is a deeply, uniquely human activity the absence of which increasingly today can only be greeted with alarm--not only because of what its lack does to us psychologically as families and communities, but also physiologically: some studies have recently shown that the failure to cook regularly not only has deleterious effects on the family as such, but also on our physical health through the rise of diabetes and obesity even in very young children. The failure to eat together as humans is equally destructive in related and different ways.  

But I am not here, schoolmarm-like, to hector you about nutrition. Such busybodies are the most tiresome people around. As an unabashed fan of Evelyn Waugh, I firmly believe with him that "food can and should be about enjoyment. As for 'nutrition'--that is all balls." And I would note that when Jennifer Patterson, one of the two gloriously grand, uproariously funny and hugely incorrect "Two Fat Ladies" died of lung cancer in the summer of 1999--while still smoking in the hospital and eating caviar and drinking champagne apparently--I used some of their recipes to make a special dinner for some of my friends in honour of Patterson--a devout Catholic and parishoner at the glorious London Oratory of which I have such fond memories from a 1997 visit. (During that dinner, and too many others, I have often bored myself by quoting Chesterton too frequently: "Catholicism is a thick steak, a frosted stout, and a good cigar!")

Some days I am tempted to write a book "Towards an Eastern Christian Theology of Feasting and Fasting" but you will be spared the dyspepsia that would come from reading such a turgid volume because I think it has largely been done better by others, including Robert Farrar Capon (an Episcopalian theologian actually) in his Food for Thought: Resurrecting the Art of Eating and his The Supper of the Lamb: A Culinary Reflection.

Among Eastern Christians, the best person to write on the connections of food-feasting-sacraments is of course Alexander Schmemann in his For the Life of the World: Sacraments and Orthodoxy, which I have been reading this semester with my students. Schmemann beings by observing that

man must eat in order to live; he must take the world into his body and transform it into himself, into flesh and blood. He is indeed that which he eats, and the whole world is presented as one all-embracing banquet table…. And this image of the banquet remains, throughout the whole Bible, the central image of life (11).

I recently tried to illustrate the centrality of the banquet by watching with my students a charming movie from 1987,  Babette's Feast. If you've not seen it, go and watch it. It's a marvelous illustration of the importance not only of feasting, but of the very sacramental nature of human life even in ways not often thought of in those terms--opera, dancing, music, and of course the preparing and enjoying of both food and wine. It also wonderfully illustrates the joy of cooking good food and, in doing so, the joy of giving joy to others--the joy of gracious hospitality graciously conveyed and received. (Mary may think she had the "better part" but there's a lot of delight for the Marthas of this world being in the kitchen.) 

The movie raised some difficult questions for my students--and I daresay for most of us today in our absurdly over-busy age--not least because of its languorous pace: each course (of seven) is focused on as each diner enjoys every bite slowly and deliberately. How rarely, they admitted, do they feast like that--even on a much less grand scale--at such a pace, and without doing so while texting, watching TV, or playing on the computer. What are we losing by not doing this regularly? Why do we deprive ourselves of one of the most basic and joyful of human encounters qua human? (One answer to that was provided many decades ago now, but all the more important today: Joseph Pieper's splendid work Leisure: The Basis of Culture.) Good food, wine, and conversation: what more could one ask for? Why would one absent oneself from that or pick oneself up from the table only to hurry back to what--the Internet or some ghastly bit of ironically so-called "reality" TV?

At one point in the movie, one of the sisters, Philippa, is very nearly rescued from her very dour Danish preacher-father and very bleak upbringing by a Parisian ("papist"!) opera singer, who convinces her father to let her take singing lessons with a view to going off to Paris to make it big. But the passion the music--Mozart's Don Giovanni--arouses frightens her and she discontinues the lessons, leaving M. Papin to return to Paris alone and heartbroken. The words Philippa sings are deeply revealing: "I'm fearful of my joy." That, it seems to me, is the most succinct summary possible of a life that refuses to be sacramental. How sad. Instead of fear, these brief experiences of joy in feasting should make us long all the more for the heavenly banquet, where the food and feasting truly will be unforgettable--and where, with Jennifer Patterson devoutly interceding for us, there will never be too much double-cream: