Eating Beauty

The Eucharist and the Spiritual Arts of the Middle Ages

Ann W. Astell

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780801444661
• eBook ISBN: 9781501704543
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: History of Medieval Art
• Index: History

"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Reading the lives of the saints not primarily as historical documents but as iconic expressions of original artworks fashioned by the eucharistic Christ, Astell puts the "faceless" Host in a dynamic relationship with these icons.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.

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

_______________

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 fundam...

Table of contents

• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• 1. “Taste and See”: The Eating of Beauty
• 2. The Apple and the Eucharist: Foods for a Theological Aesthetics
• 3. “Hidden Manna”: Bernard of Clairvaux, Gertrude of Helfta, and the Monastic Art of Humility
• 4. “Adorned with Wounds”: Saint Bonaventure’s Legenda maior and the Franciscan Art of Poverty
• 5. “Imitate Me As I Imitate Christ”: Three Catherines, the Food of Souls, and the Dominican Art of Preaching
• 6. The Eucharist, the Spiritual Exercises, and the Art of Obedience: Saint Ignatius of Loyola and Michelangelo
• 7. Weil and Hegel: A Eucharistic “Ante-/Anti-Aesthetic” Aesthetics?
• 8. To (Fail to) Conclude: Eucharists without End
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• Illustration Credits