FOOD IN MEDIEVAL TIMES
Rooted in the ancient Pythagorean and Neoplatonic belief that the
spirit is dragged down by the body, Christian writers early on began to
praise fasting as food for the soul, as a way to make the soul “clear and
light for the reception of divine truth.”24 Classical medicine, too, held
that food and sex should be consumed in moderation, as the writings
on dietetics and personal hygiene of Hippocrates and Galen illustrate
(see Chapter 6). By circa A.D. 400 the idea had taken hold among
Christians that gluttony was the sin committed by Adam and Eve that
caused the fall.25 Fasting coupled with charity was regarded as a way to
recover what had been lost.
It is in this context that the asceticism practiced by monks of the early
church has to be seen. To be precise, abstinence from food was a con-
cept that meant “dry-eating,” that is, living on bread, salt, and water
alone, a diet occasionally supplemented with fruits and vegetables.
Hermits, on the other hand, often subscribed to “raw eating,” which
has recently become fashionable again under the name “macrobiotic
diet,” meaning that no cooked food is consumed.26 The dietary re-
strictions were generally more austere in the monasteries of the East
than in western Europe. There the most famous monastic rule, the
Benedictine Rule instituted by Saint Benedict around A.D. 530, regu-
lates in chapters 39 and 40 the quantity and quality of the food to be
consumed. Benedictine monks are allowed two meals a day and two
dishes of cooked food each. The food includes one pound of bread and
approximately half a pint of wine per monk. Animal flesh is prohibited
except for the sick and the weak. The daily allowance of the monks can
be increased at the discretion of the abbot. The sick, the old, and the
young could get certain dispensations from these dietary rules.27
What these general guidelines make clear is that Benedict’s aim was
not to starve the monks to death, but to provide them with enough
nutrition so they could go about their daily tasks, first and foremost
among them prayer and study. What was eliminated from the menu al-
most completely was the consumption of meat, a measure designed to
suppress feelings of lust in the monks and to purify their bodies. The
rather moderate fasting proposed by Benedict as a group practice for
his monks is in stark contrast to the reports of extreme asceticism that
monks and hermits practiced in Egypt and Syria in the third and
fourth centuries, and later also in Ireland.28 Spurred on by the idea of
the added-on fast, called superpositio in Latin, as a way to multiply
merit, ascetics at times embarked on competitive fasting and in doing
so tried to surpass the feats of other ascetics.
186
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