FOOD AND RELIGION
the temptations of the flesh, and to make moderation a guiding prin-
ciple on lean and meat days alike, the church declared gluttony and
the other vice it was thought to beget, namely lechery, cardinal sins.
The fact that Evagrius in the fourth century and Cassian in the fifth
listed these two carnal sins before all others underlines their enormous
importance in early Christianity. Not until Gregory the Great in the
seventh century was there a shift in emphasis when the sins of the flesh
gluttony and lechery took a back seat to the spiritual sins pride, envy,
anger, sloth, and avarice.53 For Cassian gluttony was the “primal sin...
which led to the fall of humankind and which the devil first tempted
Jesus to commit in the desert.”54 In his Confessiones, Saint Augustine
gives us a vivid description of his struggle to resist the temptation of
food, a temptation he considers much stronger than sexual temptation
because man must eat to stay alive.55
Eating without falling prey to gluttony was a delicate balance for
Christians to achieve, and it raises the question what exactly the
church meant by the term “gluttony.” The Catholic Encyclopedia de-
scribes it as eating “too soon, too expensively, too much, too eagerly,
and too daintily.”56 In an Old English poem, The Seasons of Fasting,
gluttony is defined as “eating and drinking too soon, or consuming
more than necessary, or preferring more exquisite food and drink.”57
This put especially the upper classes, among whom conspicuous con-
sumption was king, at the risk of committing a deadly sin every time
they sat down for a meal. And taking part in a banquet or feast could
be construed as tantamount to committing gluttony.
In the homiletic or sermon literature of the Middle Ages much
room is given to one aspect of gluttony, namely the sin of drunken-
ness. According to Saint Jerome, drunkenness takes a central position
among man’s vices and can be seen as representative of all vices be-
cause “inasmuch as all the vices turn the mind from God they are all
ebrietas, overthrowing reason in the mind.”58 Paulinus of Nola,
Isidore of Seville, Ælfric, and Alcuin take an equally strong stance
against drunkenness, and yet none of them condemns outright the
consumption of any alcohol. Not only was wine in moderation re-
garded as medicine by the medical community, wine as a symbol of
Christ’s blood was also an important part of the Eucharist. Even the
Rule of Saint Benedict in chapter 40 allows for a hemina, or approxi-
mately half a pint, per monk per day.59
In addition, there is the issue of water-to-wine miracles performed
first by Jesus at the Marriage of Cana, and then by various saints after
him. In an interesting twist to this type of miracle, Saint Cuthbert,
193
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