In the last thirty years and across a variety of historical fields, the investigation of food and foodways has deepened our understanding of social dynamics by focusing attention on the most basic and essential of human activities: eating. Dana Robinson's important and learned study argues that the most important meal in early Christianity was not the eucharist, but the ordinary domestic meal. In the quotidian act of eating, the complex process of the Christianisation of the Greco-Roman world took place with all its ambiguities and tensions.
Robinson's monograph originated as a doctoral thesis at the Catholic University of America, but its thorough and careful reworking as a monograph is a model for how a thesis might be transformed into an important book. It consists of three case studies that move across the diverse linguistic, geographic and social space that early Christianity occupied. The first of these studies examines the sermons of John Chrysostom to his wealthy Antioch congregation. In Chrysostom's imagination the dining room is the most dangerous room in the house: a domestic theatre full of ribaldry and the vice of elite display. But with Christian moderation, conceived as a medical regimen, the table becomes a place of discipleship and where virtue can be fully displayed. The second study transports us to the White Monastery Foundation in Middle Egypt and its celebrated abbot, Shenoute of Atripe. Shenoute blends biblical imagery and classical tropes with a knowledge of agriculture and food production to exhort an audience of monks and laity to Christian good work. In an astonishing inversion of the eucharist, Shenoute encourages his audience to transform themselves into the food that Jesus would want to consume. Negatively, Shenoute is critical of the funerary eucharist and martyr festivals which stand outside the institutional structure of the monasteries. Robinson demonstrates the difficulties that Shenoute has with bringing his criticisms to bear on his lay hearers and the complicated interrelationships that exist between production and consumption, private and public, monastic and lay, ritual and social. The third study scrutinises the poems of Paulinus of Nola for the Campanian cult of St Felix. The complex transformation of sacrifice sees it being de-ritualised and re-ritualised as Paulinus assimilates Roman votive religion into the martyr devotion of Christianity. The image of the mouth becomes a crucial vehicle for uniting the consumption of the feast and the voicing forth of praise.
Two methodological perspectives inform Robinson's study and provide it with considerable interpretive insight. The first of these is cognitive metaphor theory. Robinson is a deeply perceptive reader of ancient metaphors. She demonstrates not only how they reflect the socio-economics of the Greco-Roman world, but also shows to good effect how metaphors are not just vivid images that ancient Christian preachers used to animate their sermons for their hearers, but had a fundamental effect on how reality was structured and understood. Particularly useful is the way that she unfolds the different metaphors that each of her subjects is using and reveals the social, religious and philosophical tensions that exist. In the case of Chrysostom, Robinson shows how the Antiochene preacher sometimes uses a bipartite schema that contrasts frugality and excess, and prefers frugality, and other times uses a tripartite system that sees good health as a balancing of the humours, and values moderation. If Chrysostom's rhetoric emphasises binary oppositions, the flow of the discourse establishes the core metaphor of moderation as dominant. ‘The healthy temperament resides in the middle of opposing forces held in balance by the bodily regimen. Binary opposites may be applied as treatment for a systemic imbalance, with no contradiction to the general equation of a healthy and virtuous system with the moderate state’ (p. 38).
The second methodological perspective that Robinson uses is theories of space and the perception that space is a social product that is constructed, inhabited and contested. Like food, space is endemic in early Christian discourse, and whilst rarely an object of direct examination, it reveals numerous basic assumptions about ethical and social life and exposes intellectual tensions. Thus, Shenoute imagines the monastery as the site of Christian perfection and an exceptional domestic space that decentres the lay Christian household. In contrast, the rural shrines are an ambiguous space in the Christian landscape that are incorporated into lay networks, but sit outside the monastic organisations. These spaces are not just where meals are consumed; the meals also create the space and its meaning. Shenoute's conception of the monastery as a perfect domestic space provides an example of how Robinson's case studies also address one another, and reveal the diversity of the early Christian attempts to assimilate the Greco-Roman meal and the Mediterranean space. Despite their similarities as moral preachers, Chrysostom and Shenoute move in opposite directions, since for Chrysostom the household becomes a ‘little church’ rather than the monastery becoming the perfect Christian household.
As a biblicist, I would have liked to have seen a little more on how the complexities of biblical imagery were incorporated into these writers’ works. Chrysostom might have been influenced by models of moderation in biblical texts like Daniel and Esther as well as Greco-Roman medical textbooks. As was the case with Robinson's examination of Shenoute's, attention to biblical imagery would no doubt uncover further complexities and subtleties in early Christian discourse. But this is only a minor quibble from someone with very particular interests. In every respect, I found this an engaging and subtle study with insights on every page.
