Ruminating on Paul’s Food in the Second Century

In the second century, the apostle Paul’s legacy was far from settled. This was especially true concerning the meaning of his reference to milk and solid food in 1 Corinthians. In the contentious exegetical battles that ensued during the next generations of Jesus followers, the argument for ownership of Paul emphatically relied upon the idea that common nourishment could establish one’s kinship with the apostle and with a legitimate Christian sociality. That is to say, in the unsettled world of second-century Christianities, appeals to a shared source of milk served a strategic function, insofar as it came to authorize certain arrangements of Christian social identities and relations over and against others. So many authors reflect an urgency about solving problem of Paul’s enigmatic references to milk and solid food. Nowhere is the urgency more evident than in the writings of two very different contemporaries, Irenaeus of Lyons and Clement of Alexandria, as they sought to wrest the Pauline text away from so-called Gnostic opponents. But rather than solving the problem, Irenaeus and Clement only intensified the theological and anthropological issues generated by Paul’s troublesome categories.

Same Essence, Same Food: Nourishment, Formation, and Education in Early Christianity

Ancient theories of intellectual formation depended upon corresponding theories of the power of material food to shape both body and mind. These theories show little investment in a stark distinction between literal and metaphoric nourishment. This introduction unpacks the dynamic relationship between literal and symbolic food within ancient discussions of human formation. It argues that, in the Greco-Roman world, food was understood to contain an essence that was transferred to the one being fed, transforming them from the inside out. Scholarship on ancient education has often overlooked this crucial emphasis on food and nurturance within the source material and that this has resulted in a false dichotomy between “literal food” and metaphorical references to “food for the soul.” Discussing the ambiguous Greek and Latin vocabulary for food and formation, and engaging post-structural linguistic theory, the introduction concludes that the proper education and formation of children was, throughout antiquity, dependent upon the material provision of food and the ways in which that provision was theorized and regulated.

Animal, Vegetable, Milk

In Origen of Alexandria, there is a consistent emphasis on the slow transformation of material bodies into spiritual beings—that is, of the passage from a corporeal to a noetic existence. And certain types of food play a crucial role within this ongoing process of transformation insofar as eating becomes a mechanism for integrating body and soul and elevating them into a nature of spirit. Origen uses the Pauline food categories found in 1 Corinthians 3 as a hermeneutical key to unlock the whole of scripture and its significance for the structure and formation of the Christian life. This chapter demonstrates how Origen employs the symbol of breast milk as one of several “diets” for those embodied souls undergoing the slow transformation into a spiritual body. Crucially, Origen is the first to develop at length the relationship between the milk and solid food of 1 Corinthians and the “vegetables for the weak” found in Romans 14. The inclusion of vegetables enables Origen to harmonize Paul’s threefold anthropology of fleshy, soulish, and spiritual. As a result, he creates an elaborate taxonomy of souls—a dietary system for classifying the different statuses of souls among Christians.

Conclusion

This Conclusion explores how the imperative “to eat well” has been an undercurrent, a connecting thread, linking disparate arguments about food and formation within the figures and texts explored. Gastronomy inevitably carries with it a set of social, physiological, and intellectual valences regarding the power of nourishment in human development. The simplicity of the phrase “eat well” obscures the complex of ideologies in which a community gathers and to which its individuals are held accountable. The phrase thus evokes a process of growth and development, at once essentially materialistic and profoundly symbolic. What else is gastronomy, then, but a kind of socializing curriculum, a system for incorporating ambient cultural values into one’s own person? A meal materializes the porous boundary between our individual bodies and the social body in which we participate. Drawing upon theorists such as Donna Haraway, Jacques Derrida, and Judith Butler, this conclusion considers whether the trope of milk and solid food might be wrested from its traditional and more restrictive use in regulating bodies and minds. Is it possible to imagine a new Pauline gastronomy that focuses not on power exerted but rather on the vulnerability shared between eater and feeder?

Mother’s Milk as Ethno-religious Essence in Ancient Judaism

Greek literature from ancient Judaism reflects many of the same strategies and assumptions surrounding food and proper formation found in Greek paideia and Roman family values. Indeed, certain Jewish authors (including the author of 2 Maccabees, Philo of Alexandria, the apostle Paul) worked with the prominent notion that food carries an essence in order to think through the very characteristics of their “Jewishness.” In so doing, they devised similar gastronomic regimes out of milk and solid food. Yet something was also different in how food functioned in this literature as the material basis of a deeper religious bond. The three sets of Jewish texts examined in this chapter indicate how the idioms, values, and embodied politics of Roman rule could be repurposed within a specific provincial culture. And they do so in such a way that emphasizes their own scriptural and philosophical commitments.

The Symbolic Power of Food in the Greco-Roman World

This chapter highlights some of the foundational philosophical, medical, and moral texts that account for the power of nourishment within the formation of the human person in the Greco-Roman world. Focusing primarily on Hippocratic treatises, Plato, and Aristotle, it first considers how classical anthropological theories about the relationship between body and soul broadly emphasize the importance of food in shaping human nature (both bodily and intellectually). The chapter then turns to the social and political context of the Roman Empire and its explicit program of family values within which breast-feeding and child-rearing were highly politicized—and thus highly theorized—activities. These disparate texts contribute to the discourse of human formation in antiquity. In each attempt to describe or theorize the power of food, such writings are located within a larger ideological constellation about eating and feeding, the result of which is what the book broadly identifies as the symbolic power of nourishment. This symbolic power produces a tension, or at least an ambiguity, between statements about actual nourishment and what it was specifically believed to do, on the one hand, and the symbol of nourishment as a nebulous cultural value, on the other.

Milk Without Growth

Increasingly suspicious about the efficacy of human wisdom and authority, Augustine of Hippo came to view the possibility of graduating through traditional stages of education as inconsistent with the character of the Christian life he found described in scripture. In this way, he largely abandons the original function of milk, solid food, and the Roman Family as symbols aimed at the transformation of children into their perfect form. The symbolic power of milk for Augustine, like those who came before him, was found within its capacity to transfer familial belonging and a properly formed character. But by the end of his career, the bishop of Hippo had largely emptied milk of its forming power. That is, for Augustine, the nourishment offered within the household of God was milk without growth. This chapter explores the marked process of disillusionment that Augustine’s thinking undergoes and the ways in which this process impacts his understanding of milk, solid food, and the symbolic power of nourishment in the transformation of Christian souls. It concludes by arguing that Augustine came to view milk as, first and foremost, a sign of one’s humility before God and a strategic refusal of the arrogances of intellectual development.

Gregory of Nyssa at the Breast of the Bridegroom

This chapter examines the role of nurturance in Gregory of Nyssa’s understanding of the progressive perfection of the soul. Reflecting the social ideology of his time—in which maternity and breastfeeding functioned as indexes for social legitimacy and the transfer of cultural identity—Gregory regularly emphasizes the symbolic power of nourishment in the formation of the soul. Throughout his work, milk is described as a transformative meal, a form of subsistence that is the essence of salvation and the way toward perfection. The chapter begins with a comparison of Gregory’s Encomium on Saint Basil and the Life of Moses in order to demonstrate how these texts emphasize the maternal food given to an infant as the foundation of and guarantor for later intellectual prowess and social position. The chapter turns next to the Homilies on the Song of Songs and the ways in which maternity, infancy, and breastfeeding enable the various transformations of the soul that take place throughout Gregory’s interpretation. For Gregory, the Song of Songs is an itinerary of trophic mutations premised on the assumption that all food contains an essence that perfects the one who eats it.