Food in the Early Western Christian Monastic Tradition

When we strip our needs down to the barest minimum, there are only two things necessary for life: oxygenated air and food. Unless you dove below the ocean or flew above the troposphere five to ten miles above the earth's surface, oxygen is abundant and free. Food is ultimately what human beings labor for, according to Jewish scriptures, as price for their disobedience. Everything else is extra.

No wonder then that food is at the heart of most if not all religious traditions. St. Benedict in his famous Rule that most Western Christian monastics follow devoted several chapters to food and how the monks took it. Chapter 39 deals with the apportionment of food, chapter 40 with drink. The saint recommended two cooked dishes at each meal so monks had a choice. There were two meals a day, at the sixth hour (noon) and the ninth hour (three in the afternoon). Each monk was allotted a pound of bread a day regardless of whether the monks have one or two meals. This was long before Dr. Robert Atkins. Recognizing that individuals had differing needs for the amount of food, St. Benedict did not specify amounts for the rest of the meal. In the summer, when vegetables and fruits are available he recommended a third dish of these fresh produce. In earlier times, monks grew their own vegetables and fruits. He also made allowances for the elderly, the sick, and those who worked harder than usual that day. The flesh of "four-footed" animals was reserved only for the sick.

The saint wrote his Rule at a time when it was safer to drink wine than to drink water. He would probably have prohibited wine but decided his monks would not accept this so he suggested wine intake be limited to 1/4 liter or 8 ounces a day, again with allowances at the abbot's discretion for the sick and those who performed unusually demanding physical labor that day. Vespers were scheduled to allow for meals to be finished in daylight. All monks took turns at kitchen duty and waiting on each other.

At Lent, monks were enjoined to observe the 40 days by depriving themselves of usual comforts or adding special activities like more prayers or fasting. The monks submit their intended observance to the abbot who approves or modifies the list based on his knowledge of the monk to avoid "presumption and vainglory." In his concise Rule, St. Benedict shows prescience and common sense, regulating only what needs regulating, and he recognized the importance of food as well as abstinence from food.

What we know about St. Benedict is largely from his biography written by Gregory the Great who before he became pope himself followed the Rule as a monk. Gregory praised the Rule for its "discretion and clarity of language." I think we could all learn from this sixth century saint and teacher of men (and, later, women) that our lives in the 21st century become once more moderate and healthy.

An Uncommon Commodity

"Fasting had made me more alert and more appreciative of the richness around me. I began to comprehend the sense of life anew, more intensely. This sense is an increasingly rare commodity nowadays, because the sense of the Holy, of things that are completely different, of the profoundly secret, has gradually become lost."

Bernhard Müller, Fasting in the Monastery

The early Christians fled to the desert where they confronted themselves. They called demons those features of the mind that even today, maybe more so today, tempt us to immoderation and thoughtlessness. Distinguishing themselves from other Jews, they set aside Tuesdays and Fridays as fast days (Jews fasted on Mondays and Thursdays) to remind them of the passion of their rabbi, Yeshua (Iesous in Greek, pronounced YAY-sus), that began on Good Friday.

When we're fasting, the mind becomes clear as if a giant vacuum cleaner had sucked every detail from the sky—clouds, vestigial moon, flying geese—to leave it an empty blue hemisphere above. When we do see ourselves in this dwarfing landscape, we're as ants, insignificant specks on the vastness of timeless space.

In this vast panorama, we are not the center or point of reference. We see how puny our desires are, how utterly silly our pretensions to power and importance.

No longer the center of being, everything becomes transmogrified, luminous and fresh. We're back in the garden before we took things into our own hands and lost the primal vision. In the garden, every thing is new, pure and essential. There is nothing here extraneous or unnecessary, and every thing is good.

We need to regain this vision of Paradise. All too often we are lost in our own world of thoughts and images, in the project-management attitude we learn early in life. Purpose is great. It pools our resources and directs these towards creation. After a while we forget the true nature of creation. We begin to believe we make things happen, all by ourselves, by our own resources and strength. We forget the deep roots that connect us to worlds of being so vast and empty they boggle the mind. We lose this sense of bogglement. Instead we become comfortable seeing the world from our tiny speck of a reference. Fasting restores us to the whole shebang.

And in the whole shebang, everything we see is replete with light. We can even see death and life, not as tragic events we seek to ignore but as natural punctuation marks in a timeless, endless statement that being is. Each time, our sense of ownership loosens somewhat. We see as gods do, the whole panoply of human sadness and joys laid below us like a model train loop, or the valley below when we reach the summit of high mountains.