SBL 2019 Review Panel | Much Depends on Dinner

“…all human history attests

That happiness for man — the hungry sinner!-

Since Eve ate apples, much depends on dinner.”

--Lord Byron, Don Juan Canto XIII

Meredith Warren’s new monograph invites us to revisit some well-read ancient texts with new questions about particular narrative details—specifically, to ask: what is happening when characters in these texts ingest food from another realm? What new affinities, ontologies, and knowledges are produced by the process of “eating divine food” (signified by a sort-of neologism: hierophagy)? Reading retellings of the myth of Persephone, portions of the apocryphal and prophetic 4 Ezra, key passages of the book of Revelation, the novels Joseph and Aseneth and Apuleius’ Metamorphosis, and the genre-defying Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas, Warren teases out the repeated literary figure of sacred ingestion to make a broader argument about boundary-crossing and ontological conversion.

My comments will focus primarily on the final chapter of the book—the one concerning the Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas, since that is a text I’ve worked quite closely on over a number of years—but I hope some of my observations will contribute to the more general discussion of the book’s broader contributions to our conversations.

The centerpiece of the chapter on Perpetua and Felicitas is the first of four visions which Perpetua narrates in her first-person account of her imprisonment in Carthage. In the vision, Perpetua sees a weapon-studded ladder reaching high into the sky; at the foot of the ladder is a giant serpent, threatening the safety of anyone seeking to climb. Perpetua ascends the ladder, and at the top, she arrives in a paradisiacal setting where an old shepherd offers her some cheese from a freshly-milked sheep. Awakening from the vision, Perpetua still eats “some unknown sweet” and with the voices of the many thousands of white-clad figures still resonating in her ears. She concludes, “We knew we would suffer, and we ceased to have any hope in this world.”

The scene is noteworthy for a variety of reasons: as with her other visions, Perpetua asks for insight through a vision, and she immediately receives it. She seems to be in control of her own mystical insight, a sign of her considerable spiritual authority and virtuosity. In this case, she formulates the request in response that of a fellow Christian whom she calls “my brother” to know “whether there will be suffering or freedom.” (commeatus – provisions, voyage, passage, furlough / ἀναβολή – deferral, postponement; ascent).

Commentators and interpreters of this text have long worried over the textual detail of the cheese—asking all manner of pedantic and literal-minded questions about how the milk that the shepherd had just excreted from the sheep so quickly became cheese, what kind of cheese (curds, runny, dry?) was it anyway, and what the cheese might signify. Some link it to a later iteration of New Prophecy/Montanist movement—the Artotyrites (“bread-and-cheesers”) derided by Epiphanius in his monumental anti-heretical work, the Panarion—and otherwise link it to ritual practices in formation (e.g., baptism and the eucharist).

Whether the cheese has some particular significance, it is clear that Perpetua has brought something of her visionary tour of paradise back into earthly and historical existence—the taste of “some unknown sweet” still alive in her sensorium. Warren links this narrative detail to the idea of hierophagy—eating food from a divine realm, which results in a change in ontology and the reception of a new bit of knowledge.

A number of associations and observations emerge from this reading of the Perpetua vision:

• The residual flavor—the unknown sweet—materializes the psychic experience of the vision. That is, the vision is not merely a mystical experience, but it leaves a material trace.

• Perpetua’s visionary acumen and the authority that derives from it is introduced in this vignette, laying the foundation for her later visions—all of which she summons at will, and out of which she extracts new morsels of insight. I observe this in part to note that every vision in Perpetua’s account moves her further and further along the path toward sanctity and farther away from her conventional earthly identity—and every vision also produces new insights and knowledge. The food she consumes in the first vision is but one narrative indicator of the mutability of her social role and ontology, the porousness of the membranes between the multiple worlds she inhabits, and her own openness to spiritual or mystical insight.

• I’m interested more broadly in the thematization of porousness, transcendence, and transformation both in this particular episode in the Passion and beyond: the text is in fact full of narrative details that highlight porous boundaries—somatically, psychically, socially, and ritually. The eating of heavenly cheese is but one moment in the text when the body itself is porous—and the eating allows for the barrier between heaven and earth, between immortality and mortal historical existence to be crossed. Perpetua’s virtuosic mystical life points to a heightened capacity to move between conscious and unconscious states, between learning and insight, between the “real” and the “hyperreal.” Her entire path from catechumen to gladiator involves repeated translations from one state of being to another—crossing over from ordinary social existence as daughter, wife, mother, and woman to athlete and masculinized being whose transformation is itself captured in a grammatically impossible formulation (facta sum masculus), a being deracinated from all manner of convention. Here, too, it seems that the radical implications residing in the ingestion of heavenly cheese are just the beginning—and of a piece with the blurring of many other lines.

I have a number of other broader questions—not critiques, but just invitations to further reflection.

I am wondering about the creation of a new technical language—the term hierophagy—a term intended to thread together a wide range of sources that have not always been read together. To be clear: I spent a good part of my early career in full Derridean thrall—phallogocentrism here, différance there—so I am far from a language purist. Moreover, the creation of new terms often performs important political work: I think of postcolonial theorist Boaventura de Sousa Santos who has popularized the term epistemicide as a way of talking about the destruction of local ways of knowing by acts of imperial epistemic violence. Moreover, the creation of new terms to describe features of ancient thought and social life is not new with this work—Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza coined kyriarchy and kyriarchization at various points in her oeuvre, Chris de Wet coined doulology in his book on slavery in the writing of John Chrysostom, and so on. I want to ask about the work such technical language performs in scholarly writing—what it affords, what it illuminates, what it occludes. In the case of this study, hierophagy isn’t a native term but rather functions more like a heuristic frame that allows Warren to set a series of disparate texts in some kind of apposition. In other words, it’s a name for an interpretive model rather than a historical practice or object for analysis. I would love for us to talk more about why and how such heuristic frames help us make order out of the messiness and arbitrariness of our ancient archives—but also to consider the specter of reification that technical language almost always introduces into the proceedings.

My other questions are genuinely curiosities and invitations to more conversation:

While I was reading this book, I was also sampling some ancient medical writing, especially writing devoted to ancient theories of dietetics. Galen on the various types and qualities of cheese is worth a side trip to the library. There is no direct connection between these medical works and the myths, novels, apocalypses, and passions Warren has collected for her study—but it got me to wondering about the relationship between the medical, the narrative, the visionary, and the religious when it comes to talking about eating in antiquity. There are other intriguing overlaps between medicine and religion—between health and salvation—in our sources, after all. Might knowing more about how ancient medical theorists construed ingestion—and perhaps how they routinized and standardized more common folk knowledge about food and its effects—give us further insight into how the narratives Warren explores figure the transformative character of divine food?

My final set of questions concern the matter of genre. Warren takes up the question of genre a bit at the beginning of the book, and I’m interested in exploring whether there is more to be said about the motley collection of genres represented in this book. Unless we are engaged in a close study of a particular ancient genre, we all routinely sample rather openly from a range of literary and non-literary genres for our work. In the case of this project, I wonder about the preponderance of novelistic, mythical, and apocalyptic/visionary texts included in this study and the presence of the figure of divine eating in each of them. Is the literary figure especially tied to these modes of storytelling? If we expanded the canon for divine eating, what more might we say about how literary genre in relation to this repeated trope? Does anyone ever preach about it? Does it appear in historical works? Hagiographies? Who circulates the claims about eating divine food, and whom do they hope to convince or persuade in the process?

Elizabeth A. Castelli is Professor of Religion at Barnard College.