Art as food; on the preparation and consumption thereof

Food metaphors, Katie!

I was approached with a couple questions this week that I want to address. Based on last week’s post, “Ideas as fiction,” I was asked,

I am curious as to how one can balance the intellectual life with the artistic, and these with the spiritual. I have felt, in a way, torn apart by an inability in myself to harmonize these well. Even more practically, how do you go about approaching art of a high quality that is fraught with dissolute snares, of whatever kind. I have no wish to pietize or become a moralist, but I would be pleased if you might be able to share a strategy for that kind of undertaking.

It has occurred to me in my fifteen years of adventures with a malfunctioning gut that, well, all food is bad for you. The reason you’ll constantly find in the news “studies” (well, often just corporate-sponsored propaganda) that say, “Actually, such and such food is good for you!”, or, “Actually, such and such food is bad for you!” — is that actually, all food is both good and bad for you. We need nutrition, but… nutrition is hard to digest and can take a toll on the body. This is the human situation. We’re kind of notorious for eating good-and-evil.

So in terms of producing art, I see the artist as a kind of dietitian and chef for the soul. As an artist, you aim to nourish people, optimizing the good and minimizing the evil, while preparing that nourishment in such a way that your audience will want to eat it and be able to digest it. This is not how media companies see it. Their aim is to addict souls to their product so as to make money. Exploiting passions of desire and anger (our old friends epithymia and thymos) — or in other words, material longings and ideological indignation — is the way to do this.

On that score, old-school filmmaker Ken Loach recently compared movie blockbusters of our era to fast food hamburgers. He was trying to be negative. I think he’s being too generous. I think Hollywood film studios these days are better thought of as pharmaceutical companies. They make not food, but drugs. They’re out to addict you to their product. They want you to stay alive long enough to keep taking it, but otherwise they don’t care about you, just as long as you keep identifying yourself with your desires and remain indignant with your enemies. That way they’ll be able to manipulate your attention.

It’s all about attention, and this is what the artist is up against. Inspired by a developed love of beauty, rooted in goodness and truth, you as an artist may cook up a fantabulous multi-course meal for your audience. And a lot of good that will do for a roomful of junkies so strung out on drugs that they can no longer digest food. What do you do? If you actually care more about the welfare of your audience than displaying your powers of creation like a demiurge, you will be forced to adapt. Vegetables have excellent nutrition, but they can be very hard to digest. So you cook them down. The more you cook them, the less nutritious they’ll be, but the easier they’ll be to digest. Yeah. But the mush you end up serving will never be able to compete for attention with the sweetness of whatever drug got the junkies the way they are — so what then?

Jonathan Pageau’s solution has been to show the inevitable symbolic structures within the entertainments we consume. Epithymia and thymos do not comprise the entire soul, as there is also logos as the third element. He appeals to logos to awaken people to the situation. And while logos, reason, isn’t one of the lower passions, it is still a passion. As epithymia and thymos give way to cupidity and wrath, so logos gives way to ignorance, in particular ignorance to God and the patterns of creation. Pageau has been assaulting that ignorance. It has been a very successful project which I would not have been able to conceive, let alone execute. This is real first-responder heroics kind of stuff. While helpless in that regard, I may be able to help usher convalescence along in its later stages. We have to get these guts operable again. The epithymia and thymos have to be brought back to health.

When we consume art, we are, however poorly, filling the role of illumination in our spiritual lives. By that I refer to the threefold stages of purification, illumination, and perfection. They occur strictly in that order, but it’s fractal, such that each stage contains the others. You don’t exhaust the need for purification before you already need a form of illumination. Illumination is the perception of God in created things. If you listen to a love song, and by it you understand God’s love for you, and your own love for Him in response, then you are undergoing a form of illumination in how you are listening to the song. If at the same time your mind’s eye is clouded with self-love or lust, then you still have purification to do.

St. Maximus (one of whose feast days is today, old calendar) teaches us a brilliant lesson in this regard by describing illumination and its dangers using a story from the end of Acts (ch. 28).¹ When Paul is shipwrecked and stranded on an island, he and those with him are received kindly by the native barbarians. A fire is lit for their warmth. Paul gathers wood and lays it on the fire, but when he does, a viper leaps out of the wood because of the heat and fastens on Paul’s hand. St. Maximus explains that our contemplation is like a fire, and the nature of created things which we gather in our attention is like firewood. It is inevitable that when we contemplate created things (when we set fire to firewood), the heat of our attention will rouse the power within sensible images to attach us to material passions, to idolatry, lust, and anger. The Apostle being the servant of God that he is, shakes the serpent off his hand and into the flames, suffering no harm.

This is the way it is: We need to abstain from contemplation of sensible images as long as we are vulnerable to their temptation. Unless we are able, like St. Paul, to be struck by the viper and not be harmed, we should avoid putting our mind’s fire to the wood of created things. It is common (not else but by the grace of God) for mature Christians, even today, to meet this level of spiritual competence — in regard to some things. In regard to other things, maybe not so much. There might be, say, a genre of Romantic poetry that one Christian needs to eat, for now at least, in order to be nourished by its relative good and keep showing up in Church, while for another Christian, the temptation within that poetry to indulge in solipsistic melancholy bars that genre from consumption altogether.

Everyone has different digestive needs and abilities, as the good-and-evil within food affects us all in different ways. There could be someone immersed in fornication like a junkie who could benefit from a soulful drama that examines the social and psychological effects of misusing sex. Yet the sexual content in that drama would be a prohibitive snare for many others. There is relative good in such a story, and also poisonous venom. Those who already have that venom in their blood but don’t realize how poisonous it is, could benefit from learning exactly what it’s doing to themselves and to the people their behavior affects. Knowledge of the patterns of corruption can be very beneficial for us, you know, when we’re in it. Those who already know that the venom is bad should actively avoid its temptation. The door on a brothel is a good thing to use for someone inside the brothel; not so much for those without, no matter how curious they might be to know how the hinges work.

A difference is made in the case of mature Christians who are able like St. Paul to suffer a viper bite and not be harmed, who can be in the presence of temptation and by the grace of God not be tempted to sin. Such have attained the freedom that St. Paul talks about when he says, “All things are lawful for me, but all things are not expedient: all things are lawful for me, but all things edify not” (1 Cor. 10:23). I admit to flipping around the context of that verse, but I think it holds. St. Paul was talking about abstaining from relative good things for the sake of others who would be harmed by relative evil in the process: “Let no man seek his own, but every man another’s wealth” (1 Cor. 10:24). I’m talking about enduring relative evil things when both bestowed with God’s protection and motivated by love for those who would benefit from relative good in the process. Such Christians would never expose themselves to venom for its own sake, but they might for the sake of specific others, out of love — and ensured of God’s protection because He loves them too. This is the witness of the prophet Jeremiah, who after telling the Judeans (the ones under Babylonian rule but not yet exiled) not to flee to Egypt because that would be against the will of God, yet himself went down to Egypt once they resolved to, preaching to them all the way. They went rebelliously, abandoning God; he went out of love, abandoning neither God nor his people.

I say this is the witness of Jeremiah, but it’s precisely the pattern of the Christ. We were told not to eat of good and evil, because if we did we would die. We resolved to do so anyway, and so God the Word joined us on our path, even accepting the consequence of death to which He in His sinlessness was not subject. Like Jeremiah, He was killed by the very people He was acting out of love for. Having eaten good-and-evil with us, but without sin, He became the Bread of Life. There exists Food, it turns out, that is all good and no evil. And yet — see 1 Cor. 11:27–30 — to eat it unworthily is to bring damnation upon oneself! For this cause we need preparation. We need art that, while it may be good-and-evil, yet has the right combination to nourish our soul with limited damages. And we need artists that skillfully and lovingly bring us to the chalice in a worthy state. In a world of junkies, that process can take extreme measures even just to initiate. But extreme measures are extremely dangerous and require extreme protection to undertake. In humility, we commonly must recognize our unworthiness of such endeavors and can only pray they are fulfilled by someone better than ourselves. If we loved as we should, we’d be able to do more than pray. In the meantime, we pray. And it may happen that our prayers themselves turn into art. May the Lord the Bread of Life have mercy on us all.

1. See Ad Thalassium 37.4. In St. Maximos the Confessor, On Difficulties in Sacred Scripture: The Responses to Thalassios, td. by Fr. Maximos Constas (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2018), pp. 220–21.