Buttered Transcendence
Buttered Transcendence
Nathan Beacom
It was in Florence that, with all the muscle of Michelangelo, this ravioli overpowered me. It is an unexpected delight of being human that a bowl of pasta could make you cry; but the thing was just so unbelievably good that tears welled up in my eyes. It had been one of those meals where its perfection frees us from the thick coat (sometimes hardly noticed until abandoned) of daily worry. We had entered the rosy zone of contemplation, where the world and all that is in it are seen to be good and worthy of approval.
A meal like this, fleshly as it is, can only be called a spiritual experience— and I do not say this as a journalistic embellishment, but with an eye to philosophical and theological thoroughness. A meal like this invites us into the poetic way of seeing, and this is a spiritual practice, even a path to God. William Carlos Williams had it right when he wrote that there is nothing in the world to eat except the body of the Lord.
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In the neighborhood where I used to live in Rome, Prati, there is a little old restaurant that specializes in the most truly Roman of dishes: cacio e pepe. You’d be hard-pressed to find a recipe more elegant, with only three ingredients: tonarelli noodles, pecorino cheese and black pepper. Rightly pre-pared, these three exalt and praise each other, the pepper showing what is best in the cheese, the pasta binding both together in unity.
No matter how complex the recipe, this theme, difference being reconciled into unity and unity revealing new depths in difference, is constant. I’ve had pasta bolognese like this, where the ragu has spent hour after hour simmering on the stove, coming together like a good, long marriage. Each moment reveals a deeper mystery, and the whole is more than the sum of its parts. The bacon fat and white wine draw the sweetness and pugnacity out of onion and garlic; over time, they reduce into a new creation, a rich thickness that now asks to be baptized, and so elevated to a higher life, by the blood of the tomato. The liquors of beef and the spirit of carrots and celery prepare the way for the milk that, like familial love, makes a harmonious whole out of contrasting parts.
This is pasta as poetry. To see things in a poetic way is not to see things sentimentally, as though clad in black turtleneck and glasses and looking moodily out the coffee shop window. Nothing could be further from the truth. No, to see things poetically is simply to see things as more than just themselves— to see the way that one thing resonates with another. If you can look at both a man and a mountain and call them noble, you are doing poetry. If you can look at a heartbreak, an election season, and the sea, and call them each “stormy”, then you are doing poetry. Poetry is all about making analogies, about seeing the connections between things. If you can see a pasta sauce like a marriage, you are doing pasta poetry.
Food invites poetry in a special way, because food is always so deeply connected to everything else. Soil, shadow, sun, toil, laughter, sighs, anxieties, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, rain, heat and frost—these are as much ingredients in a ragu as salt, pepper and onion. In a good dish we encounter all of the orders of creation: mineral, plant, animal, human, and, perhaps, divine.
This may be part of the reason why the sacred meal lies at the heart of so many religious traditions, and perhaps none more than Christianity, which, as W.H. Auden noted, preaches an edible God. The point is that the meaning of a dish is not just its flavor, or its capacity for sating hunger—it is the whole story of the creatures and cultures that made it, of the vital impulse of living things, of the mysterious and intricate exchanges of the created world.
In the Christian tradition, the Fathers of the Church saw the poetry in food, and especially in that sacred meal which is the Eucharist. Why did Jesus choose bread and wine to embody him? St. Gregory Nazianzus said it was precisely because we human beings are like little bits of flour: individual, prone to be scattered. Flour, though, under the influence of water, becomes elevated into unity as bread. Grapes, likewise, are formed into a unity in the glass of wine.
This is the vision of the human race embodied by the idea of the Catholic Church. Catholic is Greek for “universal”, and the word for “Church” in Greek is also the word for community. Thus, the Catholic Church is meant to establish the universal community, to invite the human species away from isolation into one family, and then to unite that family to Christ. Thus, human beings are grains of flour, we are bound together in the water of baptism, and together become the body of the Lord. Chosen, broken, blessed and given away.
These same Fathers were quite interested in what the idea of the Trinity meant for the rest of creation. For them, God is being, and God is also a relationship between Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Being, then, in its very constitution, is relational. Even the most perfect and simple of all unities, God, is also a society. Unity is community.
This means that everything that has being, everything that exists, is also relational. Because each existing thing flows out of the fundamental relationship that is God, all things are related together as having come from the same spring, and each is related to the God who made it. Because all things flow from God, they bear a likeness to him, and therefore anything can open itself up as a path to the divine: a flower, a smile, or a bowl of carbonara.
And this is what the poetics of food is about: knowing greater meanings in the tastes, textures, smells, sights and sounds of the meal—seeing in the meal the goodness that pervades all creation and that comes from the Fount of all Goodness.
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There are two ways we can look at the world: appetite or appreciation. In order to see the poetry in the food, we must ascend from the first to the second. The first is sort of an animal way of seeing. It is focused on me, my needs, my wants, my self, my pleasures and my sensations. The second is a very human way of seeing, it forgets the self and pays attention instead to something be- loved or seen as good. If we eat merely with appetite, we risk becoming gluttons. A glutton is someone who loves eating, but does not love food. You don’t need to be a connoisseur or a snob to appreciate food. In fact,
I wager that many ordinary folks are better appreciators of food than so-called “foodies”, who obsess over status symbols and social media clout. A good strawberry fresh out of the garden or a tomato from the side yard are among the finest things you can eat. Most of the best dishes our cultures possess grew out of the experience of peasants and working folks who had to get creative with their limited resources. The Italian ribollita soup, with its bread, cheese scraps, carrots and beans, is said to have originated from people making do with the table scraps of Italian lords.
In any case, the point is to appreciate food for what it is. To give it the respect it is due, a respect heightened by the fact that most of the things we eat were once alive, and some of them had feelings and relationships and favorite spots to lay in the sun. If this is important, still more important is the respect we owe those who prepare the food and who grow it, and those with whom we eat, for with them we really find the nearness of something divine.
From this respect flow table manners and all the little ceremonies that civilize the supper. Utensils, tablecloths, prayers, waiting for others to be served, chewing with our mouth closed—each of these is a defense against the selfish, animalistic approach to eating that is a risk of our nature. No, we say, we will not feed on flesh as the other beasts do, we will eat as men and women. This requires respecting the nature of ingredients and of our fellow people, recognizing that these things have their own given structure and dignity that we did not make and cannot change. A hyena does not tenderly coax out the sweetness from a carrot and wed it to garlic; a hawk does not respect his neighbor by ensuring that no juice drips down his beak. Ingredients and people alike have their own structure, which, when disrespected, result in a foul meal.
The ancient Greek philosopher Diogenes thought that our manners and morals were just conventions, and that there was nothing wrong with using our bodies as however pleases us. Thus, he slept in the public square and defecated and performed lewd acts in front of strangers. He was wrong.
To treat the body in this way is to treat it as even lower than the food we eat, when it is in fact immeasurably higher; it is to treat it as if it were a mere vehicle to pleasure, an instrument, a tool without its own dignity. On the contrary, the body is rich with values and meanings.
The shared meal is a chance to embrace both our embodiment and our spirituality, and to bring these disparate parts into harmony with one another. When we chew with our mouths shut, we acknowledge that the eating mouth is also the speaking mouth, that this thing which macerates and bites is also a thing that utters forth the thoughts and feelings of our souls. We acknowledge likewise that we owe our neighbors the respect not to mingle these two functions.
This is just one instance of the ethic of respect and appreciation that humanizes eating. When we look at our food and our neighbor (and the chef) with respect and appreciation, we look at them in a human way, and we ac- knowledge their spiritual value. When we look at food in an appreciative way, we are setting the table for poetry, and when we begin to treat the meal poetically, we are well on the path to seeing it theologically.
None of this has to be a consciously thought-out process; it is usually more like a feeling, like a deep contentment, like there’s more to this world than meets the eye, like we’re going to be okay. In these moments, the philosopher Josef Pieper said, we are invited to give a “yes” to the world. We are given a vision of the world as something fundamentally good and worthy of affirming. This, perhaps, is why a bowl of ravioli could make a grown man shed a tear.
This is food experienced in excelsis—a foretaste of the heavenly state of being that has always been described as a banquet. Although some theologians and spiritual thinkers may think food a distraction; it retains its place in the collective and inherited wisdom that puts it at the heart of the religious ritual, whose purpose, among other things, is precisely to bring the ordinary person into a state of wonder at the fundaments of being.
So it was, sitting among good friends around the table in Dante’s city that I, as on some other occasions was granted a vision, like Moses, of the Holy Land flowing with things to eat and drink. This milk and this honey were no mere earthly sustenance, but a delight both terrestrial and eternal, and the wine we drank was the new wine of contemplation, whereby human beings look at things with the eyes of God.
To look at things this way is to look at them totally out of love and delight and aside from use, because God, the all-sufficient and totally complete, has no use for anything. He creates and enjoys, we are to understand, out of sheer effusive delight. When we look at a meal with the eyes of God, we point to each thing, our loved ones, the cosmic forces and creatures that have contributed to our spread, and the whole wide world and say “yes, it is good that you are here”.
This “yes” has two implications. First, gratitude, and second, gift. This is the Christian way to eat: accept your meal with thanks, delight in it, and then make sure your neighbor, be she in the next seat or on the street corner, has enough in her bowl, too. Break the bread, give thanks and give it away.
Nathan Beacom
Writer & Cook
Nathan has been published in The New Atlantis, Plough Quarterly, America Magazine, and elsewhere.
Photography by Calogero Agrò
