Month: March 2019

St. Benedict was neither the first nor the last to demonstrate the power of magical thinking over the food we eat. Benedict lived in a period (to take Gregory’s word for it) when worry over the sanctity of food was all-pervasive, and he responded to that worry (given opportunities and obligations afforded by his cultural position) in an appropriate, not to say entrepreneurial fashion.

Such concerns might seem to have faded into the background over the intervening 1500 years. This, as I argued, is one major source of the comic effect of Gregory’s Dialogues, written for an audience that believed in demon-haunted lettuce but now read by an audience that does not. On the other hand, it’s no original observation to note that cult-like concerns about purity have become a major factor in food marketing and production over the last few decades. Lettuce may not hide demons anymore, but it certainly can carry artificial genes, pesticides, and E. coli.

I would like to leave aside the question of whether these entities are “realer” than demons. We believe in them for reasons that are as good, or bad, as the ones that led Gregory’s readers to believe in the devil. None of us will ever see genes, pesticide traces, or bacteria with our unaided eyes. We know them in two ways – through their effects, and through the explanatory accounts experts give of those effects – that are strictly parallel to the kind of knowledge that Gregory’s contemporaries had about demons. A modern doctor would probably explain the symptoms shown by the nun who ate the demon-infested lettuce as resulting from food-borne disease; without more, both explanations are equally ad hoc.

By those criteria, though, we can still make distinctions. Food-borne bacteria are associated with regular, dramatic and dangerous consequences; the task of forestalling these falls in most countries to a government agency that regulates the food supply for cleanliness. That makes them a very real entity indeed, by modern standards. The best ancient parallel for these would be, not demons, but heretics and pagans whom the Christians took to be demon-worshippers and who, by the mid-5th century CE, faced capital punishment for carrying on with religious practices that government officials believed posed a clear and present public danger.

Then and now, state regulation delimits a zone of social entrepreneurship. In the 6th century, you could no longer position yourself as a saint by wrestling with schismatics and heretics (as St. Augustine might be said to have done at an earlier date), but you could still show your sanctity by fighting the demons themselves. Likewise, no grocery store makes a special point of advertising E. coli-free produce. The real money is to be made by protecting customers from entities that the government isn’t even sure exist.

Pesticide traces and GMO have human health effects that are only observable statistically across populations, if at all. Yet we’ve been taught to experience them as though they affected us personally and made a perceptible difference to our feelings of wellness. Grocery stores, restaurants and food marketers deploy these properly spiritual entities, much as Gregory did with his demons, in order to demonstrate the usefulness of a certain kind of sanctity. Gregory’s saints, athletes in a spiritual domain, are more powerful than the demons that (via food) oppress their flock, and which they can expel. Whole Foods, e.g., intervenes in an economic domain which has become almost as mysterious to those of us who consume at its margins. It wants us to believe that it’s more powerful than (and can protect us from) entities like pesticide and GMO (or, to preserve the ruse of human agency, the economic interests that produce such entities). Our faith in this notional power and glory is the only thing standing between Whole Foods and bankruptcy.

As with every comparison, the differences are what illuminates. There’s a major distinction between St. Benedict and Whole Foods that I think it makes sense to call theological. For Benedict, as for the Orthodox Christian tradition in general, God makes food and the devil pollutes it; the entities that make our food dangerous are different from the ones who produce it in the first place. With Whole Foods, the situation is different: the entities that cause our food to be dangerous, by taking advantage of pesticides or GM crops, are identical with the entities that produce it. It’s as though the saints are fighting against God himself.

If I were going in for claims about human nature, I’d say this new theology shows us embracing a harsh truth we’ve always suspected, that the food we eat, at the same time that it keeps us alive, is also killing us. Metabolically, thermodynamically, that’s accurate: eating throws the human machine into chaos, busting up our DNA blueprints with oxygen radicals and other disruptive species. The perfect man would be one who didn’t eat, but, outside of legend, that man would also be dead. So much for human nature.

A more modest and plausible interpretation is that, unlike Gregory with his deus absconditus, we know who has mastery over the natural world, and we know that they don’t have our best interests at heart. Chemically-supplemented agriculture has transformed the face of the earth even as it transforms our habits of consumption. The people who profit from this want to profit from this, not keep us alive and healthy. We suspect that the worst we suspect of them is actually a little better than the truth. Given which, who wouldn’t want to believe in a form of economic sanctity that can protect us from the demons who make our food?

In the Dialogues, food-borne contamination is always reversible: if you eat a demon, St. Benedict can exorcise it. The threshold between outside and inside is well-defined, and the saints can police it. We might not now be so lucky. Our bodies, permeated from birth by synthetic chemistry, might also be understood as objects of cultivation; we have no “pure” inside to protect from external pollution. What Whole Foods and its ilk are most of all selling is the delusion that we do.

A lot of miracles aren’t too good. On the bottom tier are a couple by St. Benedict, the founder of the monastery at Monte Cassino and notional author of the famous rule of St. Benedict. Gregory the Great gives us our fullest account of Benedict’s life in his Dialogues, a collection of edifying stories that also illuminates the (otherwise rather obscure) social life of ordinary Italians during the period of Ostrogothic rule. Actually, Benedict is supposed to have come face-to-face with the last of the Ostrogothic kings, Totila, respecting whom many of th Western sources are outstandingly hostile. The Dialogues show him in a comparatively favorable light. At first given over to cruelty and sin, he mends his ways after receiving a prophecy from Benedict about the course of the rest of his reign: “Et quidem Romam ingressurus es, mare transiturus, novem annis regnas, decimo morieris.” Benedict just about nails it, though we may recognize “mare transiturus” as a typically Delphic amphibole. Will Totila go over the ocean to conquer his enemies or (as it turns out) while fleeing from them?

That’s a pretty good miracle. Others that Gregory introduces into his life of St. Benedict under the same rubric (Benedict’s spirit of prophecy) are less impressive. For example, Benedict can tell when someone who’s come to share a meal with him has already eaten. A monk on an errand encounters the devil (he was everywhere in Italy back then), who offers him food. Since the monk is fasting, he refuses; as the day and the journey stretch on, however, his hunger gets the best of him and he relents before his travelling companion’s repeated entreaties to eat. Back at the monastery, Benedict catches him out: “malignus hostis qui tibi per conviatorem tuum locutus est, semel tibi persuadere non potuit, secundo non potuit, ad tertium persuasit, et te ad hoc quod voluit superavit?” The monk blushes and begs forgiveness: “se cognivit etiam absentem in Benedicti patris oculis deliquisse.”

Why include this astonishingly trivial incident (and a few others like it) in Benedict’s catalogue of miracles? It may be a matter of furnishing enough examples to show posterity that Benedict did indeed possess the gift of prophecy, but I suspect that the matter at hand would not have appeared quite so trivial to Gregory’s contemporaries as it does to us. A full survey of the miracles included in the Dialogues in fact suggests that issues of food, drink and their consumption loomed large in its author’s mind. This can produce a humorous effect, as in an incident (also discussed by Erich Auerbach in Literary Language and its Public) involving a young nun who becomes possessed after eating a lettuce leaf over which she has forgotten to make the sign of the cross. Again, I suspect that the humor here is an effect of anachronism; Gregory’s contemporaries would probably have taken the threat of unhallowed lettuce leaves rather seriously.

Part of the reason for this is probably economic. The Italy Gregory describes is an austere one, shocked by scarcity after centuries of being supplied from the whole Roman Empire. Also on the bottom tier of Benedict’s miracles are a series of magical extractions from a lake: among other things, he pulls out an iron pruning-hook that has been lost there by a stupid (“poor in spirit”) Goth. A century earlier, replacing that pruning-hook would have been a simple matter; during Benedict’s lifetime, perhaps the only remaining source of iron available to Italy was the nearly-exhausted mines on Elba. Many are the saints in the Dialogues who prove their merit by miraculously extending scanty supplies of oil or wine during famine years, thus satisfying at once the hunger of their fellow monks and the skepticism of these latter about whether god will really provide.

The double-function of those famine miracles highlights another dimension of the nexus between eating and holiness. If scarcity raises food to a level of dignity and importance that we have a hard time understanding, then food also becomes a fruitful field for demonstrating something which is, it seems to me, the chief aim of the Dialogues to prove: the usefulness of sanctity. Gregory’s saints are positioned as indispensible intermediaries between the natural world and human bodies: to attempt to do without them is to open a gateway for sin. They process the food their flock eats in order to remove the taint of the devil from it. Vice-versa, laymen can re-introduce sin into consecrated food by misappropriating it: thus the many stories Gregory tells of snakes found in wine-barrels that have been stolen or embezzled.

Thus also the importance of saintly surveillance like that provided by Benedict. Best would be to establish complete control over the eating and drinking habits of his subordinate monks; next best is to know when they’ve transgressed the rule, so that the damage may be controlled and undone. Against this background, Benedict’s ability to know when someone has eaten outside the monastery looks less trivial. Actually, it’s a backstop that guarantee the efficacy of what is, for Gregory, perhaps the most important function of the saints.

By his own testimony, Richard Burton was the first European to visit Harar. I think it’s unlikely that no one whom we might call “European” by modern standards had visited Harar prior to 1850, but it’s at least possible that Burton was the first such a one in a while. Abutting (and later, some decades after Burton’s visit, incorporated into) the Christian kingdom of Ethiopia, Harar’s Islamic religious identity had long connected it to a Red Sea trading network of which it was the privileged inland entrepot. Islamic traders in Africa were generally chary of European competition, especially as (during the 19th century and earlier) this had tended to draw European military intervention in its train. Actually, Burton’s own expedition had only become possible thanks to the recent British conquest of Harar’s seaboard trading partners in Somalia and Yemen – this notionally in the service of the India trade, but producing a colony that was to last until after World War II.

Burton approached Harar via Zeyla, a port with a millennium-long history of its own that was situated on the North coast of Somalia within the ambit of the British maritime empire there. This was a much-traveled route, and Burton would have had an easy time of it if he had made more local contacts or acquired in advance any familiarity with the complex linguistic landscape of Eastern Ethiopia. The are dozens of languages spoken there, belonging to three or four different language families, present a challenge to travellers and nation-states but a rich field of research for linguists. Within this field, Harari is something of an oddity – both for socio-linguistic reasons and otherwise. The language is strongly identified with the city of Harar itself and its inhabitants; these used to consider their knowledge of Harari an aspect of their identity that separated them from the surrounding countryfolk who came to the city to trade.

This state of affairs held in the 1950’s, when the Polish-American Linguist Wolf Leslau was gathering the data that would inform his ethnographic volume on Harar. Now, most Harari-speakers are bilingual in Amharic. This development is probably in consequence of the fact that government business at Harar has for some time been conducted in Amharic, by Christian Ethiopians born well away from the city; they have always formed the interface between Harar and the nation, even though Harari is also one of Ethiopia’s national languages.

Leslau’s informants describe a society in the midst of epochal changes. The nation enforces its laws, so young men no longer fight one another with sticks as they did in earlier decades. The linguistic and ethnic diversity of the community grows, though the landowners still have local genealogies that run back generations (A local saying: “Somalis are distinguished by good manners, Amhara by craft skill; the Harari is distinguished by his noble genealogy.”) Even these are still dealing with the destruction wrought by the Italian colonists who occupied Harar between 1937 and 1941.

Harar becomes globalized in these ways and others. For instance (even though Leslau’s informants report that the younger generation is less pious than their elders), the tunsus or pre-wedding party that had been so characteristic of social life in Harar at earlier periods has now ceased to be celebrated on account of religious rigorism. Harari Islam, an idiosyncratic brew like many “local Islams” before the 20th century, is being found wanting by comparison with the absolutisms of a world religion.

The tunsus had been not only a ritual but also a literary occasion, one at which teenage men would sing the praises of a girl who had seated herself on a kind of a throne (the amir nadaba, one of the permanently-placed chairs characteristic of Harari homes.) From Leslau’s informants’ reports, laced with fragments of poetry obviously known by heart, you can tell that the Harar they knew had a song culture that thrived orally – but not only orally. One of them also mentions a written collection of songs, listed among the monuments of Harari literature alongside several works translated from Arabic. To the best of my knowledge, this collection of songs has never been translated out of Harari (or perhaps even published at all.) Has the manuscript been lost? Or has it survived, a fragment of Harar that remains invisible to imperial eyes?