“Spiritual Difficulties.” Part 1: Dealing with Food and Appetite.

This new series will focus on traditional spiritual analysis of the passions and virtues, and the difficulties they present to our own growth in desire for God and growing in divine likeness that should be the goal of our life. All these problems have a mountain of traditional experience, analysis and beautiful writings to guide us. We should thank God for this store of wisdom passed on to us, this extremely detailed instruction. Dealing with food and appetite, the tradition calls this problem sometimes gluttony, or sometimes just “the stomach.” The first describes an imbalance, the second the nagging root in our appetite(s). For Evagrius, the great teacher among the Egyptian desert monastics, this is the first he labels as one the eight tempting “thoughts” /or perhaps “rationalizations.” Why first? This particular passion or temptation around food is what Genesis uses to describe the original human disobedience. Eve is tempted by the power inherent in food, chosen particularly outside the bounds of obedience to God’s one and only law. Having great pleasures available to her, all fruit except one, she is deceived and eats the fruit because it seems good to her. God did make it good, and the story implies that God put some inherent power into the fruit to make it cause a change of her perception. Through not seeking our satisfaction with food at all times, we use the body to train our whole being in self restraint and moderation. One of the traditional allegories around the temptation of Eve is not to see her as the blameworthy “prototype of all women,” but rather as a symbol of the senses. In Greek, the word for sensing, “aesthesis,” is a word with feminine grammatical gender. So the idea is that the human being must restrain the senses from a desire to consume without proper reference to God. We could see this as about obedience, which is correct; but we can also see this sin of “Eve” as a failure to make an offering to God of our self-limitation and self-control by giving thanks to God for the goodness and generosity of God toward us, even when we seem limited in some way. St. John Cassian, the great monastic teacher of early 5th century France, says that controlling our desire for food, helps us to acquire purity of soul and thus allows us to more effectively fight very powerful appetites like lust. The control of this desire is motivated by and serves to reinforce a longing for heavenly life. We replace a desire for food that is passing with a desire for eternal nourishment.
This is also the reason for the food laws in the Old Testament, the kosher rules. In the time of the apostles, they came to understand that these laws were not necessary as they reached out to bring non-Jews to the Gospel and into Church. What replaces those laws, in Christ, is not a freedom to do anything, but rather, an over-all restraint around food. The strictest diet, the monastic, removes all meat, thereby meeting most of the Kosher food requirements. Certainly, not killing animals brings us to an important point: we should cut down on the violence of our desires to consume all things. So this is the more paradisial diet that we keep when we fast. When we fast, we desire God as our nourishment, and we return to a state of keeping his law of restraint and so we can remember to thank him for all things, rather than to devour it all up without reference to him. Evagrius tells us to use the following Scriptural verses to fight against unnecessary desire for food: “cast your anxiety upon the Lord and he will sustain you.” (Psalm 54:23) This particular verse shows us that we don’t need to eat out of stress or to have anxiety about food... Another verse that he suggest reminds us that fasting is related to self-reflection: “He made the bronze basin and its bronze stand from the mirrors of the women that fasted, who fasted by the doors of the tabernacle of witness, in the day in which he set it up.” (Exodus 38:26) However, he also reminds us that fasting is a sacrificial practice that goes with generosity: “Do not neglect to do good and share what you have for such sacrifices arepleasing to God.” (Hebrews 13:16) God also is provident and will give us what we need, we have to trust him and seek from him what is good in whatever season he gives things to us: “In any and all circumstances I have learned the secret of being well fed and going hungry, of having plenty and being in need. I can do all things through him who strengthens me.” (Philippians 4:5-6) The secret is being strengthened by God—in other words prayer and seeking the will of God.
   St. John of the Ladder tells us that our appetite for food is about habits that take away our ability to sense what is really going on in our soul and is the self-comforting that takes away the remembrance that death is a problem to be addressed and a reminder to put ourselves in good order. He says restraint with food helps us to humble our heart and control our mouths so as to avoid speaking in disordered ways.
    But the most important things is to look to communion in and with Christ. This food is the one that we should hunger for. Also to manifest him in our deeds, is to “hunger and thirst for righteousness.”