To Eat or Not to Eat?
God’s Eucharistic Proposal as Explored Through Sr. Ann Astell and the Saints in Sr. Astell’s book, “Eating Beauty.”
By Charles David Fox
Notre Dame Prompt: How is “eating beauty” beautiful for Sr. Ann Astell? What consequences is there for this beauty — do you imagine — for forming men and women in a Eucharistic beauty?
For Sr. Ann Astell, “eating” beauty is not enough. Though she pulls from many sources, including Geraldine Heng, Simone Weil, Kant and Hegel, Sr. Astell consistently refers back to God’s Eucharistic Proposal in Christ as a proposal of a fundamentally new way of life. She writes, on page 14 of her book, “Eating Beauty: The Eucharist and the Spiritual Arts of the Middle Ages,” “Eating the Eucharist [(Christ’s Body/Beauty)] was thus simultaneously to “see” Christ and to “touch” [the imagery of Christ (icons, crucifixes, etc.], to reach out for it [(the beautiful life)], and to embody it virtuously” (14). During the Middle Ages, Sr. posits, the Eucharist formed “distinctive schools of sanctity,” while also forming her own impassioned lesson plan. As an artist, I could not help but shiver with curiosity (a tempered curiosity, of course), at her initial theo-aesthetic offering, where she writes, “Eating the Eucharist was, in short, productive of an entire ‘way’ of life, a virtuous life-form, an artwork, with Christ Himself as the principal artist” (14).
First, Sr. eases us in via theology and the self-turned monastics, quoting Balthasar first, who writes: “what is a person without a life-form…without a form which he has chosen for his life, a form into which and through which to pour out his life, so that his life becomes the soul of the form, and the form becomes the expression of his soul?” (17). This line reminds me of Thoreau’s “the best work of art is a life well-lived” (Walden). Beyond the prosaic beauty of Astell’s musing, we can also see an anthropological question forming: what form do we choose, as followers of Christ? “To be a Christian,” Balthasar posits, “Is precisely such a form [(cruciform)],” to which Sr. Ann concludes is the form of Christ. The saints are, thus, Christian formations, summations, works of art, even, in her opinion, with God as artist. One wonders how the lives of Saints have not been suggested to museum curators along with the Baroccis, Da Vincis, Van Eycks and Michaelangelos. Alas, perhaps these “works” of art are too pure, too powerful, too profound to include in any gallery, not easily captured by one medium. But one could imagine the profound impact such an exhibit might have on secular culture, to one minute walk through the sculpture gallery at the Met, and the next minute walk through an immersive, multi-media exposé on St. Francis’ spiritual life, featuring, of course, visual art inspired by such asceticism. The saints were, in fact, “conscious of themselves as artists at work to carve, polish, and refine their very selves [(through ascetism)]” (18), other methods including the spiritual arts of “humility, poverty, preaching and obedience” (18). But first, and most important, the partaking in the art of the Heavenly Sacraments and the Holy Scriptures.
In such an exhibit, Christian art could once again challenge classical “notions of the beautiful” as Sr. Ann describes it once doing (20). Yet, Ann asks, “how was the beautiful form of Christ’s divine nature to be reconciled with the crucified form of a human slave?” (20). This question poses several more on Christ’s dichotomous nature, and points to the theological and philosophical battles of the time that inspired both ways of life and works of art. Gertrude the Great, devoutly, “‘read’ the Eucharist as if it were a text,” while Bernard of Clairvaux practiced lectio divina “as an art form, ruminating, feasting, digesting and expounding upon the scriptures,” for, as our Savior says, “Man cannot live on bread alone” (21, Mt 4:4). Finally, the Dominicans and Jesuits tackle the topic of the dichotomous, deformed Christ via the argument of saintly asceticism. Dominicans, she describes, believed that their powerful preaching could heal mouths and ears of the aftereffects of gluttonous speech. Beauty, therefore, is something that must be experienced with all our senses.
Even in the vibrancy of this age for Christians and Artists alike, spiritual and visual arts were facing philosophical and theological battles via opposing aesthetic theories, Astell posits. Hegel argues that the “heartrending gap between what the Eucharist promises (God) and what it actually gives (bread) is so unbridgeable that it signals the end of art itself, the inadequacy of anything sensual to express the spirit” (25). While this is the strongest case I’ve ever heard against the truth of transubstantiation, I struggle with the excessive romanticism in light of the Christus Deformis theory Sr. Ann mentions. Weil, Ann writes, by contrast, believes “the gap…between the sacrament’s substance (Christ) and its appearance (bread) is a manifestation of…what she calls ‘decreation’…Weil understands the Eucharist to be the generative source of all natural and artistic beauty, its beginning rather than its end” (25). While I think Weil may also go too far in the opposite direction, I am more inclined to follow her thesis rather than provide a lukewarm assessment of God’s heavenly initiative. Ultimately, this beautiful assumption is the thesis of Sr. Ann Astell’s work—God as builder, creationist, contortionist.
On the same note, there are, indeed, consequences to forming Christians through this deeper sense of Eucharistic beauty. This kind of teaching would ask a lot more of the everyday Christian, it would demand a full body immersion into the Sacraments, the lives of the Saints and the world of Artistic expression (Christian and Otherwise). Christians who feel they are “not art people” would have to surrender to the realization that there are no “art people.” Art (beauty or intentional lack thereof) is for everyone, and is in everything, in the same way that food, air, water, and spirit are essential. Art is the essential mode that humans (and Creators) turn to to express the beautiful. This is why God’s manifestations on earth are incredibly creative acts.
While the Saints seek atonement or at-one-ment with God, as Ann calls it, God seeks to create, recreate, and decreate, so that we will never forget our inherently creative, constructed origins. God’s proposal, therefore, is simply thus: to eat or not to eat? Yet, in fullness, he is asking: to see or not to see, to be or not to be, to live or to die? Thus, “eating beauty,” for me, Ann Astell, the Saints, and, hopefully for all Christians, is a choosing to be fully alive.
Stay tuned for more citations from Astell’s latter chapters…
