Dissertations from the School of Arts and Sciences

Food and Lay Piety in Late Antiquity
Degree Awarded: Ph.D. Early Christian Studies. The Catholic University of America, This dissertation examines food as a vehicle of lay Christian piety, both imaginative and experiential, in late antiquity as depicted in the Greek homilies of John Chrysostom and the Coptic homilies of Shenoute of Atripe. It addresses two primary questions. First, how is food language deployed by preachers of the fourth and fifth centuries in the context of lay ascesis? Second, how do food practices shape the moral opportunities and identity maintenance of lay Christians? I take an anthropological approach to food as embodied material culture and employ cognitive metaphor, performance, and space/place theories, in order to bring homiletic texts into dialogue with documentary papyri, triclinia mosaics and domestic architecture, archaeology and urban space. In answer to the first question, I argue that food metaphors are particularly compelling imaginative models for lay piety because they are deeply embedded in lived experience. Chrysostom's metaphor of the "true fast" defines virtue as spiritual health and moderation, a model which depends for its coherence on Aristotelian virtue ethics and Galenic principles of health and dietary regimen. However, his ascetic definition of moderation remains in tension with the views of his wealthy audience, which I explore by analyzing household food expenditures in the papyrological archive of Theophanes. Shenoute elaborates a metaphorical system of virtue as fruit, the product of spiritual agriculture, which reflects Theophrastus' work on plants and raises deep-seated problems of moral agency. Here I draw upon botanical treatises and agricultural manuals to illuminate the extent to which these metaphors create powerful naturalizing discourses by mirroring the perceived realities and paradoxes of the natural world. To the second question, I observe that both homilists articulate their theological and moral concerns in the guise of regulating contested food behavior among their audiences. Through a study of the theatricality of Antiochene banquets, I argue that, for Chrysostom, the performance of virtue in the "domestic church" meets sharply localized resistance in the elite dining room. For Shenoute, a fundamentally monastic ideology of Christian meals helps to explain his often obscure and critical remarks on social dining, charitable hospitality, martyr festivals, and eucharistic practices in the lay community. In both studies, a picture of lay piety emerges in which food practices produce active networks of circulation, where a range of pious motivations and social values track along with the movements of food and people, linking personal ascesis with social obligation in the varied local landscapes of late antique Christian communities.