Food

 In his book Mere Christianity, first published in 1952 but deriving from lectures given during the Second World War, C.S. Lewis has a chapter entitled Sexual Morality in which he considers what the Christian approach should be to this vexed subject, and specifically the virtue of chastity. He was writing before the sexual revolution of the 1960s but that didn't come out of nowhere and really just meant that what had been going on, or at least discussed, in certain circles of society spread throughout the whole of it.

Lewis makes the point that the sexual instinct, good and natural in itself, has gone wrong, and says that Christianity does not believe that sex is bad, an accusation often aimed at it, but that the state into which the sexual instinct has got is the problem. It has become corrupted and that is what is bad. Something often forgotten is that the idea of romantic love only really developed in the Christian West, and if that love was idealised on occasion it could be said that this reflected the sense that the human love between a man and a woman could be lifted up into the Christian Heaven and, as a result, transformed into a divine state.

But this piece is not about sex. In the course of this chapter Lewis illustrates the degenerated state of the sexual instinct by the example of a striptease act where men gather to ogle a woman undressing. He says suppose you went to a country where you could draw a crowd by slowly lifting the lid off a plate of mutton chops or bacon, wouldn't you think there was something wrong with the people of that country and that the normal healthy appetite for food had become exaggerated and corrupted? He writes this in the sure knowledge that his audience would think it absurd.

But this is more or less what we have today! Our excessive preoccupation with food shows itself everywhere. The number of restaurants and fast food outlets on every high street, the constant advertisements for all things edible, the TV schedules with their endless programmes about food and competitions for those who cook or bake it, the lionising of chefs as though they were great artists. We have become obsessed with food, not so much from the point of view of our stomachs as from that of our tastebuds and the desire to stimulate them unceasingly. This is a sure sign of decadence. There is nothing wrong with enjoying food. One should enjoy it. It is one of the comforts God has given us to make life in the physical world more bearable. But there is a difference between healthy enjoyment and gluttony, and we have forgotten the age old truth that indulging the pleasures of the flesh deadens us to the spiritual. The body is part of what we are but if we give it too much prominence it will become all of what we are, and that is what our modern obsession with food is doing.

I'm not recommending we put on hair shirts and live on stale bread and water, even if that is a good practice sometimes. It's a question of priorities and proportion, and we have gone much too far down the road of physical indulgence. There is a decadent sensuality where food is concerned just as there is in the case of sex, and it too is spiritually destructive.

The pleasures of the body have their place but that place in a spiritually aware culture is a subordinate one. The more attention you pay to these pleasures, the more you try to cultivate them or seek to stimulate the desires associated with them, the more you lose all connection to the spiritual. Man is not an animal but if he indulges the animal side of his nature, something animals don't do, he sinks lower than the animal because he has sinned against both spirit and nature.

Food is good but a good exaggerated or given a place above its merits becomes an evil. This is what has happened with food in our world. There was an episode recently when a well-known journalist and 'media personality' opined that the pleasures of foreign cuisine was compensation for the indigenous people to effectively lose their country. The spiritual state of such an individual is pitiful.