Ascetic Eucharists: Food and Drink in Early Christian Ritual Meals (review)

Andrew McGowan. Ascetic Eucharists: Food and Drink in Early Christian Ritual Meals. Oxford Early Christian Studies. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999. Pp. xiii + 312. $80.00.

In this revisionist study Andrew McGowan examines the varied and scattered body of evidence for the early use of foods other than bread and wine in Christian ritual meals. In doing so, he persuasively argues against previous scholarly approaches that identify a normative model of early eucharistic practice and are based in liturgical and theological concerns that exclude alternatives to bread and wine practices as heretical, late, and deviant. Instead, McGowan identifies an early and constant strain of "dissident" eating (78) not only among Christians but also Jews and pagans in the ancient and late ancient Mediterranean. This essentially ascetic inclination manifests itself among some Christians by their rejection of a bread and wine eucharist which represents pagan sacrificial foods and sacrificial culture, in favor of vegetables, cheese, milk and honey, and--most often--bread and water in the eucharistic meal. Thus McGowan argues that, for ascetic Christian eaters, "eucharist" is not simply a distinctive meal with a sacral character that separates it from everyday eating, but part of an entire way of life in which all eating expresses opposition to and separation from the world.

Chapters 1 and 2 lay the historical and methodological foundations for McGowan's analysis. He carefully identifies the flaws in previous studies of early eucharistic practice, which either exclude evidence for alternatives in a quest for uniformity or understate the level of diversity by focusing on the origins of specific meal types. He defines "eucharistic meals" broadly as "the communal meals of early Christians" in which the "processes of giving thanks tended to play a central part" (12). Reviewing the contributions of social theorists including Mary Douglas and Jack Goody, McGowan observes that we must understand the eucharist as food, and food as a powerful and fundamental type of "social signification" (1-7). He next summarizes various meal practices evident in the Greco-Roman world, including the banquet and symposium, Jewish ritual meals, sacrifice, and philosophical as well as Jewish ascetic eating, and argues that the ascetic rejection of meat and wine signified a rejection of the foods central to the "dominant culture of sacrifice." Thus whatever food choices early Christian communities made cannot be isolated from "the whole symbolic universe in which eaters participate," and the relationship to meat and wine expresses an individual's or a community's positioning in the world (87-88).

In chapters 3 through 7 McGowan examines the diverse evidence for alternatives to a bread-and-wine ritual meal. He notes that the use of bread and wine does not appear to be as widely accepted in the earliest sources as one might expect. Various authors, whether sympathetic, neutral, or hostile, witness to the use of different foods in Christian ritual and eucharistic meals, including cheese, milk and honey, oil, salt, fruits, vegetables, and fish. Evidence for the preference for bread and water or bread alone in the eucharistic meal is more plentiful and appears to cluster geographically in Syria and Asia. McGowan reviews discussions in sources as diverse as Irenaeus, Origen, Justin, Tertullian, Epiphanius, the Pseudo-Clementines, and the apocryphal Acts in order to trace the contours of "an ascetic pattern" that "represents the apex of a Christian version of . . . anti-sacrificial asceticism." The common element or link, then, between groups that rejected the use of meat and wine or observed a eucharistic meal without the combination of bread and wine, is an ascetic resistance to the wider social world expressed through what McGowan calls "oppositional" ritual cuisine (182). One of the tensions throughout the book, which McGowan identifies, is between this general ascetic pattern found in a geographical "cluster" and a theological diversity intensified by the disparate and uneven evidence of the sources (173, 251-56).

McGowan's convincing analysis alters...