Eating Beauty: The Eucharist and the Spiritual Arts of the Middle Ages (review)

Like the Eucharist itself, this is a book that sits in judgment on its reader, daring her to taste and bear the implications of its form. Can one read and find it beautiful—as, thanks to its exquisite cover art, elegant conceptual structure, powerful argument, and extraordinary breadth, it most definitely is? Or does one read and find it troubling, raising questions left unanswered, leaving one hungering for more? I must confess, I find it both, and yet I struggle to understand why, as, intellectually if not theologically, I agree with everything that it says about the interdependence of beauty, sacrament, nature and art; likewise, with what it says about the efforts of the saints to reform themselves to the model of Christ in whose image they, like all human beings, were originally made. My suspicion is that I was thrown at the outset by one of the epigraphs, wherein G.W.F. Hegel is quoted to the effect (and with the contextual expectation that he will be refuted) that "smell, taste, and touch are excluded from the enjoyment of art" (1; cf. 7, 245), and so I thought to learn more about the aesthetics of these senses and their relationship to the simultaneously destructive and transformative potential of sacramental, artistic eating. What I learned instead was something potentially far richer, and yet, ultimately, less satisfying.

Once again, like the Eucharist, a single flat white wafer, the book's self-announced structure is beautifully clear: eight chapters, the first and the eighth establishing eating beauty as the (unanswerable) question of aesthetic response posed by the Eucharist itself; the second and the seventh providing its answer's theo-aesthetic analytical frame; and the four chapters at the center offering the core of an answer by way four different medieval and early modern spiritualities—Cistercian, Franciscan, Dominican, and Ignatian—each defined by its answer to yet another question: "What was the first sin, and how may its effects be reversed?" (16). The shining thread running throughout and binding together all of these chapters is the beauty of Christ, in whose image and likeness humanity was formed and from which it has fallen away through sin. Eating the Eucharist, as the saints show in their lives, is an effort to take on the form of Christ, particularly the claritas, subtilitas, agilitas, and impassibilitas of His resurrected, glorified body; form—here, the definition of beauty—suggests not only a state, but a process, a "way" of life, with Christ Himself as both model and artist. Pace Hegel, sacrament not only sustains the possibility of art, it is itself its guarantee. The host is beautiful, Simone Weil would contend, "because it is a material that offers no resistance to God's will and formation" (230). Its decreation at the moment of transubstantiation is the very way to participation "in God's own wonderful, creative power—a vital power that conquers even death and that gives rise to manifold works of beauty" (232)—above all, for Astell, the lives of the saints.

Perhaps it is this movement from Christ to the saints that gives me pause, as the opening frame of the first two chapters, the matter of aesthetics and the glorified body of Christ, gives way in the middle four chapters to the central concern with the virtues realized in the life-forms of the saints, only one of which, the Dominicans' preaching, seems to my mind, at least, to be grounded explicitly in eating. To be sure, all of the saints highlighted here—Bernard of Clairvaux and Gertrude of Helfta; Francis of Assisi and his biographer Bonaventure; Catherine of Siena, Catherine of Genoa, and the "third" Catherine, Rose of Lima; Ignatius of Loyola and the artist-saint Michelangelo—apprehended (unlike the Protestant Hegel) Christ's Species (his true Beauty) in the sacramental species of bread and wine. But only the Catherines, as Astell reads them, identified...