Too Much of Too Little: Guthlac and the Temptation of Excessive Fasting

TOO MUCH OF TOO LITTLE: GUTHLAC AND THE TEMPTATION OF EXCESSIVE FASTING By SARAH DOWNEY Chaucer's Summoner tells the tale of a corrupt friar who, while trying to obtain a donation from his bedridden and irate patron Thomas, demonstrates his hypocrisy by giving Thomas's wife a very specific dinner order and immediately following it up with a long sermon on the importance of fasting. Like most medieval preachers, Friar John appeals to biblical exempla : "Lo, Moyses fourty dayes and fourty nyght Fasted, er that the heighe God of myght Spak with hym in the mountayne of Synay. With empty wombe, fastynge many a day, Receyved he the lawe that was writen With Goddes fynger; and Elye, wel ye witen, In mount Oreb, er he hadde any speche With hye God, that is oure lyves leche, He fasted longe and was in contemplaunce. . . . Our Lord Jhesu, as hooly writ devyseth, Yaf us ensample of fastynge and preyeres."1 The friar's conclusion, that fasting makes the prayers of mendicants "to the hye God more acceptable / Than youres, with your festes at the table,"2 highlights the irony that the meal he has just requested makes him unlikely to attain any divine reward for fasting in the near future. He is a false preacher, but even so, he uses techniques typical of medieval homilists.3 In particular, the evocation of Moses, Elijah, and Christ as models for fasting has precedent, as we shall see below, not only in apparently sincere homilies, but also as the opening argument of another duplicitous exhortation to fasting : a pseudo-homiletic speech offered to the Anglo-Saxon hermit Guthlac 1 The. Summoner's Tale, lines 1885-1905, ed. Larry D. Benson, The. Riverside Chaucer (Boston, 1987), 131. 1 am grateful to Pauline Thompson, Andy Orchard, Tom Hall, Roy Liuzza, and Anthony Adams for reading and commenting on early versions of this paper. Special thanks are due to Jane Roberts for her very helpful review. 2 Ibid., line 1914. This passage is addressed directly by Ian Lancashire, "Moses, Elijah, and the Back Parts of God: Satiric Scatology in Chaucer's Summoner's Tale," Mosaic 14:3 (1981): 17-30, and Penn R. Szittya, "The Friar as False Apostle: Antifraternal Exegesis and the Summoner's Tate," Studies in Philology 71 (1971): 19-46. 90TRADITIO by two disguised demons who tempt the saint to fast far beyond the apparent norms of ecclesiastically sanctioned asceticism. A number of major studies have addressed the roles of food asceticism in medieval spirituality.4 Although these have tended to focus either on desert monasticism in late antiquity or on women's piety in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, they provide a useful basis from which to explore the form and implications of the false argument for fasting in Guthlac's early eighth-century biography. Guthlac himself is not generally remembered among present-day readers for his food asceticism or resistance to demonic admonitions of fasting, but the following pages will show that these features were of great significance to Guthlac's seminal biographer, Felix, and to the medieval English audiences of the hermit's life story. Guthlac, who lived in the borderland fens of East Anglia and died in 714, is probably best remembered today for his forced flight to the mouth of hell at the hands of grotesque demons, vividly recounted in many different versions of his life.5 In the Old English poem Guthlac A, as well as in the Old English prose excerpt appearing as Vercelli Homily 23, the saint's eschatological vision operates as the final and climactic incident in a series of hostile encounters with demons.6 Other accounts of Guthlac's life, including 4 Teresa M. Shaw, The Burden of the Flesh: Fasting and Sexuality in Early Christianity (Minneapolis, 1998); Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley, 1987); and Rudolph M. Bell, Holy Anorexia (Chicago, 1985). Older but still useful accounts of early food asceticism include Herbert Musurillo, "The Problem of Ascetical Fasting in the Greek Patristic Writers," Traditio 12 (1956): 1-64; Rudolf Arbesmann, "Fasting and Prophecy in Pagan and Christian Antiquity," Traditio 7 (1949...