Raised on Christian Milk: Food and the Formation of the Soul in Early Christianity by John David Penniman (review)

“Words have a weight, a density,” John David Penniman writes in his prologue to Raised on Christian Milk (ix). They are “never neutral” and contain within them shades of past and present usage, references to embodied realities, and a formative power to construct these realities anew (x). Penniman describes his project as “a story about the weight, the histories, and the symbolic power of food in early Christianity” (xi). And yet, Raised on Christian Milk is more than a story; it is a methodological template for understanding how early Christians fashioned the Christian self—in this case, through the use of food and food imagery.

Penniman departs from previous scholarship in considering food as something more than a marker of social identity or a means of tracing the construction of said identity. His driving interest concerning food in early Christianity is the extent to which shared food correlates with shared essence. That is to say, food is not only a means by which various groups delineated their respective identities; it is also a means of “cultivating and perfecting human nature” (4). In 1 Corinthians 3:1–3, for example, Paul claims that he gave the Corinthians milk to drink because they were not prepared for solid food. For Penniman, this implies a means for perfecting the Corinthians, a “developmental process that they could not achieve on their own” (5, emphasis added). But Paul’s appropriation of the link between nourishment and intellectual development is not unique; rather, this notion is embedded in wider Greco–Roman discourses of human formation (5). For Christians who came after Paul, the trope of milk and solid food became a “regulatory principle that enabled early Christian authors to designate boundaries between mature and immature, perfect and imperfect, wise and simple, orthodox and aberrant” (6).

Christians could frame food as a regulatory principle precisely because Christian discourses about food tapped into an extant framework for understanding human formation—that of Greek paideia (14). Penniman’s first chapter explores these broader discourses. Using evidence from medical and philosophical texts, he argues that “the movement from milk to solid food was part of a dynamic and constantly shifting argument about how a person might be ‘properly formed’” (24). In short, food affects the soul (25). This connection between food and formation is reconfigured in notions of Roman “family values,” particularly those of marriage and child-rearing (36). The health of the empire was dependent upon the health of the family unit, making proper development a state concern (37). In this context, breast-feeding becomes a vehicle for forming both body and mind and transmitting identity, thereby securing the imperium (38).

The second chapter of Raised on Christian Milk delineates how Jewish notions of food were inflected by distinctive scriptural concerns while maintaining paideia’s central notion of fashioning and transmitting cultural essence (52). Penniman’s discussion of 1 Corinthians here is deeply important to the remainder of his volume. Paul claims the Corinthians were not prepared for solid food; for Penniman, this is a statement about the lack of pneuma in the church at Corinth (71). This lack results in a concomitant lack of spiritual maturity, meaning that the Corinthians were not properly formed (71–2). Paul’s milk, then, is prescribed to disseminate pneuma and inculcate growth and unity within the community (72). It is a means of spiritual formation.

In his third chapter, Penniman situates Pauline concepts of milk and solid food within second-century theological debates. Since these dual concepts could not be readily mapped onto Paul’s tripartite anthropology of spiritual/psychical/fleshly, competing interpretations proliferated (82). For example, both Irenaeus and Clement of Alexandria maintain that milk was an identifying characteristic of a unified Christian community nourished by God (107). Even so, the two do not offer a cohesive solution to the problem of incongruent Pauline categories, resulting in increasingly diverse notions...