Gluttony & Soul Food

The second in a series on the 7 deadly sins

For Part I on acedia, click here.

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I once heard a wise prelate say that “the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach.”

It’s an insight missing from the postmodern approach to fasting. A brief glance at the Vegan Society’s website provides our secular creed: Why go vegan? For the animals; For your health; For the environment; For people.

But what about For the soul? It is in this light that we see the power of fasting — and the debilitating effect of gluttony. The battle is not merely for control of one’s physiological and ecological environment; it’s the struggle for man’s interiority, for his moral integrity. Gluttony is much more than simply eating too much — it is fundamentally tied to purity of heart.

The ancients understood this: words like the Greek σπλάγχνον (splagchnon) and the Hebrew רַחֲמִים (rakhamím) defined the collective as man’s entrails (including the heart and the bowels) which were simultaneously seen as the source of his passions.

Thus, an inherent relation emerges between the organs in the core of man — at both the literal and figurative levels, as well as the physical and moral. This dynamic is also seen in the Bible. For instance, St. Jerome translates Paul’s use of σπλάγχνον in Col 3:12 as viscera.

A brief comparison of various translations shows the interplay:

“Put ye on therefore, as the elect of God, holy, and beloved, the bowels of mercy, benignity, humility, modesty, patience” (DRB).

“Put on then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, heartfelt compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience” (NABRE).

The holistic nature of the term emphasizes the intuitive connection between the heart and the stomach.

The same can be said for Christ’s first temptation in the desert, after 40 days of fasting. In Greek, “mouth” is στόμα (stoma) — the root of stomach.

“If you are the Son of God, command that these stones become loaves of bread.”
He said in reply, “It is written: ‘One does not live by bread alone,
but by every word that comes forth from the mouth of God.’”
Mt 4:3-4 (NABRE)

Here, Christ references Deuteronomy 8:3 — during the Exodus, God permits His chosen people to “be afflicted with hunger” before giving them Manna, so that they come to trust in His divine care. The implication? Fasting is an essential step of purification, allowing one to see with the eyes of faith.

This year, the Holy Father’s Lenten message echoed this need for clarity. “The exodus from slavery to freedom is no abstract journey,” he wrote. “If our celebration of Lent is to be concrete, the first step is to desire to open our eyes to reality.” But beset by gluttony, such a first step is impossible.

For while Lent can seem like a great opportunity to grow in the spiritual life, one can easily remain at the surface, ripping up weeds while the roots remain intact. Postmodern man tends to itemize and silo his evermore fractured life — think of phrases like work-life balance or work hard, play hard — and the same can be said for his ascetical vision.

Today’s challenge lies not only in pushing back on concrete vicious habits like acedia-driven doomscrolling, but also in reintegrating ourselves. Only in getting back to basics, in following the gut instinct to go to the heart of the matter, will we be able to really see the state of things — and where our real struggles lie. And a key pillar of this holistic rediscovery is fasting.

But why? As always, Christ shows us the way. Our Lord’s forty days in the desert were not just an act of heroic self-denial, they were also a time of intense preparation. Fasting centers man — the downward tug of mere sustenance is consciously resisted, leading to a heightened sensitivity to the workings of the Spirit.

At first only the lack of nourishment is felt; then, according to the strength and purity of the individual nature, the desire for food vanishes, not to return for several days.When the body receives no nourishment from without, it lives on its own substance; however, as soon as this self-calorification begins to attack the vital organs, a wild, elementary hunger is aroused, and life itself is threatened. Such was the hunger of Jesus in the wilderness.

Simultaneously, another, a psychic process takes place: the body becomes more supple, the spirit freer. Everything seems to grow lighter, detached. The burden of gravity itself grows less perceptible. The limits of reality begin to withdraw; the field of the possible to widen as the spirit takes things in hand. The enlightened conscience registers with greater sensitivity and power, and the will becomes increasingly decisive. The protective mechanisms of human nature which shield man from the hidden, threatening realms of existence beneath, above, and beyond him begin to fall away. The soul stands stripped, open to all forces.
(Romano Guardini, The Lord)

It is striking that Satan’s first move is to try and upset this equilibrium — attempting to enter the heart via the stomach. Out of all the possible temptations Christ could have suffered, why something so basic? And yet, the dynamic is eerily similar to that of the serpent in Genesis 3: from the explicit substratum of nourishment (fruit/bread) arises an implicit appeal for a divinized auto-sufficiency (you will be like gods/If you are the Son of God). While Adam and Eve (who did not fast) choose a good that puts them into direct discord with God, Christ recognizes the stakes, humbling Himself and reaffirming His trusting and loving relation with the Father.

“My food is to do the will of the one who sent me and to finish His work” (Jn 4:34).

It is here where the sinister power of gluttony emerges. For like all capital sins, gluttony hides behind her manifestations; but unlike others, her children may seem, at first glance, to be relatively unrelated to the matter at hand. As enumerated by Aquinas — who echoes St. Gregory the Great — gluttony has five offspring:

“Unseemly joy (inepta laetitia), coarseness (scurrilitas), uncleanness (immunditia), loquaciousness (multiloquium), and dullness of mind with respect to theoretical understanding (hebetudo mentis circa intelligentiam).”
(ST II-II, q. 148 a. 6).

Perhaps this is why a voluntaristic strain can emerge in fasting, due to the difficulty of discovering the root. But the devil is in the details. In the end, gluttony leads to perdition because her children numb man’s reason, scatter his attention, and lower his inhibitions. In habituating the excessive preoccupation with the most basic of goods — food and drink — man becomes a glutenous slave to his passions and ends up denying the summum bonum.

This danger is made explicit in The Ladder of Divine Ascent, a work written by St. John Climacus around the year 600 and still a common resource for monks during Lent. The treatise consists of 30 steps describing an inclined plane towards holiness, in which each “rung” is integrated into the rest; building on those that have come before it, and supporting those yet to come. At the almost-halfway point (Step 14), Climacus chooses to address a “clamorous, yet wicked master — the stomach.”

Though our technological climate may initially incline us towards fasting from screens, Climacus makes clear that such an approach cannot be at the expense of the deliberate denial of victuals: “If we go into the matter, we shall find that it is the stomach alone that is the cause of all human shipwreck,” he states. At another point, he adds: “The prince of demons is the fallen Lucifer, and the prince of passions is gluttony.”

Like Gregory and Thomas, Climacus also shows how the capital sin is innately tied to a myriad of issues. In an extended passage, he depicts gluttony describing herself:

I am bound to you by nature. The door for me is the nature of foods. The cause of my insatiability is habit. The foundation of my passion is repeated habit, insensibility of soul and forgetfulness of death. How do you seek to learn the names of my offspring? If I count them, they will be more in number than the sand. But learn at least the names of my first born and beloved children. My first-born son is a minister of fornication, the second after him is hardness of heart, and the third is sleepiness. From me proceed a sea of bad thoughts, waves of filth, depths of unknown and unnamed impurities. My daughters are laziness, talkativeness, familiarity in speech, jesting, facetiousness, contradiction, a stiff neck, obstinacy, disobedience, insensibility, captivity, conceit, audacity, boasting, after which follows impure prayer, whirling of thoughts, and often unexpected and sudden misfortunes, with which is closely bound despair, the most evil of all my daughters. The remembrance of falls resists me but does not conquer me. The thought of death is always hostile to me, but there is nothing among men that destroys me completely. He who has received the Comforter prays to Him against me; and the Comforter, when appealed to, does not allow me to act passionately. But those who have not tasted His gift inevitably seek their pleasure in my sweetness.
(Climacus, The Ladder of Divine Ascent, 14.36)

For Climacus, it is crucial to flesh out gluttony’s connection to lust. Step 15 begins by explaining that “we have heard from that raving mistress gluttony who has just spoken, that her offspring is war against bodily chastity.” In the section on gluttony, the monk spills much ink on pithy phrases that crystallize the connection:

“Satiety in food is the father of fornication;
but mortification of the stomach is an agent of purity.”

“He who cherishes his stomach and hopes to overcome the spirit of fornication,
is like one who tries to put out a fire with oil.”

“You will hear Him who says: ‘Spacious and broad is the way of gluttony that leads to the perdition of fornication, and many there are who go in by it; because narrow is the gate and hard is the way of fasting that leads to the life of purity, and few there are who go in by it.’”

At the same time, Climacus illustrates how one cannot separate the two, and criticizes figures who, ignoring the root cause of gluttony, take drastic measures (see, Origin) to try and free themselves from personal struggles with sins against chastity. For clouded by gluttony’s stranglehold, one dies “a double death” — failing to see how a chaste life is impossible without fasting, they miss the forest for the trees.

Though gluttony tries to veil the connection via obfuscation and belittling the matter at hand, man’s heart and his bowels are intimately connected. Thus, fasting’s role in the integrity of man becomes apparent: to unlock the heart, one must also free the stomach.