Pints With Aquinas - When is it gluttony? | Fr. Gregory Pine, O.P.

Episode Date: August 19, 2023

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Hello, my name is Father Gregory Pine and I'm a Dominican friar of the province of St. Joseph and this is Pines with Aquinas. In this episode I'd like to talk about gluttony. We've done a few of the capital vices or the seven deadly sins in previous episodes. I've left this off until now because it felt right and now it feels especially right. So gluttony is going to be a super sensitive issue. It's going to be an issue about which people have strong impressions and strong positions. So we are going to not so much tread lightly as tread responsibly and treating this particular issue and hopefully shining some light on the darkness, which has been cast by our ambient culture, which is so wonky when it comes to food and drink. So here we go.

Alright, at the outset, we want to acknowledge that food and drink and their consumption is a sensitive issue and we want to respect, kind of honor the sensitivity of that for many persons. So just from a perspective of health and wellness, we know that there are a variety of healthy approaches or legitimate expressions because it's going to depend in large part on your constitution, you know, your temperament on your body type. It's going to depend on your own kind of formation. It's going to depend on your history, you know, like something like a gut biome is super sensitive and maybe you've just run rough shot over it for a

long time and now you're trying to get it back in shape and it's going to take some time still. So the types of things like the principles and the arguments that I'm setting forward are to be taken kind of like always are for the most part and they're going to require some adaptation or some particular application for you. Especially if you have a history of sorting through these issues on your own or in consultation with a professional. And then also with food and drink, it's a thing that's easy to obsess about. So we don't want to feed our obsession. We don't want to kind of contribute to a pathological approach, which will only prove, yeah, less than salutary. And certainly, you know, like, there are folks who suffer from this in a very

acute way when it comes to like anorexia and bulimia. And here we're talking about, it's not like mere compulsion. It It's it's a sickness, you know, we're talking about mental illness So we also want to account for that in describing this particular problem And again not propose a one-size-fits-all type solution which will actually hurt people rather than help people Okay Now that being said within the christian setting the point isn't just to be like a well-adjusted human being, a swell fella, a nice guy. The point is to be a saint.

And in our call to sanctity, higher goods are sometimes going to require of us a certain displacement of lower goods or bracketing of lower goods. I don't know exactly the best way to describe that. But a concrete example. Okay, Father Gregory, so let's say that you are for reasons unaccountable. You're up late on Saturday night. You live in a place where Mass is only celebrated in the morning on Sundays. And so you're going to get less sleep so as to make your Mass commitment. Okay? So it requires, you know, clinging to a higher good, your Sunday obligation, and displacing a

lower good, namely good sleep tonight. Now, you could take a nap and you might catch up in subsequent days, but just at face value, being a good Christian, seeking to be a saint will sometimes require a little bit of devastation in the lower order. So when we talk about spiritual goods, we're often talking about goods which are, at times, in tension with psychological goods, emotional goods, and even physical goods. So sometimes people say, like, we want to be happy, healthy, and holy as if they were all the same thing. I submit to you that they are not the same thing. And to

be holy will sometimes mean being perhaps unhealthy. Okay, that's a hot take. When we look at the lives of the saints, St. Francis of Assisi was tempted against the virtue of chastity, so he built himself a snow family and tossed himself in thorn bushes. We wouldn't say that that seems, at first blush, to be psychologically well-adjusted or emotionally balanced or, you know, even physically sane. And yet we recognize they're a kind of sanctity and you might say to yourself well that's just for the 13th century what about the 21st century I want to submit to you that the 13th century has a lot to say

about the 21st century okay take another example St. Catherine of Siena she lived in the 14th century she wanted to overcome certain natural revolutions in order to cultivate certain supernatural disposulsions in order to cultivate certain supernatural dispositions. So like for instance, she worked at a hospital for a while and one day she was cleaning wounds with their gangrenous pus and she saw the water bowl that was collecting all of this like off scouring and she said to herself, gross, and then she said to herself, I need to overcome that, and then she drank it. Okay? Which is wild. Now,

am I recommending that you do such like things? No. But I am recommending that we have to decouple happy, healthy, and holy. Or at the very least, we can't say that they are synonymous. Because, you know, there are certain virtues of the natural order, which we're going to cultivate, which will require of us balance and equilibrium and homeostasis, all good things, right? But then there are certain virtues of the supernatural order. All right. We're talking about not acquired virtues here, but infused virtues,

which are going to require of us that we be a little bit wild, that we would be a little bit crazy. Okay. And holiness will sometimes look like madness and that's unsettling, especially if we're just kind of making our way to normalcy or just making our way to a good sleep schedule and a healthy diet and things like that okay so when someone proposes that it can be it can be kind of shocking it can be unsettling and yet we can't say to

ourselves that the purpose of the human life is just to be well adjusted or well adapted to our kind of ambient environment because it's not the point of the human life of our human lives is to be like God all right the point of our human life is deification divinization to be drawn further up and further into the divine life and so you know enjoy communion with Father Son and Holy Spirit and that's gonna place some seriously radically sometimes devastatingly real claims on our humanity. Okay, so we need to be prepared for that. We're responding to the Lord in the context of prayer and sacrament and Christian friendship

and study and penance and other things besides, okay? But I'm just introducing these principles and advancing some of these arguments so that way we don't settle for something less, okay? We don't compromise on the full grandeur of our human dignity and vocation. Okay. So here we go. Um, all right. So just to say, yeah, just to say that now when it comes to gluttony, there's a

whole host of related issues when it comes to food and drink, and we're not going to address all of them because that'd be too complicated, but you're thinking like, are these products organic or where are they sourced and shipped? Um, so like fair trade things. I'm not going to talk about those because St. Thomas Aquinas doesn't talk about those too terribly much because everything that's being sold in his marketplace is farmed close and shipped, you know, like minutes rather than hours, days, weeks. But St. Thomas wants to just kind of treat the consumption as it were, the consumption

of food and drink just in itself. Okay. So he's going to talk about the consumption of food and drink just in itself. Okay? So he's going to talk about the kind of food and drink, and he's going to talk about the way that we consume the food and drink as his principal considerations. And he thinks that this is touching on something that's super important. Okay, so it's not going to be the most important. You're here thinking of the Divine Comedy and the Purgatorio, the Mount of Purgatory, as you go through these concentric rings of purification, of healing and growth. And the first one that you touch upon is pride because that's the most grave, and then the next

one is envy because that's next most grave, and then anger, and then sloth, and then eventually, you know, you get to those sins of the flesh, which Dante, following St. Thomas Aquinas, considers most light. Okay, because in being less spiritual and more corporeal, they tend to touch on things which are base or common, less exalted, less you get it. Okay. Um, so like gluttony is, I think the sixth circle after having passed through avarice and before you get to lust. So still important, right? But, but less important than some people might, um, attribute. Yeah, I don't know actually how to finish that sentence because I make some phrases so complicated that they're unfinished. Alas and

alack. But when it comes to food and drink, we're talking about something that's of necessity because you need food and drink in order to continue living, in order to preserve your existence. But also it touches on one of those most instinctual tendencies by reason of the fact that it's necessary for the preservation of life, it's a most instinctual tendency and it tends to be most easily kind of warped by or perverted by the fall. Because the fall is going to touch upon or pervert affect the desire for food, drink, and sexual intercourse most acutely or most urgently.

Okay, so all that background. Then what are we talking about when we talk about gluttony? We're talking about an immoderate desire for eating and drinking, one that is contrary to the rule of reason. Okay, so we're talking about desire, we're talking about appetite, we're talking about a certain lack of moderation or immoderation, and it's contrary to the rule that he's proposing here is the rule of reason, whether that be human reason or divine reason, but reason nonetheless, which requires of us when we engage with certain goods that we do so in principled fashion or orderly fashion

so that the higher goods be affirmed in such a way as to kind of position or subordinate those lower goods in keeping with our human nature and our human call. So St. Thomas will say that gluttony can sometimes be a mortal sin if we defect from the end, right? And when you're like, okay, what are you talking about here? Well, the end of our lives is God, right?

The glory of God and the salvation of souls, which is like our appropriation of God. Um, and if, um, if our desire for food and drink or the inordinate desire for the consumption of food and drink becomes such that it totally deflects us from that end, then we're talking about a mortal sin. But if it signifies just like a bad use of the means, okay, or if it's just like a kind of detour, or if it's a less excellent way to go about the pursuit of the end of God, then we're talking about a venial sin, okay? And you say to yourself, when does food become the end of life? Well, here, think about certain types of people, like the health nut or the foodie, or sometimes even the way in which veganism is practiced can become all consuming, such that it's the controlling paradigm of a human life. And it begins to cast a moral censure upon all those who are not vegan you've come across this I'm sure or like wellness crusaders So I'm not saying that these people are necessarily sinning mortally

But I'm saying that these types of tendencies when when health nuttitude and when fooditude and when veganism and then wellness crusading Becomes so consuming when it becomes so englobing or encompassing that it can deflect us from what is in fact the center, then we've got a problem. I have recently befriended some folks who work for an apostolate which takes account of wellness and takes account of our consumption of food and drink and other things besides. But it's very conscious, these folks are very conscious of placing Christ at the center. So the image that they use is the monstrance. With Christ at the center and then other things radiating from that.

So we want to always have God at the center, God is our end. And if these other pursuits, health and nutitude, fooditude, veganism, wellness, crusading, become a defection from or a departure from that path, then we have to readjust, right? Then we have to ask ourselves the hard questions and answer them honestly so that we can get back on the path. Okay, so St. Thomas describes that there are five main ways in which we can sin gluttonously or that we can fall into the sin of gluttony. And he says three pertain to the type of food and then three pertain to the way we consume it. So regarding the type of food he says that we can sin by the sin of gluttony

when it's too sumptuous, when it's too dainty or when it's too excessive. So in this particular case I think that we have to, you know, again, engage with our experience and then be honest before our experience when it comes to these types of things. So food, he says is sumptuous when it's too costly and kind. He says it's daintily when we insist on it being prepared too nicely. And it's excessive, you know, when it's too much in quantity,

that one is pretty straightforward. So sumptuous, too costly and kind. I think about this in the setting of my own life, my own religious life. So it's a kind of dictum of religious life that you shouldn't have access to goods in religious life to which you didn't have access previously before entry. Okay. So if religious life becomes an opportunity to experience all kinds of cool and nice goods that you wouldn't ordinarily have had, then it's corruption, right? It's not perfection. And so there are certain things that you just probably shouldn't have as a religious, right? So you have like lobster tails and filet mignon, stuff like that. But then you ask yourself, okay, cool, Mr. Religious Pants, but what about

Christians in general? What about the laity? Well, I think that this is a check on some of our sensibilities. I think by virtue of the fact that we are Christian, that we should self-limit, that there are certain excellent things or costly things or sumptuous things that we should set aside, because all of us are called to the spirit of poverty. And when it comes to food, you don't want to skimp out on nutrition or, you know, like dietetic baseline, but you don't want to indulge in such a way that you become the type of person who can only eat the creme de the creme. Okay. So then dainty, uh, when we're talking about it being too nicely prepared, you know, like all of us have had the experience of a well-prepared meal and a poorly prepared meal.

Certain foods are just that way. Like chicken, for instance, if you prepare chicken, well, it's delicious. CF Chick-fil-A. If you prepare chicken poorly, it's just desiccating it's an absolute desertscape okay but can you finish it right can you find a way to finish it sure enough I think so and you see like the way that people interact with condiments is sometimes an indication of this type of attachment it's like unless the thing is perfectly prepared they just destroy it with salt or pepper or hot sauce or honey mustard or whatever

else it is. Okay? But then we're not tasting the food we're just tasting the condiment. Okay? So we have to ask ourselves the tough question, am I becoming dainty or am I insisting that food be prepared daintily? I don't exactly know the best use of that particular word. But I think that there should be a range within which we can enjoy food. And we don't want to become so much of an esthete or so much of a critic that we can't enjoy food unless it's to absolute perfection. Now mind you, we want to be able to enjoy it when it's prepared really well, but we don't want to make ourselves

incapable of enjoying food unless it is. And then excessively too much in quantity. I think a lot of people will say this is just from a health perspective that you shouldn't stuff yourself at every meal because it actually has deleterious effects. So like 70% of full, 75% of full meat, you know, like a good guide. And the desert fathers are pretty insistent upon this. And it's a way of pushing back against the spirit of gluttony because gluttony will often kind of clamorously yell in your ears, if you don't eat to excess, then you're going to die.

Right. And that's just not true. But the spirit of gluttony gains control over us when it convinces us that unless we observe the dictate of its clamorous shouts, then we're going to pass from existence, whereas that's just not the case. And one of the ways of disciplining our desire for food and drink, of mortifying it, of bringing it back into check, is pushing against this clamorous shouting. So again, we should get up from the table with some room left in our stomach. And that will help us to infuse reason into our sensibilities. So that way,

we're not driven hither and thither by an excessive anxiety regarding the next meal that we may or may not have when I suspect the case for most of us is that we know exactly when we're gonna have the next meal and we know that it's gonna be sufficient. Okay so then that's the first category regarding the food that it be not sumptuous or dainty or excessive. And then regarding the eating so that we shouldn't consume hastily or greedily. These sound very similar. Hastily typically refers to eating before its appropriate time, and then greedily refers to eating without the proper pacing.

So we've all again experienced this or perhaps done this. Hastily, I think that all of us have had the experience about mid-morning. All right. If I don't have a snack now, I'm going to die. Which, you know, there's nothing wrong, intrinsically wrong with snacking, but there is something wrong with feeding the spirit of gluttony and the spirit of gluttony is always going to advance your meal times. It's always going to increase your snack times. It's always going to convince you that, you know that you need to pamper and to coddle your humanity

with food and drink because life is sad and lonely and anxious. Okay? So, yes, life is sad, lonely and anxious, but it's for us to find the Lord in the midst of that. And mind you, sometimes we need to take a certain care of our humanity because it's fragile, because we are weak and wounded and otherwise will be dashed against the cruel rocks of reality. So food can be helpful in that way but if we become overly dependent upon it, in fact enslaved to it, then we have a problem. And what we're talking about is in fact gluttony. So you have a kind of Christian sensibility certainly bred into us by the monastic tradition that there are certain times reserved for food and that we should hold off until

those times. And like Exodus 90 has seized upon this and has made it part of the program. So again, snacking is not evil, especially if we do so reasonably and moderately. But if there's a general tendency in our life to consume more, to consume earlier, to consume oftener, then that's the type of thing that we should be aware of, right? And that we should push back against, ask for the grace to overcome insofar as God gives it. So then greedily without the proper pacing, there can be any number of reasons for this. I think for a lot of us, we find ourselves sitting at our desks at midday and just eating

quickly so that we can get through that task and onto the next more efficient task that we can bill our customers for. And I think that that can be, it can be dehumanizing. Um, so I had an experience, an internship at one point, and I got up to take my lunch white in the break room or wherever else. And I noticed that no one else got up and no one else had planned to get up because everyone else was planning to work through their lunch break. And at a certain point, I just started inviting people.

There's a park not too far away from our office. I started inviting people to join for lunch and it had a kind of leavening effect on, on the group. Now Now mind you, I was only there for two months and it didn't matter and I'm sure they went back to their old practices and who cares, I'm not the savior of the food world. But I think that we should be conscious of the fact that when we treat our meals like an exercise in efficiency and we try to just scarf down food and then move on, or if we're multitasking while eating, like looking at our phones while consuming, then we might be subject to this sinful inclination, or we might be giving way to this sinful inclination to

eat without the proper pacing, outside of the proper human setting, and without the proper kind of human accompaniment, which a meal should represent, because a meal is an opportunity for a kind of contemplative encounter in the sense that it's the play which we experience something of in prayer and in music and in good literature and in sport or whatever else. And that these are the types of events in which we become more human in association with our fellow human beings and represents a way in which to build out a genuine human

culture. And Joseph Pieper talks about this in Leisure, the Basis of Culture. And so we should be conscious of eating greedily because it's dehumanizing, it's to become like the beasts. So you have different words in the German language for the way that an animal eats and the way that a human being eats. And it reflects the different nature reflects the different nature of the eater and we should eat in a way that's more exalted, in a way that's more... how do you describe it best? Open to a transcendent encounter. That's too romantic or too exotic of a definition and yet still you see the point. So then for a final point, following St. Gregory the Great, St. Thomas identifies certain daughters of gluttony.

This is to say, if we don't check gluttony, then it gives way to other things besides which can be complicating factors or depressing factors for our human life. So one of what she says is like dullness of the sense of understanding. We've all felt this with like food coma, unseemly joy, the kind of euphoria that certain people express when anticipating or when consuming, which can be like kind of strange. You know, people got real pumped about bacon a while back and I always wondered why. I didn't quite get it. Maybe that's because I'm insensible.

But yeah, when we find ourselves over the moon about certain foods, like what's exactly going on there? You know, we shouldn't be dead eyed and like slack jawed. Like there should be a certain excitement about eating, which is proportionate and just, foods, like what's exactly going on there? You know, we shouldn't be dead-eyed and like slack-jawed. Like there should be a certain excitement about eating, which is proportionate and just, but when we're, yeah, setting up a George Foreman grill next to our bed so that way we can wake up to the sound and smells of bacon only to have our foot clamped by it, then we've got a problem. C.F. Michael Scott. Okay, so the next one that St. Thomas lists is loquaciousness or loquacity.

And he just tends to think that overconsumption leads to overtalk, oversharing, a kind of immodesty almost. And then he lists the next one, which I love, scurrility, which is a certain levity from lack of reason and the way that we comport ourselves. And then the last is uncleanness. And here he has in mind the tendency of certain men to ejaculate after having over-consumed. Like so passing the night in restlessness or in strange dreams because of over-consumption, then there'd be a higher instance of what he calls nocturnal pollutions and what typically

is called wet dreams. And I think that there's, you know, that's probably borne out by experiencing. Thomas wouldn't have described it as such, were it not a problem. But I think that we're saying here is, you know, when it comes to sexual uncleanness, as he describes it, there's a certain responsibility that we have to be vigilant, that we have to be watchful, and that we can't just say, it's fine because I'm not doing the actual sexual thing now. And if it happens later, whatevs.

It's like, no, we have a certain custody over how we dream and how we think and how we sleep. It's not one for one. It's not direct, but it can be indirect. And that's not to make us yet more consumed with thoughts of responsibility in such a way that we shut ourselves down with anxiety. But it is to say that we can build out our consciousness of the implications of our spiritual life and the responsibility that we have for it by slow steps. Okay? So to sum up, when it comes to gluttony,

we're talking about, again, a sensitive issue. And so I don't want to say this is a one-size-fits-all, or you definitely have to blah, blah, blah on us and such without due sensitivity to the persons involved, their histories, their experiences, and things like that. And especially when we're talking about something more compulsive or something that represents a genuine mental illness. But the virtue dynamics here are going to push us, they're going to incite us to respond more generously to the Most High God. And that might mean certain negative effects, which are physical or emotional or

psychological, or at least we can't associate our holiness with just positive emotions Okay, because they come apart. All right, and I'm not gonna say as a Christian you should be Coming apart at the seams physically you should be absolutely devastated emotionally. You should be at odds and psychological I'm not saying that okay. It's not it's not necessarily an inverse relationship, but it's not one-for-one Okay, so we can't become enslaved to a certain equilibrium of homeostasis, which will actually foreclose on the possibility that the Lord is calling us to something heroic, which might take a toll. Okay, so in having described gluttony in this way, I hope that it's illuminating for you ways in which you might ask God to shine the light of his revelation and infuse the impetus of his grace into certain aspects so that you can

journey with him further up and further in. And I suspect that there are other people who are asking similar questions and that you have the opportunity to exchange with them and to find out good sage counsel. I'd say you know discuss it with somebody close to you before implementing it because there's no sense in kind of flying off the handle and then having to be brought back to an equilibrium yeah by the experience of pretty rank failure or just yeah brutal devastation so all those things I hope that they can be taken into account all right that's what I had planned to say this is pints

with Aquinas if you haven't yet please do subscribe to the channel push the bell and get updates when other things come out also I contribute to a podcast called God's planning where we talk about similar things with some frequency also cool update vis- a podcast called God's planning, where we talk about similar things with some frequency. Also cool, update vis-a-vis God's planning is we're hiring, we're hiring a podcast assistant. We're hiring a social media editor. So those two postings are going to be, you can find them at God's planning.org. We've started to put the word out via email and via social media, via social

media. So if you're interested in those things, you can find out more details, job descriptions on, on Godsplaining.org and submit your application in the way described, um, and then also when talking about applications, here's another cool application opportunity. Our province runs Providence college in Providence, Rhode Island. And I was talking to one of the campus ministers there, or one of the chaplains at PC and he says that they are looking for a PC complex director.

So they've started posting, um, this complex director job. And basically they're looking for mission oriented applicants for like a hall director for several residences at PC. Um, and this person would be like helping to build their dorm chaplaincy program. Uh, so like a young Catholic interested in helping students in coordinating with the Catholic and Dominican mission of the school. So if so, you can find the job listing. I'm going to click on this link and tell you where you can find the job listing.

You can find the job listing at careers.providence.edu. So again, complex director, or you can be in touch with father Damien day, who can be reached at Damien dot day at Providence dot edu D a M I a N dot day at Providence dot edu. If he hasn't, if you have any questions or if you want to follow up further. Okay. All right. One more thing. Last thing.

Dominican rosary pilgrimage is coming up and that's on September 30th in Washington, DC at the Basilica of the national shrine of the immaculate conception. Um, and it's going to be like a day of recollection where I'm going to give a talk and then we're going to have time for adoration and confessions with a day of recollection where I'm going to give a talk and then we're going to have time for adoration and confessions with a lunch break and then I'm going to give another talk and then we're going to pray the rosary and then we're going to have a vigil mass.

So it's going to be awesome. So I hope to see you there. Hope to pray with you there and you'll be able to meet other God's Blending Friars and Themistic Institute Friars and other things besides, other persons besides. So it's going to be sweet, I think. I hope. I pray. Okay, that's all I got. Know my prayers for you. Please pray for me, and I'll look forward to chatting with you next time on Pines with Aquinas.