MDDM23: The Sacrament of the Eating

[Dave Monroe]

   "His pleasure at being able to utter a recently
minted word, is at once much curtialed by the volatile
Chef de Cusine Armand Allegre, who rushes from the
Kitchen screaming.  'Sond-weech-uh!  Sond-weech-uh!,'
gesticulating as well, 'To the Sacrament of the
Eating, it is ever the grand Insult!'" (M&D, Ch. 36,
p. 366)

"'... the birth of the "Sandwich," at this exact
moment in Christianity,-- one of the Noble and Fallen
for its Angel!  Disks of secular Bread,-- enclosing
whilst concealing slices of real Flesh, yet a-sop with
Blood, under the earthly guise of British Beef, all,--
but for the Species of course,-- Consubstantiate,
thus...the Sandwich, Eucharist of this our Age.'"
(M&D, Ch. 36, p. 367)

And from Piero Camporesi, "The Consecrated Host: A
Wondrous Excess," Fragments for a History of
the Human Body: Vol. 1, ed. Michel Feher et al.
(trans. Anna Cangogne, New York: Zone, 1989), 221-37
...

In the Pit of the Stomach

"Most likley, the introduction of the Host into the
worshiper;s mouth created a real trauma.  As he
swallowed it, all the terrifying images connected with
this act--the body of the purest lamb entering the
filth of the digestive apparatus, the divine flesh
polluted by contact with mucous membranes, the juices
of the corruptible flesh and the rot of the
bowels--must have returned to his mind and seized him
with vertiginous horror.
   "The stomach occupies a crucial place in all
theological meditations on the Eucharist.... this
fleshy bag is the terminus where the ultimate and
definitive prodigy of the supernatural metamorphosis
occurs.  With concern and anxiety, theologians follow
the descent of Christ's body into the natrum, the damp
and smelly bowels." (p. 228)

   "The manduccatio, the swallowing, ingestion and
digestion of the consecrated bread was to take place
according to the most perfect physiological rhythm....
 The ventricle became the delicate locus of
transubstantiation, the prodigious metamorphosis that
leads, first of all, to the assimilation of the
didvine into the human, an then to the passage and the
fusion of the human into the divine--th crucible whee
the swallowed food becomes one with the swallower.'
(pp. 229-30)

   "The stomach became a hidden altar where occult and
incomprehensible acts took place, a zone of liturgical
mediation between Heaven and earth, the didvine and
the beastly, where an unimaginable rite of
transformation occured ...." (p. 232)

   "The final destiny of the material 'accidents,'
that is to say of bread and wine, and the mysterious
events that accompanied thir putrefaction, constituted
the last stage in a series of 'miracles an prodigies
that nature can only contemplate with dread.'" (p.
232)

   "The 'awesome sacrifice' seemed so enormous that
not all Christians could accept it in its inhuman
atrocity, and preferred to see it as a symbol or
trope." (p. 233)

   "Believers, particularly in earlier centuries,
confusedly understood God's sacrifice as a prodigy of
abominable grandeur, and were quite conscious of the
bloddy fragments of divine flesh that descended into
their stomachs in the guise of the Host.  To their
horror of th anthropophagous act, in itself nefarious,
was added their sacred dismay at th thought of
introducing illicit portions of an incommensurable
food--global fragments of heavenly into their infamous
bowels." (p. 233)

And see as well ...
   
Camporesi, Piero.  Bread of Dreams: Food and
   Fantasy in Early Modern Europe. Trans. David
   Gentilcore.  Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1989.

"In a rich and engaging book that illuminates the
lives and attitudes of peasants in preindustrial
Europe, Piero Camporesi makes the unexpected and
fascinating claim that these people lived in a state
of almost permanent hallucination, drugged by their
very hunger or by bread adulterated with
hallucinogenic herbs. The use of opiate products,
administered even to infants and children, was
widespread and was linked to a popular mythology in
which herbalists and exorcists were important cultural
figures. Through a careful reconstruction of the
everyday lives of peasants, beggars, and the poor,
Camporesi presents a vivid and disconcerting image of
early modern Europe as a vast laboratory of dreams."

http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/3260.ctl

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