GLUTTONY: Presented on 10/29/01 at The Newman Center by Rev. Bruce Williams, O.P. as part of the series on the Seven Deadly Sins.

Tonight our series turns a corner, and we lighten up after our involvement the past two weeks with those depressing vices of sadness, envy and (especially) apathy. The vices we discuss now and next week – Gluttony and Lust, in that order – are the most frankly sensual or "carnal" vices on our list; in each of them, what’s out of control is not sadness but, on the contrary, the appetite for pleasure.

These two vices, respectively, concern our most basic pleasure-drives, namely, for food and for sexual gratification. Thomas Aquinas understood that these drives are in themselves wholesome because they’re aimed at what is basically necessary for human life: the nutritive power of food to sustain each of us individually, and the generative power of sex to sustain the human race. If the activities of eating and mating were not particularly enjoyable, if people’s incentive to engage in these activities depended solely on a rational appreciation of their importance for human individual and collective survival, our species might have died out a long time ago. Adequate incentive for eating and mating depends, then, on these activities being intensely pleasurable and attractive. The problem here, of course, is that our attraction to these pleasures is easily apt to carry us off into excess, in ways that undermine rather than promote the basic human goods they’re supposed to serve. And that’s how we get involved with vice in these areas.

Tonight’s vice, Gluttony, is traditionally seen as the least serious of the Seven Capital Vices. More than any of the other vices on that list, gluttony has been treated in a light vein and even regarded as a semi-comical trait. Aquinas was willing to say that gluttony, in and of itself, does not generally involve serious wrongdoing; in other words, it’s not "objectively speaking" a grievous sin. Still, it’s serious enough not to be simply dismissed. As a carnal vice, it has a gross and base character that renders it more "shameful," even though less grievous, than many other vices. In the words of that 1993 New York Times Book Review series I’ve cited before, gluttony, in a particularly vivid way, "exemplifies an absence of the restraint that dignifies the human condition." Moreover, like all the capital vices, gluttony tends to generate a number of mischievous "offspring," some of which are apt to be more grievous than the vice itself. Again here, as with the others we’ve already treated, we’ll see that this vice and its offspring are apt to have wider social, economic, and political implications.

Gluttony refers to our pleasure-appetite being out of bounds with respect to food and drink. The appropriate "bounds" for eating and drinking are determined by the requirements of health in all its dimensions: physical health in the first place, but also psychic health, (i.e., emotional/mental health), and likewise our health as social beings. Embracing and transcending all these dimensions is our spiritual health, our relationship with God. Now the requisites for health are not uniform for all of us, and they don’t even remain the same for any one of us at all times of our life. We’re talking, then, about a standard that’s relative or variable according to different individuals and also according to different situations in the life of any given individual. But, for all of us at all times, gluttony will refer to any involvement with food or drink that exceeds the proper bounds of health in any of the dimensions just indicated.

The scope of this vice includes a lot more than we commonly think. Aquinas, following Gregory the Great here again, lists five types of gluttony. The first type consists in being overly fussy about the quality of the food one eats, being satisfied with only the choicest brands, the choicest cuts of meat, etc. Secondly, one can be too painstaking or finicky about how the food is prepared, e.g., spending inordinate amounts of time and energy in cooking, or being overly distressed if something comes out slightly overcooked or undercooked or just a little bit off in the seasoning. (Note: The point is not to condemn or criticize the exercise of care in the selection of food, or artistry in its preparation; it’s the overdoing of these efforts that’s labeled vice.) Then, third, one can consume food in excess quantity; this overeating is what we usually have in mind when we speak of gluttony. Fourthly, one can eat at inappropriate times, e.g., right before mealtime (impeding one’s capacity to eat and/or enjoy the meal itself), or just snacking constantly all day long. There are indeed some people who just can’t seem to maintain equilibrium without having something in their mouths all the time. And finally, the fifth type of gluttony consists in eating too ravenously, wolfing one’s food, uncouth table manners due to over-intense involvement with the food.

We see, then, that gluttony occurs in a variety of ways, and I suggest that there could still be other varieties besides the traditionally identified ones I just listed. Underlying all the varieties is the same basic idea, namely, inordinate preoccupation with food. So we mustn’t confine the idea of gluttony too narrowly to overeating, even though overeating is evidently the most common form and so, understandably, it has been taken as the prototype of the vice. That’s why, both in medieval art and in our own time, the vice of gluttony is customarily personified by depicting a grotesquely obese person.

Here again we need to be careful. Not all gluttons are overeaters and, even among those who are, not all are obese or even overweight. (Those are the people we love to hate: the ones who habitually eat tons of rich food and still look like toothpicks!) And also, conversely, not all obese or overweight people are gluttons. Glandular or other physiological disorders are sometimes responsible; and in other cases, even though overeating is involved, this excess bespeaks a pathological addictive process rather than a vice properly speaking. I’ll mention addiction again later on in connection with alcohol consumption, which is part of our topic tonight. For now just let me repeat a general point I already touched on last week in regard to apathy ("sloth"), namely, that many cases of misbehavior which pre-modern people used to condemn as morally blameworthy are now understood and treated as pathological disorders. The dividing line between immorality and pathology (sin vs. sickness) is often quite difficult to discern in practice, and the complexities of this whole problem are quite beyond our scope here.

The points I’ve been making here are well put by Solomon Schimmel, the Jewish therapist whose work has been cited throughout this series. In an important endnote to his chapter on gluttony, he writes:

The glutton is not necessarily obese nor are obese people necessarily gluttons. A painfully

thin, anorexic-bulemic adolescent girl, who alternates between self-starvation and eating

binges and who is almost totally preoccupied with food, would be considered a glutton if

she were thought to be responsible for her behavior and capable of controlling it. However,

since there is a substantial and evident link between overeating and obesity, both medieval

and modern descriptions of the glutton frequently depict him as grossly overweight. (258 n. 8)

While he certainly recognizes the pathological dimension of eating disorders, Schimmel complains that treatment programs for these disorders – even the most responsible and effective ones, leaving aside those that are passing fads or outright frauds – nearly always lack a sound moral philosophy about food. In his own therapeutic work, he endeavors to inculcate in his patients a sense of values regarding food as well as a sense of responsibility regarding its consumption, so that they are then empowered to make sound, rational choices about their eating. It’s worth listening to his description of how he goes about arousing this sense of values and responsibility; in the quote that follows, he explains that he uses the feminine pronoun because "most patients who seek help for eating disorders are women" (140-141):

Schimmel reports that patients "are usually surprised, and often shocked" to discover that they are spending sometimes as much as 85 percent of their waking hours in food-related activities, besides all the mental and emotional energy indicated in the last part of this survey. When we devote so much time and energy to food, we have "become its slave rather than its master."

As a capital vice, gluttony is understood to generate certain typical offspring. The list we have from Thomas Aquinas, and, more remotely, from Gregory, has five items, none of which involve anything seriously reprehensible – except possibly for the last one, depending on how we understand the term.

I now list the five offspring, with my free translation followed by the Latin original in each case:

1. Dullwittedness / hebetudo sensus circa intelligentiam. Overeating or other psychic over-involvement with food tends to make one less efficient in processing and understanding information. I can’t do any serious reading or studying after a heavy meal; if I habitually eat too heavily, my over-all mental acumen will suffer.
2. Buffoonery or inappropriate playfulness / inepta laetitia. People out of control with food are also apt to go out of bounds in regard to social decorum, becoming silly and frivolous.
3. Loquaciousness / multiloquium, being overly talkative, is another way in which this lack of control is apt to be manifested. It can overlap with the previous item, or with the following one.
4. Scurrility / scurrilitas refers to a kind of playfulness that is not just inappropriate or unbecoming in a generic way, but mischievous. A common example is playing practical jokes that really aren’t all that funny, i.e., jokes that tend to be sources of annoyance or even hardship rather than amusement to others. Verbal teasing which goes overboard and becomes offensive is another example.
5. Finally we have uncleanness / immunditia. This is the tricky one to understand. At one level it refers to one’s being unkempt, sloppy, careless of hygiene, given to incontinent discharges such as flatulence. At another level it refers to discharges of semen. The medievals understood that nocturnal emissions are a physiological phenomenon occurring quite spontaneously and innocently in sleep; but they also thought such emissions could result from gluttonous eating, and deemed them blameworthy in this case. (Today we would see this causal relationship as questionable at best.) But, lastly, "uncleanness" can refer to conscious lustful behavior. In the medieval perspective, the most serious moral problem about gluttony was its aptitude to aggravate our vulnerability to the much more serious vice of lust.

All these offspring are especially evident in the case of that specific form of gluttony which consists in drunkenness. For instance, the famous saying in vino veritas ("in wine there is truth") means that drinkers become loquacious and more easily apt to reveal their true feelings which they would discreetly keep to themselves when sober. The saying doesn’t mean that imbibing alcohol enhances intellectual efficiency in pursuing and understanding truth. Quite the opposite is the case; dullwittedness, the first offspring listed for gluttony, is all the more apt to result from drunkenness. And we don’t need to belabor the connection between drunkenness and vulnerability to lust; it’s a growing problem among teenagers in our day, though of course it’s not confined to them.

Gluttony in general was not traditionally condemned as a grievous sin, though it could become so if it were the near occasion of lust. But the same tradition condemned substantial drunkenness as being always a grievous sin, even if it didn’t lead to lust. Unlike generic gluttony, drunkenness by definition involves over-all moral incapacitation; by suppressing the exercise of reason, it lays the basis for all manner of irresponsible and destructive behavior. – Here again, as with eating disorders and even more so, we need to underline the important distinction between willful drunkenness, which is the vice we’re speaking of here, and alcoholism, which is a pathological addiction. To repeat, pre-modern people lacked understanding of this distinction and hence they regularly condemned as sin many instances of excess drinking that we now recognize as pathologically compulsive.

We need to note, finally, one additional complication which the medieval tradition saw as a most severely aggravating factor in the moral assessment of gluttony. This is the case where gluttony is carried to the extreme of inducing radical selfishness which involves contempt of one’s responsibilities toward others and toward God. It is seen in gross overconsumption combined with indifference to starving people; it is also seen in the materialism of people who have opted to live only for sensual gratification and reject the call to godliness. These cases, and also of course the case of willful overindulgence which is destructive of one’s own physical health, would count as instances of what Aquinas identified as the adoption of gluttonous pleasures as one’s ultimate end in place of God, and by definition this would be mortally sinful.

Since gluttony is ultimately a spiritual failing, the remedy for it must likewise be ultimately spiritual. Techniques to control one’s eating can be valuable – e.g., eating to relieve hunger instead of eating to feel full, and not combining eating with other activities – but these and other techniques are most effective as tools of a spiritual discipline. Most of all we need a spiritual outlook on food. Schimmel lists five traditional outlooks – "the ascetic, the puritanical, the thankfully accepting, the sanctifying, and the hedonistic" (258 n. 7) – and remarks that all but the last of these find expression in both Judaism and Christianity. Of course, the balance among the four outlooks (excluding hedonism) comes out differently in these two faiths; ascetic and puritanical elements are less pronounced in Judaism than in Christianity. Although naturally the various outlooks have differing approaches to explaining why gluttony is a vice, all of them – including hedonism – hold that food must not be desired or consumed immoderately.

The virtue of temperance, as applied to eating, is labeled by Aquinas as "abstinence," meaning abstinence from the excess indulgence toward which most of us are inclined by our untrained appetite. Any instance of moderate eating and any abstention from inappropriate eating will qualify as an act of "abstinence." Fasting is seen as an especially intense act of the same virtue; it goes beyond the mere avoidance of excess, and involves also going without some food that would not be excessive for us. This discipline helps curb the appetite’s tendency toward excess; it can also express a variety of spiritual and moral concerns in a way that heightens our sensitivity to others, and to the world we live in, and – above all – to God. Aquinas notes, however, that fasting must itself be done moderately in order to be virtuous; i.e., it must not be exaggerated to the detriment of our health or of our effective functioning in the community.

In any instance of eating, we are, by definition, interacting with our environment. We are called to eat with awareness of this fact, sensitive to the effect we are having on the world God has created as our home, and, above all, mindful of our dependence on the Creator himself for "our daily bread," i.e., for all that sustains us. "Grace before (and after) meals" should be an expression of this mindfulness, not just a perfunctory ritual. It is this mindfulness, ultimately, that will protect us against gluttonous and greedy tendencies as it deepens our loving solidarity with God, and with our fellow humans, and with all our fellow creatures.

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