“Why spend your money for what is not bread,” asks the prophet Isaiah, “your labor, for what fails to satisfy?” And there is our Word of the Week, bread, which that poet and prophet — did you know that a great portion of the prophesies in Scripture are in poetic form? — takes as the sign of food in general, but food as having to do with the whole person, with the soul, with all that a human being can long for. If you go to the deep South, you may have an old-fashioned dinner made up of what the African Americans called “soul food,” spicy concoctions originally created because the slaves didn’t get the best parts of the pig or the chicken — or because they had to go hunting or fishing on their own. So catfish rolled in cornmeal and fried, with collared greens or okra, or red-eyed peas and gravy with corn grits — those are good “soul food” dishes. And the odd thing is that because the slaves worked hard for those meals, sharing them amongst themselves, they ended up feeding their souls more than they fed their bodies.
Anyway, the body needs food, as everybody knows, but so do the mind and the soul. An individual person needs food, if you think of a person as a calorie-consuming thing; that’s the bitter jest behind the “Billows Feeding Machine” in Charlie Chaplin’s film Modern Times. The foreman at the monstrous industrial plant where Charlie works calls him into a back room at the lunch break, where representatives from the Billows Company try to sell him on a robotic feeding machine that will squeeze all “unnecessary” time from the worker, filling him up as quickly as possible. Of course the machine goes on the blink, dumping a bowl of soup into Charlie’s lap, and going like crazy on the typewriter-like instrument from which Charlie is to eat corn on the cob. The boss doesn’t object to the fact that it’s a feeding machine that treats his workers as machines. He turns them down because the darn thing doesn’t work.
It doesn’t occur to the Billows people or to the boss, and maybe it’s hard for us to remember too, that animals eat, but only human beings have meals. Stuff that goes down the gullet is food for the body alone, but what you share with other people is a meal. In that way, all meals are soul food.
Of course, the prophet Isaiah wasn’t singing to the Jews that they should have meals rather than just stuffing themselves in some antisocial fashion and then hurrying off to till a field or milk a cow. He isn’t even speaking for himself. He’s speaking for God, and goes on to say, “Hearken to me, and eat what is good, and let your soul delight in richness” — actually, “in fatness,” as in the wonderful phrase, “the fat of the land.” We want that mysterious bread, that food for the soul, that comes from heaven and builds up the soul to rise and walk. The rain and the snow come down to water the earth, says the prophet, to give seed to the man who sows and bread to the man who eats, and just so, the word of God proceeds from his mouth and doesn’t return till it accomplishes what he has intended.
So here I’m giving you the beginning of Canto 2 of Dante’s Paradise, where the poet invites us to follow him in his little ship, but he warns us that if we haven’t fed upon “the bread of angels,” we’re going to get lost at sea. And you say, “Didn’t we just have the hymn Panis Angelicus yesterday? Is Dante saying that unless you’re receiving the Sacrament, you better not read his poem?” Yes and no. I mean that, sure, the Sacrament is tremendously important to the poet and the Divine Comedy. It’s why, when Thomas Aquinas — our poet from yesterday! — reveals himself to Dante, he says he joined the flock of Dominic, “where you can fatten well, if you don’t rove.” That was a nice jest on his bulkiness, because Thomas wasn’t called The Dumb Ox by his fellow students only because he didn’t chatter a lot. He was a big-boned lad who grew into a bigger-boned man. Somebody told me once that the brothers carved a bit of a crescent into the table-edge where Thomas sat, to accommodate his portliness. Maybe that too was a merry jest.
But Thomas wasn’t talking about the meals in the Dominican priory. He was talking about thinking, learning, teaching, praying, and adoring — real food for mind and soul. Dante then has in mind what Thomas devoted his brilliant and capacious mind to understanding. It’s theology, studying and contemplating the word of God. So then, says Dante, if you haven’t been nourishing mind and soul with that food, you’re not well provisioned for this voyage. Better turn back to shore, till you’re ready!
So Dante and Beatrice rise instantly from earth to the lowest of the heavenly bodies. And the translation below is mine, naturally.
O all you in your shallops following
my furrows as I sail across the sea,
you who desire to listen as I sing,
Don't try the open ocean -- turn and see
your own familiar shores, for you'd remain
forever lost, should you lose sight of me.
I venture waters never sailed by man!
Apollo steers me, Pallas breathes the winds,
nine Muses point me to the Bears on high.
You other few who long have raised your minds
unto the bread of angels, such a food
as brings men life and never feeds them full,
Well may you set your ships of sturdy wood
upon the deep salt, keeping in my wake
before the splashes settle evenly.
Never such wonder they who sailed to take
the Golden Fleece once felt as you shall feel,
not when they saw how Jason bore the yoke!
The lasting thirst, created with the soul,
for that deiform kingdom swept us far,
swift as the mind-seen wheeling of the skies.
Beatrice gazed upward, and I gazed at her,
and in the instant of an arrow's flight --
sunk in the target, whistling off the nock --
I saw I'd reached a place that turned my sight
toward something to behold in awe, so she,
from whom no care of mine could be concealed,
As glad as she is lovely, said to me,
"Direct your thought to God in gratitude,
for He has led us to the lowest star."
