FEAST

The year is 1883, and we’re in a theater in Paris, and the most famous actress of her time is on stage, looking with utter despondency on the body of her fiancé. It’s just the beginning of the play, so the fellow on the floor hasn’t had to act at all, and that led a lot of men to volunteer to be the body for one night. This time it’s a fellow named Edward, though his friends and family call him David. He happens to be the Prince of Wales, and he’ll later be the King of England. The actress is Sarah Bernhardt, but in the play she’s Fedora Romazoff, a Russian princess. She’s wearing a close-fitting felt hat, and because of the popularity of the play, the fashion caught on, and it became known as a fedora. But what the heck does that have to do with our Word of the Week, feast?

It’s in the name! Fedora — that’s the Russian way of mispronouncing Theodora, which means Gift of God. It’s easy enough to jumble up th with f. In England right now, if you hang around people with even a bit of a Cockney accent, you’ll hear them saying fahver instead of father, and earf instead of earth. All those Greek and Greek-Hebrew names with th in them became Russian names with f: Athanasius became Afanasy, Martha became Marfa, Thomas became Foma, Timothy became Timofey, and Theodore became Fyodor or Fedor, and so forth. So it’s the Theo- part that I’m interested in: it means that we’re thinking of God, and the divine. One of my favorite philosophers, Josef Pieper, said that there’s simply no such thing as a feast without the gods, however dim the relation may have become.

“But,” you say, “why not just start out with feast and leave Sarah Bernhardt and her funny hat behind?” Don’t worry, dear Readers, I’ll get there! Meanwhile, let’s think about the business of a feast. Sometimes a great mystery lies right in front of our eyes, and we don’t see it, because it’s too familiar. We need an apostle of the obvious, a philosopher of the ordinary! All animals eat. Lions eat gazelles, and amoebas eat paramecia, and human beings eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches — oh, and other things too. Tomorrow, Debra and I and the kids will be doing what lions and amoebas and even our delightful little dog Molly do not do. We will be having a feast. That’s because we’re in Nova Scotia, and tomorrow is the Canadian holiday of Thanksgiving. So Debra has been cooking today, and who knows but that somebody may show up to share the meal with us? People still do that here. Of course, you can’t just “give thanks,” no more than you can just praise — you have to give thanks to someone. And since we’re talking about everything in life, the Someone you give thanks to, the Someone you praise, can’t be your senator or your dental hygienist or the man who delivers the heating oil, as fine as they may be. Somehow, even people who don’t intend it must have a dim sense of God as they give thanks.

And our word feast is founded in religious feeling, and not just in this or that person here or there, but among a whole people, expressing the highest aspirations of their culture. It comes from Old French feste (which became modern French fête, when st collapsed into t), and that came in turn from late Latin festa, plural of festum, for merrymaking, related to feria, holiday, and fasti, divinely sanctioned days for legal business. So when the king, in Jesus’ parable, gives a wedding feast for his son, it’s really a strange thing indeed that the people he first invites refuse him. Imagine turning down a feast, given by a king! It’s like preferring to play in the mud rather than to go on a holiday by the seashore. Actually, it’s infinitely more unreasonable. If we’ve become a people who no longer feast, we may as well say we’ve ceased to be a people at all, since nothing really can bring us together. And the kingdom of heaven is not just like a wedding feast: we learn that it is a wedding feast.

As for the word: think of the Cockneys and the Russians! The ancient Indo-European root for God and for divine things, dhes-, became theos- in the Greek branch of the family, but in the Italic branch, that dh- became f- (in the Germanic branch it became d-, but that’s another matter). Say th and f back and forth, over and over, and you’ll hear how similar the sounds are. So Greek Theos, God, is a cousin of Latin festa, just as it’s a great-great-granddaddy many times over, of Russian Fe- in Fedora, and so of the hat in English!

“The Wedding Feast,” Pieter Bruegel the Younger. Public Domain.

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