Eat roots and leaves (comm 1 tf 10:30-12)

"Eats roots and leaves: the quest for spiritual virtue through personal austerity drove many Eastern Christians to lead solitary lives as hermits surviving in the wilderness. Andrew Jotischky describes how indifference to food became an integral part of the monastic ideal in the Byzantine era, one revived in the West in the 11th and 12th centuries." History Today 61.4 (2011): 19+. Academic OneFile. Web. 11 June 2011.
The world's best restaurant, according to Restaurant Magazine, is Noma in Copenhagen. Its head chef, Rene Redzepi, has made his name from serving dishes that include the apparently inedible--lichen, moss, obscure molluscs and even 'edible soil' feature as part of this new wave of 'molecular gastronomy'. Redzepi's philosophy of making full use of the free food offered by nature, food that can be harvested by anyone on a casual walk in the country, is simply the most spectacular example of a trend that has been increasingly popular in recent years. From the survival guru Ray Mears to hunter-gatherer Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall the message is to pick, gather and even kill from Nature's provender: to graze, one might say. There is nothing new about this: in all societies people have used food that grows wild to supplement what they sow and raise themselves. Even the moral dimension that sometimes accompanies these exhortations--the need to conserve food supplies, concerns over food miles, the moral superiority of home-grown and locally picked food- is an echo of a much older theme. Religious reformers, from the earliest Christian hermits in Egypt and Syria to the monks of the great monasteries of northern England, recognised the virtue of eating simple food that could be picked and needed little or no preparation.


No group of monks was more attuned to the philosophy of 'molecular gastronomy' than the boschoi, or grazers, of Syria and Palestine. Grazers are first described by the theologian Ephrem the Syrian, writing in the fourth century, as having no fixed abode but wandering around the arid semi-desert regions of western Syria and Palestine, either in groups or alone. Their table, as Ephrem put it, was the earth and the mountains, just as though they were wild animals. According to the historian Sozomen, writing around AD 425, 'they were called boschoi when they first embarked on the philosophic life, because they had no dwellings, ate neither bread nor meat, and drank no wine ... When it was time to eat, each one would take a sickle, go up to the mountains and feed on what grew there, like animals at the pasture'. Even some particularly ascetic monks who lived in the monasteries of the Judaean desert would leave their cells every year at Lent and wander around the Dead Sea, living off the plants that grew wild. The plants they gathered included the reeds growing on the banks of the Dead Sea and melagria, a desert succulent. A true grazer ate his food raw. In one story in the Life of Euthymius, a fifth-century monk in Palestine, a novice who was following an experienced grazer to learn the secrets of desert monasticism was chastised for carrying pots and pans with him: if you need to cook the food that grows naturally, he was told, you will never make a true monk. Or, as the Egyptian desert monk John 'the Dwarf' advised: 'Eat grass, wear grass, sleep on grass: then your heart will be like iron.' Nor was it only the 'professional' grazers of the golden age of monasticism between the fourth and seventh centuries who dug up roots and gathered wild plants to eat. Reforming monks in 11th- and 12th-century Europe such as Robert of Arbrissel and Stephen of Obazine are often described as spending periods of rejection and angst in the wild, digging up roots and forest plants and even stripping the bark off trees to eat.
Grazers went in search of their food; easier still was to have it provided for you by nature in the same place without having to travel. The example par excellence of the monk who subsisted on what grew around him without having to look for it was the fifth-century Egyptian hermit Onuphrios who lived in the same spot in the Sinai desert for most of his adult life. Apparently, so he told the monk Paphnutios who recorded the story, all his needs were met by the palm tree under which he camped: the leaves provided shade, clothing and shelter and the dates his only food. The bunch that dropped every month was enough for him to live off.
Was any of this true? Our natural instinct is to distrust such obviously hagiographical stories. We do not even know whether Onuphrios was a real person, or an allegorical figure used by contemporaries to illustrate certain ascetic virtues. The images of Onuphrios the hermit that became popular in both the Greek Orthodox world and in the medieval West (where he gave rise to the name Humphrey) are highly stylised, depicting him with a beard growing down to his waist. There are so many cases of medieval reforming monks who are described in monastic literature as throwing everything up to live in the wild eating roots and herbs that to do so was obviously part of the behaviour expected of those who were searching for a particularly virtuous way of life. One reason why we distrust such accounts is because they tend to appear in saints' Lives, a genre of writing that is notorious for hyperbole and rhetoric. The purpose of a saint's Life was to demonstrate that the saint had the requisite virtues expected of someone who could perform miracles either in life or after death and, for monastic saints, personal austerity and asceticism were essential virtues. Thus the depictions of saintly monks often read like idealised types rather than actual men and women.


Yet it would be foolhardy to suppose that all such cases were no more than stock motifs. In the case of Onuphrios, for example, if one were going to survive on a single food type, dates would be a good choice. The date palm, phoenix dactylifera, has been estimated to have 800 distinct uses, only some of which are culinary. Dates are rich in sugar, fats and vitamins and provide most of the essential nutrients for staying alive, as any of the local Bedouin could have told Onuphrios. Most commercially grown date palms today produce about 1001bs of fruit a year in bunches that can weigh as much as 201bs each. But Onuphrios need not have eaten his dates simply as fruit. A monastic rule from ninth-century Constantinople recommends a wine made from the fermented juice of dates, which Onuphrios might have been able to produce with the help of a basic press similar to an olive press. This would also have helped him to crush tree kernels from which he could have produced a syrup and which, if ground finely into a flour, could be mixed with water to make into flat cakes. This kind of food is mentioned in other sources concerned with desert monasticism from the same period. The fruit can also be dried and ground into a kind of flour, which when mixed with grains such as barley and with water produces a cake.


Similarly there is no reason to suppose that a saint's Life is exaggerating whenever it describes a hermit eating roots or woodland plants. A number of easily accessible and recognisable plants grow profusely in the kinds of environments in which hermits in western Europe lived: wild watercress by rivers and streams, fat hen and pignut (plants with an edible, tuberous route) at field edges, dandelions, nettles and wild chervil in and near woodlands, sea kale and marsh samphire near coasts. Stephen of Obazine, a 12th-century hermit who fled for solitude to the forests of the Limousin in south-western France, supposedly found himself reduced to eating tree bark. There is no reason to doubt this: about a dozen native European species of trees have edible bark and many indigenous cultures around the world have used bark as food. Once the bark is stripped from the tree, the inner pulp is cut into strips and either boiled or dried. It can he ground to make a kind of flour.
Granted that it was perfectly feasible for monks to live for long periods on the kinds of food that some restaurant connoisseurs now praise as innovative, why would they have wished to do so? What made eating food that one gathered oneself a spiritually virtuous act?
One of the few early grazers about whom we know more than simply a name was the seventh-century Syrian monk known as Symeon the Holy Fool. Trying to persuade a companion that they should leave their monastery to go off alone into the desert, Symeon explained that living off what they could find, rather than worrying about how they would survive, would make them more like the angels. Like angels monks should be able to spend their time worshipping and adoring God without the constraints of human bodily needs: what to eat, where to live, how to deal with other members of society. The answer was to eat only when one had to and then in small quantities, to renounce sexual relations and to own no property. These were the 'low-impact dwellers' of the late Roman era.


Not all early Christian monks were so idealistic as to assume that living an austere life would improve one's spiritual rating. Nevertheless there is a strong strand, especially in Syrian monastic tradition, of self-inflicted masochistic behaviour. Some monks hung weights and chains from their necks or bound corsets tightly around their chests to restrict breathing; in one monastery niches were cut into the walls in which monks stood all night in prayer, unable to move. Syrian monks also deliberately exposed themselves to the heat of the sun by day, eschewing any shelter. It would be easy to think of such practices as stemming from a desire to establish the inferiority of the body and to ensure that the mind, rather than the body, ruled the will. But they were just as much about perfecting the body as ruling it: about returning humanity to the state it had occupied before the Fall and the expulsion from the Garden of Eden. Adam and Eve in their sinless state had had no need of property or society; without full consciousness of their bodies and their bodies' appetites they had been able to live for and in the moment. This is the ideal state to which monks such as the grazers wanted to return. perhaps the most spectacular example of early Christian monasticism is Symeon the Stylite, a Syrian shepherd whose life story is told in the Religious History of the fifth-century writer Theodoret. After he was told by his superior to refrain from self-mortifying practices, Symeon left his monastery and devised the perfect form of public asceticism: he occupied a column in the semi-desert and became a visible holy man. Symeon's platform on top of a column rescued from a ruined pagan temple became a famous resort for those with spiritual--and not so spiritual--problems to bring before the holy man. Naturally, because he was in public view, Symeon had to keep up the appearance of an ascetic existence of prayer and contemplation. He occupied a place, physically and metaphorically, between heaven and earth, between humans and the angels.
Yet Symeon was also deeply dependent on human society. Everything he ate had to be winched up to him in a basket by means of a pulley. If nobody had paid him any attention he would have starved. Moreover his statement of abandoning human society would have had no meaning had nobody known what he was doing. Hermits and monks who withdrew from society in the Middle Ages as well as in the early Christian centuries, relied to a large degree on a public reaction to their withdrawal. The literal dependence on others is borne out vividly in the Life of Stephen of Obazine, in which Stephen and a companion are depicted on the verge of starvation because of their inability to find enough food in the forest in winter. The local villagers who had previously brought them food out of respect for their status as holy men had become disillusioned after a 'fake' hermit set himself up in the area, demanded gifts and offerings and then left secretly without even saying the Masses he had promised. Stephen not only had his pitch queered, but was left with no means of support.
One moral from the story of Stephen is that a monk who wanted to live as a hermit needed some basic survival skills. Even St Anthony, the archetypal hermit in fourth-century Egypt, took a hoe and spade with him into the desert, in the knowledge that if he could sow some seed he could survive alone. Good hermits had also to be decent gardeners and there are some charming vignettes in medieval hagiographical accounts of wilderness-dwellers clearing patches of land and planting vegetable gardens with beans and other hardy legumes. One unlucky 11th-century Greek hermit in Calabria complained that he would have been able to survive alone if thieves had not stolen his equipment--an early example of allotment vandalism. Sulpicius Severus, a fifth-century Gallic writer, developed the motif of the hermit who defied nature in the Egyptian desert by harnessing an ox to a wheel that turned the handle of a well so that he could irrigate his little patch of arid land to grow vegetables. Godric, a 12th-century hermit in Finchale in the Pennine valley of Weardale, even trained the local deer not to trample his garden.


The theme of the victory of monks over nature became an important feature of early Cistercian writing. The Cistercians founded their first community, Citeaux in northern Burgundy--from which they took their name--in 1098 as a result of serious disagreements between monks at the nearby monastery of Molesme. The monks who wanted to live according to a stricter interpretation of the Rule of Benedict (c. 565) had to find a site in which to found their new breakaway community and the place they found, known to locals as 'Wormwood', was an uncleared patch of scrub that was notorious as a hideout for bandits.
Taming nature and imposing on it agriculture that could produce food on a regular basis for a fixed community of monks takes us a long way from the ideal of the grazers. Indeed for medieval orders like the Cistercians the notion of monks wandering about the countryside was anathema. The Benedictine ideal of stability demanded that, unless removed or directed by the abbot, the monk remain in the cloister in the same monastery as he had professed until death. The grazer ideal was only possible in a religious culture in which a high degree of fluidity between settled monastic life and peripatetic religious devotion was possible. Always a feature of religious life in the eastern Mediterranean, in the West such fluidity was frowned upon by purists, though it was adopted by some reformers of the 11th and 12th centuries.
This did not mean, however, that Benedictine reformers were not also concerned with austerity of diet. In the 1120s the abbot of the new Cistercian monastery he founded at Clairvaux, the fiery ex-knight Bernard, launched a passionate attack on the practices of what he considered unreformed and degenerate Benedictine monasteries. Although he probably had in mind a wide target including any monastic community that did not interpret the Rule of Benedict as strictly as his own, his ire fell mainly on the monastery of Cluny. He raged over how course followed course at mealtimes of such delicacy and variety that 'you only have to begin sampling the second dish to imagine that you have never tasted fish before'. Bernard was especially disgusted by the way in which food was disguised to resemble some thing else--a practice typical of aristocratic cookery in the Middle Ages, with its meatballs coloured to look like oranges and so on. He extended his displeasure to the use of relishes, spices and condiments. For Bernard these served only to increase the appetite by giving the food a depth of taste that made it something other than what it was. This was a pretence. Monks should be content with the genuine flavour of the food in its plain and simple state. He railed that: 'Food in its pure state holds no attraction, so we mix together ingredients willy-nilly; we despise the natural goodness that God gave us, and use exotic flavours to stimulate our appetites. In this way we can eat more than we need, and still enjoy it.'


In part, Bernard's criticism is that the monks at Cluny and other wealthy monasteries ate too much because they were tempted by the quality and artistry of the food. 'Unfortunate stomach! The eyes feast on colour, the palate on taste, but the poor stomach, indifferent to either but compelled to accept both, is crushed rather than refreshed in consequence.' Monks who overate were, obviously, less able to devote themselves fully to the work of devotion; besides, if a monastic community could afford to indulge the sensual appetites in this way, it was not observing the principle of poverty. But Bernard also reveals something like a philosophy of food in his distrust of complicated cookery. Take, for example, his diatribe against the cooking of eggs at Cluny. Who, he asks rhetorically, could list all the ways in which eggs are mistreated by monastic cooks? They are tossed and turned in the pan, subjected to softening or hardening, served in so many unnecessary ways--fried, baked, even stuffed, combined with other foods or on their own. Fundamentally, Bernard's principle is similar, albeit taken to extremes, to the criticism of a modern writer such as Elizabeth David of overfussiness in the preparation of food. For Bernard every kind of food had a basic 'natural' flavour and this should remain inviolate. He was not advocating eating only raw food but he wanted each substance to retain its own distinctive flavour and taste. This might simply reflect personal whim--some people, after all, dislike foodstuffs to be mixed together on the plate. But it also indicates a more fundamental principle. The use of spices and condiments, besides entailing unnecessary expense, was an attempt to persuade the diner that he was eating something other than what was on the plate. This betrayed a lack of sincerity that was analogous, for example, to the use of secular rhetorical skills in interpreting Scripture rather than using faith and tradition as guides. Bernard distrusted anything that seemed too clever even in the realm of food and cooking.
Bernard and the Cistercians were not alone in their attitude to simplicity in cooking and eating. Although western sources are relatively spare in the detail they provide about the exact kinds of food ideally to be eaten in monasteries, we can be sure that in reforming communities such as the early Cistercians, or in the monastery of that order eventually founded by Stephen at Ohazine in Limousin, the diet was dominated by cereals and vegetables. Cereals largely meant bread made from either wheat, barley or oats, depending on the region, although in northern Europe, where small ale was the standard drink, much of it was also taken in liquid form. Bread was probably eaten every day by monks; indeed the Rule of Benedict specified a pound a day for each monk. Vegetables meant dried or flesh legumes--depending on the season--such as beans, peas and lentils but also onions and leeks, garlic and a variety of 'worts' or greens. These were usually cooked either as a soup ('pottage') or as a dish of plain boiled vegetables. To judge from the much more extensive evidence about diet in Greek Orthodox monastic literature, the food eaten in eastern Mediterranean monasteries was remarkably similar in principle to that in western Europe. The main differences were in the extensive use of olive and other oils as dressings and for cooking and the prevalence of wine in the Mediterranean. More fruit also seems to have been eaten in Greek Orthodox monasteries. Reforming Greek monasteries also retained a sense of the moral value of raw food, insisting that during Lent vegetables should be served uncooked for half the week.


Reformers like Bernard of Clairvaux were trying to restore the ideals of the 'golden age' of monasticism in Egypt, Syria and Palestine between the fourth and seventh centuries. They were influenced by the rediscovery of some of the most influential texts of the monasticism of that period and by none more so than John Cassian's Conferences and Institutes written between AD 420-429. Based on his own experiences of visiting and learning from monks in Egypt, Cassian's writings sought to promote the principles of an ascetic life. For Cassian the ideal state for the monk was one in which he reached a kind of bodily lassitude, so that while the mind was perfectly clear and focused on God, the body and its appetites were all but forgotten. In such a state, food served the most basic function of simply keeping the body alive. The monk should therefore pay scant attention to what he ate, as long as it contained enough nutrition to keep him going. For this reason Cassian distrusted long periods of fasting, which required concentration on the mind/body struggle and reminded the monk of his body. It was better to take a little food every day but not to pay much attention to it.
Did Bernard--or any other monk--ever really achieve this state of perfect indifference to food? Perhaps it is unlikely but an incident recounted after his death indicates that others recognised the ideal in his way of life. The story goes that one day at dinner in the refectory, being thirsty he picked up a container from the table, put it to his lips and drank. Afterwards the other monks noticed that his lips and beard were glistening and realised that he had picked up a container of olive oil rather than his water cup. He did not even appear to have noticed the difference until they told him. Cassian would have approved--but so would dieticians and food experts of our own day who have popularised the use of olive oil rather than saturated fats. There is something, in the end, distinctly contemporary about late Roman and medieval ascetic ideals.

Further reading William Harmless, Desert Christians: An Introduction to the Literature of Early Monasticism (OUP, 2004); Arthur Voobus, History of Asceticism in the Syrian Orient (3 vols, Louvain 1960-88); Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (Faber, 1990); Mayeul de Dreuille, The Rule of St Benedict and the Ascetic Traditions from Asia to the West (Gracewing, 2000); Tim Vivian (trans), Histories of the Monks of Upper Egypt and Life of Onuphrios (Cistercian Studies, 1993); David Williams, The Cistercians in the Early Middle Ages (Gracewing, 1998); The Cistercian World, ed by Pauline Matarasso (Penguin, 1993).
For further articles on this subject, visit: www.historytoday.com/monasticism
Andrew Jotischky is Professor of Medieval History at Lancaster University and the author of A Hermit's Cookbook: Food, Fasting and the Religious Life in the Middle Ages (Continuum, 2011).
Source Citation
Jotischky, Andrew. "Eats roots and leaves: the quest for spiritual virtue through personal austerity drove many Eastern Christians to lead solitary lives as hermits surviving in the wilderness. Andrew Jotischky describes how indifference to food became an integral part of the monastic ideal in the Byzantine era, one revived in the West in the 11th and 12th centuries." History Today 61.4 (2011): 19+. Academic OneFile. Web. 11 June 2011.
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