The Hungry Soul, by Leon R Kass:
Douglas, Mary
TABLE MATTERS THE HUNGRY SOUL Eating and the Perfecting of Our Nature Leon R. Kass, M.D. Free Press, $24.95,248 pp. Mary Douglas The author freely avows that this is a strange volume. The...
...The Eucharist is a doing, kashroot is a refraining from, but it is not negative...
...Surely he will manage to conclude with bringing physics and astronomy, mathematics too perhaps, under the single umbrella...
...in popular esteem...
...Alas...
...The initial idea is splendid, a meditation on eating...
...Taking consecrated bread together in Communion is a privileged ritual act...
...Kass notices that it is paradoxical that the nice, innocent animals get to be eaten, and the nasty, unclean ones go free...
...The Hungry Soul's section on table manners and dining is about the secular endowment of meaning by rituals of eating...
...Kass is the author of Toward a More Natural Science: Biology and Human Affairs...
...Such vast libraries are filled with theological books on nourishing and feeding, that if he had read them he would hesitate to claim originality for the thesis of the hungry soul...
...Kass writes well about the impurity of so-called leprosy balancing the impurity of food: the former is about what comes out of the body, the latter about what goes into it...
...How far will the metaphor take him...
...I suspect that apart from not reading biblical criticism or anthropology, the author does not read Christian devotional works either...
...Instead of using nature for evidence of the existence and attributes of God, as did William Paley, Kass seems about to find testimony for human meaning by exploring the grand metaphor of consuming and being consumed...
...He answers by saying that being eaten is not a punishment, but just part of the whole process of living, as he explained at the beginning...
...He has evidently not been interested in the meat prohibitions of other than biblical societies and in modern criticisms that have been brought to the reading he gives of Leviticus, by Walter Houston who recently examined anthropological writings on the classification of animals and rules about edibility, and by Jacob Milgrom in the first volume of his commentary on Leviticus in the Anchor Bible series...
...Usually in the anthropological record of eating customs, the animals which are not to be eaten are honored, not abhorred or despised...
...Then Kass turns to the Bible, where the theme of eating flourishes, but he turns to prohibitions on consuming certain kinds of animals...
...The words common, or profane, might better apply to the forbidden animals than the words defiled or unclean...
...But why are they forbidden...
...Unless he does manage a more comprehensive synthesis than already widely on offer on the metaphor of consumption, his vaunted claim to philosophical originality is void...
...The theme is developed as for a humanist pulpit, with the undisciplined scope, weak logic, and strong emotional appeal too often evident in spiritual writing...
...the big theme soon loses momentum...
...A reviewer has no reason to complain about gaps in a work of inspiration motivated by a strong desire to address our modern, moral predicament...
...But isn't the contrast with Christianity well worth exploiting...
...But suppose that God is telling his people to be compassionate toward beings which lack the normal number of leg joints or toes, and says not to eat them because they are disadvan-taged...
...Banality takes over with an anthropology of human eating behavior, ritual, hospitality, table manners and all...
...So what does defiling mean...
...The altar is consecrated, the table is consecrated, the animals which are not sacralized to the table or the altar are common, profane, and so forbidden...
...Does the author realize that he has made a U-turn, or does he think that he is still pursuing eating...
...The hopeful reader feels launched on a modern version of nineteenth-century natural theology...
...but in the traditional interpretation of the words used in the Bible they are rejected as "abominable...
...It is good to find a writer who enjoys and defends Leviticus...
...He acknowledges the sources of this interpretation, but thinks that he is the first to glimpse the possibility that the logic of the biblical classification of animals might have "universal anthropological meaning...
...Kass goes along with the idea established for over two thousand years that the forbidden animals are not eaten because they are defiling...
...Yet God made them and Genesis says he looked at them all and found them good...
...Its intention is to give meaning to modern life through a sermon on nourishment...
...But perhaps there may be something more to say if we can treat The Hungry Soul in light of eu-charistic theology as seen from a biblical and so from a Jewish standpoint...
...First Adam and Eve were told not to eat the fruit of the tree, then Noah was told not to eat blood, then we come to chapter 11 of Leviticus with the long list of forbidden animals which forms the main part of the Mosaic dietary laws...
...He misses the chance of seeing the body as the model of the covenant, but his general enthusiasm is welcome as a move to reinstate the third book of the Pentateuch in popular esteem...
...honoring the Mosaic law by refraining from forbidden blood and animals is a continuous ritual act...
...As the prototypical form of incorporation and assimilation, eating is part of a continuum that starts with transformations at the level of cellular biology and ends at the dinner table...
...The first part sets the homely act in a grand cosmological context...
...It is important to keep this distinction between consuming and abstaining in mind...
...The title suggests a book of devotion...
...The list of biblical animals picked out either for food or for rejection, Kass writes, gives matter for pious reflection...
...The way that The Hungry Soul has been arranged makes the doing, in the first place, and the not doing in the second, both sacraments of eating...
...That would be in keeping with the great chapters central to Leviticus on God's justice...
...And more surprisingly, he is not interested in traditional Jewish criticisms of the very passages he is analyzing...
...The theme of the chapter on the Bible is sanctification by curbing what may be eaten...
...The contrast between sacred and profane allows for danger to come from any unprepared mixing of the two...
...True enough...
...Kass treats the dietary laws in a fairly conventional way, starting with the order of creation as given in Genesis, then saying that the forbidden animals are declared unclean because they exemplify anomalies in that order, by not having the right hoofs or legs...
Vol. 122 • March 1995 • No. 5
