God and sushi: More theo-nerdery

[LONGREAD: on food, art, and religious experience]

The boundless realm of being, which extends beyond man (Wabi Sabi, Bloomfield)

Back in March I wrote what I called a “theologically suggestive” introduction to my favorite food, in which I tried to explain, to the best of my ability, what makes excellent sushi so transporting. In this sprawling, theo-nerdy follow-up,¹ I will try to explore philosophically what I meant when I wrote, in the spirit of Peter Kreeft’s epigram “There is the music of Johann Sebastian Bach; therefore there must be a God,” that “When I eat really good sushi, I know that God loves me.”

These maxims are not, of course, demonstrative proofs, nor have I any intention here of mounting an apologetical argument for God’s existence! Still, there is a reason that many people in the throes of certain types of overwhelming and ineffable experiences, even nonreligious people, reach for language like “transcendent,” “sublime,” and even “religious experience.”

Such privileged moments may be occasioned by the splendor or immensity of the natural world as well as great art; they may also coincide with great suffering and duress. They may occur in the midst of prayer and meditation or religious rituals, amid a quiet conversation among friends, or at a momentous event such as the birth of a child. Love is a powerful icon of the divine; evil beyond comprehension may also offer a back door—a kind of via infernalis—to awareness of God.

A taxonomy of religious experience is beyond my purpose. I am writing about excellent sushi—and Bach, I guess, and by extension about great food and great art in general.² I want to consider them in terms of what some philosophers consider transcendental qualities of being: qualities today often invoked as goodness, truth, and beauty, or the good, the true, and the beautiful.³ Such qualities are thought to represent something more than human constructions or interpretations of reality: more even, for theologians, than creative ideas that God had. Where such qualities are seen as transcendental, they are understood as aspects or manifestations of being-itself, as revealing or reflecting qualities of ultimate reality—for theologians, of God’s own nature.⁴

“Rays of God” is how Pope Pius XII described them in thoughts addressed to filmmakers on the “ideal film.” Most people, the pope proposed, “ask no more from the cinema than some reflection of the true, the good, the beautiful: in a word, a ray of God.” In the same address, in a more philosophically and poetically elevated register, Pius XII spoke of goodness, truth, and beauty as “refractions, as it were, across the prism of consciousness, of the boundless realm of being, which extends beyond man, in whom they actuate an ever more extensive participation in Being itself.”

In Kreeft’s “argumentum ad Bach” or appeal to Bach, Bach’s compositions, like the best works of art generally, manifest the transcendent quality of beauty. From a metaphysical perspective, according to the 1962 Dictionary of Moral Theology, “art is the actuation of the beautiful, which of itself leads to God.”⁵

Irises (Vincent Van Gogh, 1889)

Beyond moral good

If art is an actuation of the beautiful, what about excellent sushi, or other foods that we experience as transporting and sublime? It may seem counterintuitive at first, but I think they are best understood, at least to start with, as instantiations of the good. Thus Thomas Aquinas says that “goodness properly relates to the appetite (goodness being what all things desire).”⁶

What makes this potentially counterintuitive is our habit of thinking of “goodness” primarily or even exclusively in moral terms. But goodness, while it includes the morally good, is broader than that.⁷ When Genesis 1 depicts God declaring “good” each thing he has created, from light to animals, and ultimately declaring creation as a whole “very good,” it makes an existential claim about the cosmos and everything in it: Created existence itself, derived from God’s own infinite being through the divine act of creation, shares in some way in the goodness of God’s own being. It is good that the universe exists: good in some respect that every creature exists that does exist.

Creation week panels, Sistine Chapel ceiling (R–L: separation of light from darkness; creation of the sun, the moon, and vegetation; separation of waters and dry ground; creation of Adam; creation of Eve)

I say good “in some respect” because different aspects of creation manifest the goodness of being in different ways or degrees. For living creatures in particular, some states realize the goodness of existence to fuller degrees than other states: For example, health represents a wholeness or fullness of being, where disease or injury are diminished or impoverished expressions of existence. (Thus, the existence of cancerous tissue is not “good” in the same way as the existence of healthy tissue!)

This means, in turn, that whatever contributes to the wellbeing of creatures is good for those creatures, in the sense of enhancing their wholeness or fullness of being. Whatever is good in this sense provides a positive motive for behavior (while what is bad provides a negative motive). Thus, sunlight, rain, and earth are good for green plants (which are incentivized, in their vegetative way, to seek sunlight with their leaves and water with their roots); green plants and water are good for herbivores (which are motivated to eat green plants and drink water); eating herbivores and other animals is good for carnivores;⁸ etc.

Goods of this sort, which contribute to the wellbeing of living creatures, can be called “substantive goods.” Animal biology being what it is, the benefits of substantive goods are often accompanied by satisfaction of appetite and appeal to the senses—what can be called “sensible goods” (“sensible” here meaning not “reasonable” but “relating to the senses”).⁹ Eating the food we need to be healthy is accompanied both by the enjoyment of taste and by the satisfaction of appetite.

While our senses are obviously not infallible guides to what is really good for us, they are useful guides: Broadly speaking, most substances that would do us no good at all to eat, or that would actively harm us, don’t appeal to our palates. It is of course true that we can contrive delicious indulgences that combine low or negligible nutritional value with high costs if consumed regularly in large quantities (one would not want, as a rule, to make a meal of cheesecake or ice-cream sundaes, however enjoyable such meals might be). It is also true that some substances that are very harmful to us, like cocaine, hack the pathways in our brains meant to guide us in beneficial directions and disrupt our ability to make healthy choices. These test cases, though, have nothing to do with sushi!

Awe and gratitude

Sushi, after all, is good, wholesome food—neither a decadent dessert nor a mind-altering drug. Yet, for a sushi lover like me, the power of excellent sushi as a “sensible good” goes so far beyond any proportionality, not only to the nutritional value of fish and rice, but to the nutritional value of any meal whatsoever, that it rises to an occasion of wonder, almost of awe, as well as gratitude.

There is a relationship here to the awe and gratitude occasioned by great art, which is similarly gratuitous.

The Water Lily Pond (Claude Monet, 1899)

In their book A Meaningful World: How the Arts and Sciences Reveal the Genius of Nature, Benjamin Wiker and Jonathan Witt propose that the genius of, say, Shakespeare or Newton so greatly exceeds any conceivable evolutionary benefit that it seems to defy Darwinian¹⁰ explanation:

We can understand how slightly faster cheetahs would have a distinct advantage in chasing down gazelles; but if we discovered a distinct species of cheetahs that could run 6,000 mph rather than 60mph, far faster than any gazelle, we would have to look elsewhere for an explanation.¹¹

Likewise a food that tastes 100 times better than anything needs to taste! Describing the omakase at Ai Sushi in my previous post, I used the word “transporting.” If we are “transported” by excellent sushi, or by Bach or Shakespeare, where do we go? “Transported” where?

Saint Teresa of Avila, in a much-quoted poem, wrote, “He who has God lacks nothing: God alone suffices.”¹² I regret that I cannot vouch for the authenticity of another beloved quotation widely ascribed to St. Teresa: “God and chocolate is better than just God.”¹³ If we understand the first proposition to be true and the second, therefore, untrue (and I do, both of chocolate and also of excellent sushi), there is nevertheless a reason why people who may understand the theological truth might nevertheless be fond of the untrue quotation and the sentiment behind it.

God alone suffices, as St. Teresa says, but in this life awareness of God seldom wholly negates for long our awareness of temporal needs. We are creatures of body and soul, and the interrelationship of bodily and spiritual appetites is attested, for example, in the practice of fasting for religious reasons. We fast during Lent, not to feel hungry, but to free ourselves from our normal bodily and psychological food-related expectations, which do subside when not regularly gratified. I would never say one can’t pray well when famished or sleep-deprived, or with a migraine, for example—sometimes the opposite is true—but it’s also entirely possible for bodily needs to crowd out our experience of God.¹⁴

God alone suffices, but even in fasting we need eventually to eat. Our relationship with food, even tasty food, is generally a matter of necessity. Like our very lives and everything in them, all food is a gift of God (it’s why we thank him in grace before meals), but food is a gift that is not gratuitous to us; it is a gift we need, without which we die. This necessary character of food can dull us to its character as a gift.

Eating excellent sushi, I experience—not as an intellectual inference, but directly and overwhelmingly—“giftness” in all its gratuity. Excellent sushi fills me, not just with ecstasy or joy, but with overwhelming gratitude, which places me in the presence of the Giver.

Flickers of white light

Each of the transcendental qualities has the potential, I think, to reach levels of intensity at which the perceived boundaries between the different qualities start to break down. For some, perhaps, the boundaries may not seem particularly hard and fast to begin with; as Keats wrote in Ode on a Grecian Urn:

Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

We are not all poets, and truth does not always strike us as obviously beautiful, nor does beauty speak clearly and reliably of truth. The same is true of goodness—unmentioned by Keats—which is not obviously or intuitively (to borrow from Aquinas) “convertible” with truth or beauty.

Yet a vision of overwhelming beauty—beauty that elicits awe and gratitude; the beauty of Bach, or of an unobstructed view of the Milky Way—may at times speak to us both of truth and of goodness. An encounter with heroic goodness brings tears to our eyes, impressing us both as beautiful beyond words and as emblematic of what is ultimately true. A burning insight into immense truths—the vastness and complex harmony of the cosmos, or the diversity and unity of life on Earth, or the finality of a brilliant logical or mathematical proof—dazzles us with interlocking elegance and fills us with awe and gratitude both that the world works as it does and that we are here to appreciate it, an experience both of beauty and of goodness.

When our awareness of the good, the true, and the beautiful starts to overlap and merge—when we begin to glimpse, in the “refractions across the prism of consciousness,” flickers of unified white light—then, I think, God is close at hand.

Not, I hasten to add, that such sublime moments are anything like mystical experience in the spiritual life! No degree of sanctity, virtue, discipline, or faith is required or implied. Himmler was moved to tears by Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde; Hitler himself reportedly wept during a performance of Lohengrin. Music lovers may debate to what extent the Nazis who celebrated Wagner really understood or appreciated his works, but I have no reason to doubt that they were capable of responding deeply to the exalting power of great art. In this life and as long as one remains in the body, the most depraved person, as alienated from and opposed to God as is humanly possible, may still enjoy aspects of divine reality mediated through created things.¹⁵ To pass a celebrity or a saint on the street is not the same as knowing them, and to feel the thrill of God’s closeness is not the same as being close to God.

I wrote in my first sushi post that the glory of great sushi lies in the “marvelous balance of textures and tastes, no one element predominating.” The firmness of the rice and the softness of the fish, salty sourness balanced against savory umami: I can’t help processing the way it all comes together on an aesthetic level, not just a gastronomic one. After all, proportion, balance, and harmony are fundamental aspects of what we understand as beauty.

Edible beauty? (Sushi 35 West, New York)

Of course it’s true that proportion and harmony are aspects of nearly all food preparation. Even a good bagel with cream cheese means neither too much cream cheese nor too little! Yet I at least don’t feel that aesthetically. I’m not sure I can offer a coherent account of this—possibly because I’m not enough of a foodie, though I may also be constrained by my theory of art.

As an art theorist, I tend not to put much stock in distinctions between “high art” and “low art,” or between “art” and “craft.” Yet when I spread cream cheese on a bagel, that to me is a matter of mere technique, not aesthetics—craft, as you might say. I recognize that when I order an entrée at a nice restaurant, the chef is concerned about presentation, and that art goes into the arrangement of elements on the dish. I appreciate this aesthetically, but my appreciation is purely visual. As I begin to eat, my palate knows what it likes, but I no longer think of that as “art” or process it aesthetically.¹⁶

Probably this is my own limitation; I suppose more savvy foodies have this kind of aesthetic experience of proper proportions (or the lack thereof) eating all kinds of dishes. (If you are a savvy foodie, I welcome your thoughts!) I just know that when I eat great sushi, sometimes I’m acutely, sublimely aware that I’m eating art—that I am, in a sense, tasting beauty as well as goodness.

Am I also tasting truth? To say, as I have, that “when I eat really good sushi, I know that God loves me” sounds to me as close to “tasting truth” as any merely natural experience could—bracketing, needless to say, the Blessed Sacrament as an encounter of another order altogether!

More God thoughts >

More longreads >

Related:

1. I promised in my first piece to write this follow-up; I am happy, three and a half months later, to keep that promise. (I have a long history, alas, of beginning series, letting them lapse alarmingly, and not always finishing them. But I am determined to complete most or all of the unfinished work begun here at Dailies & Sundays!)

2. It is certainly not my view that sushi is the only food capable of offering this kind of experience! There are many amazing cuisines in the world, and palates do differ.

At the same time, I don’t believe that all beloved foods are essentially equal, or that it’s all entirely subjective. Subjectivity and environment are obviously factors. Having lived in the New York area for most of my life, and in the Philadelphia area for a few important years, I have strong opinions about pizza and cheesesteaks—but I’m not about to declare that no one enjoys, say, California pizza as much as I enjoy New York pizza. On the other hand, I will not hesitate to say that no one, no matter how much they may love McDonald’s, enjoys a Big Mac as much as I enjoy even reasonably good sushi!

Which is not the same as saying that eating McDonald’s can never be, in some way, a profound or religious experience! God can meet us via nostalgia, for example, and I suppose that nostalgia is a significant factor in the role McDonald’s plays in many people’s lives. More than that, any created thing can speak to us of the Creator, and epiphanies can occur anywhere and in connection with anything. But an essay on “Big Macs and God” will probably not be as interesting or insightful as an essay on “nostalgia and God.”

Likewise with art; see note 5 below.

3. The conception and enumeration of transcendental qualities has varied significantly over the centuries. (Standard disclaimer: I am a student of the history of philosophy, not an expert.)

As I understand it, for Plato “the Good” is the supreme “form” or “idea,” an eternal, unchanging, trans-physical principle that is reflected or approximated in particular things in the material world. As such, the Good is the source or basis for other forms, including Beauty, though truth, for Plato, was a different category. Aristotle critiqued Plato’s theory of the Good, arguing that goodness is polyvalent and thus not basic; for him “Unity” or “Oneness” was the most fundamental principle of reality.

Among writers who are sometimes designated “Neoplatonic,” Plato’s idea of “the Good” and Aristotle’s idea of “the One” were conflated in a single first principle and source of all reality: a concept at least convergent with monotheism and embraced by many Christian writers. An important, anonymous late fifth- or early six-century Neoplatonic Christian writer known as Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, in a work called The Divine Names, ascribed transcendent value to a wide range of positive terms which he uses in no systematic way. These include “the Beautiful and Good” as well as “the Truth”; others include “Life,” “Light,” “Being,” “Union,” “Order,” and “Wisdom” (all described as “self-existent”), along with “Perfect and One.”

Thomas Aquinas ascribes “four predicates—being, the one, the true, and the good”—to God (particularly associating “the one” with the Father, “the true” with the Son, and “the good” with the Holy Spirit; Quaestiones Disputatae de Veritate or Disputed Questions on Truth, Q1, A1). (N.b. “Being” is not a transcendental; is is that with which transcendental qualities are coexistensive. Thus, for Aquinas the triad of transcendentals is the one, the true, and the good.) Aquinas also maintains a fundamental identity, though a logical distinction, between goodness and beauty (ST I, Q5, A4). The specific triad of the good, the true, and the beautiful may be of modern origin, but the transcendental character of beauty, along with truth and goodness, has some precedent in premodern thought.

4. For more on knowing God through the transcendentals, see “What does it mean to know God?”

5. “Art,” Msgr. Pietro Palazzini, in Dictionary of Moral Theology, ed. Francesco Cardinal Roberti (Westminster, MD: The Newman Press, 1962). Without getting too deep in the question of beauty and subjectivity, I will simply say that, while many factors from culture and environment to temperament shape how we receive works of art as well as beauty in other contexts, I don’t believe that beauty is completely subjective, or that any work of art is just as capable as any other of offering satisfying or powerful asthetic experiences.

My sister appreciates country music more than I do; I appreciate comics more than she does. Yet nobody appreciates even the best comics or country music the way that some people appreciate the best opera. Or, in a popular cinematic vein, I appreciate Jackie Chan more than many people, and many people appreciate John Wick movies more than I do. But the biggest Jackie Chan or John Wick fan in the world (a person whose favorite movie is a Jackie Chan or John Wick movie, who has seen it fifty times) can’t begin to imagine what some people get out of—I won’t say, like, Wong Kar-wai or the Dardennes; let’s pick a contemporary director of comparatively light entertainment, and someone for whom I have little personal affinity: Wes Anderson. I don’t vibe with Wes Anderson, but I know that many people love him in a way that nobody, including me, loves Jackie Chan movies.

Likewise with food; see note 2 above.

6. Aquinas says this in the same passage cited in note 3 above, ST I, Q5, A4!

7. In this part of the discussion I am significantly dependent on moral theologian Germain Grisez’s magnum opus, The Way of the Lord Jesus. Grisez informed my initial graduate-level exposure to moral theology back in the early 1990s at St. Charles Borromeo Seminary in Overbrook, Pennsylvania.

8. Being eaten by carnivores is not, of course, “good for” the herbivores, which are motivated to try to escape! Again, this discussion of “good” is pre-moral; I am not saying that herbivores being eaten by carnivores “should”—or for that matter “should not”—happen. Moral good is simply not part of the discussion at this stage (and I’m not going to get to it in this essay!).

9. As intelligent creatures endowed with free will, we may approach substantive goods under another heading, that of intelligible goods. For my purposes here I’m just interested in getting the ideas on the table, not developing a coherent taxonomy!

10. I fear the authors do appear to be “Intelligent Design” creationists. I am not; as I’ve said, there is no apologetic for God’s existence here. (I am much more sympathetic in principle to the material in the book dealing with “fine-tuning” arguments concerning the basic laws that make possible a universe like ours.) I give full weight to the “seems” in “seems to defy Darwinian explanation.” To me an argument about meaning is an argument about interpretation, not phenomenological explanation.

11. Benjamin Wiker & Jonathan Witt, A Meaningful World: How the Arts and Sciences Reveal the Genius of Nature (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2006), 86.

12. Here is the text of the poem in English translation and in the Spanish original, along with Teresa’s original handwritten text.

Let nothing disturb you,
Let nothing frighten you,
All things pass away:
God never changes.
Patience obtains all things.
He who has God
Lacks nothing;
God alone suffices.

Nada te turbe
nada te espante
todo se pasa,
Dios no se muda
la paciencia
todo lo alcanza
quien a Dios tiene
nada le falta
solo Dios basta

13. Teresa of Avila lived in Spain right around the time of the introduction of chocolate, so the alleged quote has that going for it, at least! I suspect it’s one of those things that the person should have said, but didn’t. In any case, it’s a kind of quotation that I think is ideally associated with a saint who is both a woman and a Doctor of the Church.

14. A couple of perspectives on the body–soul relationship and spiritual vs. bodily appetites:

15. I am not sure that moral depravity does not impair one’s capacity to appreciate the good, the true, and the beautiful in created things. (I am quite sure that sanctity does not automatically enhance this capacity!)

16. For the record, I have had memorable non-sushi food experiences! I’d be hard pressed to think of a world cuisine I’ve tried that don’t enjoy. I well recall, for example, a seafood ravioli dish that I ate in Rome, in Trastevere, on the last night of my first visit in 2009. Every bite was pure bliss. (If I’m honest, probably a lot of things went into that moment beyond the dish itself.) Was the dish an aesthetic experience for me? I don’t remember it that way. Again, probably my own limitation!