This is a delightful piece, especially as my husband and I also truly delight in sushi as well. Other than a favorite local Italian restaurant for special occasions, and a family/budget-friendly Mexican restaurant our kids like, we rarely eat out anywhere else but sushi. I do love discovering new restaurants, but I think I love sushi more! I will savor this article and read it to my husband this week.
You mentioned the idea of nostalgia - are there any plans for a future piece exploring it? I recently came across the Welsh word "hiraeth", and it has been haunting me. My rather unique childhood and childhood home is tinged with so much beauty and goodness and also an almost overwhelming amount of emotional and spiritual trauma. I wonder if nostalgia can be considered a synonym to hiraeth as, for me, it seems not quite capable of describing what it is I experience when I think of my childhood. I would love to read an article delving more deeply into the idea of nostalgia.
Thanks so much for your thoughtful reply, Heidi! And you read the footnotes too, as your comment about nostalgia reveals!
I have no plans to write about nostalgia anytime soon, but it’s definitely a possibility at some point in the future. A few converging lines of thought in my mind and my life point in that direction…
Thank you, Steven, for this amazingly thoughtful piece—and so full of joy! I can't wait to read it again. (Well, I'll have to, but I'll get back to it asap!)
I’m beyond gratified—overwhelmed, in all truth—by your response, Benjamin. I honestly thought of this as one of my more niche pieces, but it means a lot to me, and I can’t tell you what it means for it to connect like this!
With amusement I will be forwarding this to my devout mother, who is convinced sushi will one day kill my husband and who has forbidden me from feeding it to my children!
I hope it gives her another perspective, Janalyn! As for the safety of sushi in the US, she may benefit more from knowing that nearly all sushi sold in the U.S. has been frozen, and generally flash-frozen for at least a week, definitely killing all parasites.
Something I've pondered when reading your sushi pieces: To what degree would you (or wouldn't you) be comfortable ascribing the extent of your love for sushi, or more specifically the transcendent experience portion, to the self-tuning *caused* by that love?
It seems that becoming a connoisseur of something requires leaning into a self-reinforcing cycle. The more we like something, the more tuned we are to the experience of it, and the more focused on and open to the experience we are. Which makes us love it more, and so on around the cycle. Of course, there are human limitations that keep the cycle from continuing infinitely.
I like good sushi a great deal, but if I'm looking for a transcendent food experience, I generally have to look elsewhere. :-) If you are in Chicago some time, I can show you maybe the best drinking chocolate in the United States.
“Of course, there are human limitations that keep the cycle from continuing infinitely…” And also limitations in the objects of our love! Some things continue to reward continued pursuit with ever greater dividends; others do not. Some movies are enjoyable at first, and even reward a rewatch or two, but after that begin to reveal their limitations, while others prove themselves able to reveal new layers and insights after dozens of viewings. I can enjoy a Big Mac like anyone else, but if a Big Mac is someone’s favorite food in the world, their gastronomic universe is cramped and impoverished, and they don’t really understand how amazing food can be.
Sushi is a whole universe unto itself; you can spend your life exploring it, and it will keep rewarding you. The same is true, for example, of wine and cheese (both jointly and severally!). Chicken wings, not so much. I love chicken wings—within normal parameters, the hotter the better—but you can learn everything there is to know about chicken wings in relatively short order, and your 500th dish of chicken wings probably will not make you significantly happier than your 50th dish. Pizza is more complicated than chicken wings, but the difference between a top-notch pizza and a mediocre pizza is, I take it, arithmetic, not exponential—there is a reason people say that even when pizza isn’t great, it’s still pretty good—and I doubt if pizza quality per se makes anyone orders of magnitude happier than it makes me. (I have an Italian friend who disagrees, but he also claims, almong other things, that white pizza is not real pizza, so I take his claims with a grain of salt.)
This all sounds reasonable, though it prompts the suggestion that perhaps chicken wings could offer the same rewards, if as much time and effort went into their development. Alternately, perhaps it isn't a fair comparison. Chicken wings seem to be a much more specific food topic than all of sushi. I think a fairer comparison would be, say, the several kinds of tuna nigiri. Perhaps chicken wings offer the same limited depth as that. If we're going to take a category as broad as sushi, I'd put it up with "American barbecue". I've had some *extraordinary* BBQ, and it's a topic I'd happily explore at great length!
FWIW, Brian, I almost included American barbecue as a connoisseur-type food! 😄
As for tuna nigiri … I mean even if we limit ourselves to a single tuna species (bluefin tuna), and a single _cut_ of tuna (toro, akami, chutoro, otoro), toro nigiri (let’s say) is still vastly more complex than chicken wings. Was the fish spiked within the first minute of capture to prevent depletion of ATPs? Was it quickly gutted and cleaned? Was it flash-frozen for at least a week? Has it been properly aged (for toro, up to 15 days!) and monitored during aging, with the paper or cloth changed frequently? Is the rice good short-grain rice, properly prepared, cooked, and seasoned with an appropriate salted and sugared vinegar? These are just the bare bones.
I know chicken wings can be, e.g., fried or baked, say, and there are different sauces and so forth. In my experience, though, chicken wings at Outback Steakhouse and chicken wings at a nicer steakhouse are both good, and I’ve never heard of anyone claiming that the wings somewhere else are orders of magnitude better, or insisting on driving an hour for the one restaurant that serves the most sublime wings in the state.
I originally wrote toro nigiri, and then changed it to tuna in general, because I felt I was being unfair to the sushi! 😄 Toro has always been my least favorite of the common nigiris, because is has such a mild, sometimes even bland, flavor. So it seemed unfair to compare it to wings, where at least they are aren't bland. I'd also claim that there's roughly one order of magnitude difference between "junk" wings (soak some indifferently breaded, indifferently cooked wings in frank's) and "good" wings (well breaded, well cooked wings, with a sauce made to actually have layers of flavor and a proper mouth-feel). But, yeah, I agree with you that sushi (and BBQ) are far deeper, far more rewarding subjects!
This is actually something where I have a bit of expertise, philosophically speaking. (As for sushi, I spent $20 on it once and I think I'd rather have Mexican.)
Although I get why people want to elevate beauty, I think it is somewhat misguided. Not calling it a transcendental would clarify many of the problems that you're exploring here and have no answer for. A solution would be to say that beauty is not a transcendental per se but instead our response to an experience of the transcendental. (Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.)
I know this sounds somewhat negative, but I mean it in a very positive way. You get at something very true when you say that the distinctions between the transcendental begin to disappear the closer you get to them. This is because they are not just emanations of being but convertible with it! The one, the good, thisness, truth are all really just the same thing: existence. To call a thing beautiful is to recall having had the experience of all of these walls of distinction collapsing, things like scales having fallen from your eyes. But I think that in the real moment of experiencing beauty, the last thing we want to do is to talk about it. Rather, we forget ourselves. We forget everything except that moment. Shades of heaven and its eternity?
When you enjoy sushi and have what we call, by extension, a transcendent experience, do you really feel like you could write about it? Or do you just feel that same explosion of insight and joy which in other moments of your life you translate to the creative impulse? And then once you start talking to soon it starts to fade, dissipate? You can talk about it, but that's usually best in order to recall the experience and feel that joy again, rather than increase the joy you're feeling in the moment. That's my experience of the sublime. I think finding the distinction between the transcendentals and beauty does not run down beauty but rather elevates the experience which beauty is attempting to identify. But none of this is possible if beauty is, properly, a transcendental---if it is convertible with being. That is the definition of a transcendental. It's not simply something beyond us---so is "the nearest tree." It is something which is Is-ness, is Being.
I'm aware the thrust of modern theology kind of runs against this, and I'm grateful for the citation of pseudo-Dionysius. (There is so much bare insistence among Catholics that beauty is a transcendental without any understanding what a transcendental is, so much insistence that it's patristic, but you're the first person to have done the work to show it rather than just insist!) But beauty does involve a real distinction between the observer and the observed. As much as that barrier seems to evaporate in the experience of beauty, as much as beauty describes an experience of intimate communion with ultimate reality, beauty is not inherent to the thing itself, it is not one with the thing itself. It is the point of contact between one and another, but it is not the other!
(And this is why the Mass must be beautiful, why liturgy is far deeper than words but includes ritual and a beautiful setting. It must, it ought. It, too, is an intimate experience of communion with ultimate reality, so it should act like it.)
I am, as you probably gathered, familiar with the view (or with different forms of the view) that beauty is not a transcendental. Being a student rather than an expert in this area, I confess I was surprised to learn that the “goodness, truth, and beauty” triad is modern; from its widespread proverbial usage (as in Pius XII’s address) I naively supposed, as I suspect is not uncommon, that I would certainly find it in Scholastic philosophy, if not Greek philosophy. (Another insight I didn’t go into: It seems that, prior to the cultural triumph of this triad, beauty was sometimes identified with the good [as in Aquinas], and sometimes [in later writers] with truth—but not with both.)
I am open to the idea that beauty is not properly a transcendental, and I am willing to consider some formulations of the maxim that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” but not if this means sheer aesthetic subjectivism. Obviously beauty, like goodness and even truth, is variously perceived by various observers; we disagree on questions of truth and goodness as well as beauty. But I also think that at least some disagreements or debates about aesthetic questions, like some debates about questions of truth and goodness, are debates about reality, in which some views have more actual merit than others.
Perhaps our disagreements, or different perspectives, about beauty start here: You say “To call a thing beautiful is to recall having had the experience of all of these walls of distinction collapsing, things like scales having fallen from your eyes.” I am not at all sure this account, at least as I understand it, corresponds to my experience!
Certainly beauty, like goodness, *can* herald us in the type of overwhelming, epiphanic experience that I tried to evoke, and that you suggest. Yet—also like goodness—beauty not only can, but overwhelmingly does most often meet us in pleasant, wholesome ways that we appreciate without breaking our stride, and often without much attending to them.
The empty tankard at my left recently contained iced sen-cha green tea. It was good, though I confess I drank it more or less unthinkingly. I like this brand of sen-cha (both hot and iced); I brewed it myself; I was thirsty when I poured it, and I’m not thirsty now. I’m sure I enjoyed it on some level, and certainly I have benefitted from it.
A little further to my left, outside my window, I can see trees: one in my yard, and others in the park across the street. The trees are lovely. I often see them more or less unthinkingly, though I suspect that I frequently benefit from them on some level without consciously noting them. Even now, consciously appreciating their beauty, I am neither having nor recalling an epiphanic experience connected with them. I think the beauty in my life, like the goodness, most often meets me in this kind of unassuming way. If this doesn’t undermine your account, I’m not sure I understand you!
I am intrigued by Aquinas’s formulation that “beauty and goodness in a thing are identical fundamentally,” as “based on the form,” though they differ logically, for goodness properly relates to the appetite,” while “beauty relates to the cognitive faculty.” I am accustomed to thinking, within the framework of the popular triad, of truth as apprehended by reason; (moral) goodness by conscience; and beauty by the aesthetic faculty. All three attract us: We are drawn to want to know truth, to choose (moral) goodness, and to appreciate beauty. Within Aquinas’s terms, this could be understood to mean that truth, moral goodness, and beauty are all reducible to or aspects of goodness (Plato’s view?). I can live with that way of thinking until something better comes along.
Just for the sake of my bona fides, let me tell you that I have read pretty much everything you've published over years. (And don't mind the username; I used it when I wanted to be a contrarian over at pitt.substack.com.) So when I am talking about the highest and greatest experience of beauty, I am drawing on what I know you believe about the greatest of all sushis, as well as how you have defended the true art of artistic criticism. (The sommelier can appreciate the finer wine that the alcoholic chugs down, waxing poetic with praise that the other cannot understand.) And so I'm looking towards the finest of things and the finest of experiences in order to draw out the meaning of the lesser kinds of experience. In principle, it is by the greatest example a thing that we know the thing, I believe---"prime analogue." So I use the greatest experience of beauty to get at what I think beauty is. It is a doorway to a little death, in this case the experience of the ultimate transcendent. In a lesser way, the word beauty is used of lesser experiences as well.
If your question is why it is that you can think a thing beautiful but never have had that great experience of its beauty, especially natural things--- it's a fallen world. Why is the silent planet silent? If our hearts were not so dim, perhaps we would see the glory of God even in the tree. If the "dew and hoarfrost" blesses the Lord, and if all creation cries out to testify to the existence of God, then much more the living tree, image of the Garden and the cross, at every moment in scripture a theophany. And the quenching of thirst? There is a harmony there between you and the woman at the well by the simple fact of having a thirst. We physically thirst, I believe, in order that we can understand the spiritual thirst for Christ. (And of course, that we may quench the physical or spiritual thirst of others.)
In the same way Christian morality can be explained by extending a perfect love of family towards everyone one meets, I believe that a Christian love of natural things created at the hand of God terminates in the ecstasy of being one with being, though undoubtedly this ecstasy is only known in flashes until heaven. (And, strangely, the dark night of the soul is the gift of God to the ones he most loves in this life, the withdrawal of all experiences of consolation! I think this is because we might mistake the ecstasy as the point, when the point is not the feeling of Joy, but the God with whom and from whom one has that joy.)
It occurs to me, though this isn't at a point of discussion at the moment, that the way we have ecstasy in a fictional sub-created universe is in its moral verisimilitude, that it has a ring of truth which is satisfying in itself, depicted with elegance, simplicity, purpose, honesty, insight. Beauty is the experience that points beyond to the ultimate, and it requires no more and no less than for the artist, like John the Baptist, to decrease so that the infinite may increase. How many movies are overstuffed? How many single panel comic strips are undercooked? The artist of trope goes mad finding the words in which to bottle the ineffable and then says just what he needs to. Didn't Father Brown once defend a poet falsely accused of murder by pointing out that the poet had every reason to stare all night at the thing he was trying to describe?
I find myself nodding in agreement with most of what you write about our ecstatic and non-ecstatic experiences of beauty, goodness, and art. I am not *sure* you say anything here to contradict my working idea, which I think echoes that of Plato, that the supreme transcendental is the Good, and that both Truth and Beauty are species of the God. (This working idea will not stop me from adducing the Good, the True, and the Beautiful as a triad! I think this formulation is useful, even if we decide that it not the most technically correct way of approaching the subject.)
You say “Beauty is the experience that points beyond to the ultimate,” but you appear to say this also of the Good, specifically of the good of a drink that quenches thirst. So if the Good the the Beautiful are in fundamentally different categories of being—or, rather, if the Good is convertible with Being and the Beautiful is not—I am not sure I see that argued here.
Aquinas says the Good relates to appetite inasmuch as it is what is desired, while the beautiful relates to the intellect inasmuch as it pleases on being seen. It seems to me that to whatever extent we recognize something as good, we should be pleased on seeing it. If so, it would seem to follow that the Good and the Beautiful are coextensive—per Pseudo-Dionysius, “the Beautiful and Good”!
Hang on, I was using your examples, and I meant to use them as examples of experiences that point beyond to an ultimate. I consider beauty the name for the experience rather than a description of a quality of the thing itself.
The way I understand how transcendentals work means that all acts of existence are in fact good, real, one, and all the rest. The difficulty for beauty is that beauty seems to evolve two acts of existence, a perceiver and a perceived.
What would it even mean for it an existent thing to be beautiful in itself? The old joke is that Thomists either use the example of a dog or the example of a tree, and we're talking about trees so let's stick with that. (Stick? Har har har.) What makes a tree beautiful? When I start to think about what makes a tree beautiful *in itself* all of a sudden I'm talking about inner harmonies and inner light and coherence and unity. I can't say correspondence to some other, because then beauty becomes a category that includes more than one act of existence. But is inner harmony or light really beauty? I don't think that's what people mean by the word beauty. I think they mean what you experience when you recall the most sublime of sushi.
Now that I think about it, the experience of beholding a tree is a theophany because it points beyond the tree itself, bringing 1) the observer of a tree to the threshold of 2) the one he perceives through 3) the tree. As I write this, I realize that rather than just two, there are three in the truly sublime. There is the truth, there are the observers, and there are---I use this word advisedly---the media.
So again, when I think of aesthetic experience and the sublime, I think most precisely beauty should be discussed as a gateway experience. I'm doing this we can elevate what art does and what natural beings are by denying rather than asserting that beauty is a transcendental.
There is one way around this. If beauty is, rather than an experience, a quality of being a gateway to the one, then you might have something that could be a transcendental. But then is God a gateway to himself? I fear to tread too lightly on matters that relate to God's inner life, especially if it would collapse God's being into being just like created things. It might even collapse God's simplicity, or rip apart the Trinity, depending on which direction you take the reflection.
You consider beauty the name of an experience rather than a description of a quality of the thing itself. In this approach, if someone says, of Bach or of an unobstructed view of the Milky Way, or of Van Gogh, Michelangelo, or Monet, “I don’t see what’s so beautiful about it,” this is merely an entirely subjective and incontestible assertion that they happened not to have an experience of a particular kind. Yet I think most of us would diagnose in such aesthetic non-responsiveness to such stimuli as these nothing less than a kind of blindness. If we consider beauty the name of an experience, that still leaves us to account for the reality that some stimuli are more obviously, so to speak, “beauty-apt” than others, and some so overwhelmingly “beauty-apt” that a kind of blindness is necessary not to perceive it. I think that when we talk about “beauty,” most people are thinking of that quality of what I am within your approach calling “beauty-aptness,” rather than the experience of that quality.
St. Thomas says that goodness relates to appetite, and defines the good as that which all beings desire. But this definition immediately invokes a desirer and a thing desired, an appetitive subject and an appetizing object. The same two acts of existence that you highlight in the beautiful meet us in the good! And I think your other objections to beauty as a transcendental likewise apply in various ways to goodness. That’s because I tend to think of beauty as a mode of goodness rather than a mode of experience. What if we say that a tree is good, to begin with, because God wanted it (“appetite”), and a tree is beautiful because it pleases God (“the cognitive faculty”)?
Your “gateway to himself” paradox is, I think, easily resolved by recognizing that in God all descriptors and categories—beauty, but also good, love, mind, power, etc.—apply analogously. The same difficulties in trying to understand the beauty of God apply to the goodness of God only if we try to apply them univocally. I would say that beauty is a “gateway to the One” insofar as we encounter it, so to speak, outside the One; within the One, it is *that to which* beauty in created things is a gateway. The same of goodness. That’s how I understand the concept of a transcendental. It is convertible with being, yes, but this quality is what enables us to arrive at insights about infinite and eternal Being-itself.
The most interesting question here I think is what constitutes some things having more beauty-aptness than others. (I do think my paradox stands, so we might have to just agree to disagree. At the moment, only knows that I'd rather be watching even Aladdin than Frozen 2 with my little girls--- so there is something to artistic merit being real, and I hope you don't think I've ever disputed that!)
In answering the question of what makes some things more apt for an experience by which we call something beautiful--- and not just satisfactory, or coherent with our biases, or important for our political purposes, or effective as propaganda---I think it's important to distinguish beauty from those other purposes of art. But at the same time, those lesser experiences are mistakenly called beautiful not because beauty is all subjective but because they have something in common with beauty. What do they have in common? I would say it's a pointing towards another. What they lack is pointing towards the true other. This part is not subjective. You either have the sublime experience or not, and some things are not disposed to sublimity. All natural things do point to God, because they were made by him, so the only things I can think which are necessarily ineffective are, appropriately, arts (or crafts or technology---artifacts, technically.)
But even among things which point to the true other, some things may be more effective than others. But the effectiveness of the beauty oriented art does seem to vary from person to person. Arrival was my film of the year, but for some reason La La Land just killed instead. At the same time, Eminem's Stan could strike that beauty chord for some people when I know it would not have worked on Pope Benedict, a man very sensitive to the call of beauty. Stan is one of the greatest songs of a genre, and some people don't even consider it a song. I don't think this is because of some tyranny of subjectivism but because arts do in particular operate on appearances and cultural expectations, and all sorts of other "noise." There is no shortage of genre-aware or metacritical entertainment, and I don't think that's particularly new. It's the whole genre of comedia del arte. (Sp)
Let's take a particular example, if you have the time: Is the Divine Comedy beautiful? I think this is uncontested. But at the same time you have to translate its language unless you are medieval and Italian, you also have to translate its ties to a variety of other works of art, particularly those of Virgil, as well as the history of medieval Florence (IIRC). Now, THAT the Divine Comedy is beautiful is probably accessible to people who don't have all that contextual knowledge. But why does contextual knowledge of those things enhance your aesthetic appreciation of the Divine Comedy? Why does contextual knowledge INCREASE the aptness of the Divine Comedy towards a sublime experience? I don't see a way to explain The interrelative nature of aptness towards beauty as convertible with being, and the one, without falling into the same paradox that turns being into a collection of parts, which contradicts the one as a transcendental. And if the one is not a transcendental, things do not have identity! That dog won't hunt.
For more contemporary examples, I think Babette's Feast and Arrival are so enhanced by having the cheat sheet of divine revelation in mind that the aptness of those works of art towards beauty increases beyond, apparently, even the artists' sense of what those works really mean. I don't think Villeneuve has any particular religious commitment, and I know the director of Babette's Feast didn't. And yet, those tellings of those stories are deeply sublime. There's something happening that's truly mysterious in the subcreative process in artists of genius. They worship the God they do not know, so to speak. The law is written on their hearts?
Perhaps the aptness of a thing towards sublimity, and the definition of beauty, is its degree of being, its degree of unity, and its degree of the rest of the transcendentals, while at the same time only being accessed through a variety of contingent cultural barriers that have to be bypassed and even evaporate. I can't imagine what it would take to like Noh theater---but I know what it takes to adore Frozen 2 is a complete lack of taste.
First, "possibly because I’m not enough of a foodie" -- to which I say, thank God for that! Like you, I love food (including the notion of it as a gift from God, and something whose aesthetic qualities can foster my gratitude to God just as art does) -- eating it, reading and writing about it, cooking it (and I've been a professional cook/caterer). But as for foodie, I am* fully team Fran Lebowitz: "I despise the term 'foodie.' I mean, how is this a personality? 'I like food' —how original. Do you also like air? Water? Shelter?"
Second, thanks for this thoughtful and thought-provoking column, which has given me lots to think about. I'll just mention Teresa of Avila: she naturally figures prominently in my "Humor and Spirituality" course, which has helped me come to the conclusion that in addition to just generally being one of my favorite saints, she is probably one of the most prolific sources of "we don't know if she really said this, but she could have/should have" quotes. I confess I had not heard (but I love it!) the one about chocolate you use here, but it reminds me of another food-related favorite, namely, "There is a time for penance, and a time for partridge." Try as I might, I have never seen this sourced any more specifically than "... the story is told that she ..."
Anyway, thanks, and yes, 35 West sounds like the next right thing!
Haha! I confess I have a bit more sympathy for the term “foodie,” Michaelangelo, insofar as the term overlaps with “gourmet,” but also connotes someone who is interested in the culinary arts, food cultures around the world, food sourcing, etc.
I appreciate Drescher’s joke, but with air and water we mostly only ask that it be clean. With shelter, people spend their lives studying everything from history of architectural styles to challenges of affordable housing.
But food is different. With food, we have not only a gut that needs to be sated, but a palate that God created for enjoyment. And in a world with billions of people, it is fitting that different people should devote themselves in different ways the study of just about everything, from the history of architectural styles to the social lives of octopuses, stamp collecting to marathon running, oil painting to opera, philosophy to theology. Even comic strip technique!
When a person is passionate about something, they can potentially make that subject interesting even to other people with little or no interest per se in that topic. For example, I have virtually no interest in sports, but I loved to listen to the late Frank Deford talk about sports on NPR. He loved sports and loved to share what he cared about and what he knew, and that made it interesting to me, and makes my world and my outlook a little broader.
Knowing all about as many kinds of good food from all around the world as possible is absolutely a worthy pursuit, and one potentially worth sharing with other people. It is not my pursuit, but I am more interested in good sushi and what goes into making it so good than nearly anyone else I know. I am also more interested in philosophy and theology than most people I know. The Venn diagram overlap of people who care both about sushi and about philosophy and theology as much as I do is small. Still, I hope that by bringing my passion to this subject in this piece, I have brought a little glimpse to some readers of topics they might not otherwise have much interest, and perhaps made their world a little broader.
Sorry to nitpick (although I know you too value correct citation), but the quote is not from Fran Drescher, comic genius though she is -- it's from Fran *Lebowitz*. I have admired her writing since I first heard of her way back when I was in high school, and I also enjoyed Martin Scorsese's recent series with her, "Pretend It's a City."
And in perfect honesty, I have nothing against the characteristics of the "foodie" as you described them, and in fact embody lots of them myself -- I just think the *word* is stupid, and that's probably what Fran was really cranky about, as well.
HAHAHA! Oh my, that’s the funniest mistake I’ve seen to date as a consequence of Substack’s weird handling of comments in the browser client. At the moment I’m using the mobile app on an airplane, and while I’m typing I can see the whole comment thread. In my browser, though, IIRC, clicking “reply” hides everything except the comment field, and either I open the thread in a separate tab and go back and forth or else I just try to remember what I’m replying to. In this case I guess I mentally filed your quote under “Fran” and then stopped, which is so funny it’s worth the embarrassment of such a silly mistake!
“Gourmet” is respectable to the point of decadence; “foodie” is scruffy and colloquial. I don’t mind it. Any ideas for an alternate coinage??
Alas, none. "Gourmet" is also, to me, too elitist to describe the many people [like me] who don't have a degree from the CIA or a financier's bank account, but "foodie" just sounds lazy. Like, "How long did you think before settling on that designation?" But no, I don't have a recommendation for a replacement.
On Fran Drescher, my favorite bit from her comes from an interview once, where she said that everybody knows she's from New York because "I sound like traffic --" and then emits a series of honks that sound exactly like both a bunch of taxis at a gridlocked intersection, and a parody of herself.
In Note 6, you said “Aquinas says this in the same passage cited in note 1 above, ST I, Q5, A4!”
But you cited that passage in Note 3, not in Note 1.
I mentioned this because Note 3 caught my attention before any other part of the article, specifically what was said of Saint Thomas Aquinas (my patron saint), and it got me wanting to look up those links and internalize what was stated in the note.
Once again, thank you very much, Deacon! And please pray for a friend of mine—I wish to respect his privacy, but he’s going through a difficult situation and needs prayers and guidance.
Well … it was note 1 when I wrote what became note 6! 😄 As the notes section expands, I try to catch those errant references, but sometimes I miss them.
I will remember your friend in our evening family devotions.
You know what’s funny? I actually considered the possibility that that was the reason for the mistake! 😄 In fairness, you had a lot of notes (not that I’m complaining!), so it’s understandable that you might miss something.
Thank you very much, Deacon. God bless you and your family. 🙂
This is a delightful piece, especially as my husband and I also truly delight in sushi as well. Other than a favorite local Italian restaurant for special occasions, and a family/budget-friendly Mexican restaurant our kids like, we rarely eat out anywhere else but sushi. I do love discovering new restaurants, but I think I love sushi more! I will savor this article and read it to my husband this week.
You mentioned the idea of nostalgia - are there any plans for a future piece exploring it? I recently came across the Welsh word "hiraeth", and it has been haunting me. My rather unique childhood and childhood home is tinged with so much beauty and goodness and also an almost overwhelming amount of emotional and spiritual trauma. I wonder if nostalgia can be considered a synonym to hiraeth as, for me, it seems not quite capable of describing what it is I experience when I think of my childhood. I would love to read an article delving more deeply into the idea of nostalgia.
Thank you so much for your writing!
Thanks so much for your thoughtful reply, Heidi! And you read the footnotes too, as your comment about nostalgia reveals!
I have no plans to write about nostalgia anytime soon, but it’s definitely a possibility at some point in the future. A few converging lines of thought in my mind and my life point in that direction…
P.S. Heidi, did you also read the first piece, which is more specifically about sushi in particular and why it’s so amazing? :-)
Thank you, Steven, for this amazingly thoughtful piece—and so full of joy! I can't wait to read it again. (Well, I'll have to, but I'll get back to it asap!)
I’m beyond gratified—overwhelmed, in all truth—by your response, Benjamin. I honestly thought of this as one of my more niche pieces, but it means a lot to me, and I can’t tell you what it means for it to connect like this!
"Universality lies in specificity," he intoned sonorously.
Yes I KNOW that but I don’t really BELIEVE it apparently!
With amusement I will be forwarding this to my devout mother, who is convinced sushi will one day kill my husband and who has forbidden me from feeding it to my children!
I hope it gives her another perspective, Janalyn! As for the safety of sushi in the US, she may benefit more from knowing that nearly all sushi sold in the U.S. has been frozen, and generally flash-frozen for at least a week, definitely killing all parasites.
(Assuming that’s her concern!)
It is, but she won’t listen to reason on this. She doesn’t trust ceviche, either.
Oh dear. My sister makes great ceviche!
Something I've pondered when reading your sushi pieces: To what degree would you (or wouldn't you) be comfortable ascribing the extent of your love for sushi, or more specifically the transcendent experience portion, to the self-tuning *caused* by that love?
It seems that becoming a connoisseur of something requires leaning into a self-reinforcing cycle. The more we like something, the more tuned we are to the experience of it, and the more focused on and open to the experience we are. Which makes us love it more, and so on around the cycle. Of course, there are human limitations that keep the cycle from continuing infinitely.
I like good sushi a great deal, but if I'm looking for a transcendent food experience, I generally have to look elsewhere. :-) If you are in Chicago some time, I can show you maybe the best drinking chocolate in the United States.
“Of course, there are human limitations that keep the cycle from continuing infinitely…” And also limitations in the objects of our love! Some things continue to reward continued pursuit with ever greater dividends; others do not. Some movies are enjoyable at first, and even reward a rewatch or two, but after that begin to reveal their limitations, while others prove themselves able to reveal new layers and insights after dozens of viewings. I can enjoy a Big Mac like anyone else, but if a Big Mac is someone’s favorite food in the world, their gastronomic universe is cramped and impoverished, and they don’t really understand how amazing food can be.
Sushi is a whole universe unto itself; you can spend your life exploring it, and it will keep rewarding you. The same is true, for example, of wine and cheese (both jointly and severally!). Chicken wings, not so much. I love chicken wings—within normal parameters, the hotter the better—but you can learn everything there is to know about chicken wings in relatively short order, and your 500th dish of chicken wings probably will not make you significantly happier than your 50th dish. Pizza is more complicated than chicken wings, but the difference between a top-notch pizza and a mediocre pizza is, I take it, arithmetic, not exponential—there is a reason people say that even when pizza isn’t great, it’s still pretty good—and I doubt if pizza quality per se makes anyone orders of magnitude happier than it makes me. (I have an Italian friend who disagrees, but he also claims, almong other things, that white pizza is not real pizza, so I take his claims with a grain of salt.)
This all sounds reasonable, though it prompts the suggestion that perhaps chicken wings could offer the same rewards, if as much time and effort went into their development. Alternately, perhaps it isn't a fair comparison. Chicken wings seem to be a much more specific food topic than all of sushi. I think a fairer comparison would be, say, the several kinds of tuna nigiri. Perhaps chicken wings offer the same limited depth as that. If we're going to take a category as broad as sushi, I'd put it up with "American barbecue". I've had some *extraordinary* BBQ, and it's a topic I'd happily explore at great length!
FWIW, Brian, I almost included American barbecue as a connoisseur-type food! 😄
As for tuna nigiri … I mean even if we limit ourselves to a single tuna species (bluefin tuna), and a single _cut_ of tuna (toro, akami, chutoro, otoro), toro nigiri (let’s say) is still vastly more complex than chicken wings. Was the fish spiked within the first minute of capture to prevent depletion of ATPs? Was it quickly gutted and cleaned? Was it flash-frozen for at least a week? Has it been properly aged (for toro, up to 15 days!) and monitored during aging, with the paper or cloth changed frequently? Is the rice good short-grain rice, properly prepared, cooked, and seasoned with an appropriate salted and sugared vinegar? These are just the bare bones.
I know chicken wings can be, e.g., fried or baked, say, and there are different sauces and so forth. In my experience, though, chicken wings at Outback Steakhouse and chicken wings at a nicer steakhouse are both good, and I’ve never heard of anyone claiming that the wings somewhere else are orders of magnitude better, or insisting on driving an hour for the one restaurant that serves the most sublime wings in the state.
I originally wrote toro nigiri, and then changed it to tuna in general, because I felt I was being unfair to the sushi! 😄 Toro has always been my least favorite of the common nigiris, because is has such a mild, sometimes even bland, flavor. So it seemed unfair to compare it to wings, where at least they are aren't bland. I'd also claim that there's roughly one order of magnitude difference between "junk" wings (soak some indifferently breaded, indifferently cooked wings in frank's) and "good" wings (well breaded, well cooked wings, with a sauce made to actually have layers of flavor and a proper mouth-feel). But, yeah, I agree with you that sushi (and BBQ) are far deeper, far more rewarding subjects!
This is actually something where I have a bit of expertise, philosophically speaking. (As for sushi, I spent $20 on it once and I think I'd rather have Mexican.)
Although I get why people want to elevate beauty, I think it is somewhat misguided. Not calling it a transcendental would clarify many of the problems that you're exploring here and have no answer for. A solution would be to say that beauty is not a transcendental per se but instead our response to an experience of the transcendental. (Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.)
I know this sounds somewhat negative, but I mean it in a very positive way. You get at something very true when you say that the distinctions between the transcendental begin to disappear the closer you get to them. This is because they are not just emanations of being but convertible with it! The one, the good, thisness, truth are all really just the same thing: existence. To call a thing beautiful is to recall having had the experience of all of these walls of distinction collapsing, things like scales having fallen from your eyes. But I think that in the real moment of experiencing beauty, the last thing we want to do is to talk about it. Rather, we forget ourselves. We forget everything except that moment. Shades of heaven and its eternity?
When you enjoy sushi and have what we call, by extension, a transcendent experience, do you really feel like you could write about it? Or do you just feel that same explosion of insight and joy which in other moments of your life you translate to the creative impulse? And then once you start talking to soon it starts to fade, dissipate? You can talk about it, but that's usually best in order to recall the experience and feel that joy again, rather than increase the joy you're feeling in the moment. That's my experience of the sublime. I think finding the distinction between the transcendentals and beauty does not run down beauty but rather elevates the experience which beauty is attempting to identify. But none of this is possible if beauty is, properly, a transcendental---if it is convertible with being. That is the definition of a transcendental. It's not simply something beyond us---so is "the nearest tree." It is something which is Is-ness, is Being.
I'm aware the thrust of modern theology kind of runs against this, and I'm grateful for the citation of pseudo-Dionysius. (There is so much bare insistence among Catholics that beauty is a transcendental without any understanding what a transcendental is, so much insistence that it's patristic, but you're the first person to have done the work to show it rather than just insist!) But beauty does involve a real distinction between the observer and the observed. As much as that barrier seems to evaporate in the experience of beauty, as much as beauty describes an experience of intimate communion with ultimate reality, beauty is not inherent to the thing itself, it is not one with the thing itself. It is the point of contact between one and another, but it is not the other!
(And this is why the Mass must be beautiful, why liturgy is far deeper than words but includes ritual and a beautiful setting. It must, it ought. It, too, is an intimate experience of communion with ultimate reality, so it should act like it.)
Thanks for your expert commentary, D!
I am, as you probably gathered, familiar with the view (or with different forms of the view) that beauty is not a transcendental. Being a student rather than an expert in this area, I confess I was surprised to learn that the “goodness, truth, and beauty” triad is modern; from its widespread proverbial usage (as in Pius XII’s address) I naively supposed, as I suspect is not uncommon, that I would certainly find it in Scholastic philosophy, if not Greek philosophy. (Another insight I didn’t go into: It seems that, prior to the cultural triumph of this triad, beauty was sometimes identified with the good [as in Aquinas], and sometimes [in later writers] with truth—but not with both.)
I am open to the idea that beauty is not properly a transcendental, and I am willing to consider some formulations of the maxim that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” but not if this means sheer aesthetic subjectivism. Obviously beauty, like goodness and even truth, is variously perceived by various observers; we disagree on questions of truth and goodness as well as beauty. But I also think that at least some disagreements or debates about aesthetic questions, like some debates about questions of truth and goodness, are debates about reality, in which some views have more actual merit than others.
Perhaps our disagreements, or different perspectives, about beauty start here: You say “To call a thing beautiful is to recall having had the experience of all of these walls of distinction collapsing, things like scales having fallen from your eyes.” I am not at all sure this account, at least as I understand it, corresponds to my experience!
Certainly beauty, like goodness, *can* herald us in the type of overwhelming, epiphanic experience that I tried to evoke, and that you suggest. Yet—also like goodness—beauty not only can, but overwhelmingly does most often meet us in pleasant, wholesome ways that we appreciate without breaking our stride, and often without much attending to them.
The empty tankard at my left recently contained iced sen-cha green tea. It was good, though I confess I drank it more or less unthinkingly. I like this brand of sen-cha (both hot and iced); I brewed it myself; I was thirsty when I poured it, and I’m not thirsty now. I’m sure I enjoyed it on some level, and certainly I have benefitted from it.
A little further to my left, outside my window, I can see trees: one in my yard, and others in the park across the street. The trees are lovely. I often see them more or less unthinkingly, though I suspect that I frequently benefit from them on some level without consciously noting them. Even now, consciously appreciating their beauty, I am neither having nor recalling an epiphanic experience connected with them. I think the beauty in my life, like the goodness, most often meets me in this kind of unassuming way. If this doesn’t undermine your account, I’m not sure I understand you!
I am intrigued by Aquinas’s formulation that “beauty and goodness in a thing are identical fundamentally,” as “based on the form,” though they differ logically, for goodness properly relates to the appetite,” while “beauty relates to the cognitive faculty.” I am accustomed to thinking, within the framework of the popular triad, of truth as apprehended by reason; (moral) goodness by conscience; and beauty by the aesthetic faculty. All three attract us: We are drawn to want to know truth, to choose (moral) goodness, and to appreciate beauty. Within Aquinas’s terms, this could be understood to mean that truth, moral goodness, and beauty are all reducible to or aspects of goodness (Plato’s view?). I can live with that way of thinking until something better comes along.
Just for the sake of my bona fides, let me tell you that I have read pretty much everything you've published over years. (And don't mind the username; I used it when I wanted to be a contrarian over at pitt.substack.com.) So when I am talking about the highest and greatest experience of beauty, I am drawing on what I know you believe about the greatest of all sushis, as well as how you have defended the true art of artistic criticism. (The sommelier can appreciate the finer wine that the alcoholic chugs down, waxing poetic with praise that the other cannot understand.) And so I'm looking towards the finest of things and the finest of experiences in order to draw out the meaning of the lesser kinds of experience. In principle, it is by the greatest example a thing that we know the thing, I believe---"prime analogue." So I use the greatest experience of beauty to get at what I think beauty is. It is a doorway to a little death, in this case the experience of the ultimate transcendent. In a lesser way, the word beauty is used of lesser experiences as well.
If your question is why it is that you can think a thing beautiful but never have had that great experience of its beauty, especially natural things--- it's a fallen world. Why is the silent planet silent? If our hearts were not so dim, perhaps we would see the glory of God even in the tree. If the "dew and hoarfrost" blesses the Lord, and if all creation cries out to testify to the existence of God, then much more the living tree, image of the Garden and the cross, at every moment in scripture a theophany. And the quenching of thirst? There is a harmony there between you and the woman at the well by the simple fact of having a thirst. We physically thirst, I believe, in order that we can understand the spiritual thirst for Christ. (And of course, that we may quench the physical or spiritual thirst of others.)
In the same way Christian morality can be explained by extending a perfect love of family towards everyone one meets, I believe that a Christian love of natural things created at the hand of God terminates in the ecstasy of being one with being, though undoubtedly this ecstasy is only known in flashes until heaven. (And, strangely, the dark night of the soul is the gift of God to the ones he most loves in this life, the withdrawal of all experiences of consolation! I think this is because we might mistake the ecstasy as the point, when the point is not the feeling of Joy, but the God with whom and from whom one has that joy.)
It occurs to me, though this isn't at a point of discussion at the moment, that the way we have ecstasy in a fictional sub-created universe is in its moral verisimilitude, that it has a ring of truth which is satisfying in itself, depicted with elegance, simplicity, purpose, honesty, insight. Beauty is the experience that points beyond to the ultimate, and it requires no more and no less than for the artist, like John the Baptist, to decrease so that the infinite may increase. How many movies are overstuffed? How many single panel comic strips are undercooked? The artist of trope goes mad finding the words in which to bottle the ineffable and then says just what he needs to. Didn't Father Brown once defend a poet falsely accused of murder by pointing out that the poet had every reason to stare all night at the thing he was trying to describe?
Thanks for this amazing comment, D!
I find myself nodding in agreement with most of what you write about our ecstatic and non-ecstatic experiences of beauty, goodness, and art. I am not *sure* you say anything here to contradict my working idea, which I think echoes that of Plato, that the supreme transcendental is the Good, and that both Truth and Beauty are species of the God. (This working idea will not stop me from adducing the Good, the True, and the Beautiful as a triad! I think this formulation is useful, even if we decide that it not the most technically correct way of approaching the subject.)
You say “Beauty is the experience that points beyond to the ultimate,” but you appear to say this also of the Good, specifically of the good of a drink that quenches thirst. So if the Good the the Beautiful are in fundamentally different categories of being—or, rather, if the Good is convertible with Being and the Beautiful is not—I am not sure I see that argued here.
Aquinas says the Good relates to appetite inasmuch as it is what is desired, while the beautiful relates to the intellect inasmuch as it pleases on being seen. It seems to me that to whatever extent we recognize something as good, we should be pleased on seeing it. If so, it would seem to follow that the Good and the Beautiful are coextensive—per Pseudo-Dionysius, “the Beautiful and Good”!
Hang on, I was using your examples, and I meant to use them as examples of experiences that point beyond to an ultimate. I consider beauty the name for the experience rather than a description of a quality of the thing itself.
The way I understand how transcendentals work means that all acts of existence are in fact good, real, one, and all the rest. The difficulty for beauty is that beauty seems to evolve two acts of existence, a perceiver and a perceived.
What would it even mean for it an existent thing to be beautiful in itself? The old joke is that Thomists either use the example of a dog or the example of a tree, and we're talking about trees so let's stick with that. (Stick? Har har har.) What makes a tree beautiful? When I start to think about what makes a tree beautiful *in itself* all of a sudden I'm talking about inner harmonies and inner light and coherence and unity. I can't say correspondence to some other, because then beauty becomes a category that includes more than one act of existence. But is inner harmony or light really beauty? I don't think that's what people mean by the word beauty. I think they mean what you experience when you recall the most sublime of sushi.
Now that I think about it, the experience of beholding a tree is a theophany because it points beyond the tree itself, bringing 1) the observer of a tree to the threshold of 2) the one he perceives through 3) the tree. As I write this, I realize that rather than just two, there are three in the truly sublime. There is the truth, there are the observers, and there are---I use this word advisedly---the media.
So again, when I think of aesthetic experience and the sublime, I think most precisely beauty should be discussed as a gateway experience. I'm doing this we can elevate what art does and what natural beings are by denying rather than asserting that beauty is a transcendental.
There is one way around this. If beauty is, rather than an experience, a quality of being a gateway to the one, then you might have something that could be a transcendental. But then is God a gateway to himself? I fear to tread too lightly on matters that relate to God's inner life, especially if it would collapse God's being into being just like created things. It might even collapse God's simplicity, or rip apart the Trinity, depending on which direction you take the reflection.
You consider beauty the name of an experience rather than a description of a quality of the thing itself. In this approach, if someone says, of Bach or of an unobstructed view of the Milky Way, or of Van Gogh, Michelangelo, or Monet, “I don’t see what’s so beautiful about it,” this is merely an entirely subjective and incontestible assertion that they happened not to have an experience of a particular kind. Yet I think most of us would diagnose in such aesthetic non-responsiveness to such stimuli as these nothing less than a kind of blindness. If we consider beauty the name of an experience, that still leaves us to account for the reality that some stimuli are more obviously, so to speak, “beauty-apt” than others, and some so overwhelmingly “beauty-apt” that a kind of blindness is necessary not to perceive it. I think that when we talk about “beauty,” most people are thinking of that quality of what I am within your approach calling “beauty-aptness,” rather than the experience of that quality.
St. Thomas says that goodness relates to appetite, and defines the good as that which all beings desire. But this definition immediately invokes a desirer and a thing desired, an appetitive subject and an appetizing object. The same two acts of existence that you highlight in the beautiful meet us in the good! And I think your other objections to beauty as a transcendental likewise apply in various ways to goodness. That’s because I tend to think of beauty as a mode of goodness rather than a mode of experience. What if we say that a tree is good, to begin with, because God wanted it (“appetite”), and a tree is beautiful because it pleases God (“the cognitive faculty”)?
Your “gateway to himself” paradox is, I think, easily resolved by recognizing that in God all descriptors and categories—beauty, but also good, love, mind, power, etc.—apply analogously. The same difficulties in trying to understand the beauty of God apply to the goodness of God only if we try to apply them univocally. I would say that beauty is a “gateway to the One” insofar as we encounter it, so to speak, outside the One; within the One, it is *that to which* beauty in created things is a gateway. The same of goodness. That’s how I understand the concept of a transcendental. It is convertible with being, yes, but this quality is what enables us to arrive at insights about infinite and eternal Being-itself.
The most interesting question here I think is what constitutes some things having more beauty-aptness than others. (I do think my paradox stands, so we might have to just agree to disagree. At the moment, only knows that I'd rather be watching even Aladdin than Frozen 2 with my little girls--- so there is something to artistic merit being real, and I hope you don't think I've ever disputed that!)
In answering the question of what makes some things more apt for an experience by which we call something beautiful--- and not just satisfactory, or coherent with our biases, or important for our political purposes, or effective as propaganda---I think it's important to distinguish beauty from those other purposes of art. But at the same time, those lesser experiences are mistakenly called beautiful not because beauty is all subjective but because they have something in common with beauty. What do they have in common? I would say it's a pointing towards another. What they lack is pointing towards the true other. This part is not subjective. You either have the sublime experience or not, and some things are not disposed to sublimity. All natural things do point to God, because they were made by him, so the only things I can think which are necessarily ineffective are, appropriately, arts (or crafts or technology---artifacts, technically.)
But even among things which point to the true other, some things may be more effective than others. But the effectiveness of the beauty oriented art does seem to vary from person to person. Arrival was my film of the year, but for some reason La La Land just killed instead. At the same time, Eminem's Stan could strike that beauty chord for some people when I know it would not have worked on Pope Benedict, a man very sensitive to the call of beauty. Stan is one of the greatest songs of a genre, and some people don't even consider it a song. I don't think this is because of some tyranny of subjectivism but because arts do in particular operate on appearances and cultural expectations, and all sorts of other "noise." There is no shortage of genre-aware or metacritical entertainment, and I don't think that's particularly new. It's the whole genre of comedia del arte. (Sp)
Let's take a particular example, if you have the time: Is the Divine Comedy beautiful? I think this is uncontested. But at the same time you have to translate its language unless you are medieval and Italian, you also have to translate its ties to a variety of other works of art, particularly those of Virgil, as well as the history of medieval Florence (IIRC). Now, THAT the Divine Comedy is beautiful is probably accessible to people who don't have all that contextual knowledge. But why does contextual knowledge of those things enhance your aesthetic appreciation of the Divine Comedy? Why does contextual knowledge INCREASE the aptness of the Divine Comedy towards a sublime experience? I don't see a way to explain The interrelative nature of aptness towards beauty as convertible with being, and the one, without falling into the same paradox that turns being into a collection of parts, which contradicts the one as a transcendental. And if the one is not a transcendental, things do not have identity! That dog won't hunt.
For more contemporary examples, I think Babette's Feast and Arrival are so enhanced by having the cheat sheet of divine revelation in mind that the aptness of those works of art towards beauty increases beyond, apparently, even the artists' sense of what those works really mean. I don't think Villeneuve has any particular religious commitment, and I know the director of Babette's Feast didn't. And yet, those tellings of those stories are deeply sublime. There's something happening that's truly mysterious in the subcreative process in artists of genius. They worship the God they do not know, so to speak. The law is written on their hearts?
Perhaps the aptness of a thing towards sublimity, and the definition of beauty, is its degree of being, its degree of unity, and its degree of the rest of the transcendentals, while at the same time only being accessed through a variety of contingent cultural barriers that have to be bypassed and even evaporate. I can't imagine what it would take to like Noh theater---but I know what it takes to adore Frozen 2 is a complete lack of taste.
First, "possibly because I’m not enough of a foodie" -- to which I say, thank God for that! Like you, I love food (including the notion of it as a gift from God, and something whose aesthetic qualities can foster my gratitude to God just as art does) -- eating it, reading and writing about it, cooking it (and I've been a professional cook/caterer). But as for foodie, I am* fully team Fran Lebowitz: "I despise the term 'foodie.' I mean, how is this a personality? 'I like food' —how original. Do you also like air? Water? Shelter?"
Second, thanks for this thoughtful and thought-provoking column, which has given me lots to think about. I'll just mention Teresa of Avila: she naturally figures prominently in my "Humor and Spirituality" course, which has helped me come to the conclusion that in addition to just generally being one of my favorite saints, she is probably one of the most prolific sources of "we don't know if she really said this, but she could have/should have" quotes. I confess I had not heard (but I love it!) the one about chocolate you use here, but it reminds me of another food-related favorite, namely, "There is a time for penance, and a time for partridge." Try as I might, I have never seen this sourced any more specifically than "... the story is told that she ..."
Anyway, thanks, and yes, 35 West sounds like the next right thing!
*I'm sure you're shocked.
Haha! I confess I have a bit more sympathy for the term “foodie,” Michaelangelo, insofar as the term overlaps with “gourmet,” but also connotes someone who is interested in the culinary arts, food cultures around the world, food sourcing, etc.
I appreciate Drescher’s joke, but with air and water we mostly only ask that it be clean. With shelter, people spend their lives studying everything from history of architectural styles to challenges of affordable housing.
But food is different. With food, we have not only a gut that needs to be sated, but a palate that God created for enjoyment. And in a world with billions of people, it is fitting that different people should devote themselves in different ways the study of just about everything, from the history of architectural styles to the social lives of octopuses, stamp collecting to marathon running, oil painting to opera, philosophy to theology. Even comic strip technique!
When a person is passionate about something, they can potentially make that subject interesting even to other people with little or no interest per se in that topic. For example, I have virtually no interest in sports, but I loved to listen to the late Frank Deford talk about sports on NPR. He loved sports and loved to share what he cared about and what he knew, and that made it interesting to me, and makes my world and my outlook a little broader.
Knowing all about as many kinds of good food from all around the world as possible is absolutely a worthy pursuit, and one potentially worth sharing with other people. It is not my pursuit, but I am more interested in good sushi and what goes into making it so good than nearly anyone else I know. I am also more interested in philosophy and theology than most people I know. The Venn diagram overlap of people who care both about sushi and about philosophy and theology as much as I do is small. Still, I hope that by bringing my passion to this subject in this piece, I have brought a little glimpse to some readers of topics they might not otherwise have much interest, and perhaps made their world a little broader.
Sorry to nitpick (although I know you too value correct citation), but the quote is not from Fran Drescher, comic genius though she is -- it's from Fran *Lebowitz*. I have admired her writing since I first heard of her way back when I was in high school, and I also enjoyed Martin Scorsese's recent series with her, "Pretend It's a City."
And in perfect honesty, I have nothing against the characteristics of the "foodie" as you described them, and in fact embody lots of them myself -- I just think the *word* is stupid, and that's probably what Fran was really cranky about, as well.
HAHAHA! Oh my, that’s the funniest mistake I’ve seen to date as a consequence of Substack’s weird handling of comments in the browser client. At the moment I’m using the mobile app on an airplane, and while I’m typing I can see the whole comment thread. In my browser, though, IIRC, clicking “reply” hides everything except the comment field, and either I open the thread in a separate tab and go back and forth or else I just try to remember what I’m replying to. In this case I guess I mentally filed your quote under “Fran” and then stopped, which is so funny it’s worth the embarrassment of such a silly mistake!
“Gourmet” is respectable to the point of decadence; “foodie” is scruffy and colloquial. I don’t mind it. Any ideas for an alternate coinage??
Alas, none. "Gourmet" is also, to me, too elitist to describe the many people [like me] who don't have a degree from the CIA or a financier's bank account, but "foodie" just sounds lazy. Like, "How long did you think before settling on that designation?" But no, I don't have a recommendation for a replacement.
On Fran Drescher, my favorite bit from her comes from an interview once, where she said that everybody knows she's from New York because "I sound like traffic --" and then emits a series of honks that sound exactly like both a bunch of taxis at a gridlocked intersection, and a parody of herself.
In Note 6, you said “Aquinas says this in the same passage cited in note 1 above, ST I, Q5, A4!”
But you cited that passage in Note 3, not in Note 1.
I mentioned this because Note 3 caught my attention before any other part of the article, specifically what was said of Saint Thomas Aquinas (my patron saint), and it got me wanting to look up those links and internalize what was stated in the note.
Once again, thank you very much, Deacon! And please pray for a friend of mine—I wish to respect his privacy, but he’s going through a difficult situation and needs prayers and guidance.
Well … it was note 1 when I wrote what became note 6! 😄 As the notes section expands, I try to catch those errant references, but sometimes I miss them.
I will remember your friend in our evening family devotions.
You know what’s funny? I actually considered the possibility that that was the reason for the mistake! 😄 In fairness, you had a lot of notes (not that I’m complaining!), so it’s understandable that you might miss something.
Thank you very much, Deacon. God bless you and your family. 🙂