Thoughts on Eating the Rich: A Fat Tuesday Meditation
Basil the Great's Explosive Sermon and the Erosion of Virtue
What do we make of an appetite gone awry? What is all this stuff for?
The Aesthetics of Wealth
Last night, I watched The Menu partly because I go for high horror, and partly because I suspected it was going to have something to do with class, wealth, and corrosion. The premise of the film is this: overly wealthy people are gathering at an island restaurant for a meal that’s not just a meal, but an event. Ralph Fiennes, the chef, has put together an immersive event, for which food is the vehicle for a dramatic artistic teaching tool. All of the people in the film, minus one, are characteristically terrible, in no small part because of their great wealth.
The film itself was fine: you can see the ending coming a long way off, and ultimately, the commentary on class isn’t all that original. It doesn’t make the film’s diagnosis incorrect, but my sense was this: if you’re going to make a film about money, having the vehicle be about elite dining is a little self-defeating. When a film about fine dining is a critique of wealth, all I can think about is what that high-dollar food actually tastes like. In the pursuit of making you hate the thing that the film hates, you kind of just want to be like the bad guys. It’s like why it’s hard to make an anti-war film: in dramatizing violence so heavily, you ultimately make the violence you want to oppose slick and gorgeous.
So, films like The Menu take away what they give: they play on our hunger and desire for security, only to condemn the thing which satiates it. All the while, the film never really explains to us why having the resources to have the good food is bad. Occasionally, we get the sense that wealth dulls us to love or that wealth makes us indifferent to true pleasure. But in the end, all I found myself wanting to do was know what the delightful looking food on the plates tasted like.
So, how can you talk about the dangers of wealth without actually falling into the pit?
How can you acknowledge that, like the ancients knew, wealth has a real moral weight to it, keeping our attention trapped to the earth and to the wheel of survival? It’s tricky: to name wealth is to describe it, and the more you describe it, the more delightful it sounds. One could start off like 1 Timothy, and just say that the love of money is the root of all kinds of wealth, or like James and equate it straight out with oppression. In this way, you cut through what wealth does, and let the golden calf be just an idol.
It’s a tricky thing talking about critiques of wealth like this, because when you’re in my position, you’re ultimately dependent: my position is mostly dependent on the good graces of donors and good will of budgets far out of my control. My job began in 2020 not as a fully-funded position, but as a fundraised one, in part because it emerged as a matter of exigency, but the fact of the matter is this: fundraising and the hope of fundraising lie at the center of many worries for me.
And so, I watch a film like The Menu and want to hear its message, but all I see is a luxurious meal bathed in violence, willing to eat the feast and put up with the blood around it.
The True Wealth of Virtue
There’s a long tradition of wealth criticism within Christianity, one of two minds. On the one hand, you have the fairly tame version which is encapsulated in Clement of Alexandria’s 3rd century sermon Who is the Rich Man Who Can Be Saved?, in which Clement proposes the following:
He then is truly and rightly rich who is rich in virtue, and is capable of making a holy and faithful use of any fortune; while he is spuriously rich who is rich, according to the flesh, and turns life into outward possession, which is transitory and perishing, and now belongs to one, now to another, and in the end to nobody at all. Again, in the same way there is a genuine poor man, and another counterfeit and falsely so called. He that is poor in spirit, and that is the right thing, and he that is poor in a worldly sense, which is a different thing.
One who is rich and virtuous is capable of being faithful with wealth, and the one who is poor but unvirtuous is incapable of handling well any amount of wealth well. On the one hand—yes—fools are always fools regardless of how much money they have. But Clement’s argument that the rich who are virtuous are untouched in their virtue by having great wealth is one that we should struggle with.
Clement is preaching here on the so-called “Rich Young Ruler”, the one who came to Jesus having kept most of the commandments and whom Jesus tells to go give away his wealth and follow. But not everyone took the allegorical approach as Clement. Consider, as a counter-example, Basil the Great, a 4th century monk and church administrator. Wealth makes one engage in a kind of madness, for example:
Since, then, the wealth still overflows, it gets buried underground, stashed away in secret places. For (they say), “what’s to come is uncertain, we may face unexpected needs.” Therefore it is equally uncertain whether you will have any use for your buried gold; it is not uncertain, however, what shall be the penalty of inveterate inhumanity. For when you failed, with your thousand notions, wholly to expend your wealth, you then concealed it in the earth. A strange madness, that, when gold lies hidden with other metals, one ransacks the earth; but after it has seen the light of day, it disappears again beneath the ground.”
Having pulled it out from underground, our first impulses is to hide it once again, rather than to put it into circulation. Likewise, wealth corrodes our sense of the future and what we do for its sake:
People, what’s the matter with you? Who has done this to you, to turn your things into a conspiracy against you? “I need them for my life-style.” Well, and hasn’t your money furnished provisions for wrongdoing? “It’s a form of insurance.” Isn’t it rather a means of self-destruction? “But money’s a necessity, on account of the children.” A fine excuse for greed: you parade your kids, but gratify your own desires. I do not accuse the innocent man: he has his Master, and his responsibilities; from another he received life, from himself he finds means of staying alive. But wasn’t this Gospel passage written also for married folk: “If you want to be perfect, sell your belongings, and give to the poor” (Mt 19:21)?
To put away money for one’s own children—something Dante will much later say is the most subtle temptation that avarice and greed present us with—is likewise put aside by Basil. To pile up wealth for the sake of being able to pass it down, rather than put it to good use, divesting oneself of it, is a subtle and no less corrosive temptation.
But the banger of the whole sermon is what Basil writes about death itself: when you die, divest yourself of all of it, and be buried in only your virtue. Don’t worry about leaving behind a legacy, but lose it all in life. There’s nothing less than your soul at stake:
Give it all away before death: Get a head start on them, then. Prepare your own self for burial. Piety makes a lovely winding-sheet. Come away fully dressed: make wealth your peculiar beauty. Take it with you. Believe in the good counsel, in Christ who loves you, who for us became poor, so that through his poverty we might become rich, who gave himself as a ransom for us.
I can imagine Basil giving this sermon, and it being the last sermon preached at many churches, not because the wealthy rise up in open revolt, but because it makes the ones without much wealth sigh in resignation: they don’t have much now, and accumulation out of that scarcity is bad for them in other pernicious ways.
And yet: there is great comfort in Basil’s admonition that one doesn’t have to admire the great dishes of splendor, or want to be in the midst of seats of power. They’re all going to die anyway. But by making even the appearance of wealth unsatisfying, Basil outstrips Clement, and undoes the problem of how you critique a vice: by making it unappealing. You can’t beat a vice by demonstrating how explosive or rotten it is, like The Menu or Parasite (which I loved!): you beat it by showing uncoupling the vice and pleasure.
Making a vice unappetizing, and virtue the greatest feast imagined: that’s how you win.
Coming next month: Rowan Williams’ When God Happens—this will be our Lent Zoom book club. Happy Fat Tuesday! Now, go repent!
"It’s like why it’s hard to make an anti-war film: in dramatizing violence so heavily, you ultimately make the violence you want to oppose slick and gorgeous. "
Yes, I remember thinking this when watching "Hacksaw Ridge" (celebrating a conscientious objector medic in WWII) and Dunkirk (glorifying a civilian boat rescue). Hacksaw Ridge seemed to relish in the violence more while Dunkirk (which ends with Churchill's "We will fight them" speech) seemed *felt* more anti-war, or at least relished in the violence less.