Book contents
- Food, Virtue, and the Shaping of Early Christianity
- Food, Virtue, and the Shaping of Early Christianity
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Introduction
- 2 The Medicine of Moderation
- 3 From Dinner Theater to Domestic Church in Late Antique Antioch
- 4 Shenoute’s Botanical Virtues
- 5 The Places of God
- 6 Meals, Mouths, and Martyrs
- 7 Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
4 - Shenoute’s Botanical Virtues
Fruit, Labor, and Ascetic Production
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 August 2020
- Food, Virtue, and the Shaping of Early Christianity
- Food, Virtue, and the Shaping of Early Christianity
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Introduction
- 2 The Medicine of Moderation
- 3 From Dinner Theater to Domestic Church in Late Antique Antioch
- 4 Shenoute’s Botanical Virtues
- 5 The Places of God
- 6 Meals, Mouths, and Martyrs
- 7 Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
In this sermon, Shenoute takes the common conceptual metaphor people are plants in uncommonly intricate directions. Repentant sinners are plants that Jesus, as a poor person, finds acceptable to eat, a striking inversion of the Eucharistic relationship with potent socioeconomic overtones. Those who do not repent are poisonous weeds, hinting at a dichotomy between wild and cultivated plants that Shenoute will eventually use to situate ascetic labor, like agriculture, as a normative feature of human existence. Like Chrysostom’s metaphors of medical regimen, Shenoute’s metaphors of agriculture and food production evoke a richly blended conceptual field for structuring ascesis in a lay environment.
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- Information
- Food, Virtue, and the Shaping of Early Christianity , pp. 107 - 143Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2020