Dedicated to the memory of Ursula Kolmstetter, our Babette of Indianapolis
["Enjoying the Rasa of Babette’s Feast" has been visited 273 times since 26 June 2009]
[Introduction will be completed in due course – Sunthar]
This thread (links provided to the original unedited posts at the Abhinava forum) began with my feedback to Frank Burch Brown on his book Good Taste, Bad Taste, Christian Taste that he had been kind to send immediately upon its publication in September 2000 (the earlier exchanges around the cover of the book are missing…). The ‘transgressive’ underpinnings that we have broached on (or rather, below) the aesthetics of Babette’s Feast are continued and explored more directly in our exchanges of 2003 on the hermeneutics of the medieval cycle of the Virgin and the Unicorn that interrogates the possibility of ‘Christian Tantra’ (see related links below). The sacrificial connotations of the Crucifixion and the Eucharist are likewise analyzed in depth from a specifically theo-anthropo-historical perspective in our preceding 2003 exchanges on the Christian (and Hindu) Trinity. I have inserted introductory comments to contextualize some of the posts [Do let me know if your views have been inadvertently omitted or distorted: this is an evolving archive!]. Having decided to make this archive available to the public, I would like to offer some concise clarifications—a conceptual grid as it were—of my own take on the various perspectives that are under scrutiny in this discussion:
Tantra:
Christianity:
Transgression:
Aesthetics:
Related threads at svAbhinava:
The Virgin and the Unicorn: is there a Christian Tantrism?
Trinity in Christianity and Hinduism: Sacrifice, Love (Bhakti) and Acculturation
Future of Hindu-Christian relations: a Dialogue about dialogue!
Problematizing God’s interventions in History: Historicism, East and West
This compilation will be eventually complemented by others including those listed above; in the meantime please check out the (incomplete) Abhinavagupta forum-index under the following headings and topics:
Index to threads below on the Trinity dialogue:
Subject: Re:
Babette's Feast...
Subject: RE:
Babette's Feast...and the temptation of Christ
Re: Babette's
Feast...and the temptation of Christ
Subject: Was
Jesus a vegetarian? Maybe…but we still eat Him!
From: Visuvalingam, Sunthar
Sent:
To: Frank Burch Brown (E-mail)
Hi Frank,
Just a quick note to say that I got to read 2 chapters of your book today (“Art in Christian Traditions”; “Making Sacred Places, and Making Places Sacred”), and have been relishing the abundant morsels of information and insight. Finally, I've jumped impatiently to the end to finish Babette's Feast. Right now as I write you, Elizabeth is also enjoying Babette's feast while seated before a large wall-poster from the British Museum of an exhibition on "Buddhism: Art and Faith" that we had visited many years ago in London [Dec. 1985]. I appreciate much better now your earlier email and queries about "feasting"!
Since I've been in
best regards,
Sunthar
Subject: Re: Babette's Feast...
From: Frank Burch Brown
Sent:
To: Visuvalingam, Sunthar
Cc: Camilla Brown
Sunthar—thanks for that "feed-back" (pun intended!) on your reading so far. I'm glad I whetted your appetite for Babette's Feast! I don't think you'll be disappointed; but I'm sure that your reactions will be conditioned by a range of experiences that will be distinctive. I'll be interested, of course, in all of that.
P.S. As you might expect, I agree with your earlier assertion that the "original" founder or prophet or whatever of a religion does not control all its future developments, and that this is not altogether a bad thing! Each religion seems to have spheres/aspects of tradition in which it wants to exercise utmost control, and others in which it feels freer to allow new developments. But sometimes (in certain cases of scripture interpretation, for instance) the new developments can be dramatic while also occurring surreptitiously—almost unnoticed—and often in the name of "restoring" the original meaning! —Well, I must go for now.
—Best wishes to you and Elizabeth
Frank
Subject: RE: Babette's Feast...and the temptation of Christ
From: Visuvalingam, Sunthar
Sent:
To Frank Burch Brown (E-mail)
Cc: Elizabeth Visuvalingam (E-mail); Ursula Kolmstetter (E-mail); Maheswari Kirby (E-mail); 'Kohilambal'; Camilla (E-mail); Anthony R Guneratne (E-mail); Stewart, Chuck; Paul Wilson (E-mail); Wilson, Paul; Charles Mopsik (E-mail); Liung Cheong Poh (E-mail); Yuen Wah Cheong (E-mail)
"As a Christian aesthetician, I am committed to the belief—the faith, even—that in God, and for God, the world itself is somehow transcendentally beautiful and sublime, and that this is part of its goodness" (Brown on Christian Taste, pg. 177).
Dear Frank,
After yet another week of Babette's Feast (Gabriel Axel, 1987, Oscar for best foreign-language film), I should pause in good Christian fashion (at least for the sake of a healthy digestion) to share my "feed-back" (as you 'tastefully' put it) before I plunge right back in! Let me frame my dissection (that goes beyond a sympathetic "description") with your opening observation that "the feast depicted here is at once a work of 'worldly' art and a communal sacrament, with the chef Babette playing the part of the artist and, at points, of the unseen and self-giving host in the pattern of Christ" (p.265).
How do the chief protagonists participate in and
contribute to the aesthetic delight of a distinctively Christian feast? General
Loewenhielm enjoys the unique delicacies in very much the epicurean manner in
which he had feasted on Babette's mercenary talents amidst the mundane ambience
of the Cafe Anglais in
Babette's artistry brings together the world of Parisian haute cuisine and the Kierkegaardian spirituality of these artless Danish folk in a curious and paradoxical manner. On the one hand, as the master chef, she knows best the intricacies of the ineffable flavors the General is merely relishing, for she alone is capable of conjuring them up to the palate. On the other hand, she is the truly abstinent one, working unseen for the gratification of the pious and the mundane alike. Already at the Cafe Anglais, she "could transform a dinner into 'a kind of love affair' in which one no longer distinguishes between bodily and spiritual appetite" (p.268): at the height of artistic perfection, even sensuous enjoyment sheds its worldly opacity. Just as the subtle play of emotional sensitivities in foreplay can serve not only to postpone but to diminish the blinding tyranny of the sexual appetite (which is what Amaru's rasa-laden erotic poems, even the adulterous ones, are all about...). Now investing everything she has, all of herself, into a banquet of voluntary thanksgiving, these possibilities inherent in the aesthetic experience assume an overtly spiritual dimension. When the matured Loewenhielm, already married to another, takes Martine's hand to proclaim "I have been with you every day of my life," was he with her spiritually or sexually? In retrospect, as a youth, had he fallen for her outer physical beauty only because it reflected her/his spiritual aspirations?
There is more to Babette's role than her renouncing the enjoyment of her own art. The culinary alchemist takes upon herself everything that is loathsome in the inevitable transformation of God's creatures into life-giving food. It is this disgust for everything that goes into the nourishment, that the camera accentuates by lingering on the remains of the animal corpses on the day of the feast. The two ascetic sisters, who have inherited the spiritual mantle of their Christ-like father, are not fooled. Martine's soul, perhaps unbeknown to herself, had already pierced through the appearances even as she gazed the previous day with astonishment at the huge sea-turtle, ox, quails and other animals being led ceremoniously into Babette's kitchen. She is tormented by nightmares of their partaking, like witches at a sabbath, in a bloody pagan sacrifice. It is this realization of the horror at the heart of life, and exemplified above all in the basic necessity of eating, that is at the root of their asceticism. By vowing to remain silent on the food and to act as "they never had the sense of taste" (p.267), the invited Lutheran guests are endorsing Martine's valid insight that, in and by itself, the banquet laid before them is indeed the killing artistry of a pagan sorceress. Nor is this sordid underlying reality lost during the enjoyment of the meal: I found myself wincing at the gusto with which the General (bloodied, no doubt, by countless triumphs on the battlefield...) sucked the brains out the quail's head still adorning the "Caille en Sarcophage," Babette's chef d'oeuvre. It would be edifying, in this respect, to juxtapose Babette's feast to its deconstruction in the demoniac masterpiece that Peter Greenaway offers us in "A Cook, a thief, his wife and her lover." This revolting film ("even disgust is not entirely ruled out of the sphere of ecumenical taste," p.192) raises questions about aesthetics that cannot easily be avoided by a religion that has raised torture (i.e., the crucifixion) and cannibalism (the Eucharist) into the central mysteries of the religious life. But we are already straying here into Abhinavagupta's pagan celebration of the communal Kaula sacrament, the avowed source of his highest spiritual realizations....
If Babette's feast is indeed a real foretaste of the Heavenly Jerusalem, that parousia where God is no longer enjoyed apart from but through the world, it would seem to be an aesthetic experience that is no longer "Christian" in the traditional sense. The community's motto (Psalms 85:10): "Mercy and truth have met together; righteousness and bliss shall kiss one another" is fully realized only when the spiritual intent of its departed founder finds its commemorative refrain through the sensual lips of the General, his unwitting worldly spokesman. Thus the mutual recriminations of the adulterous couple evaporate, not through confession and repentance but through an affectionate kiss that leaves no trace of sin. Instead of begging for forgiveness, the swindling merchant teases his victim for being such a fool only to be teased in turn by the latter, who had been simply humoring him in mutual deceit. Surely this is not the "righteousness" and "truth" that the theologians are so fond of...? Unchristian behavior is not really renounced, it's merely rendered innocuous, even enjoyable, through aesthetic distance, as if in a play where the players have also become, like us, their own spectators. Is there still a place for the Devil in Babette's feast, and could there still be a Christianity without the Devil?
So we come back to the question posed by your cover illustration: who is really qualified to write a treatise on Christian taste? Or, to put it less maliciously, in your Temptation of Christ, as in Babette's Feast, who is the real tempter? Perhaps the city here below that Gustav Dore's Satan is revealing to the disdainful Jesus on the mount is the Heavenly Jerusalem after all? "We tremble at making the wrong choices, he observes; but that which we have chosen is given to us, by the grace of God, and that which we have refused is also granted at the end" (p.268).
Amen!
Sunthar
P.S. I have dutifully seized this occasion to pay tribute to some of the Babettes (copied here, along with some vegetarians...) who have spiced my life with "ecumenical" fare ranging from French ratatouille to crab curry!
P.P.S. I've completed your chapter on Ecumenical Taste and started the earlier one on The Taste for Art and the Taste for God
Re: Babette's Feast...and the temptation of Christ
From: Frank Burch Brown
Sent:
To: Visuvalingam, Sunthar
Dear Sunthar—thanks very much for that veritable feast of observations and dissection.
I follow much of what you say, and concur with much.
You explore some aspects of the film that I could not, within the very limited framework of my exposition. Only occasionally would I care to differ. The horror of Martine (?) regarding the witch's sabbath is not, as far as I can tell, especially related to the sacrifice of animal life per se—though we as viewers are certainly made aware of that feature. After all, this Danish community is not vegetarian. And I believe that, from the perspective of both the story and the film, her reaction of horror—while not to be trivialized—is meant to be seen as excessively fearful of that which needs to be transformed and taken into the life of "faith," rather than rejected as "merely" pagan.
I think we agree that, in the film/story, it is a mutual transformation of elements that creates the sacramental energy or "presence"—the church community's negation of the merely sensuous and indulgent; the gourmet's "worldly" sense that there is an appropriate fullness and abundance of sensuous and aesthetic enjoyment; the artistic capacity (of the rare artist) to bring out the spiritual depth of the sensuous surface; and the religious capacity to find grace in self-giving and painful sacrifice.
It is not all sweetly benign, to be sure. We agree about that.
As for Babette's "hiddenness" and whether it makes her seem less Christ-like rather than more, I suggest that the parallel here is not between B's feast and the "last supper" of Jesus, but between B's feast and a communion meal/Lord's supper. Christian theology typically teaches that Christ is really the chief celebrant/priest at communion, but that Christ's presence is hidden even as it is encountered in communion. It seems to me that Dinesen (sp?) is quite intentionally playing on that feature of Christian teaching.
Your query about what person could or would be qualified to write a Christian aesthetic is in one sense unanswerable. (And I'm not quite sure about the tone of the question.) I'm not sure anyone is *qualified* to write any sort of theology! And I'm sure your query has many layers of meaning. But part of what I am doing is trying to make more explicit certain features of Christian life and thought that cry out for theological aesthetic interpretation—without which they cannot begin to be accounted for satisfactorily at a phenomenological level.
Part of what interests me is not exactly traditional Christianity, however, which you must have sensed already. For one thing, I am interested in a much more affirmative stance toward the senses and embodiment than Christianity has traditionally offered—but without forgetting what is problematical about senses and bodies. And in this regard, I am allied with a strong movement within contemporary Christian theology. Likewise, I am interested in seeing that religious practices and perceptions depend (far more than is often recognized, traditionally) on a quite active aesthetic and imaginative engagement—but not in the relatively impoverished sense of "aesthetic" bequeathed to us by much modernist theory.
I have tried to write a book that a wide range of folks (especially Christians, to be sure) could find valuable in one way or another. But, underneath, there is some rather serious reworking of Christian theology going on here. Like you, I value the capacity of a tradition to envision new possibilities for itself.
At times, though, I have the impression that I am rather less confident than (occasionally) you seem to be when it comes to saying what Christianity has taught about this or that. Christianity is not, perhaps, so polymorphous as Hinduism; but it is nonetheless exceedingly diverse, and not only politically or doctrinally. Beyond that, trying to figure out what the "historical Jesus" might have thought or taught or done is a massive enterprise.
When it comes to aesthetics, in any case, you have doubtless noticed that I have a sort of thesis, antithesis, new synthesis going: Kierkegaard, Blake, and their mutual transformation at a different level.
Of course one important move in that process is to think through more carefully and thoroughly the sorts of things that turn up when one sets aside a narrowly "purist" notion of what to count as aesthetic, or as a matter of taste.
I'm hoping, therefore, that someone who is more-or-less a theologian and who has undertaken that kind of philosophical re-examination of "aesthetics" would indeed be in a position to offer something worth pondering by way of theological aesthetics.
But I suppose this comes as no surprise!
—Frank
P.S. Sunthar, although I wrote this book out of the most "Christian" side of myself, so as to make it useful to Christians (and others) of various kinds, I would admit that in many ways I am, personally, eager to stretch the boundaries of Christian traditions—not least in relation to other religious traditions and certain secular philosophies. I don't know whether others will detect this more exploratory side of my theological and philosophical "agenda."
This exploratory heterodoxy applies, I suppose, to the General's paradoxically absent/present relationship to his "love" of so many years, even while married. Obviously that mysteriously covert "life together" does not fit with explicit ideals set forth in the New Testament. But I find that there is something quite tender and truly loving about it, I confess, which does not have to do, after all, with living in a state of extra-marital lust or psychological marital infidelity. It is related, rather, to what the General says in his "after dinner speech": it has to do with realizing, on the one hand, that one makes choices—and then sensing, on the other, that there is a gracious completion of life at some level (mystical?) in which even what is given up is somehow not something *lost.* So that the General's love for his former love is not the undoing of his admittedly sketchy marriage, but is a paradoxical sacrifice that is also a gift. Having said that, and not being quite sure I mean it (or what I mean by it), I do find this to be one of the more fascinatingly heterodox elements in the story!
>
>
With best wishes, Frank
Subject: Was Jesus a vegetarian? Maybe…but we still eat Him!
From: Visuvalingam, Sunthar [Ontological Ethics msg #61 – order of thread has been reversed]
Sent:
To: Frank Burch Brown
Dear Frank,
Thanks for your comments on various aspects of my
‘weighted’ analysis of Babette's Feast. By a curious coincidence,
Actually, what I was proposing was not so much a vegetarian critique of Babette's feast (I just had noodles with pork and shrimp last night while Elizabeth contented herself with tofu and vegetables...), but the (perhaps universal) religious insight that deconstructs all eating (including a diet restricted to plants alone) as a form of cannibalism. There's nothing specifically Christian in the equation, for example, of wine with blood. After all, the murder, resurrection and consumption of Dionysus is in a sense woven around the horticulture of the vine. This "horror at the heart of life" becomes increasingly apparent as we move up the food chain closer to man, and hence I followed the film in harping on the killing of animals: it's difficult to grasp the head or tail of (any discussion on) plants! So, I agree with you completely that the solution to Martine's (and our own) predicament is to transform every meal (even a vegetarian one) into a sacrament.
This being said, I'm struck by the increasing number of friends who find it natural to be vegetarians. This includes not just hard-headed ecologists and soft-hearted Brahmins, but also born-again Christians and orthodox Jews. I've yet to hear them condemn traditional Jewish rituals or Christian food-habits as irreligious; just as, Tibetan monks enjoy a regular diet of meat without having to invoke the vegetarian Buddha's (fatal) last meal to justify their life-style. As you rightly point out, "trying to figure out what the 'historical Jesus' might have thought or taught or done is a massive enterprise;" even otherwise, does it really matter whether Jesus was a vegetarian or a carnivore (for all we know, he might have been both...)?
Great
to learn that you've been having such a good time at
Sunthar
From: Sunthar Visuvalingam
Date:
Nietzsche's dictum: "Honesty is the only virtue."
Since
we are what we eat, food and drink remain perhaps at the heart of any
"ontological ethics", which is thus informed, whether we like it or
not, by the problematic of transgressive sacrality!
So here's a start at being "honest" (authentic?) about food, sacramental or otherwise....
Sunthar