Dish, victim and sign

"Feast is the best image of happiness": images of meal in theology and culture / Ed. Svetlana Panich and Irina Language. - M.: BBI Publishing House, 2016. - XII +264 p.

Formally - a collection of reports read at the symposium (I want to imagine that, in accordance with the name of the event, around the set table). But in fact - a conversation. First of all , with the one to whom the collection is dedicated and who will no longer read it, with Natalya Leonidovna Traubberg, who, following her translated by Chesterton, had no doubt that "paradise rivers flowed with milk, water, wine and beer." This is she, for whom, according to the author of the preface, gathering friends of the feast "were one of the few available on Earth, if not indisputably paradise, then saving and saving classes," she saw in the feast "Best image of happiness."

But we are talking in articles that compiled a book-after all, not only about happiness and not even in the first place about it (although, if you mean happiness the fullness of life - why not?).

The conversation between representatives of different disciplines - art critics, literary critics, historians of culture and religion - goes on these pages, again formally, about the meanings of food. (By the way, it’s a pity that there is not in the collection - as it happens sometimes - the list of authors with a brief representation of each of them, with their disciplinary coordinates - well, nothing, we will guess.) What, why, why and how we ate biblical and New Testament times? What are the images of food and feast in painting and in different literature of the world tell us about? And, by the way, literally - what words they say? How to correctly retell these words in another language - to translate them from culture into culture - but not to lose meanings? The whole article is devoted to this in the book - Jerome Lepher: "On the translation of culinary terms in detective literature." True, this text, the name of which first suggests that it concerns the issues of quite technical, has completely opened a collection. Firstly, because under the "detective literature" here, of course, no less than the Bible itself. Secondly, because the type of view presented in this bright text itself is a voluminous, captivating several sides of reality at once-is also characteristic of the book as a whole. And finally, thirdly, from the very first lines, we are talking about the inseparability of food (and in general everyday life), extremely high meanings-and another indispensable, perhaps the main component of everything that happens: secrets. Oh yes, and fourthly: this is also that without food, without bodily participation, all these high meanings, including a secret with all its mystery, are perceived as it should not. Oh, after all, also fifth: it turns out to fit high and mysterious perfectly-without ceasing to be yourself, maintaining its incomprehensibility, its own multiple of us, into the structures of everyday life available to us. At least all the authors of the book clearly unites just such an understanding.

"... What can be more mysterious and more unusual in the Scripture than the word" Easter ", Pesah , and does it mean, first of all, a certain dish of Jewish cuisine? Or even several dishes at once? Do two chapters in the Expert (12-13) book for a lively discussion of households at the town fair, someone had just asked them for a recipe, and everyone It is in a hurry to share his version, preferably opposite to everyone: “Take a lamb ...” - “Yes , not a lamb, but a goat ...” - “ and fry”. Just a cake, even without yeast ... "and so on. For two chapters, with an inexorable sequence, one to another, variations are strung (if you change the kitchen metaphor for a musical one) on a well-known topic, a three-legged chord, a root of Hebrew letters: p- S- H ".

Offering us further the development of these variations, the author, of course, jokes, plays, winks to the reader, sometimes even fucks. But the foundation of all this is quite serious. The true truth is even the fact that Easter is a "dish of Jewish cuisine": "The first three proposed meanings of the word" Easter ": a dish, sacrifice and a sign."

And after all, completely inseparable values - how we will constantly be convinced throughout the book.

Essentially, everything that will be discussed further is about the integrity of a person, about the fullness of life and about the allocation of meaning. And that the meaning is always - and in some cases especially - is experienced by the whole body: everything is involved in its perception and creation.

They write the cultural history of gastronomic and culinary practices as one of the lines of Christian history

After all, the point is that in a person nothing is empty and no accident. Nothing is reduced only to its utility of its meanings, it is not closed to itself - at least it has all the possibilities not to be like that. On the example of food and the general feast called the solemn word "meal", this is especially clear.

The topic, of course, is for a thorough anthropological treatise. Here everything is - in the mode of living, albeit quite academic, conversation, from different ones - sometimes unforeseen different - sides. Without final conclusions - but with through ideas, uniting all the issues that are being considered here.

Of course, the authors of the collection (almost all) who discussed the circle of problems associated with this at the symposium - already the sixth of those that are specially devoted to the meal! -At the Bibli-Bogoslovsk Institute named after St. Apostle Andrei, all this occupies primarily from a Christian point of view. They write the cultural history of gastronomic and culinary practices as one of the lines of Christian history. “The whole ambiguity of the idea of the meal, ” says Tatyana Chumakova, “ becomes clear when we look at her through the prism of Christian anthropology. For Christian anthropology, it is important that a person is transforming all, not only spiritually, but also bodily.” But it is clear that the topic is significantly wider.

The meal, the lively synthesis of different aspects of life and being, is not in vain that is an indispensable part of religious rituals in almost all cultures. And not without reason, in each of the cultures, food and drink are accompanied by many rules, requirements and prohibitions of varying degrees of severity, of which not everyone is rationalization. A striking example of this Jerome Lephart finds in the book of the outcome, where the Lord prescribes in detail to Moses in the company with Aaron, how to cook and then eat meat for Easter, and it is clear that the taste of the product is present here last. "<...> The meat should be frying mercilessly, to extreme readiness, and it is necessary to choose a different opinion on fire, without the slightest water participation, but so far there is no need to choose a preliminary preparation between fire and water): a small-rifle-living region (the word Seh can relate to the lamb and a goat: 12: 5) is prescribed to fry it with a head, 5: 5). with the hooves with all the insides (v. 9).

Food is such a symbol that works as a symbol exclusively when they perceive specifically, literally, materially.

“As for good manners,” Lefert of the Lord further sets the instructions for the Easter meal, “two rules are given to us: 1) We need to eat everything (and head? And hooves?), 2) at maximum speed (Article 11). The self -absorption manner is strictly regulated, so that the most inconvenient and harmful for digestion is required to“ tighten it ” Belt "(while usually the participants in the feast relax it), hold the" staff in the hand "(who has not yet tried to eat meat with a staff in his hand, let him try)," pull the shoes "(obviously, to exclude the lying position common for the feasts).

And all this at night. It is easy to summarize what has been said: the small-rot-burning should be prepared without any preparation and eaten with such a manner to exclude all sorts of manners. This is the first commandment of the Torah, "Easter for (gentlemen)" (Article 11). "

The author, of course, is ironic as usual. However, he knows very well that this is really the extremely important: this is the first (!) Commandment of the Torah. The main intuition of the carriers of the corresponding ideas is as follows: if such instructions are violated-at least you are stripping from the place of something significant in the very structure of the world. For the greater extent - destroy. This can be done (using food-drink as an instrument), of course, and intentionally-simultaneously affirming other meanings, no less important than the current world order. The case of this kind is described, for example, Ilya Snegirev (by the way, one of those who examines the topic in addition to Christian history, giving the conversation universality) in the article “On the Flag and Paper for“ surviving the Great Blef ”dedicated to the poems of James Clifford - heteronum of the Russian poet Vladimir Lifshits - about the“ retreat in the Ardennes ”:

< ... > There were five of us
In the dank dugout.
The command was crazy
And drapalo already.
We are from a canvas
They drank whiskey in a circle
Destroyed the forms
Orders, maps, lists,
And, remotely hearing the fight,
I am a miserable slave of the Lord -
For the first time he was himself,
I was free for the first time! <...>

The symbolic significance of whiskey in this situation - of course, present, and in other situations, only latent - becomes completely obvious. “The moment of the crash of a hierarchical world order, the destruction of things, this order symbolizing, gaining freedom is accompanied,” writes Ilya Snegirev, “the use of alcohol. The whiskey, which is drinking five from a canning can transmitted in a circle. Here, of course, is a very strong element of the fraternal rite, introducing to a certain fraternity of desperate.” The destruction of the established one is also a ritual, and, by the way, it is the drink in this case that what does it do it.

The traditional culture is especially sensitive to the connection of the order and order of the world. But even the cultures of the New Age, although we ourselves seemed to be forgotten about it, remember with their whole body and, on occasion, remind us that the meal is a symbolic act, as a definition, ultimately cosmic, one of the devices (the language does not turn to say “mechanisms”, alive), which establish relations between man and the world. Connecting the cables with each other, it connects a lot of things: the body and soul, literal and allegorical, tangible and symbolic, heaven and earth, living and dead.