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Between ages 20 and 50, the average person spends about 20,000 hours—over 800 days—eating. Our daily schedules are often planned around mealtimes. Business deals are cut among people who "do" lunch together. We have TV dinners, fast-food drive-up windows, and tailgate parties.

Eating is also a problem in our culture. In one poll, 40 percent of the respondents said that "getting fat" was what they fear most in the world. This may be one reason that each day approximately 65 million Americans are dieting, and the sales of diet books outrank all other books on the market except for the Bible.

But few books, even those by Christians, spend much time on the topic of gluttony. In Whatever Became of Sin? (1973), Karl Menninger described how cultural, psychological language has replaced moral language in our culture. The dieting industry, even the Christian version, talks a lot about nutrition and eating disorders while sidelining gluttony.

This is a surprise, for gluttony was for centuries considered a chief sin to monitor, one of the seven deadly sins. It is also a loss, for the insights of the early Christian monks on gluttony, and its corollary, fasting, are more relevant than any dieting fad.

Eating, of course, is crucial in biblical narratives. Our first parents plunged the human race into sin by violating a prohibition against eating. The Hebrews were given a sense of identity in a meal that signifies the defining moment in their history. The second Adam was victorious over a temptation involving bread. Christians celebrate their life together in Christ around a family meal initiated by Jesus—one that anticipates an eschatological banquet marking the consummation of history. Add to these all of the stories many of us learned from the time we were toddlers: Abraham and his three visitors; Esau and his soup; Joseph and the famine; the Prodigal Son and his father's banquet; the feeding of the 5,000; Mary and Martha; the couple on the road to Emmaus; and breakfast on the beach with the risen Lord.

The word gluttony is scarcely mentioned in the Bible, though Paul implores us to exercise restraint in the use of our bodies. In fact, the biblical writers encourage us to enjoy food as much, if not more, than they warn us against it. Food itself is not shunned in the Christian Scriptures (a distinction from other religions, such as Judaism, Islam, and Hinduism), but it is not supremely important either. One is neither to make a god of one's belly nor to be overly concerned about what one eats.

It is not until the fourth and fifth centuries that we find greater attention to gluttony, especially in the writings of early monks. Gluttony was on the earliest lists of vices drawn up by the spiritual writer Evagrius (346–99), the monk John Cassian (ca. 360–c.430), and Benedictine-monk-become-pope Gregory the Great (ca. 540–604). These lists eventually evolved into the famous seven deadly sins (pride, covetousness, lust, envy, gluttony, anger, and sloth).

These sins are key because each sin begets "daughter" sins. For instance, Gregory says that gluttony propagates foolish mirth, uncleanness, babbling, and dullness of mind. But each of the seven parent sins can become deadly (that is, "mortal" as opposed to "venial"). In the case of gluttony, a person who occasionally eats more than is necessary or appropriate has committed only a venial sin; becoming so taken by the pleasure of gluttony that the delights of the palate turn one away from God and his commandments is to commit a mortal sin. Gluttony is deadly when a person makes a god of the belly.

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September 4 2000, Vol. 44, No. 10