Holy Feast and Holy Fast Quotes

“Thus, by the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the emphasis of hymn, sermon, and story was less on the bread of heaven than on flesh (i.e., meat) and blood. To eat God was to take into one's self the suffering flesh on the cross. To eat God was imitatio crucis. That which one ate was the physicality of the God-man. If the flesh was sweet as well as bitter, that was because all our humanness, including our fleshliness, was redeemed in the fact of the Incarnation. If the agony was also ecstasy, it was because our very hunger is union with Christ's limitless suffering, which is also limitless love.”
― Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women

“To patristic poets and theologians, the food on the altar had suggested that Christ himself came as bread to hungry humankind or that he "digested" Christians, binding them to him as his body—i.e.,
the church. Hunger meant human vulnerability, which God comforted with food, or it meant human self-control, adopted in an effort to keep God's commandments. In the sermon and song, theology and story, of the high Middle Ages, however, the food on the altar was the God who became man; it was bleeding and broken flesh. Hunger was unquenchable desire; it was suffering. To eat God, therefore, was finally to become suffering flesh with his suffering flesh; it was to imitate the cross.”
― Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women