Being Consumed

Bulgakov writes, “By nourishment in the broadest sense we mean the most general metabolic exchange between the living organism and its environment, including not just food but respiration and the effects of the atmosphere, light, electricity, chemistry, and other forces acting on our organism, insofar as they support life.  Nourishment understood even more broadly can include not just metabolism in the indicated sense but our entire ‘sensuality’ (in the Kantian sense), that is, the capacity to be affected by the external world, to receive impressions or irritations of the sense from it.”

This is what Bulgakov thought of as the “economy” of the world household, the constant production and consumption, the circulation of exchange that makes up the “body of the world.”  In this economy, human beings are given the world, as Schmemann said, as food.  Bulgakov continues:

“We eat the world, we partake of the flesh of the world not only with our mouths or digestive organs, not only with our lungs and skin in the process of respiration, but also in the course of seeing, smelling, hearing, feeling, and general muscular sensation.  The world enters us through all the windows and doors of our sense and, having entered, is apprehended and assimilated by us.  In its totality this consumption of the world, this ontological communication with it, this communism of being, lies at the foundation of all life process. Life is in this sense the capacity to consume the world, whereas death is an exodus out of the world, the loss of capacity to communicate with it; finally, resurrection is a return into the world with a restoration of this capacity, though to an infinitely expanded degree.”

In another passage, he writes that “The boundary between living and nonliving is actually removed in food.  Food is natural communion – partaking of the flesh of the world.  When I take food, I am eating world matter in general, and in so doing, I truly and in reality find the world within my and myself in the world, I become a part of it.”

This consumptive ontology and anthropology underwrites the gastronomic epistemology mentioned in earlier posts.  To know the world is to eat it; in eating the world, the boundary of subject and object is overcome, consumed.  ”Food in this senses uncovers our essential metaphysical unity with the world.”