The Instructor 2.1.5

“A certain man gave a great supper and invited many.” But I see where the fine-sounding name of suppers flowed from: from gullets and the madness of going to dinner, as the comic poet says. “For truly most things for most people are for the sake of dinner.” They have not learned that God prepared food and drink for his creature, the human being I mean, for the sake of being kept alive, not for pleasure; since bodies are not by nature benefited by expensive foods. Quite the contrary: those who use the cheapest foods are stronger, healthier, and nobler, as servants are than masters and farmers than landowners; and not only more robust but wiser too, as philosophers than the rich; for they have not buried the mind under food nor deceived it with pleasures. But love is truly heavenly food, a rational feast: “It bears all things, endures all things, hopes all things; love never fails.” “Blessed is he who shall eat bread in the kingdom of God.” The hardest fall of all is for love, which does not fall, to be thrown from heaven above to the ground among the sauces. And do you think I consider a supper, which is done away with, to be love? “For if I give away all my goods,” it says, “but have not love, I am nothing.”