Eating the book, or why we need to digest what we read 1

The central mystery of the Catholic Church, as it was most fully elaborated in the High Middle Ages, was that its god was born to be eaten. By the fifteenth century, the emphasis was less upon the eating of Christ’s body than on the drinking of his blood. The eating trough superimposes Christ’s flesh and the hay that animals eat. This superimposition is reworked in the Catholic Mass, where consecrated bread becomes Christ’s flesh. Eaten and digested, the words are also transformed into the new text that the evangelist writes. St John’s inspiration is imagined as an inner process only in the literal sense: the bodily absorption of another text. Inspiration comes from outside the writer, and it enters not his mind, but his belly. What was increasingly in dispute, however, by 1498, when Durer made his woodcut, was both how one should eat and digest the Christian scriptures and how one should eat Christ’s body and blood.