Food
See also: Purity, Impurity.
"The two paths most commonly taken by Satan to reach Souls are the carnal attraction and gluttony. He always starts with the material side of nature. After dismantling and enslaving it, he directs the attack towards the higher part."[2]
During his stay among men, Jesus abolished the prescriptions of the Jewish law regarding Food.
In "The Gospel as it was revealed to me"
- The holy Family in Egypt: "In this house we were frugal. We would have been, even if money had not been lacking. We ate to live, we did not eat to satisfy greed, with the insatiability of gluttons and the whims of gourmets who consume Food until they become weighed down and waste their wealth on costly products without thinking of those who do not have their fill or must deprive themselves, without considering that by moderating themselves they could spare many the sufferings of hunger."[3]
- "The two paths most commonly taken by Satan to reach Souls are the carnal attraction and gluttony. He always starts with the material side of nature. After dismantling and enslaving it, he directs the attack towards the higher part."[4]
- (Following reproaches from Pharisees): The pure and the impure. It is not Food, but what comes out of the Heart: "What contaminates man is what is his own, only his own, generated and born of his self. That is to say what he has in his Heart, and that from the Heart rises to the lips and the head and corrupts the thought and the word and contaminates the whole man.
It is from the Heart that come evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false testimonies and blasphemies. It is from the Heart that come covetousness, vicious inclinations, pride, envy, anger, exaggerated appetites, guilty idleness.
It is from the Heart that comes the stirring of all Actions. And if the Heart is evil, they will be evil as the Heart. All Actions: from idolatries to slanders without sincerity... All these evil things that go from inside to outside contaminate man, but not the act of eating without washing hands."[5] - Impure Food among the Jews: "But then why were they classified by us as impure?" asks Philip.
"(...) To this classification there is a supernatural reason and a natural reason. The first is to teach the chosen people the way of living keeping in mind their spirit, their election and the dignity of man, even in a common action such as eating.
The savage feeds on everything. It suffices for him to fill his belly. The pagan, even if not savage, likewise eats everything without thinking that overfeeding fosters the vices and tendencies that degrade man. The pagans even seek to reach that frenzy of pleasure which for them is almost a Religion (...)
The son of the people of God must know how to control himself and by obedience and prudence perfect himself thinking of his origin and his end: God and Heaven. The natural reason on the other hand forbids exciting the blood by foods that lead to unworthy passionate impulses of man.
Carnal love itself is not forbidden to him, but he must always temper it with the freshness of the Soul which tends to Heaven. It must therefore be love and not sensuality that unites man to his companion in whom he sees his equal and not a female. But poor beasts are not guilty either of being pigs, or of the effects that pork meat can in the long run produce in the blood."[6]
In other works of Maria Valtorta
Notebooks
Catechesis of January 11, 1944: The word of God prepares us to receive the Eucharist, food of life.[7]
In the Bible
7:18 Then he said to them, "Are you also without understanding? Do you not see that whatever goes into a man from outside cannot defile him,19 because it does not go into his Heart but into the belly, and then out of the body?" Thus he declared all Food to be pure.
20 And he said, "What comes out of a man is what defiles him.
21 For from within, out of the Heart of men, come evil thoughts, murders,
22 adulteries, immoralities, thefts, false witness, blasphemies.
23 All these evil things come from within, and they defile a man."[8]