The Instructor 2.1.7

Whoever eats of this meal will gain the best of all things, the kingdom of God, having practiced here the holy assembly of love, the heavenly church. Love, then, is a pure thing and worthy of God, and its work is sharing. “Care for instruction is love,” says Wisdom, “and love is the keeping of her laws.” These festivities have a spark of love, accustoming us through common food to eternal food. Love, then, is not a supper; but let the feast depend on love. “For let your sons, whom you loved, O Lord, learn,” it says, “that it is not the growing of crops that nourishes a man, but your word preserves those who believe in you”; for the righteous man will not live by bread. Let our supper be plain and light, suited to wakefulness, unmixed with various dishes; nor is this without instruction. For love, a good nurse of the young, has a rich provision for fellowship, self-sufficiency, which, presiding over food measured in just quantity, directs the body wholesomely and shares something of itself with neighbors; while a diet that overflows self-sufficiency harms the human being, making the soul sluggish and the body liable to disease. Indeed, the pleasures of rich sauces bring on hard-to-bear names of reproach: daintiness, gluttony, fish-hunger, insatiability, voracity. Proper to these names are flies and weasels, flatterers and gladiators, and “the wild tribes of parasites,” who have sold for the pleasure of the belly, some their reason, some their friendship, some their life, crawling on their bellies, beasts in human form, in the image of their father, the dainty beast. Those who first called them asōtoi (“profligates”) seem to me to hint at their end, understanding them as asōstoi (“not to be saved”), by the dropping of the letter sigma.