'The State of Many Living at the Same Table'

A reader encountered “commensalism” in Wednesday’s post and wrote: 

“I haven’t looked it up in many years, but ‘commensality’ came to mind when you mentioned commensalism in your blog this morning. If I recall correctly, New Testament scholars wrote of the practice of Jesus in which he took meals with all classes of society as a way of breaking down cultural barriers. Unlike commensalism, in commensality everybody benefits.”

 

Nice to have readers who further my education. I hadn’t known the word or the concept. The OED defines commensality as “the habit of eating at the same table,” though “habit” doesn’t sound right. Practice is closer. Voluntarily dining with another person suggests benevolence, trust, an act of communion. A meal is more than sustenance. Sir Thomas Browne uses the word in a specifically religious context in Pseudodoxia Epidemica (1646-72), also known as Vulgar Errors:

 

“And as for the same distinction in the time of Moses, long after the flood, from thence we hold no restriction, as being no rule unto Nations beside the Jews in dietetical consideration, or natural choice of diet, they being enjoyned or prohibited certain foods upon remote and secret intentions. Especially thereby to avoid community with the Gentiles upon promiscuous commensality: or to divert them from the Idolatry of Egypt whence they came, they were enjoyned to eat the Gods of Egypt in the food of Sheep and Oxen.”

 

In his Life of Browne, published in 1756 as the introduction to his edition of Christian Morals, Dr. Johnson describes Browne’s prose as “vigorous, but rugged: it is learned, but pedantick; it is deep, but obscure; it strikes, but does not please; it commands, but does not allure: his tropes are harsh, and his combinations uncouth.” Browne, he writes, “poured in a multitude of exotick words; many, indeed, useful and significant, which, if rejected, must be supplied by circumlocution, such as commensality for the state of many living at the same table.”

 

Browne’s vocabulary is a sumptuous English word-feast. Among citation sources in the OED, he ranks seventy-third. He is quoted 4,146 times, has 775 entries for first usage of a word, and is quoted 1,565 times as first evidence of a particular meaning of a word.

 

As serendipity would have it, the longtime reader who alerted me to commensality lives in the Texas Hill Country. He will be visiting Houston later this month and we plan to have dinner together in a Mexican restaurant.