Stories From the Silver Screen: Babette’s Feast                             

The late Vincent Canby, chief arbiter of taste on matters of theater and cinema, who, from his lofty perch at The New York Times would regularly lay down the law and the prophets, must have cranked out more than a thousand reviews in his long and storied career. Thus did he succeed in shaping the public perception of countless cinema and stage productions. So authoritative were his judgments, in fact, that an adverse word could upend whole careers on either Broadway or in Hollywood.

But owing to a sensibility steeped in the usual dreary categories of secularist thought, he would often miss the boat on movies not instantly reducible to ideology or sex. Babette’s Feast, for instance, which he otherwise wrote nice things about but, alas, along the way, managed to leave out the whole mysterious meaning of the feast itself—which is less about food than a whole world of sacrament signified by it, not to mention the symbolism of the 12 people who sat down together to share it. 

Warning viewers not to see it on an empty stomach lest the sight of so vast an abundance of food induce indigestion, while proving ruinously expensive to buy at a restaurant, hardly qualifies as the most penetrating film criticism. Poor Mr. Canby; he quite overlooked the hidden meaning of the meal, which is that you can never get enough of a good thing.

And what is that good thing you can never get enough of, the thing on which Babette’s Feast finally depends? The answer, in a word, is “Eucharist,” no holier reality than which exists in all the world. Taken from the Greek word Eucharistia, which equals thanksgiving, it is what happens when a gift so utterly over the top, so wonderfully, impossibly extravagant is offered to us free of charge. A gift, moreover, one could never oneself give nor possibly requite, not even were one to spend a lifetime learning how to cook in the finest Parisian restaurant. Which is exactly what dear Babette, the star of the story, had been doing before fate stepped in and she found herself exiled to a remote fishing village along the coast of Denmark. 

There she is instructed by two pious old sisters of strict Protestant observance, who, having rescued her from the sea, are now explaining how to prepare the meals she has agreed to make. They must be very simple and spare, they insist, neither fancy nor fine, lest the pleasure of eating them lead others into sin. 

And how does the once famous chef from Paris, whose culinary confections delighted diners across Europe, respond? She meekly submits, quietly spending the next dozen years cooking split cod and an ale and bread soup for the village poor. Until, that is, a great and unexpected windfall comes her way in the form of the winning ticket in the French Lottery. And what does she do with her winnings? They will become the gastronomic centerpiece of the story, in which she throws together a meal so sumptuous, so perfectly delicious, that the cost itself would have equaled an evening’s dining at her very own Café Anglais.

It is precisely here, at the deepest possible level, a level the ancient and medieval commentators called anagogy—unearthed from beneath the literal, even as nothing in the literal will be lost, only perfected—that we discover with a sense of astonishment and joy what the meal is really about, the reality to which it ultimately points. Namely, the truth about God Himself, which is that the shape of His own Christic heart is nothing less than sheer self-giving love, an infinite self-expenditure of who God is right down to the bottom of His absolute and eternal being.   

If, as the Church Fathers tell us, “God does not reckon His gifts by the measure,” then there can be no limit to the generosity He shows, either in making a world or remaking it when it all comes to grief and shipwreck. Madam Babette is clearly not God, nor can the meal she makes be compared to God’s creation of the world. Like all contingent creatures, from angels to amoebas, she cannot produce anything ex nihilo.

But within that larger world created by God, the most distant frontier of which is surrounded by, suffused even, with grace—“grace riding time like a river,” as the poet Hopkins would say—Babette remains blessedly free, as an artist, to apply the same logic of the gift as God Himself. She is free, therefore, to empty out all that she has in order to fashion, in a work of supreme sub-creation, to use the language of J.R.R. Tolkien, a single unforgettable meal for a dozen undeserving guests.

Thus moved by an artistry of skill and soul not unlike the artistry of God Himself, she pulls off a miracle of cuisine that will live on in the memory of those 12 souls privileged to dine at her table one magical night amid the darkness and cold of a Danish winter. “I am a great artist!” she exclaims, standing before her two ladies at the very end. “A great artist,” she adds, “is never poor. We have something, Mesdames, of which other people know nothing.”

And quoting a certain Monsieur Papin, another great artist—indeed, it was he who arranged early on for her escape from Paris and will, himself, mysteriously appear in the story as a kind of catalyst behind its unfolding action—she ends on a note of triumph: “Through all the world there goes one long cry from the heart of the artist: Give me leave to do my utmost.” At which point one of the ladies will go up to Babette and, in a sort of whisper, say to her, “Yet this is not the end! I feel Babette, that this is not the end. In Paradise you will be the great artist that God meant you to be! Ah!” she added, the tears streaming down her cheeks, “Ah, how you will enchant the angels!”

What more can be said? Only this, perhaps. That the gift is such that it can never be repaid. Whatever form it takes on, whether it be an exquisite wine distilled from a mere grape or the Blood of Christ offered in sacrifice upon the altar, it cannot ever be requited.

But it can, most certainly, be received—and with all the gratitude and delight of which we human beings are capable. Because, from first to last, it remains infinitely in excess of what any of us could possibly have expected or deserved. Even as, from the hidden depths, we long for it with all our hearts. “It never occurred to any of them that they might have been exalted by their own merit,” we are told. And yet, vouchsafed for a time the clearest glimpse of the promised glory, they seize upon it with gladness and joy.

[F]or it had been but the fulfillment of an ever-present hope. The vain illusions of this earth had dissolved before their eyes like smoke, and they had seen the universe as it really is. They had been given one hour of the millennium.  

It is all grace. And what else are sacraments for if not to dispense more and still more of it? Babette, by bringing forth the feast, has become the very instrument of grace. Or, to put it more daringly, she has become the very mediatrix of grace—not to the world, exactly, but to one tiny microcosm of it, enriching it far beyond expectation or desert. And the viewer—not unlike the 12, who, in a sort of stupefied trance, wander blissfully home when the meal ends—is likewise moved to cry out:

Alleluia! Alleluia…Glory to God in the highest…We praise you, we bless you, we adore you, we glorify you, we give you thanks for your great glory.