A Bagel With Your Laute ?

Doug and I were talking yesterday about gluttony, and whether a Christian lifestyle indicated something beyond just stuffing oneself. As I was running this morning, I was thinking about this and a bell went off in my head: Thomas Aquinas had something to say about this, didn’t he? Well, I checked Wikipedia under “gluttony” and found that indeed Thomas had made his opinions known on this topic. According to Wikipedia, Thomas identified five types of sinful gluttony:

• Praepropere - eating too soon
• Laute - eating too expensively
• Nimis - eating too much
• Ardenter - eating too eagerly
• Studiose - eating too daintily
  

You don’t have to be a scholastic philosopher to agree that this makes sense. I feel almost queasy when I got to an expensive restaurant and find that I’m paying enormous amounts of money for less food than is in a $4.99 frozen dinner, just so the meat and veggies can be arranged in a design matching, for example, a map of Napoleon’s retreat from Russia. That doesn’t fit the narrow definition of eating too much, but I would agree with Thomas that there something just not right there.