From History Today,Volume 72 Issue 3 March 2022:
The Theology of Chocolate
The introduction of chocolate to the Catholic world caused a dilemma: could it be eaten? Should it be given up for Lent?
Many Christians, and even post-Christians, give up chocolate for Lent. This self-denying act now sometimes seems to be simply part of a calendar of occasions for virtuous abstention: as with ‘dry January’, we do it because it is good for us. But the original theory behind the Lenten fast is that it helps those who undertake it identify with Jesus. After all, Lent originally commemorates the 40 days Christ spent in the wilderness before his triumphal entry into Jerusalem.
In fact, the relationship between chocolate and the Lenten fast has been complex and fascinating, at least within Christianity’s Catholic tradition. Chocolate’s history is an important part of the story of early modern globalisation and the Catholic Church’s response to it, therefore, reveals much about how it adapted to a fast-changing world.
Chocolate has a history but, for Catholics, it also has a theology. Long and learned treatises were written about whether it was licit to consume it – and when. Part of the issue was that the original Spaniards who travelled to the Americas quickly associated the drinking of chocolate with Aztec religious rituals. The Aztecs told those Spaniards that they valued the chocolate mixture they brewed not only as a source of nutrition but also as a sacred, even mystical, elixir, which altered body and spirit. The cacao pod was a gift from the gods, they declared, to be associated with the human heart and depicted as bleeding. Many Maya and Mixtec images of human sacrificial victims show those victims as anthropomorphic cacao pods.
Such ideas and images hardly endeared chocolate to the first friars who crossed the Atlantic to convert indigenous peoples to Christianity. Some wondered whether it could be appropriate for Christians to drink something so intimately associated with idolatry and ritual murder? Others, on the other hand, saw chocolate’s potential as a substitute in indigenous communities for another sacred but more scarce liquid: wine. The Franciscan friar Toribio de Benavente (d.1569) wrote approvingly of a local custom in the Mexican town of Tlaxcala where ‘on the feast of All Souls in nearly all the Indian towns, many offerings are made for the dead. Some offer corn, others blankets, others food, bread, chickens and in place of wine they offer chocolate.’....
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For some (there are many) of our non-theological posts see also:
https://climateerinvest.blogspot.com/search?q=cocoa
where you will find Warren Buffet and Chocfinger and Fat Marvin and Chinese communists and...
