Years ago, my parents started a Christmas Eve tradition of taking me and my brothers to a French restaurant for dinner after the vigil mass. For many years prior, not even the name of this restaurant had crossed our lips, much less any of the food, for it’s a once-in-a-great-while sort of place for anyone who isn’t as rich as its fare.
The first time we went, I couldn’t believe that a meal could have such a powerful effect on a group. The combination of the quality of the meal and my parents’ generosity bringing about this rare event lifted our spirits in gratitude for all we had. My mom and I had the same thought: It was just like the story of Babette’s Feast.
Written by Karen Blixen under the pen name Isak Dinesen, “Babette’s Feast” is a short story that was published in 1950 and later adapted into a film in 1987. The story’s titular character is a Frenchwoman taken in by the daughters of the founder of an ascetic, religious sect in Norway.
The Starvation Diet
Martine and Philippa serve as the heads of the religious brotherhood founded by their father. They adhere to the belief that this world and the body are of no consequence, and all they have known is a starvation diet of Christianity: They know the rules of what not to do, but they don’t see the fullness of truth and the goodness those rules were designed to give us. They sacrifice much in order to avoid sin, but they don’t know how to receive blessings, to accept grace, and to acknowledge the goodness of things on earth.In turning from the common vices inclining people to excess and self-indulgence, the religious brotherhood veers towards the opposite extreme of rejecting the gifts and opportunities for happiness which God has given them. Throughout the story, the members of the group deny their very senses: “Its members renounced the pleasures of this world, for the earth and all that it held to them was but a kind of illusion.”
Martine rejects her suitor Lorens Loewenhielm, while Philippa ends her singing lessons with famous opera singer Achille Papin when he kisses her during one of her lessons. Both sisters turn from the role of the beloved in the Song of Songs, remaining silent towards the lover who calls out, “Let me see your face, let me hear your voice.”
Their upbringing failed to instill in them the ability to praise and to appreciate goodness in the world. The narrator emphasizes this point by saying that, after Achille Papin left, “Of this visitor from the great world the sisters spoke but little; they lacked the words with which to discuss him.” In their efforts to seek the Creator, they lack the proper vocabulary to praise His creation, trying to love the Artist while failing to appreciate His art.
Years later, it is through Achille Papin that the sisters end up meeting Babette when the opera singer sends her with a letter entrusting her to the kindness of the two sisters he once knew. Initially, the fact that Babette is a Catholic concerns the two sisters, but Babette assures them that she is no stranger to asceticism, having also been a cook to an old French priest. Believing luxurious meals to be sinful, the sisters teach Babette to make the bland fare to which they are accustomed: split cod and ale and bread soup. Babette, in learning these dishes, becomes “expression-less,” and, in a deeper sense, she is stripped of the artistic expression which she used to enjoy as a cook.
The other members of the religious group see Babette as “the dark Martha in the house of their two fair Marys.” However, it is Babette who has chosen “the better part” and bears a closer resemblance to Christ, and as the narrator says, “The stone which the builders had almost refused had become the headstone of the corner.”
The Heavenly Feast
When Babette wins 10,000 francs in the lottery, she begs the sisters that they allow her to cook them and their guests a proper French dinner for the celebration of their late father’s 100th birthday. The sisters are reluctant to grant this request, but Babette persuades them, saying that they should grant the prayers of others with the same joy with which God grants their own prayers.When their hearts are opened to grant this request, they think, “Their consent in the end completely changed Babette. They saw that as a young woman she had been beautiful.” However, it is not Babette who changes, but rather their sight. Their eyes are opened, like those of the blind healed by Christ in the Gospel, to perceive the beauty that lies before them.
Still, the Brotherhood vows that in order not to sin in eating the meal, they will be completely silent on the subject of food and drink during the feast. One of the brothers says they will cleanse their tongues of all taste, keeping them for higher things such as praise and thanksgiving. However, their severe self-denial is the very thing that keeps them from praise and thanksgiving; they lack the experience of good things, so their praise isn’t fueled by gratitude.
Loewenhielm, Martine’s former suitor, returns to the village after many years and becomes the 12th member of the dinner party, rounding the group off into a number present with Christ at the Last Supper. He is the only member of the group accustomed to such food as Babette prepares, and is able to recognize the exact extent of the artistry that goes into the meal’s preparation.
Even for those who have vowed not to enjoy the food, however, the meal has the effect of healing the blind, mute, and deaf. The members of the Brotherhood find that their “tongues had been loosened,” and they look at one another with greater kindness, putting aside past wrongs, and feel as though the evening had fulfilled a long-cherished hope in them. The earth and all it held was no longer an illusion; instead, the Brotherhood “had seen the universe as it really is.”
The acceptance and enjoyment of Babette’s feast serves as a preparation for the heavenly banquet. If we refuse what God wants to give us now, we will find ourselves ill-prepared to accept what he wants to give us in the life to come. However, as Loewenhielm realizes during the feast, nearly all the characters have missed out on a great deal of life’s happiness as a result of their choices. Grace is infinite and continues to be poured out upon us abundantly, restoring what they rejected in the past. Loewhenhielm himself undoes his youthful proclamation that, in this world, some things are impossible, affirming now the opposite in an echo of Christ’s words: “For God, all things are possible.”
Previously, the members of the Brotherhood had experienced a sort of spiritual death, living in a premature separation of the soul from the body as they rejected the body as worthless. As Christ raises Lazarus back from the dead in the Gospel, Babette’s feast includes her invention “Quails in Sarcophogus” (“Cailles en Sarcophage”), thus named to underline the fact that she does the same in a sense for the Brotherhood.
The Divine Artist
Babette recognizes that her gift is not meant only to enchant the angels. The sacrifice of all her lottery winnings on such a meal as she used to make as a chef at the Cafe Anglais satisfies the inmost cry in the heart of the artist. “Give me leave to do my utmost!” The full exercise of her talent is itself an act of praise, and her gift rewards her with the knowledge that she can make others happy.Babette is able to look at her own work and, as God did with His creation, recognize that it is good. “A great artist is never poor,” she tells the sisters. She continues, “We have something, Mesdames, of which other people know nothing.” In exercising their creative faculty, artists uniquely mirror their Creator and even participate in His art, recognizing the goodness of the world and working in order to bring forth the beauty they envision.
On such occasions as that of the feast, the artist has a foretaste of the joy that awaits us in heaven. For a moment on earth, we experience the fulfillment of our ultimate purpose of living in union with God as we are who we were created to be. As Philippa tells Babette, “In Paradise you will be the great artist that God meant you to be!”
Babette recognizes that when we are given the means to do so here on earth, we must seize such opportunities to give our gifts back to God and to others. Her sacrifice, she tells them, was as much for her as it was for them. She was able to be the great artist God meant her to be, crafting to the best of her ability a hymn of praise for the divine artist.
