At times, reading Robert Capon’s The Supper of the Lamb feels like being shown around a quaint cooking shop by its aged proprietor. He strolls with you through the aisles, offering delightful, unsolicited advice on culinary implements:
If you never sharpen your own knives, you will no doubt prefer stainless ones; but if you are the constant whetter of edges you ought to be, only carbon steel blades will keep you happy.
Your guide betrays a surprising familiarity with onions, pointing out that, once they’ve been cut in half, they can’t be fit together again.
The faces which began as two plane surfaces drawn by a straight blade are now mutually convex, and rock against each other.
Such idiosyncratic nuggets of wisdom are worth the price of the book. However, the real value comes as you realize that your host is brilliant as well as funny. His theological and philosophical reflections offer keen insight into the nature of reality.
Things must be met for themselves. To take them only for their meaning is to convert them into gods – to make them too important, and therefore to make them unimportant altogether. Idolatry has two faults. It is not only a slur on the true God; it is also an insult to true things.