To meditate upon one's sensations—to know one is eating—is an accession of consciousness by which an elementary action transcends its immediate goal. Alongside intellectual disgust develops another, deeper and more dangerous emanating from the viscera, it ends at the severest form of nihilism, the nihilism of repletion. The bitterest considerations cannot compare, in their effects, with the vision following an opulent banquet. Every meal which exceeds, in time, a few minutes and, in dishes, the necessities disintegrates our certitudes. Culinary abuse and satiety destroyed the Empire more pitilessly than the Oriental sects and the ill-assimilated Greek doctrines. We experience an authentic shudder of skepticism only around a copious table. The Kingdom of Heaven must have represented a temptation after such excesses or a deliciously perverse surprise in the monotony of digestion. Hunger seeks a way to salvation in religion, satiety, a poison. To be "saved" by by viruses and, in the indiscrimination of prayers and vices, to flee the world and wallow in it by the same action … that is indeed the apex of acrimony and of Alexandrianism.