On fasting

Fasting frees a person's soul from its constant inclination toward the material and earthly; it subjects the body to the soul, and the soul to the spirit. Fasting helps the soul to master the passions. It is an important factor in preserving the harmonious unity of spirit and flesh.

Fasting increases a person's capacity for spiritual freedom and makes him less dependent on external conditions; it reduces the lower needs to a minimum, and as a result energy and time are freed for the spiritual life.

Fasting is an expression of the will, and religion depends greatly on a person's will: whoever cannot restrain his belly is powerless to quell stronger passions.

Apart from the personal aspect, fasting also has an ecclesiological side. Through fasting a person enters the rhythm of the Church's worship, and so truly lives through the events of biblical history.

Fasting is a universal phenomenon; in one form or another it is characteristic of all religions, but Christian fasting cannot be compared with any of them. Indeed, in other religions the basis of fasting is always different in principle from the Christian one. In particular, Hindus and Buddhists do not eat meat because, according to the theory of metempsychosis (the transmigration of souls), the soul of a dead relative or ancestor may dwell in this animal or that. According to the teaching of Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism and other dualist religions, an evil power also took part in the creation of the world, and so they saw an evil principle in certain creatures. Some teachings regarded the human body as the dwelling-place of evil and considered it the prison of the soul, and so their restriction of food led to self-torment and fanaticism.

In the Old Testament the chief fast was the “Day of Atonement,” kept in the month of September. There were also fasts devoted to the destruction of Jerusalem and the burning of the Temple. As is well known, the Law of Moses forbade the eating of so-called “unclean” animals. They personified sins and vices — the hare, for example, fear; the pig, filth; and so on. This prohibition passed in part from Judaism into Islam as well.

Even within non-Orthodox Christianity the attitude to fasting varies. In particular, in Monophysitism and Nestorianism, which have ancient traditions, fasting is marked by its length and strictness. In Catholicism fasting has been reduced to a minimum, and eating is allowed up to a couple of hours before Communion. Besides this, milk and eggs are counted as fasting foods.

In most Protestant confessions there is no calendar fast at all, and questions of fasting are decided individually.

The fasts established by the Church are not all alike. There is strict fasting and relaxed fasting:

Complete abstinence from food — such a fast is permitted by the Church on the first two days of Great Lent and on the last Friday of the same fast, and also on the first day of the Apostles' Fast;

raw fasting — eating food that is neither boiled nor baked;

dry fasting — eating food prepared without vegetable oil;

fasting without fish;

ordinary fasting — eating fish, vegetable oil and every kind of plant food.

At the same time, food during a fast is also limited in quantity: twice a day, eating two-thirds of the usual amount.

Here it must also be noted that fasting should correspond to a person's physical condition. The same fast cannot be laid on people with strong and with weak constitutions. The fast is relaxed for pregnant and nursing women, the elderly, the sick, and those who are travelling or in extreme situations.

Faith is for a person the immediate, direct and certain confirmation of the existence of God and of the spiritual world, and one of the chief factors of communion with that world, together with prayer, is precisely fasting. Fasting and prayer are the two wings of the soul that lift it to heaven, for it is by fasting and prayer that the chief obstacle on the way there is overcome; for, as the Saviour says: “This kind (that is, the demon) can come forth by nothing, but by prayer and fasting” (Mark 9:29).

Zurab Ekaladze