Only The Lover Fasts

Why should we do it? Why do those ascetical practices in Lent or any other time? Why bother with this self-discipline, this extra penance, especially if we’re already living fairly moderate lives? Isn’t it better to eat, drink, and be merry, given that we might die tomorrow?

There are many answers one could give that might have parts of the truth in them. The deepest and most true answer is this: we should fast out of love.

This claim seems counterintuitive to many. Many unbelievers, non-Catholic Christians, and even some Catholics have a hard time wrapping their heads around the idea that asceticism is done out of love. While giving alms for the poor and the Church is understood as an act of love, since it involves giving away something for the benefit of others, how can simply giving up things we enjoy be a good thing? If it doesn’t benefit someone else, what good is self-denial? Doesn’t God want us to enjoy ourselves?

Many who doubt the wisdom of fasting for anything other than health reasons think that voluntary renunciation of pleasures must come from some sort of disordered thinking. Perhaps, some think, it is a sadomasochistic impulse, by which the more we suffer the better we feel. Perhaps a hangover from Manichaeism or some other ancient philosophy that holds that the material world and bodily pleasure are evil. Others consider it a Pelagian mistake, by which we think we can earn God’s love by giving up things.

Those who tend toward the last theory sometimes say that while “works of righteousness” were part of the Old Testament, the New Testament is about grace and not works. The problem with that theory is that the New Testament assumes ascetical practice as normal. When our Lord gives instructions about fasting, He says, “when” and not “if.” Fasting is taken as a normal practice of one who serves the God of Israel. “And when you fast,” Jesus tells His disciples, “do not look dismal, like the hypocrites, for they disfigure their faces that their fasting may be seen by men. Truly, I say to you, they have their reward” (Matthew 6:16).

It is true that Jesus’ own disciples did not fast during His earthly ministry. This caused the disciples of John the Baptist to question why—not surprising if they had heard His teaching about fasting. Our Lord’s answer to them indicates that the Twelve would indeed be fasting after His departure: “And Jesus said to them, ‘Can the wedding guests mourn as long as the bridegroom is with them? The days will come, when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast’” (Matthew 9:14). They were in a temporary state of continual feasting to celebrate the love of the Divine Bridegroom, present with them for a few short years. They would soon fast again in preparation for His glorious return at the end of history.

That is exactly what we find when we look at the earliest days of the Church. Just as the Church continues to feast because of Christ’s presence in the Church by the power of the Holy Spirit, the Church also fasts out of love and longing for His return in glory. In fact, fasting is understood to be a necessary corollary to both worship and prayer itself—a means of experiencing His presence and hearing His voice.

In Acts 13, we see the origin of Paul and Barnabas’s mission as it begins in the Church at Antioch. “While they were worshiping the Lord and fasting,” we read, “the Holy Spirit said, ‘Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them’” (Acts 13:2). It is, we read in verse 3, only after “fasting and prayer” that the two are sent forth with hands laid upon them. In Acts 14:23, we read that Paul and Barnabas were ministering in Lystra and Derbe, appointing presbyters in every Church “with prayer and fasting.”

Fasting is a necessary and normal part of Christan life if the New Testament is any indication. It seemed obvious to St. Paul and the other Apostles that ascetical practice has no expiration date on it. They did not think that the fullness of grace in Jesus Christ meant an end to the self-discipline of the body, mind, and senses that are necessary to hear the Voice clearly and respond. Far from it.

As Saint Paul wrote to the Church at Corinth, the asceticism Christians practice is just like that of the athletes who “exercise self-control in all things” to “receive a perishable wreath.” Christians do it to receive the “imperishable” prize. “Well, I do not run aimlessly, I do not box as one beating the air,” he writes; “but I pommel my body and subdue it, lest after preaching to others I myself should be disqualified” (I Corinthians 9:25-27).

Nor did any Christians for most of history question the necessity of the need to fast from food and indeed other legitimate pleasures that are gifts from God—but might come to take the place of God in our hearts. The general assumption was that grace itself allows the Christian to love God ever more extravagantly, to live completely on doing the will of the Father in Heaven, just as the Lord did.

Those who went furthest in ascetical practice were those men and women who forsook marriage, family, and ordinary life to live the monastic life. They went out into deserts and onto mountaintops to try to live a life of continual prayer, just as Saint Paul also had taught. They took the age of grace so seriously that they wanted to test the possibility of living again, as did Adam and Eve in Eden. As Fr. Simon Tugwell wrote in his classic Ways of Imperfection, the earliest monks believed that Christ’s coming “had reopened the fundamental question, what it means for us to be human beings.”

For the early monastics, the grace and love of our Lord Jesus Christ were so powerful that they provoked the desire to see how much they could give up and thus live on divine love alone. Fr. Tugwell writes: “It is difficult to avoid the feeling that at least some of the curious practices adopted by some ascetics were intended to be a kind of experiment, designed to extract further evidence of just what it is to be human. It is as if they were saying, ‘Let us fast for a week and see what happens,’ or ‘Let us fasten ourselves to rocks and see what happens.’”

We say our goal is, as the Benedictine monks say, “Prefer nothing to Christ.” The reality is quite different. Often, we prefer our own little comforts—nothings!—to Christ. That’s why all through Church history one finds all sorts of people doing odd experiments in self-denial to express their love for Christ—and also to test it.

Saints are found giving up every kind of comfort and putting on every kind of discomfort because they want to be like Christ. Even if the Twelve did not fast when they were with Him, He certainly fasted. We know He fasted for forty days in the desert at the beginning of His ministry. John 4 tells us that our Lord was fasting after the encounter with the woman at the well, even as He was being besieged by those seeking His words, His touch, and His help. When the Disciples beg Him to eat, Jesus replies, “My food is to do the will of him who sent me, and to accomplish his work” (John 4:34).

Far from a hatred of the good things of the earth, fasting from good things is an acknowledgment that they are good, but not the final and ultimate good, which is God alone. The way we experience the ultimate good is to be united to His Will. The aim of the grand ascetical experiments is the unity of our will with God’s will.

By giving up food, pleasures, and comforts of all kinds, we desire to show and strengthen our love. which is no mere feeling of affection for God. No, love is the ruthless will to do and experience everything that His will puts in our way and consider that our true food and happiness.

There are all sorts of reasons, from bad to good, that one might fast. We don’t have to drop the good ones that we might think of. We do, however, have to subordinate the good ones to the final good one. It is good to lose excess weight if we don’t eat as much. It is good to be less financially strapped if we don’t spend as much. It is good to have more time if we don’t fritter it away on entertainment or scrolling the internet. Every discipline will have natural rewards for us.

Yet the true good of Lenten discipline, the supernatural one, will only be attained when we give up those goods for the final Good of union with Christ. Only the lover truly fasts.

Editor’s note: This review originally appeared in The Catholic Servant and appears here with kind permission.

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