The Ancient Exercise of Fasting
The church practiced the discipline of fasting early in its history. Jesus expected His disciples to fast early in His teachings (Matt 6:16, English Standard Version). For the first few centuries after Jesus, Christians faced the threat of persecution until the conversion of Constantine in the fourth century.1 Once Rome lifted the ban on Christianity, effectively ceasing persecution of the church, some Christians looked to an ascetic life as a sacrificial offering and retreated to the desert.2 As part of the desert fathers’ ascetic life, they practiced discipline as a means of spiritual formation.3 This blog entry explores how theologians thought about and practiced the spiritual discipline of fasting in their lives, ministry, and writing over the first several centuries.
Evagrius held to a rigid teaching about gluttony and called it the “mother of fornication.”9 Gluttony is like “the relaxation of fasting, the muzzling of ascesis, terror over one’s moral purpose, imagining of foods, picturer of condiments,” according to Evagrius.10 The act of gluttony was a gateway to the demise of body, mind, and spirit, which Evagrius characterized as “unbridled madness, a receptacle of disease, envy of health, an obstruction of the throat, a groaning of the innards, the extremity of insults, a fellow initiate in fornication, pollution of the intellect, weakness of the body, wearisome sleep, gloomy death.”11 Gluttony is the antithesis of fasting. Evagrius defined gluttony as an “obsession with food, whether or not we actually eat too much of it” and believed one could control it through the practice of spiritual disciplines he called “ascesis.”12 The Christian can only hope to gain victory over gluttonous passions “through the grace and love of God.”13 It seems Evagrius believed access to the grace and love of God partly came through the spiritual discipline of fasting.
Augustine (354-430), a contemporary of Evagrius, was born in north Africa.14 Augustine studied rhetoric and philosophy, desiring to become a famous speaker.15 Some scholars refer to Augustine as the “Doctor of Grace.”16 Towards the end of Augustine’s life, he refuted the Pelagian heresy with a basic message of “the necessity of grace” as seekers struggled with feeling they were not good enough for mercy.17 If the Pelagian heresy was correct, Augustine lamented that Christianity could not survive.
A lack of moral discipline, especially sexual immorality, afflicted Augustine’s life before Christ.18 Augustine believed the need for godly discipline was “to restrain the excesses of freedom.”19 Gluttony was an excess of freedom Augustine engaged in as a child.20 Augustine wrote how he “sought for pleasure, honors, and truths . . . and fell thereby into sorrows, troubles, and errors” as he considered the root of his sin.21
One might compare the lust of the flesh to the desire for eating and drinking. Augustine called gluttonous passion another “evil of the day” (Matt 6:34, ESV).22 As food and drink are necessary for physical sustenance, Augustine argued how it can unnoticeably become a “necessity of habit.”23 To overcome a habit of eating more than needed for nourishment, Augustine advocated “a daily war by fasting, constantly ‘bringing my body into subjection,’ after which my pains are banished by pleasure.”24 Augustine subjected himself to the spiritual discipline of fasting based on Paul’s inspiration, “I discipline my body and keep it under control, lest after preaching to others I myself should be disqualified” (1 Cor 9:27, ESV).
An adverse effect of the body in response to the lust of the flesh is it craves more and thinks it needs more. Augustine recognized the danger in the desire of the flesh when he wrote, “What is sufficient for health is not enough for pleasure. And it is often a matter of doubt whether it is the needful care of the body that still calls for food or whether it is the sensual snare of desire still wanting to be served.”25 A gluttonous lust constantly plagued Augustine, but he committed to fighting its urge.26 The ancient spiritual exercise of fasting is an effective weapon against the fleshly desire for food.
1 Justo L. González, The Story of Christianity, Volume 1: The Early Church to the Dawn of the Reformation, Revised and Updated. (New York: HarperCollins, 2010), 142.↩
2 Ibid., 147.↩
3 Gerald L. Sittser, Water from a Deep Well: Christian Spirituality from Early Martyrs to Modern Missionaries (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Books, 2007), 85.↩
4 Susan Muto and Lori Mitchell McMahon, “Ever Ancient, Ever New: Spirituality of the Ancient Church Featuring Evagrius Ponticus,” YouTube, last modified December 14, 2017, accessed June 6, 2023, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbv_L5zUUh4&t=2s.↩
5 Ibid.↩
6 Ibid.↩
7 Sittser, Water from a Deep Well, 74.↩
8 Ibid.↩
9 Evagrius, Evagrius of Pontus: The Greek Ascetic Corpus, trans. Robert E. Sinkewicz, Oxford Early Christian Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 62.↩
10 Ibid.↩
11 Ibid.↩
12 Sittser, Water from a Deep Well, 84-85.↩
13 Ibid.↩
14 Ibid., 105.↩
15 Robert Godfrey, “Augustine,” RightNow Media, last modified 2016, accessed June 6, 2023, https://app.rightnowmedia.org/en/player/video/205280?session=206829.↩
16 Robert Barron and Brandon Vogt, “Chrysostom, Jerome, Augustine, and Gregory the Great (Part 3 of 3),” Word on Fire, last modified January 13, 2020, accessed June 6, 2023, https://www.wordonfire.org/videos/wordonfire-show/episode214/.↩
17 Ibid.↩
18 Saint Augustine, Confessions, ed. Mark Vessey, trans. Albert C. Outler (New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 2007), 109.↩
19 Ibid., 14.↩
20 Ibid., 17.↩
21 Ibid., 18.↩
22 Ibid., 169.↩
23 Ibid.↩
24 Ibid.↩
25 Ibid., 170.↩
26 Ibid., 172.↩
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