On Fasting, against the Psychics 1–10

I would be surprised at these psychics if they were held by lust alone, which makes them marry more than once, and were not also torn by gluttony, which makes them hate fasts. A lust without appetite would of course be thought a monster, since these two are so united and grown together that, if they could be separated at all, the private parts would not cling to the belly itself first. Look at the body, and it is one region. In short, the order of the vices follows the arrangement of the members. The belly comes first, and at once all the rest of lasciviousness is built beneath its gorging; through voracity passes salacity. I recognize, then, the animal faith by its zeal for the flesh, of which it wholly consists, as prone to much eating as to much marrying, so that it rightly accuses the spiritual discipline, its rival by nature, in this form of continence too, since that discipline puts a bridle on the appetite by eating sometimes nothing, or late, or dry food, just as it does on lust by a single marriage. I am tired of engaging with such people already; I am ashamed even to dispute about men whose defense is not even decent. For how can I protect chastity and sobriety without taxing the adversaries? Who they are I will name once: the outer and inner sausages of the psychics. These are the men who quarrel with the Paraclete; it is for this that the new prophecies are rejected: not that Montanus and Priscilla and Maximilla preach another God, nor that they undo Jesus Christ, nor that they overturn any rule of faith or hope, but that they plainly teach fasting more often than marrying. On the measure of marrying we have already published a defense of monogamy. Now the second, or rather the first, battle of continence concerns the chastening of diet. They charge us with keeping fasts of our own, with prolonging the station-fasts mostly into the evening, with even observing xerophagies, drying our food of all meat and all juiciness and of all the more succulent fruits, and neither eating nor drinking anything with wine in it; and also with abstaining from the bath, in keeping with a dry diet. So they object that it is a novelty, and on its unlawfulness they rule that it must either be judged a heresy, if it is a human presumption, or pronounced a false prophecy, if it is a spiritual injunction, so that on either side we hear “anathema,” since we proclaim otherwise.

For as regards fasts, they set against us certain days appointed by God, as when in Leviticus the Lord commands Moses the tenth day of the seventh month, the day of atonement, saying: “It shall be a holy day for you, and you shall afflict your souls; and every soul that has not been afflicted on that day shall be cut off from its people.” In the gospel, certainly, they think those days were fixed for fasts on which the bridegroom was taken away, and that these alone are now the lawful days of Christian fasts, the old things of the law and the prophets having been abolished. For where they wish, they acknowledge what the meaning of “the law and the prophets until John” is. So for the rest, they say, one should fast indifferently by choice, not by command of the new discipline, according to the times and circumstances of each; and so the apostles observed it, imposing no other yoke of fixed fasts to be undertaken in common by all, and therefore none of stations either, which themselves have their own days, the fourth and sixth days of the week, yet run freely, neither under the law of a precept nor beyond the last hour of the day, since even prayers they generally conclude at the ninth hour after the example of Peter, which is reported in Acts. Xerophagy, they say, is a new name for an affected duty, and very near to heathen superstition, like the observances of purity that purify Apis, Isis, and the Great Mother by excluding certain foods; whereas faith, free in Christ, does not owe abstinence from certain foods even to the Jewish law, having been admitted once and for all to the whole meat market by the apostle, who detests those who, as they forbid marrying, so command abstaining from foods created by God. And therefore, they say, we were even then marked out beforehand as “in the last times departing from the faith, giving heed to spirits that seduce the world, to doctrines of liars, having their conscience branded.” With what fires, I ask you? The ones, I suppose, with which we often celebrate weddings and cook dinners every day? So too they say that we are struck along with the Galatians as “observers of days and months and years.” Meanwhile they hurl at us that Isaiah too declared, “Not such a fast has the Lord chosen,” that is, not abstinence from food, but the works of righteousness that he adds; and that the Lord himself in the gospel answered briefly all scrupulousness about diet, that a man is not defiled by the things that are put into the mouth but by those that come out of the mouth, since he himself ate and drank to the point of being branded: “Look, a glutton and a drinker!” So too, they say, the apostle teaches that food does not commend us to God: we are not the better if we eat, nor the worse if we do not eat. With these and similar thoughts they now aim subtly at this: that anyone more inclined to the belly may consider the duties of food removed, reduced, or delayed to be superfluous and not really necessary, since God of course puts the works of righteousness and innocence first. And we know what the arguments for fleshly comforts are like, how easily it is said: “What is needed is that I believe with my whole heart, that I love God and my neighbor as myself. For on these two commandments the whole law hangs, and the prophets, not on the emptiness of my lungs and intestines.”

So we must first affirm what is in danger of being secretly undermined: how much this emptiness avails with God, and above all where the very reason for this way of winning God's favor came from. For the necessity of the observance will be recognized when the authority of its reason, traced from the beginning, has shone out. Adam had received from God the law not to taste of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and he would die if he tasted. But he too, having then turned back into a psychic after the spiritual ecstasy in which he had prophesied that great sacrament concerning Christ and the church, and no longer grasping the things of the Spirit, yielded more readily to the belly than to God, assented to fodder rather than to the precept, sold salvation for gluttony. In short, he ate and perished; he would otherwise have been saved if he had chosen to fast from one little tree; so that from here on the animal faith may recognize its own seed, drawing from it the appetite for fleshly things and the refusal of spiritual ones. I hold, then, that murderous gluttony was from the beginning to be punished with the torments and punishments of hunger, even if God had commanded no fasts. Yet by showing why Adam was killed, he who had pointed out the offense had left me the remedies of the offense to understand. I would of my own accord count food as poison, in whatever ways and at whatever times I could, and take hunger as the antidote, by which I might purge the cause of death that from the beginning has passed into me too along with the race itself, certain that God wills this whose opposite he did not will, and confident enough that the pursuit of continence will please him by whom I had found the fault of incontinence condemned. Further, since he himself commands fasting and calls a soul broken, properly, surely, by the straits of food, a sacrifice, who will now doubt that this was the reason for all the mortifications concerning diet: that by food once again forbidden and a precept kept the primordial sin might now be expiated, so that man might make satisfaction to God through the same matter as the cause through which he had offended, that is, through the prohibition of food; and so that hunger, in a rival way, might rekindle salvation as gorging had extinguished it, despising many lawful things for the one unlawful?

This reason was kept in reserve in the providence of God, who arranges all things according to the times, lest anyone should say on the other side, in order to overthrow our proposition: “Why then did God not at once establish some chastening of diet? Why, on the contrary, did he even increase the permission?” For in the beginning he had assigned to man only the food of herbs and trees: “Behold, I have given you every seed-bearing plant sowing seed which is upon the earth, and every tree that has in itself the fruit of seed-bearing seed shall be food for you.” But afterward, to Noah, having listed the subjection of all the beasts of the earth and the birds of the sky and the things that move on the earth and the fish of the sea and every creeping thing, he says, “They shall be food for you; like the vegetables of the field I have given you all things; but flesh with the blood of its life you shall not eat.” For by this very fact, that he excepts from eating only the flesh whose life is not poured out through the blood, it is plain that he granted the use of all other flesh. To this we reply that it was not fitting to burden man as yet with any law of abstinence, since he had been unable to bear so light a prohibition as that of one fruit; and so he was to be let off and strengthened by freedom itself. Likewise after the flood, in the re-forming of the human race, one law was enough for the time being, abstaining from blood, the use of everything else being allowed. For the Lord had already shown judgment through the flood, and had further threatened it by requiring blood from the hand of a brother and from the hand of every beast. So, setting the justice of judgment in front, he let out the matter of freedom, preparing discipline by means of pardon, allowing all things so as to take some away, intending to demand more if he had entrusted more, intending to command abstinence once he had first granted indulgence, so that, as we have said, the primordial sin might be expiated all the more by the work of greater abstinence, on the occasion of greater license.

Then, when a people his own began to be chosen for God and the restoration of man could be begun, all the laws and disciplines were imposed, including those that curtailed diet, some foods being taken away as unclean, so that man might one day more easily bear fasts, having practiced perpetual abstinence in certain things. For the first people too had re-carved the crime of the first man, being caught more inclined to the belly than to God, when, rescued from the harshness of Egyptian slavery by the strong hand and lofty arm of God, it saw him as its Lord, destined for a land flowing with milk and honey; but at once, offended at the sight of the barren wilderness, sighing for the loss of Egyptian fullness, it muttered against Moses and Aaron: “Would that we had died, struck by the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat over the pots of meat and ate bread to the full. Why have you led us out into this desert to kill this congregation with hunger?” With the same preference for the belly it was to lament again to those same leaders and arbiters of God, whom it provoked with its craving for flesh and its memory of Egyptian plenty: “Who will feed us meat? We remember the fish we ate in Egypt for nothing, and the cucumbers and melons and leeks and onions and garlic. But now our soul is dry; our eyes see nothing but manna.” So they too were displeased by the xerophagy of angels' bread; they preferred to smell of garlic and onions rather than of heaven. And therefore from people so ungrateful everything more pleasing and more tasty was withdrawn, both to punish gluttony and to exercise continence, so that the one might be condemned and the other trained.

Now if we have rashly traced back to the experiences of the beginning the reasons for diet chastened by God, and to be chastened by us for God's sake, let us consult the common conscience. Nature herself will declare what we are usually like before food and drink, with our saliva still untouched, at least in things to be done by the sense through which divine things are handled: whether of a much more powerful mind, whether of a much more lively heart, than when that whole dwelling of the inner man, crammed with food, flooded with wine, seething with dung already being digested, is made an antechamber of the latrines, in which plainly nothing is so near at hand as to have a taste for lewdness. “The people ate and drank, and rose up to play.” Understand the modesty of holy Scripture: it would not have noted play unless it were impure. Besides, how few will remember religion when the places of memory are occupied and the members of wisdom hindered? No one will remember God as is fitting, as is right, as is useful, at a time when it is customary for a man to lose even himself. Food either kills or wounds all discipline. I am lying if the Lord himself, reproaching Israel with forgetting him, does not reckon fullness as the cause: “The beloved grew thick and fat and broad, and forsook God who made him, and departed from the Lord his savior.” Then in the same Deuteronomy, commanding that the same cause be guarded against, he says: “Lest, when you have eaten and drunk and built the finest houses, and your sheep and oxen have multiplied, and your silver and gold, your heart be lifted up and you forget the Lord your God.” He set the excess of eating, which riches themselves provide, before the corruption of riches. It was through this, of course, that the people's heart had grown fat, so that it should not see with its eyes and hear with its ears and understand with its heart, blocked by fat, which he expressly removed from eating, unteaching man from devotion to gorging. But the one whose heart was found raised up rather than fattened, who kept up a fast for forty days and as many nights beyond the power of human nature, spiritual faith supplying the strength, both saw the glory of God with his eyes, and heard the voice of God with his ears, and understood with his heart the law of God, who was even then teaching that man lives not by bread alone but by every word of God; while the fatter people could not steadily look at Moses himself, fed by God and fattened by a hunger borne in his name. Rightly, then, the Lord showed himself even in the flesh to him, the companion of his fasts, and no less to Elijah. For Elijah too, by this first act, that he had called down famine, had already vowed himself sufficiently to fasts: “The Lord lives,” he said, “before whose face I stand, if there shall be dew or rain in these years.” Then, fleeing from Jezebel's threats, after a single meal and drink which he had found on being woken by an angel, he too, for forty days and nights, with empty belly and dry mouth, came to Mount Horeb, where, when he had turned aside into a cave, with how familiar a meeting of God he was received! “What are you doing here, Elijah?” That voice is far friendlier than “Adam, where are you?” For the latter threatened a man who had eaten, the former caressed a man who was fasting. So great is the prerogative of restricted diet that it makes God man's tent-companion, truly like to like. For if the eternal God will not hunger, as he testifies through Isaiah, this will be the time when man is made equal to God: when he lives without food.

So we proceed now to examples, to unroll by the effectiveness of its usefulness the powers of this duty, which reconciles even an angry God to man. Israel had sinned when gathered by Samuel at the water-drawing at Mizpah, but it washed away the sin so quickly by fasting that it escaped the danger of battle at the same time. Just as Samuel was offering the burnt offering (we hear of God's mercy won by nothing more than by the people's abstinence), and the foreigners were advancing to battle, there and then “the Lord thundered with a great voice upon the foreigners, and they were confounded and fell before Israel; and the men of Israel went out from Mizpah and pursued the foreigners, and struck them down as far as Beth-car”: the unfed the fed, the unarmed the armed. Such will be the strength of those who fast for God. Heaven fights for such as these. You have a pattern of defense needed in spiritual wars too. Likewise, when Sennacherib king of the Assyrians, having already taken many cities, was hurling blasphemies and threats at Israel through the Rabshakeh, nothing else turned him from his purpose toward Ethiopia. Then what else destroyed one hundred and eighty-four thousand of his army through the angel than the humiliation of King Hezekiah? For when the enemy's harshness was announced, he tore his garment, put on sackcloth, and ordered the elders of the priests in the same garb to approach God through Isaiah, fasting of course accompanying the prayers. For in danger there is no time for food, nor in sackcloth any care for fullness. Hunger always follows grief, as gladness goes with gorging. By this consequence of grief, hunger, even that sinful city Nineveh is freed from the destruction that had been proclaimed. For the repentance of its crimes had sufficiently commended its fast, kept for three days, even the cattle being starved, with whom God was not angry. Sodom and Gomorrah too would have escaped if they had fasted. Ahab too recognizes this remedy. When, after his transgression and idolatry and the murder of Naboth, killed by Jezebel for the sake of his vineyard, Elijah had reproached him, “As you have killed and taken possession of the inheritance: in the place where the dogs licked up Naboth's blood, they will lick yours too,” he humbled himself and put sackcloth on his flesh and fasted and slept in sackcloth. And then the word of the Lord came to Elijah: “Have you seen how Ahab has shown reverence before my face? Because he has shown reverence, I will not bring the harm in his days, but in the days of his son I will bring it”: his son was not going to fast. So fasting is a work of reverence toward God; by it Hannah too, wife of Elkanah, long barren, asking earnestly, easily obtained from God to fill a belly empty of food with a son, and a prophet at that. But fasts will earn from God not only a change of nature, or the averting of dangers, or the blotting out of sins, but also the knowledge of mysteries. Look at the example of Daniel. Over the dream of the king of Babylon all the wise men are in confusion; they say it cannot be known beyond human ability. Daniel alone, trusting God and knowing what to do to win God's favor, asks for three days' time, fasts with his brethren, and so, his prayers commended, he is taught the order and meaning of the dream in every point; the tyrant's wise men are spared, God is glorified, Daniel is honored. And afterward too he was to receive no less favor from God, in the first year of King Darius, when, after pondering the times foretold by Jeremiah, he set his face toward God in fasts and sackcloth and ashes. For the angel sent to him at once declared this cause of the divine favor: “I have come,” he said, “to show you, since you are one pitied”: pitied, that is, for fasting. If pitied by God, he had been terrible to the lions in the den, where an angel provided a meal for him when he had been fasting six days.

We pass over the rest too. For now we hurry on to the new proofs. On the threshold of the gospel, Anna the prophetess, the daughter of Phanuel, who both recognized the infant Lord and proclaimed much about him to those who were waiting for the redemption of Israel, after the outstanding title of a long widowhood from a single husband, is further enhanced by the testimony of her fasts too, showing in what duties one ought to wait upon the church, and that Christ is understood by none more than by those once married and often fasting. Soon the Lord himself dedicated his baptism, and in his the baptism of all, with fasts, though he was able to make loaves from stones, and perhaps also to make the Jordan flow with wine, if he had been such a glutton and drinker. On the contrary, he was initiating the new man, to the disgrace of the old, by the virtue of disdaining food, so as to show him, when the devil again sought to tempt him by food, stronger than all hunger. Thereafter he set down a law for fasts to be carried through without gloom. For why should what brings salvation be gloomy? He taught also that one must fight against the more dreadful demons with fasts. For what wonder is it if the wicked spirit is led out by the same work by which the Holy Spirit is led in? Then, when the favor of the Holy Spirit, with the gift of prophecy besides, had hastened upon the centurion Cornelius, not yet dipped, we read that his fasts had been heard. And I think the apostle too, in Second Corinthians, among his labors and dangers and hardships, after hunger and thirst, lists also “fastings often.”

This principal form in the chastening of diet can now prejudge the lesser works of abstinence too, as being themselves useful or necessary in their measure. For excluding certain foods is a partial fast. Let us look, then, at the novelty or vanity of xerophagies, whether in them too there is not the working of a religion as very ancient as it is very effective. I return to Daniel and his brothers, preferring a fare of vegetables and a drink of water to the royal dishes and wine jugs, and thereafter handsomer, so that no one need fear even for the looks of his little body; and cultivated, besides, in spirit. For God gave the young men knowledge and understanding in all literature, and to Daniel in every word and in dreams and in all wisdom, by which he understood this very thing too: in what ways the knowledge of mysteries is obtained from God. Then, in the third year of Cyrus king of the Persians, when he had fallen into pondering a vision, he provided another form of humiliation. “In those days,” he says, “I, Daniel, was mourning for three weeks; I ate no pleasant bread; meat and wine did not enter my mouth; I was not anointed with oil, until the three weeks were completed”; and when they were over an angel was sent, speaking thus: “Daniel, you are a man pitied; do not be afraid, for from the first day on which you gave your soul to pondering and humiliation before God, your word was heard, and I have come in at your word.” So the pitiableness of xerophagies both drives out the fear of the humbled and turns the ears of God and makes men sharers in hidden things. I return to Elijah too. When the ravens had been accustomed to fill him with bread and meat, why afterward, at Beersheba of Judah, when he was woken from sleep, did that angel, beyond doubt, offer him only bread and water? Had the ravens failed, who used to feed him more generously, or was it difficult for an angel to snatch some servant from somewhere from the king's banquet with a well-furnished dish and carry him to Elijah, just as the reapers' lunch was brought to Daniel when he was hungry in the lions' den? But an example had to be set, teaching that in time of distress and persecution and any difficulty one must live on xerophagies. With such a diet David expressed his confession, eating ashes, indeed, like bread, that is, bread like ashes, dry and dirty, and mixing his drink with weeping, instead of wine, surely. For abstinence from wine too has its own titles of honor: it had vowed Samuel to God and consecrated Aaron. For of Samuel his mother says, “And he shall not drink wine and strong drink”; for such was she herself as she prayed to God. And the Lord to Aaron: “You shall not drink wine and strong drink, you and your son after you, whenever you enter the tabernacle or go up to the altar, and you shall not die.” So those will die who minister in the church not sober. So too he reproaches Israel for drink, as the next point: “You gave my consecrated ones wine.” And this restriction of drink is itself a part of xerophagy. Yet where abstinence from wine is either required by God or vowed by man, there let a restriction of food also be understood, setting the pattern for drink. For as the eating, so the drinking. It is not likely that anyone would sacrifice half his gullet to God, sober in water and drunk in food. And whether the apostle too knew xerophagies, who had celebrated greater things, thirst and hunger and many fasts, who had rejected drunkenness and revelry, the case of his disciple Timothy is argument enough: in urging him to use a little wine for his stomach and his frequent weaknesses, from which he abstained not by rule but by devotion (otherwise custom would have done his stomach more good), by this very thing he commended as worthy of God the abstinence from wine which he advised against out of necessity.

Likewise they accuse our stations of novelty, both as being enjoined and because some are even set to last into the late hours, saying that this duty too must be undertaken by choice and not kept beyond the ninth hour, according, of course, to their own custom. But as regards the question of injunction, I will answer once for all the cases. Now, on the point proper to this kind, I mean the measure of time, I must first demand of them where they get this rule of the ninth hour for ending stations. If from the fact that Peter and those with him are read to have entered the temple at the ninth hour, the hour of prayer, who will prove to me that they were keeping a station that day, so that the ninth hour may be interpreted as the close and completion of the station? And yet you would more easily find that Peter went up to the upper room to pray at the sixth hour, before taking food, so that the sixth hour of the day, which seemed to be about to end that duty after prayer, might rather be the end of this duty. Further, since in the same commentary of Luke the third hour too is shown as an hour of prayer, at which those initiated with the Holy Spirit were taken for drunk, and the sixth, at which Peter went up to the upper room, and the ninth, at which they entered the temple, why should we not understand that, while it remains entirely indifferent to pray always and everywhere and at every time, yet these three hours, as more marked in human affairs, which divide the day, which separate business, which are sounded publicly, were likewise more solemn in divine prayers? This is also suggested by the case of Daniel praying three times a day, surely with certain hours set apart, and no others than the more marked ones, and hence the apostolic ones: the third, the sixth, the ninth. From this, then, I will say that Peter too kept the ninth hour from old custom rather, praying for the third time in the duty of the final prayer. But this is said on account of those who think they act by the example of Peter, which they do not know: not as though we reject the ninth hour, which we very often keep on the fourth and sixth days of the week, but because for those things observed from tradition we must bring a reason all the more worthy as they lack the authority of Scripture, until they are either confirmed or corrected by some heavenly gift. “And if you are ignorant of anything,” he says, “the Lord will reveal it to you.” So, setting aside the Paraclete, the confirmer of all these things, the guide into all truth, ask whether a more worthy reason for observing the ninth hour is brought forward among us, such that this reason too should be credited to Peter, if he was keeping a station then. For it comes from the death of the Lord, which, though it ought always to be commemorated without distinction of hours, yet we are then more impressively bound to it, in keeping with the very word “station.” For soldiers too, though never forgetful of their oath, obey more strictly on stations. So the distress is to be observed up to that hour at which the world, darkened from the sixth hour, performed a mourning duty for the dead Lord, so that we too may return to gladness then, when the world too regained its brightness. If this savors more of Christian religion, since it celebrates Christ's glory more, I can equally fix the status of the late station from the same order of events: that we fast until late, awaiting the time of the Lord's burial, when Joseph took down the body he had asked for and buried it. Hence it is even irreligious for the flesh of the servants to be refreshed before the Lord's. But so far I have set these conjectures, arising from the challenge of their arguments, against conjectures, and, I think, more faithful ones. Let us see whether something of this sort also supports us from ancient times. In Exodus, was not that posture of Moses fighting against Amalek by prayers, persevering until sunset, a late station? Do we suppose that Joshua son of Nun, when making war on the Amorites, took lunch on that day on which he ordered even the elements to keep a station? “The sun stood still at Gibeon and the moon at Aijalon; the sun and moon stood still in station until the people avenged themselves on their enemies, and the sun stood still in mid-heaven.” But as it drew toward setting and the end of one day, “there was no such day before or after,” surely so long, “that God should listen to a man,” a man, that is, equal to the sun, persisting so long in duty, in a station longer even than a late one. Certainly Saul too, when set in battle, plainly enjoined this duty: “Cursed be the man who eats bread until evening, until I avenge myself on my enemy”; and all his people did not taste, and all the land was lunching. And God gave such authority to the edict of that station that Jonathan, the son of Saul, although he had tasted honey unaware of the fasting fixed until evening, was soon exposed by lot for the offense and was scarcely rescued from danger by the prayer of the people. For he had been guilty of gluttony, though simple gluttony. And Daniel too, in the first year of King Darius, when he was making confession to God fasting in sackcloth and ashes, says: “And while I was still speaking in prayer, behold, the man whom I had seen in dreams at the beginning, flying swiftly, came near me about the hour of the evening sacrifice.” This will be the late station, which, fasting until evening, offers to God a richer prayer.