Christos Yannaras: Fasting & Asceticism

Christian asceticism is above all an ecclesial and not an individual matter. It is the changing of our nature’s individual mode of existence into a personal communion and relationship, a dynamic entry into the community of the life of the body Of the Church. The aim of asceticism is to transfigure our impersonal natural desires and needs into manifestations of the free personal will which brings into being the true life of love. Thus the instinctive need for food, the greed for the individual’s independent self-preservation, is transfigured if, the context of the Church’s fasting: submission to the common practice of the Church becomes paramount, turning it into an act of relationship and communion. The Christian does not fast in order to either subjugate matter to the spirit, or because he accepts a division of foods into “clean” and “unclean.” He fasts because in this way he ceases to make the intake of food an autonomous act; he turns it into obedience to the common will and common practice of the Church, and subjugates his individual preferences to the Church rules of fasting which determine his choice of food. And obedience freely given always presupposes love: it is always an act of communion.

Nevertheless, the Church’s fasting rules do not express a fortuitous or arbitrary division of foods, but summarize a long experience of human nature on the part of the saints who laid down these canons. This experience knows well the rebelliousness of our nature, and understands how to distinguish what use of foods invigorates the autonomous impulse for self-preservation and what weakens it. In this sense, we can accept the connection between fasting and the subjugation of matter to the demands of the spirit, as an image or a figure of interpretation. All that need be made clear is that asceticism in the Church is not in conflict with matter itself, but with the rebellion of material individuality, the rebellious drive for self-subsistence. Asceticism checks the rebellion of our material nature and does not allow nature to become an end in itself— a second purpose within creation, different from that unique end which is the personal hypostasis of life, our participation in the life of Trinitarian communion.