This weekend I was asked why we fast from meat, fish, eggs, dairy, alcohol, and oil. The person wanted a neat explanation. There isn’t one.
My own understanding will differ from some and we Orthodox are OK with that. We’re not OK with not keeping the rule, but we’re OK with different understandings of why the rule might be in place, especially since there is more than one reason we fast [I already talked about that in another post].
As I see it, we fast from those things which are traditionally or ceremonially regarded as feast foods. By definition and practice, a fast is not a feast, and vice versa. After all, we don’t only fast from foods, but from parties, from spectacles and shows, etc. Whatever event it may be, the death of Our Lord, the darkness of the world and preparation for His Incarnation, his temptation in the wilderness, and ours, the answer can be simple: Our Lord is in such a condition; shall we be celebrating, or covering our heads with sackcloth and ashes, and keeping vigil? For us, there is no union with God, apart from sorrow, grief, dryness. The notion of only happy times, of continual gratification, is foreign to Orthodoxy. We don’t consider it Christian at all, but fundamentally pagan and anti-Christian. God is a burning fire. We have always known it, and said it, and meant it, and we have always fasted, since the first man in the Garden.
Fasting and feasting alternate along a timeline – they are inherently time based, historical activities. And we are a people of holy history, and that is another key point. In becoming Orthodox, one steps into the line of that history, with continuity, not with opposition or resistance. We are always either fasting or feasting, because we are the people of God, created by Him and redeemed by Him, and always following His life, and our calendar, through the Incarnation. We are a people of the calendar, a people of time, a people of history, because we are people of the Incarnation, of the Timeless entering Time, of God becoming man, and living a historical life among us, eating with us, fasting with us, and teaching us to live accordingly.
First, meat. Meat is traditionally a feast food. You’ve heard the phrase “to kill the fatted calf”. Meat, milk, cheese, eggs, among the Orthodox are a way of celebration. Keep in mind that we are always feasting and fasting, have always been, since time immemorial – since the beginning. People forget, when they ask these questions, that we are not a Protestant religion, that began at a certain time among men, which is based on some particular philosophical stance. We are the religion of the first man, since God made him according to that religion, and we are in accord with our history. Ours is not a belief system, but an asceticism. Ours is not a religious philosophy, but an orthopraxis. The supremacy of doctrine over activity is a late, Western mediaeval, heterodox notion that has nothing to do with us. We reject it – it is heresy. In fact, we have always feasted and fasted since before there were any written doctrines, before there were any scriptures, before there were books, before anyone tried to explain anything. If anything, our way, our tradition, our history is the important thing, and any discussion afterward must be in accordance with it, since it came after. History dictates that, as an inviolable law – that there is a before and an after – an order built into our very condition and context and Orthodox people, as indeed all people are rightly designed to be Orthodox, and were from the beginning, from Adam.
So meat… – we did not try to transform that into a philosophical explanation. When it was necessary to clarify, we clarified, but we are not religionists constructing a positive religious philosophy. As Vladimir Lossky points out, we make statements when they are necessary to protect the faithful, to preserve for them the possibility of salvation. The statements are not “here is how we have built this philosophical construct” but “this is what we say, and this is what we do” – “this is our orthopraxy”. We have always treated meat as something especially regarded for feasting. So when we fast, it is quite normal for us to regard it as inappropriate. As evidence that we were not building a philosophy of meat, we did not regard shellfish the same way. Crabs and mussels and clams were ubiquitous – you picked them up off the ground like leaves. You don’t see this today, because of overfishing, ecological alteration, and climate change. But shellfish was never regarded as a special food, a feast food, because it was as common as grass, and so inappropriate to a feast. It would be a Protestant in the US having ramen noodles at Thanksgiving. The Orthodox always knew how to use food to celebrate. And because we always did, we always knew, almost automatically, what was inappropriate for a feast. Remember, we are either fasting or feasting at all times.
What about oil and wine? (by which we mean alcohol, though in some places, where beer is a ubiquitous part of daily life, served at ever meal, that has been accepted, within normal moderation – though going out drinking is still ridiculously inappropriate as the activity of a fast, just as a party is). Oil has always been a special food. We have always spoken of it among ourselves (listen to the Scriptures being read in our Churches) as special, as significant, as rich, as reserved, as often holy. We annoint with it, ceremonially was our faces with it or cover our heads in it. It is understood, like meat, to be the fat of the land, a richness, a feast food. The same is true of wine. The examples are everywhere, and the reasons obvious. Christ, after all, fasted from wine. If being Christian means anything at all, according to the minimum definition thrown about in the wide open culture, it at least contains the idea of imitating Christ. Again, as an illustration that we did not make a philosophy of wine or of oil: some Orthodox fast from all oil, because they piously see it as the same thing, and some fast only from olive oil (that at least is forbidden during fasts), but find corn oil acceptable, because corn oil where they live is as common as dung, and included in every meal, since they can remember. In South Korea, where Orthodoxy has existed for 100 years, the Metropolitan has given a general economia for sesame oil (it is to Koreans what corn oil is to people in the US). Again, in some Germanic Orthodox churches, beer (as a daily dinner food) is acceptable.
Neither those who would point fingers and say, “you’re in violation – you’re using canola oil!” nor those who would say, “ah, who cares about oil anymore when chocolate and coffee are the happy foods of our time – we should ban those!” are allowed to rule us in this. The Church has been gentle, though in gluttony it is easy to see the fast as extreme. But that is to have already stepped outside the Faith to occupy some presumably automonous plateau of evaluation, and is heretical in principle. We have always fasted with gravity, with somberness, with seriousness, with sorrow, with work, with effort – there is absolutely nothing there that was decided by philosophical principle and simply ‘implemented’. This is how Orthodox people behave.
We have not become like the heterodox, who make personal inclination or attitude the beginning place – and choose what to “give up” for a fast – that is to miss the point – the fast changes your personal inclinations and attitudes, not the other way around. One might as well decide to drape oneself with robes, if one is so inclined, and proclaim onself a bishop. Indeed, some heterodox do. This is all of one piece.
Certainly, if pious people wish to fast from chocolate and coffee, along with what the Church requires, there is nothing wrong with that. There is something deeply heterodox about substituting that decision for what the Church requires. And even the decision to add to it may only be made, in Orthodox praxis, with the Church, in consultation with one’s father confessor. The moment it becomes disconnected from the life and mysteries of the Church, the good thing is now a heterodox thing, and becomes bad. It was not for Adam to decide, on his own, from which fruit to abstain in the Garden. As it was with our father, so it is with us, his children.
Certainly, if pious people understand the prohibition on oil to mean all oil, a dry fast (there is great tradition behind that), let them keep it, if that is how their bishop and their father confessor roll. If they eat corn oil, and that does not conflict in their understanding, with the prohibition on oil, or with the advice of their father confessor and bishop, then who can judge otherwise for them? To do so, is to oppose the Church. God forbid.
As [looking up priest’s name] has said, I feel it’s all right to have non-dairy creamer in my coffee, and to have coffee, but I’m not comfortable with vegan bacon. Still, personally, I’ll eat a Boca Burger during the fast. It’s basically our falafel. There are areas here where one cannot make absolute statements on an item by item basis, and one cannot create a general philosophy that explains external reasons for what we fast from – reasons external to our history and tradition.
We have fixed the basic requirement, when clarification became necessary, at meat, fish, dairy, eggs, oil, and wine – just as the Apostle St. Peter had fixed the minimum for avoiding “pagan food” at rejecting at least the drinking of blood and eating strangled things. Our way in this is not a philosophy, nor because it is tradition is it optional in the way the heterodox speak of tradition (“well, it’s tradition, but we don’t keep it”). Phooey on that; it’s just a lie. An Orthodox person who says this has told you a lie, whether he realizes it, or has simply believed the lie himself and is repeating it like a monkey repeats an action it sees. We are not monkeys. In essence, I can just as easily say that there is no “why” for this food vs. that food. We fast – this is what fasting is and has always been – we kept the tradition w/o words until the words were needed, and then we kept the tradition with words, and because the words changed little, the tradition changed less after the words. When you ask for “why”, you are hypothesizing a different kind of “religion” than that. You are asking that we give it a Western mediaeval philosophical pedigree. This we cannot, need not, should not do.
Personally, I think that there are more than one reason for the same thing. It’s not the Orthodox way to say that one word has only one meaning, nor that there is one law to all truths, one premise to all realities. Reality is not based on premises – reality is reality – reality yields premises, and many of them. The West has it backwards. They try to divide 2 by 6 to get 3.
Among the effects then, if not reasons, I think it’s a true statement, as the monks have discussed, that the rich foods tend to inspire the passions, most especially blood-filled meats do. This isn’t hard to fathom on a practical level when you consider that the US consumes the bulk of the world’s meat, and is also the most violent and warlike civilization in history. Sorry if you don’t like that, but it is the only people to have utilized a nuclear weapon on another civilization. On civilians populations. Intentionally. Twice. The cultural obsession with meat in the United States, in my view, is no coincidence.
I also think that fasting from meat is an abstinence from death, a sign of paradise that was and paradise that is to come. The lion will lie down with the lamb and a little boy will lead them. There will be no more suffering, no more tears, no more death. Yes, you’ll all be non-meat-eaters in Heaven. Even Protestants would have to cook up some new ad campaign to keep their books from adding up to that truth. In fact, the monks, who eat only fish on special feasts, and no meat the rest of the time, are themselves as sign of the coming world, of paradise, and I think that’s one reason. But again, this cannot be, is not, and never has been a philosophical principle, with any absolute weight, or any precise 1:1 correlation with our practice. After all, we fast from milk, which does not require the death of the animal. Though, we fast from eggs also, and I think it’s telling that we fast from reproductive products. This has significance as well, in my view, for paradise and for our history. I simply refuse to make a philosophy of food out of it, nor does the Church teach it as a doctrine. I think it’s true, but I would only comment on the significance I see, and not offer it as an absolute rule, or the “why” of it all. Again, remember, we are not forbidden, most of us, mussels and crabs during the fast, though most of us would understand it to miss the point entirely if we went out for Alaskan King Crab and Maine Lobster during Lent. It’s not really appropriate, and we know better. Some Orthodox, quite piously see all fish, including shellfish, as included in the prohibition on fish, and that’s pious – nothing wrong with that at all.
The Church is gentle. The Church does not pronounce absolutes – cannot do so – because we are not a religious philosophy. Philosophers are the ones who make categorical statements, inviolable ones. We are alive in time and history, the Spirit with and in us, and always have been, since our first breath, and will be always now and ever unto Ages of Ages. Amen.