The Orthodox View on Fasting

[The Liturgist]

With Lent approaching, one book of relevance that graces my liturgical library is the celebrated translation of the Lenten Triodion, which is a service book and hymnal used by the Orthodox Church during the three Sundays before the Great Lent, during the Fast ifself, and Holy Week, concluding with Paschal Vespers on the morning of Holy Saturday (another hymnal and service book called the Pentecostarion or Flowery Triodion, picks up where this Triodion leaves off, at Paschal Matins, and governs services in the weeks following Pascha, including the Ascension, Pentecost Sunday and All Saints Day (the first Sunday after Pentecost, which in our rite is both a feast of the Holy Spirit and the Trinity, although the liturgy on the Monday after Pentecost, called Holy Spirit Monday, is purely Pneumatological in focus).

At any rate, my edition was translated from the Greek by Metropolitan Kallistos Ware, memory eternal, and Mother Mary (a nun, who lives privately and in humility, about whom very little is known). Metropolitan Kallistos wrote this very good introduction, which I thought I should share an excerpt from with the forum to explain the Orthodox idea of fasting as a joyous aid (which for those with an illness who cannot fast in terms of diet, can be done in other ways), which is not Pelagian or an example of works righteousness:

“the Triodion should not he misconstrued in a Pelagian sense. If the Lenten texts are continually urging us to greater personal efforts, this should not be taken as implying that our pro gress depends solely upon the exertion of our own will. On the contrary, whatever we achieve in the Lenten fast is to be regarded as a free gift of grace from God. The Great Canon of St. Andrew of Crete leaves no doubt at all on this point:

I have no tears, no repentance, no compunction; But as God do Thou Thyself, O Saviour, bestow them on me.*

In the third place, our fasting should not be self-willed but obedient. When we fast, we should not try to invent special rules for our selves, but we should follow as faithfully as possible the accepted pattern set before us by Holy Tradition. This accepted pattern, ex pressing as it does the collective conscience of the People of God, possesses a hidden wisdom and balance not to be found in ingenious austerities devised by our own fantasy. Where it seems that the tra ditional regulations are not applicable to our personal situation, we should seek the counsel of our spiritual father - not in order legal- istically to secure a ‘dispensation’ from him, but in order humbly with his help to discover what is the will of God for us. Above all, if we desire for ourselves not some relaxation but some piece of additional strictness, we should not embark upon it without our spiritual father’s blessing. Such has been the practice since the early centuries of the Church’s life:

Abba Antony said: ‘I know of monks who fell after much labour and lapsed into madness, because they trusted in their own work and neglected the commandment that says: “Ask your father, and he will tell you.” 9 (Dcut. 32:7)

Again he said: ‘So far as possible, for every step that a monk takes, for every drop of water that he drinks in his cell, he should consult the gerontes, in case he makes some mistake in this.**

These words apply not only to monks but also to lay people living in the ‘world’, even though the latter may be bound by a less strict obedience to their spiritual father. If proud and wilful, our fasting assumes a diabolical character, bringing us closer not to God but to Satan. Because fasting renders us sensitive to the realities of the spiritual world, it can be dangerously ambivalent: for there are evil spirits as well as good. In the fourth place, paradoxical though it may seem, the period of Lent is a time not of gloom but ofjojfulness. It is true that fasting brings us to repentance and to grief for sin, but this penitent grief, in the vivid phrase of St. John Climacus, is a ‘joy-creating sorrow’.*** The Triodion deliberately mentions both tears and gladness in a single sentence :

Grant me tears falling as the rain from heaven, O Christ, As I keep this joyful day of the Fast. ****

It is remarkable how frequently the themes of joy and light recur in the texts for the first day of Lent:

With joy let us enter upon the beginning of the Fast. Let us not be of sad countenance. . . .
Let us joyfully begin the all-hallowed season of abstinence;
And let us shine with the bright radiance of the holy command ments. . . .”

* Canticle Two, troparion 25
** Apophthegmata Patrum, alphabetical collection (P.G. lxv), Antony 37 and 38. The Greek term geron (in Russian, starets) means literally an old man - old, not neces sarily in years, but in spiritual experience and wisdom. He is one endowed by the Holy Spirit with the gift of seeing into men’s hearts and offering them guidance.
*** The Ladder of Paradise, Step 7, title.
**** Vespers for Monday in the first week of Lent (which begins on Clean Monday and does not have Ash Wednesday, unlike in the West. Clean Monday is a joyous day, in which it is customary for families to have a picnic with Lenten foods and to fly a kite, surely among the most wholesome of recreations).

 

[The Liturgist]

By the way, I just posted a liturgical question related very loosely related to this in The Ancient Way forum, which I thought I’d link to here in the event any Eastern Orthodox or Byzantine Catholic members who are familiar with the Triodion and the Pentecostarion might see it: Is Flowery Triodion a misnomer for the Pentecostarion?

For those curious, in Lent we use a hymnal called the Triodion because at Matins, during weekdays, a hymn we sing at Matins and other services throughout the year called the Canon, which can have as many as nine Odes, usually only consists of three (although one of them, Ode 2, only really appears in Lent, at Matins on Monday and in other penitential canons such as the Great Canon of St. Andrew of Crete (which is not used at Matins but is typically sung as a supplemental service, often in the fifth week of Lent). The Pentecostarion, the hymnal which replaces the Triodion starting just before Midnight on Pascha (the Feast of the Resurrection, also known as Easter Sunday) is known in the Slavic languages by the lovely name “Flowery Triodion” but it just occurred to me, I can’t think of any Canons in it with only three odes! However I could well be missing something, as it is vast; my physical copy by St. John of Kronstadt Press is a gorgeous folio-sized volume which is one of the most beautiful books in my liturgical library (the Liturgikon from New Skete Monastery is also really beautiful, as is the ROCOR sluzbenik (liturgikon) containing the most accurate text of the Byzantine* version of the rarely celebrated Divine Liturgy of St. James and the very rarely celebrated Presanctified Liturgy of St. James (which differs from the Presanctified Liturgy of St. Gregory the Dialogist, known to Catholics as Pope St. Gregory the Great, in that it is not a vesperal liturgy).

* The Syriac Orthodox also use the Divine Liturgy of St. James, which has a privileged position in the Syriac Orthodox liturgy, being required by the rubrics for many occasions, and which is also the longest of their liturgies although unfortunately lately there has been a trend in many places of using just one of their 86 liturgies, that of Mar Dionysius Bar Salibi, on all occasions, because it is the shortest. The only thing the Maronite Catholics have done right since Vatican II is to keep six of their traditional liturgies alive by cycling through them seasonally, but the obliteration of so much of the beautiful flowery prose typical of the West Syriac liturgies (much of which predates their schism with the Syriac Orthodox) and the loss of interesting liturgies like that of Peter (Sharar) and worse yet, the almost universal replacement of the traditional a capella hymnody with bombastic pop orchestrations, causes me to regard the Maronite liturgy as the one that is presently in the worst condition of any Eastern liturgical rite.