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jenny_islanderToday's post is about fasting.
Foster begins this chapter with this observation by John Wesley: "Some have exalted religious fasting beyond all Scripture and reason; and others have utterly disregarded it."
Wesley was writing in the 18th century, but the problem he identified was already very old. Arguing about when to fast, and from what and for what purpose, goes all the way back to the earliest writings we have from the fathers and mothers of the Church. But, says Foster, there is a peculiar gap in the literature in our times. "I could not find a single book published on the subject of Christian fasting from 1861 to 1954, a period of nearly one hundred years."
Why?
Foster identifies two reasons. The first, he says, is a prolonged reaction to the exaggerated asceticism of medieval Christianity. (Note that he is talking specifically about the Western branch of the faith.) And he blames that asceticism on "the decline of the inward reality of the Christian faith." I don't agree. In medieval Christianity, ascetic movements--for example, the Poor of Lyon, which became the Waldensian Church--were actively persecuted as disruptive influences. He goes on to talk about fasting together with mortification and flagellation and how the last two tended to over-color the first one in retrospect and produce repugnance. But the Catholic Church condemned the extravagant displays of self-flagellation seen e.g. in reactions to the depredations of plague in Europe in the 14th century. I think that what he sees as "the decline of the inward reality of the Christian faith" is much more the swamping of the outward reality of the Christian faith by lurid mass-market historical fiction, which influenced even people who didn't read the stuff. I am reminded of how when I was a teenager, my Lutheran congregation had to have a special talk about Rapture timelines and international peace being an Antichrist conspiracy and whatnot because we simply had no tradition of any of that--but now, after decades of American Exceptionalist Protestant preachers going on and on about it on TV, the same congregation takes those notions for granted. And so, I think, as mass media became ever cheaper and ever louder, the most exciting stories about fasting--hollow-eyed mad hermits and whatnot--got into the minds of people who should have known better, and taught better.
But onward.
The second reason for the loss of literature on fasting, says Foster, is that we are continually encouraged to eat-eat-eat. I am reminded that Foster is a man and that he was writing originally in 1978. Diet culture appears to have passed him by. But he does have a point when he quotes the concerns he has heard about the immediate injurious effects of fasting. The average reader of Foster's works may never even have been so hungry that the next meal is unusually tasty. Food is everywhere, and for many years it was so cheap that thinness--the ability to spend time obsessively exercising and seeking out the very skinniest foods--was a sign of disposable income, not of poverty. Plus, the conventional wisdom that we can attain and retain supreme good health and longevity by consuming the correct foods is rarely questioned. So the knowledge that moderate hunger at moderate intervals won't harm you (if you are in good health) is relatively rare. And our only modern examples of the further reaches of fasting are of people who really are hurting themselves--anorexics, or people who are always high on drugs that suppress the appetite, or people who have a very powerful irrational belief about health that leads them to proclaim how healthy they are not long before they die prematurely. We don't generally understand that fasting, done well, can go on for a long time before starvation begins.
All of this is modern talk, however. Fasting in the Christian tradition has roots that go much, much further back. And like many of the Christian disciplines, fasting is not even exclusive to faiths that acknowledge Abraham. Foster cites examples of fasting in Zoroastrianism, Confucianism, Hinduism, and classical Hellenic religion.
But what does it look like when Christians fast? This is a question with a long and complicated answer. Foster summarizes part of that answer in the next section of this chapter.
Foster begins this chapter with this observation by John Wesley: "Some have exalted religious fasting beyond all Scripture and reason; and others have utterly disregarded it."
Wesley was writing in the 18th century, but the problem he identified was already very old. Arguing about when to fast, and from what and for what purpose, goes all the way back to the earliest writings we have from the fathers and mothers of the Church. But, says Foster, there is a peculiar gap in the literature in our times. "I could not find a single book published on the subject of Christian fasting from 1861 to 1954, a period of nearly one hundred years."
Why?
Foster identifies two reasons. The first, he says, is a prolonged reaction to the exaggerated asceticism of medieval Christianity. (Note that he is talking specifically about the Western branch of the faith.) And he blames that asceticism on "the decline of the inward reality of the Christian faith." I don't agree. In medieval Christianity, ascetic movements--for example, the Poor of Lyon, which became the Waldensian Church--were actively persecuted as disruptive influences. He goes on to talk about fasting together with mortification and flagellation and how the last two tended to over-color the first one in retrospect and produce repugnance. But the Catholic Church condemned the extravagant displays of self-flagellation seen e.g. in reactions to the depredations of plague in Europe in the 14th century. I think that what he sees as "the decline of the inward reality of the Christian faith" is much more the swamping of the outward reality of the Christian faith by lurid mass-market historical fiction, which influenced even people who didn't read the stuff. I am reminded of how when I was a teenager, my Lutheran congregation had to have a special talk about Rapture timelines and international peace being an Antichrist conspiracy and whatnot because we simply had no tradition of any of that--but now, after decades of American Exceptionalist Protestant preachers going on and on about it on TV, the same congregation takes those notions for granted. And so, I think, as mass media became ever cheaper and ever louder, the most exciting stories about fasting--hollow-eyed mad hermits and whatnot--got into the minds of people who should have known better, and taught better.
But onward.
The second reason for the loss of literature on fasting, says Foster, is that we are continually encouraged to eat-eat-eat. I am reminded that Foster is a man and that he was writing originally in 1978. Diet culture appears to have passed him by. But he does have a point when he quotes the concerns he has heard about the immediate injurious effects of fasting. The average reader of Foster's works may never even have been so hungry that the next meal is unusually tasty. Food is everywhere, and for many years it was so cheap that thinness--the ability to spend time obsessively exercising and seeking out the very skinniest foods--was a sign of disposable income, not of poverty. Plus, the conventional wisdom that we can attain and retain supreme good health and longevity by consuming the correct foods is rarely questioned. So the knowledge that moderate hunger at moderate intervals won't harm you (if you are in good health) is relatively rare. And our only modern examples of the further reaches of fasting are of people who really are hurting themselves--anorexics, or people who are always high on drugs that suppress the appetite, or people who have a very powerful irrational belief about health that leads them to proclaim how healthy they are not long before they die prematurely. We don't generally understand that fasting, done well, can go on for a long time before starvation begins.
All of this is modern talk, however. Fasting in the Christian tradition has roots that go much, much further back. And like many of the Christian disciplines, fasting is not even exclusive to faiths that acknowledge Abraham. Foster cites examples of fasting in Zoroastrianism, Confucianism, Hinduism, and classical Hellenic religion.
But what does it look like when Christians fast? This is a question with a long and complicated answer. Foster summarizes part of that answer in the next section of this chapter.
