The Fasting Seasons and Their Logic

Roughly half the Orthodox year is fast, and the fasts are not distributed by pious arithmetic: each of the four is ordered to a feast, and the two weekly fast days are ordered to the Cross. This file sets out why the fasting year has the shape it has — and why the shape is a dated structure, which is what makes the calendar question something other than an abstraction.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

Scope

The rules themselves — what is eaten and when, the gradations of oil, wine, and fish, the pastoral measure — are set out at Orthodoxy: Fasting Periods and Orthodoxy: Fasting Rules, and the content of Great Lent at Orthodoxy: Great Lent. Those files are not repeated here. What belongs here is the logic of the arrangement, and its bearing on liturgical time.

Every Fast Is Ordered to a Feast

This is the governing principle and it is worth stating before anything else, because it inverts the way fasting is usually described.

Fast	Prepares for
Great Lent and Holy Week	Pascha
Apostles’ Fast	Ss Peter and Paul (29 June)
Dormition Fast	The Dormition of the Theotokos (15 August)
Nativity Fast	The Nativity of Christ (25 December)
Wednesday and Friday	The Lord’s Day

No fast in the Orthodox year stands by itself. Each is an approach — a road with a destination, and the destination is a feast. The fast is not the point; the fast is how one arrives. This is why the Church’s fasting is not asceticism in general but a movement in time: it has a beginning, an intensification, and an arrival.

The pattern is visible even in the small structures. The Nativity Fast intensifies over its last five days, the forefeast, and culminates in the strict eve, paramony or sochelnik, kept until the first star. Great Lent has its own crescendo through Holy Week to the great and silent Saturday. The weekly fast has Friday, and then Sunday.

The Four Fasts and How They Are Anchored

The four fasts differ in a way that ordinary accounts pass over and that this collection needs (see The Fixed and the Movable Year):

Great Lent — wholly movable, computed from Pascha in both directions. Clean Monday is the forty-eighth day before Pascha; Great Saturday is the day before.
The Apostles’ Fast — begins on the Monday after All Saints Sunday, fifty-seven days after Pascha, and ends on 28 June. Movable start, fixed end. Its length therefore swings from about a week to six weeks.
The Dormition Fast — wholly fixed, 1 to 14 August, exactly two weeks, every year.
The Nativity Fast — wholly fixed, 15 November to 24 December, exactly forty days, every year.

Three fasts have a length the calendar cannot alter. One does not. That one is the Apostles’ Fast, and it is the structure through which any change in the relation between the two cycles registers immediately (see The Revised Julian Calendar and Its Reception).

The Weekly Fast

The oldest of the dated ascetic structures is the weekly one, and its earliest witness is polemical: “Do not let your fasts be with the hypocrites, for they fast on Monday and Thursday; you, however, should fast on Wednesday and Friday” (Didache 8.1; trans. Holmes, The Apostolic Fathers, 3rd ed., Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007). The commemorations attached to the days — the betrayal on Wednesday, the Crucifixion on Friday — interpret a practice that already existed.

Notice that the weekly fast is calendar-independent: Wednesday and Friday are the same days for every Orthodox Christian on earth, on any calendar. The rhythm that carries most of the year’s actual asceticism is untouched by the entire dispute of sections 04 to 07 (see The Daily and Weekly Cycles).

The Single-Day Fasts and the Feast That Is a Fast

Three days outside the seasons are kept as strict fasts, and each says something:

The Eve of Theophany (5 January) — the eve of a Great Feast, kept as a strict fast, with the Great Blessing of Water.
The Beheading of St John the Forerunner (29 August) — a commemoration whose content forbids festivity.
The Exaltation of the Cross (14 September) — and this one is the interesting case: a Great Feast that is a fast day. The Typikon permits wine and oil in recognition of the festal rank but not fish, and the day remains a fast because its content is the Cross (see Orthodoxy: Fasting Periods; The Exaltation of the Cross).

The Exaltation refutes, all by itself, the notion that fast and feast are opposed states with fasting as the lesser one. A Great Feast can be a fast because the fast is not a mood; it is a bodily participation in what is being celebrated.

The Anti-Fasts

The Church built deliberate suspensions into the year, and one of them is theologically pointed enough to deserve its own paragraph.

The week after the Sunday of the Publican and Pharisee is entirely fast-free — including Wednesday and Friday — precisely against pride in fasting. Great Lent’s approach opens with the parable in which the man who fasts twice in the week goes down to his house unjustified, and the Church responds by abolishing the fast for a week (see Orthodoxy: Great Lent; Orthodoxy: Fasting Periods).

That is a remarkable piece of liturgical engineering, and it bears directly on the subject of this collection. The Church knows that ascetic observance becomes an identity and a measuring-rod, and she has installed an antidote in the calendar itself. A tradition that suspends its own fast to prevent the fast from becoming a boast is not a tradition that intends its dates to be used as tests of other Christians (see Why the Calendar Is Not a Dogma).

The other fast-free periods have their own logic: Bright Week and the week after Pentecost, because the Bridegroom is present (Mark 2:19); Svyatki, the days between the Nativity and the eve of Theophany; and Cheesefare Week, a transitional week in which meat is already forbidden and dairy still permitted, easing the body toward Lent.

Degrees, and the Measure

The Typikon‘s prescriptions are monastic in origin and represent a maximum, not a minimum expectation for every Christian. The gradations — abstention from meat, then from dairy and eggs, then from fish, then from oil and wine, then xerophagy — are a scale, and the pastoral tradition is that a person’s place on the scale is set with his priest or spiritual father (see Orthodoxy: Fasting Rules; and the Russian Church’s On the Participation of the Faithful in the Eucharist, Moscow, 2–3 February 2015, which codifies the principle of pastoral discretion).

This is oikonomia in its proper sense: not the waiving of a rule, but the application of a rule by the one charged with applying it, with the rule’s purpose in view (see Orthodoxy: Pastoral Economy). ROCOR practice tends toward the stricter reading of the Typikon and applies economy individually, which is the same principle exercised differently (see Orthodoxy: Calendar and Typikon in ROCOR).

And the constant warning of the tradition is that the food is the smallest part. The Triodion‘s own hymn for the first week of Lent puts it in the Church’s voice: “Let us fast an acceptable and most pleasing fast unto the Lord: true fast is estrangement from evil, restraint of the tongue, putting away of anger, separation from lusts, slander, falsehood, and perjury” (Vespers of Monday in the first week of Great Lent, The Lenten Triodion, trans. Mother Mary and Kallistos Ware, London: Faber and Faber, 1978).

Why This Belongs in a Collection About the Calendar

Because fasts are dated structures. They begin and end on days. Three of the four are unaffected by any calendar question, and one of them is not; the weekly fast is unaffected; the fast-free weeks are unaffected. That is the honest accounting, and it shows both that the calendar question is not nothing — a fast of the Church can vanish from a year — and that it is not everything, since most of the fasting year is untouched by it.

A reader who has followed both halves of that sentence is in a position to read section 06 without either dismissing it or over-weighting it, which is what this collection is for.

References

Didache 8.1; in Holmes, Michael W., ed. and trans. The Apostolic Fathers. 3rd ed. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007.
The Lenten Triodion. Trans. Mother Mary and Kallistos Ware. London: Faber and Faber, 1978.
On the Participation of the Faithful in the Eucharist. Document of the Hierarchal Consultation of the Russian Orthodox Church. Moscow, 2–3 February 2015.
Rose, Hieromonk Seraphim. “The Rule of Fasting in the Orthodox Church.” The Orthodox Word; widely reprinted.
Schmemann, Alexander. Great Lent: Journey to Pascha. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1969.
Typikon (Ustav), chapters on the fasts.
Bulgakov, Sergei V. Nastolnaya Kniga [Handbook for Church Servers]. 2nd ed., 1900.