Fasting and Feasting

Feast and fast are inseparable in Orthodox life: the great feasts are prepared for by fasting and celebrated by its relaxation, so that the year is a rhythm of expectation and rejoicing. This file treats the two fasting seasons tied directly to Great Feasts (the Nativity and Dormition fasts), the paradox of Great Feasts kept as strict fasts, and the fast-free periods that follow the greatest celebrations.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The rhythm of fast and feast

Orthodox Christianity does not set fasting against feasting but binds them: the fast is the preparation, the feast the fulfillment, and neither is intelligible without the other. Schmemann made the point that fasting has no meaning as mere abstention; its meaning is expectant — it is a hunger ordered toward a joy, an emptying that makes room for a feast (Schmemann, Great Lent, SVS Press, 1969, on the meaning of the fast; and see Orthodoxy: Fasting). The liturgical year is accordingly structured as an alternation: four great fasting seasons and a scattering of single fast-days lead up to the feasts, and the greatest feasts break out into fast-free rejoicing. To grasp the feasts one must grasp the fasts that shape their approach.

The four fasting seasons and the feasts they serve

Two of the four annual fasting seasons lead directly to Great Feasts, and a third to a great (though non-Twelve) feast.

  • The Nativity Fast (the “Winter Lent” or Philip’s Fast), a forty-day fast from 15 November to 24 December (Julian reckoning), prepares for the Nativity of Christ. It is milder than Great Lent — fish is permitted on many days until the final stretch — but it grows stricter as the feast approaches, and from 20 December the forefeast intensifies the preparation (Bulgakov, Nastolnaya Kniga, 1900, on the Nativity Fast; and see The Nativity of Christ and Orthodoxy: Fasting Periods).
  • The Dormition Fast, a strict two-week fast from 1 to 14 August, prepares for the Dormition of the Theotokos. Though the shortest of the four, it is among the most austere, kept at roughly the level of Great Lent — wine and oil only at weekends — with a single relaxation for fish on the Transfiguration (6 August), which falls within it (Bulgakov, Nastolnaya Kniga; and see The Dormition, The Transfiguration).
  • The Apostles’ Fast (from the Monday after All Saints to 28 June) leads to the feast of Sts Peter and Paul (29 June) — a great feast, though not one of the Twelve; its variable length (because it begins from the movable Pentecost) is a direct consequence of the interlocking of the fixed and movable cycles (Bulgakov, Nastolnaya Kniga).
  • Great Lent, the greatest fast, prepares not for one of the Twelve but for Pascha, the Feast of Feasts, above them all — the pattern of which the other fasts are lesser images (Schmemann, Great Lent; and see Pascha).

Within Great Lent fall two of the movable Great Feasts (the Annunciation and Palm Sunday), each of which relaxes the fast in its honor — fish permitted — precisely to mark that a feast interrupts the fast with a foretaste of joy (Bulgakov, Nastolnaya Kniga; and see The Annunciation, The Entry into Jerusalem).

The paradox: Great Feasts kept as fasts

Two of the Twelve are themselves kept as strict fast days, a paradox that repays attention. The Exaltation of the Cross (14 September) is a first-rank feast on which no meat, fish, wine, or oil is taken, because its subject is the Passion — one does not feast the body on the day one venerates the instrument of the Lord’s suffering (Bulgakov, Nastolnaya Kniga; and see The Exaltation of the Cross). By ancient discipline the same austerity attaches to the day of the Beheading of St John the Baptist (29 August), a great feast kept as a fast for the like reason. And though the Theophany itself (6 January) is a joyous feast, its eve is a strict fast, as is the eve of the Nativity of Christ — the last, sharpest hunger before the celebration breaks (Bulgakov, Nastolnaya Kniga; and see Theophany). The paradox is not an inconsistency but a discipline of fittingness: the character of the day governs, and a feast whose content is the Cross is honored by fasting, not by the table.

The fast-free periods

Answering the fasts are the fast-free weeks (Slavonic sploshnye sedmitsy), periods in which the Wednesday and Friday fasts that mark the ordinary week are suspended in honor of a great celebration. The chief of these are: the twelve days from the Nativity of Christ to Theophany (25 December – 5 January), the “Svyatki,” fast-free in celebration of the Incarnation and the ancient unity of the two feasts; Bright Week, the week after Pascha, the most festal days of the year, on which even Wednesday and Friday are fast-free; and the week after Pentecost, before the Apostles’ Fast begins (Bulgakov, Nastolnaya Kniga, on the fast-free weeks; and see Pentecost). There are also the week after the Sunday of the Publican and Pharisee and the week of Cheesefare in the pre-Lenten season. The fast-free periods are the mirror-image of the fasts: as the Church prepares for the feast by hunger, so she prolongs the greatest feasts by a rejoicing that suspends even the weekly fast — the body brought into the celebration as it was brought into the preparation.

Economy and the pastoral application of the fast

The rules described above are the akriveia, the full strictness of the tradition as set out in the Typikon and the Nastolnaya Kniga. But Orthodox practice has always distinguished this ideal norm from its pastoral application, governed by economy (oikonomia) — the adaptation of the discipline to the strength, health, and circumstances of the individual under the guidance of a spiritual father (Ware, The Orthodox Church, rev. ed., Penguin, 1993, on fasting and economy). The sick, the pregnant and nursing, the very young and the very old, travelers, and those in conditions of hardship are relaxed from the full rigor; and the degree to which the fasts are kept varies widely between monastic and lay practice and between local Churches. The point of the distinction is that the fast is a means, not an end: it serves the feast and the transformation of the person, and a fasting that damaged health or bred pride would defeat its purpose. This is why the tradition’s sternest warnings about fasting are directed not at those who eat but at those who fast without love — the Lenten and pre-Lenten hymns insisting that “the true fast is the estrangement from evil,” not merely from food (the stichera of Cheesefare Week; The Lenten Triodion, trans. Mother Mary and Ware, Faber, 1978; Schmemann, Great Lent, on the spiritual fast). The feasts, correspondingly, are broken not chiefly by the return to rich food but by the joy of the celebration the fast prepared.

The theology of the rhythm

The alternation of fast and feast is not an arbitrary discipline but an enacted theology of time. In fasting, the Church lives the “already but not yet” — the longing of a world awaiting its redemption; in feasting, she lives the arrival of the Kingdom, the joy of the redemption given (Schmemann, For the Life of the World, SVS Press, 1973, ch. 3, on time, fasting, and the Kingdom). The two together keep the feasts from becoming either grim duty or empty festivity: the fast guards the feast from triviality, and the feast gives the fast its purpose. This is why the Orthodox tradition insists that fasting is finally about joy — a joy prepared for, and therefore real (Schmemann, Great Lent, on “bright sadness”; and see Orthodoxy: Fasting). The rhythm is itself catechesis: the body learns, across the year, the pattern of expectation and fulfillment that is the shape of the Christian hope.

See Also

References

  • Schmemann, Alexander. Great Lent. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1969.
  • Schmemann, Alexander. For the Life of the World. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1973.
  • The Lenten Triodion. Trans. Mother Mary and Kallistos Ware. London: Faber & Faber, 1978. (The Cheesefare hymns on the true fast.)
  • Kallistos Ware. The Orthodox Church. Rev. ed. London: Penguin, 1993. (Fasting and economy.)
  • Bulgakov, Sergei V. Nastolnaya Kniga (Handbook for Church Servers). 2nd ed., 1900. (The fasting seasons, the strict-fast feasts, and the fast-free weeks.)
  • The Festal Menaion. Trans. Mother Mary and Kallistos Ware. London: Faber & Faber, 1969. (Introduction, on the fasts attached to the feasts.)