Homilies 14.1–14.5

Homily 14. A discourse on the beginning of the fasts. Man is a composite living being, allotted to be what he is from the visible body and from the rational and bodiless soul. But of these two the nature and dignity are not equal. The one was fashioned as an instrument, moved for the management of the ruling part; the other was appointed to lead and to reign, as the better over the worse. The soul, having received the power of discernment from the mind and reason, and having found out the difference between good things and the like, recognizes God as maker and creator both of the things at our feet that are grasped by the senses, and also of the invisible things … [loving] justice and virtue, as dear to God, it aims at philosophy; obeying its laws and precepts, it leads itself as far as possible from the desires of the flesh, draws near to God, and labours as far as it can to be made familiar with the good. The greatest and most important part of this sacred philosophy turns on what is called self-control. For here the mind remains unclouded, and, receiving no admixture of the defilements that come from the belly or elsewhere, has unhindered activity and the contemplation of heavenly things akin to it. So all of you who are nurslings of philosophy, lovers of lofty things and disciples of the word, love the present season, and receive the holy Forty Days with joy, as the teacher of self-control, the mother of virtue, the nurse of the sons of God, the tutor of the disorderly, the calm of souls, the stability of life, a peace sworn by covenant and untroubled. For its austerity and solemnity lull the passions to sleep, quench anger and rage, and calm everything … And what the north wind does in summer, when the sun shines its flames on the earth, [cooling] the stifling heat, fasting too bestows, [cooling the heat] that comes from … And while it does the soul so much good, it benefits the body no less. It thins the thickness of the humours, removes the bulk of the body, relieves the veins bursting with the abundance of blood, and gives them a little room in their narrowness, so that they may not suffer what pipes suffer: for pipes too, when the water flowing into them is much and beyond measure, burst … [the body] has a calm and peaceful state, the arteries not throbbing, the brain not darkened by vapours rising to it. Self-control is the freedom of the stomach; for then it is released from its forced slavery, from boiling like a cauldron and toiling at digestion. The eyes see clearly and undimmed, every mist being taken away that satiety usually pours over them; the step of the feet is firm and the activity of the hands unshaken. The breathing is regular and moderate, pressed from within by none of the troublesome winds. The faster's speech is clear and articulate, his mind pure, and truly godlike when, in the flesh as if it were bodiless, it performs its own activity without pain or disturbance. His sleep is painless and free of fantasies. To pass over many things and say it briefly: fasting is the common peace of soul and body, an untroubled life, a stable way of living, a life that gladdens God and grieves the enemy. For as an enemy, when he sees his opponent practising manliness, considers that industrious preparation his own defeat, so the plotter against our salvation hates all our exactness in virtue as his own misfortune. And therefore know, O man, that angels are the guardians and attendant watchers of the faster's house; but of the man who revels in enjoyments during the Forty Days, demons are the companions, friends of the savour of sacrifices, lovers of blood, attendants of drunkenness. For each of the spirits, whether holy or unclean, [delights] in its own and in its friends, as one can see with birds too. The dove loves clean places and goes about the fields, picking up seeds for itself and its young; and the turtle-dove sits pleasantly among the leaves of the trees, murmuring something sweet and soft.

But the gluttonous crow sits by the meat-markets, croaking something heavy and unpleasant at those who carve the meat. So let us love self-control, that we may be loved by angels; and let us hate licentious luxury, that we may not, along with it, fall into fellowship with demons. No one living in luxury ever became earnest, no one devoted to banquets a disciple of virtue, no lover of pleasure holy, nor anyone who lives according to the flesh … Go back in memory to the beginning of our race, and you will find experience a witness to what we are blaming. No law of fasting would have been laid on us if the law of the first self-control had not been transgressed; the belly would not have been called treacherous if the pretext of pleasure had not brought in sin. There would have been no need of the plough, nor of seeds, and water to irrigate them, and the cycle of seasons, winter binding and summer loosening, and all this round of hardship, had we not been condemned to this cycle of labours because of our forefather's hasty enjoyment. We were to live a different state of life from the one we see, which we hope to attain again when we put off the passionate life through the resurrection. For this is the benefit of God's condescension to us: that we may be restored to our ancient dignity, which we received through his love for mankind but, lacking sense, did not keep as a grace. Fasting is an image of the life to come, an imitation of the incorruptible way of life. There are no drinking parties there, nor … Leave the first man aside, and count those after him in order. What made the righteous Noah behave indecently, stripped in his insensibility of the parts that the law [says] must be covered, and [led] the rash Ham to … so that two evils came about through one offence? For one drunkenness stripped both the father of his seemly covering and the son of his freedom. And when, again, I look at the sons of Eli the priest and occupy my [mind] with that history, … starting from one beginning, the belly and satiety. For they made their father's priesthood an occasion of pleasure and enjoyment, profaned the sacrifices, and took the first portions of the victims for their belly before God. Sexual immorality followed too, the sin that is sister to luxury, and after all these God's judgment, bringing a severe and sharp penalty. For a hostile nation marched against Jerusalem because of them. To cut short a multitude of gloomy stories: the licentious young men fell in battle, their homeland was carried off captive by the enemy, the old priest died at the news of the evils, and so great a swarm of evils was brought on the city through the pleasure of the throat. Let us all fast, then; and the households of the priests all the more, since they have the teacher of self-control living with them and receive the precepts of philosophy at their own hearth. It is absurd that the sons of bankers should be assayers of silver, and the households of smiths should busy themselves about the fire and the anvil, while those close to the priests, whether relatives or otherwise of their household, break away from the aim by which the head and master of their hearth has been allotted to live. Isaac's elder son too was greatly harmed through his belly. Being a hunter by trade, he once came home after a long chase and, in uncontrollable hunger, clung to the food that appeared and sold his birthright to his brother for lentils. From then on he was robbed of his father's blessing as well; and so, estranged little by little from virtue and from God, he lost the glory of a patriarch, and, cut off from Israel in kinship, he himself became a barbarian and a foreigner and begot such a people from himself. This disease also led the people of the Old Testament into transgression of the divine and sacred laws. For while Moses was occupied with the giving of the law, the people abandoned their way of life and turned to luxury and dancing; and as they slid little by little and trampled the good order of life, the devil drew them on to impiety. From there came their sharing in the pollution, the corrupting of the law, the breaking of the tablets, Moses' second ascent of the mountain, and all that the history laments and bewails; it all had its beginning and cause in immoderate eating.

… later than the one just mentioned in time, but equal in effect. King Saul forbade the people to take food on that day, sealing the decision with an oath, and death was the penalty for anyone who disobeyed. While the whole army obediently accepted the command, only the king's son Jonathan, coming upon a swarm and overcome by the honey, dipped [his staff] into the combs … came near to danger, had not the whole multitude together resisted the impulse of his father and king, who had decided to carry out the threat. Besides what has been said, one can gather countless such examples from the Scriptures and see clearly that self-control is good, and that, on the contrary, unhindered enjoyment of drink and dishes is harmful. Fasting is the companion of the saints; fasting is the leader of every good action. As craftsmen cannot practise their arts without tools, so earnest men, even when helped by spiritual gifts, never worked any wonders or signs without self-control. Fasting, Elisha raised a dead man and gave him life again, and overcame the sorcery and error of the Assyrians; fasting, the Lord too endured the devil's temptations; fasting, the apostles made their prayers for earnest matters; by fasting the Ninevites overcame the threat of death. In short, fasting is an advocate before God, worthy of respect, a trustworthy ambassador, quickly moving God for those on whose behalf it brings its supplication to him. So come to the days of self-control rejoicing and cheerful, I beg you, every godly man and whoever is a lover of God rather than of pleasure. No one who is gloomy at the start of the contests is a noble contestant. Do not be sullen, like an infant dragged to school; do not grumble at the purity of the days; do not look for the end of the week as for the coming of spring after a bitter winter; do not long for the Sabbath for the sake of drunkenness, like a Jew; do not count the days of the Forty like a lazy hireling waiting for the end of his paid term; do not be grieved that from the first hour your house does not smoke, nor the cook stand at the fire. Give something to the soul too, not everything to the body. Abstinence from food nourishes the one, filling up nourishes the other. But since the two are yoked together, and things very far apart in nature have been bound together by the Creator's providence and art, let us plan how both may come through, neither being deprived of the needs proper to it. You are composed of the two, O man; and I say nothing for now of the fact that the soul is far more to be honoured, and that it would be fitting to give it the greater share of goodwill. But it is just for both, as a rational … I will plead the soul's case, as for a woman who has entrusted her defence to me, on the points in which she says she is wronged and insulted. She is sacred and bodiless, immortal and indestructible; her kinship is not with the earth and the things here, but with God. Being pure, she rejoices in what is pure; having an immaterial origin, she flees from matter. But since she was ordered to manage the vessel formed from earth, like an obedient slave of her master she sits beside the clay, keeps guard over it and takes care of it, until the command comes that permits the separation. This soul, which gives life to the body, is benefited by abstinence from food; for the earthly instrument the enjoyment of food is necessary. She asks nothing more, being the stronger. “Divide the year's time for me,” she says; “give six months to the one that is steered, and the rest to the steersman.” The request is just, and no judge is so fond of the body or so one-sided as not to vote for what she says. But I will go further: I do not hold out for equal shares. I make allowance for the weakness of the body. I give ten months to the body, and … , so that I may be freed for a little from the mire, the clay being cooled by self-control. These things, Christians, are just and indisputable, whether God is the judge or man. And you, judge, cast your vote (for you have come at the right time) for the soul in her dispute with the body. Take away, then, O Christian, your love of pleasure as something childish. You are a man; do not think the thoughts of infants. They wail if they do not get honey; if you do not offer them meat or wine, they throw themselves down and struggle, and wear everyone out with their crying for a very long time. I blush at the dejection of the gluttons, at the way they [dread] fasting. … they go back to sleep by force; they try to spend the days without feeling anything; they are annoyed at the sun for lingering before it sets; they say the days are longer than usual. Then they invent pains in the stomach, swellings of wind, heaviness of the head and an upset of their constitution; yet these are signs of satiety, not of fasting. They come with distaste to the solemn … the pulses, as though they had been brought into creation for nothing; for the lovers of pleasure become natural philosophers against the foods of self-control.

They gulp their water without taking breath, as though taking an unpleasant drug from the physicians. Many also … wine. Others therefore contrive [luxury] with vegetables, and become intricate sophists of enjoyment. This is very foolish and senseless. Self-control is the mark of a self-governing and free mind … You demand a wage for living according to the law of virtue. But wages and rewards are promised to honest workers, not to cheats. Do not adulterate the fast, so that you may not suffer what tavern-keepers suffer. For if they are punished for mixing water with wine, how will you go unpunished for bringing contrived enjoyments into the austerity of the fast? … Do not slander the Forty Days as a cause of disease; on the contrary, it produces health. Do not make excuses for sins along with men who work at pleasure-seeking. Because of your bad habit you think self-control your enemy; it is not burdensome by nature. Proof of this are all the barbarians who neither plant vines nor drink wine, but draw on the spontaneous and uncultivated drink, water; and they are known as noble and excellent in war, and the sober, as one would expect, overcome the drunken wine-lovers. Their bodies are light and hardy; such men are quick to mount a horse, daring by nature and accurate at archery, secure in their boldness and able to find counsel in difficulties. Do not, then, accuse water of being unhealthy, as if it made those who drink it feeble and weak; for … refute you: those who live by the Bosporus, and all who [live along] the river Rhine. They live as tent-dwellers, fixing their shelter out of felts and fleeces and whatever coverings come to hand. Therefore they do not eat bread, nor know the plough, nor break up the ground; how could they, since they have not learned to farm grain and the seeds of the earth? Yet living without bread and wine, they are brave, a match in war for whole nations, and they overcome the many; and the absence of bread and wine has not harmed them at all; their ancestral custom has become nature for them. Why has the discourse recalled this? So that we may learn that training and practice shape a person toward whatever we wish and practise. Accustom yourself to self-control, and in time it will become a companion that is no burden. But if, on the contrary, you have enjoyments and feasts as your companions and friends, you will never love fasting; it will seem heavy to you, as something strange and unaccustomed. A life of self-control is an image of the life to come, the incorruptible life. For as then, having put off this passionate flesh, we shall live free, with no need to serve the belly or be slaves to the other passions, so now too, if we cast off the great necessity and its material, we shall be near the incorruption we expect. In short, let us flee [the illusion that one can] be both a lover of pleasure and a lover of God. For the lover of the body will necessarily be a lover of money too, and the lover of money unjust; and the one who has fallen into injustice will easily transgress the ordinances of godliness and trample the laws of the wise, and will readily set his hand to what is forbidden, gathering from it the materials of his enjoyment and bringing all the spoils of injustice as offerings to pleasure. Do not flee from the hardship of self-control; set your hopes against the present toil, and you will pass lightly through the abstinence from food. Say to yourself words of godliness: “Fasting is bitter, but paradise is sweet; thirst is burdensome, but the spring is near, from which whoever drinks will never thirst. The body is weak, but the soul, which is bodiless, is stronger. Its strength is dead, but the resurrection is near.” And say to your pressing belly the word of the Lord: “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word of God.” It is not famine, but a small delay; not an inexorable punishment, but a voluntary abstinence; not slavish necessity, but free philosophy. Pray, and you will be strong; call on him, and he will stand by you as a ready helper.

Recall an ancient history, and you will learn how those who press down the body for godliness are neither weaker in strength than those who live in luxury, nor gloomier in appearance, nor faded in their grace. That king of the Assyrians, who lived wholly for the flesh and was tied to a luxurious life as to a manger, ordered that his cupbearers and table-servers, and in short all the servants of his enjoyment, be chosen for their good bodies and charming looks, so that not only his mouth and taste but also his eye might luxuriate in what he saw. Then the three young men from the captivity of Israel were enrolled in the list of his servants; but they abstained from the dishes of the royal table as defiled by the admixture of idol sacrifices, and ate only seeds. Wine too was to be shunned because of the libation, and all meat for the reason already given. When the overseer tried to compel them to partake of what was offered them, so that their beauty might not be turned to ugliness by their self-control, and the young men's repulsive and neglected looks might not become a charge and a punishment against him, one of them said: “Let us be, and allow it; we will not appear to the king less honoured than those who live in luxury, nor will you bring him … servants. For the craftsman who formed us will give the grace, and you will learn from experience that our beauty and …” And so it happened; for the young men bloomed exceedingly, and … What of Samson? Was he not taught to fast from the time he was weaned, since the Spirit had told his mother that the child should be kept from tasting wine and every luxury? And who was as strong as he? What champion was so renowned? He alone was a match for every battle line of the enemy and put a countless multitude to flight at will; once, lacking sword or spear, he took up the jawbone of a donkey and [struck down] a thousand warriors. So you too, hope, and you will be strong; be eager, and you will be empowered; give your ears to learning hidden things, and you will forget food, like the crowd that followed Jesus as he taught by word and deed … Let us be ashamed, we who are incontinent and pleasure-loving, before Greeks and Jews who fast, though in vain and for no purpose (for they lose to no end what they do not eat), yet who pursue the commandment as something enviable and fitting for earnest people. Exactness of life and the solemnity of philosophy befit Christians, to whom the pure and true word of godliness belongs. Those who labour at moral discipline without it seem to me to do the same as those who build houses without a foundation, or put a ship together without laying [its keel]. And I am seized by violent laughter when I see them … of the prophets, abortive offspring of Abraham; slaves of folly, though sons of freedom; ignorant and lawless, the supposed disciples of the law, who have lost the hope of fulfilment because they did not wisely receive the types of what was to come. For everything Moses did prefigured images of what would come later: the Feast of Tabernacles and the memorial of trumpets, and likewise circumcision, the unleavened bread, the bitter herbs. All those were tokens of the life in Christ, images engraved beforehand for those being initiated step by step toward perfection. For I, the Christian, the slave of the Crucified, fast rightly, whether for the hope of … , as a slave who loves his Master, [sharing] in the sufferings of my Lord. But you, the son of murderers and descendant of those who slaughtered the Lamb, who received from your fathers the inheritance of the blood that was shed, since they called it down upon themselves and their children, for what do you fast? Tell me. If you fast in repentance for your sins, I welcome your purpose warmly: leave the synagogue of the wicked and hasten to the Church of the godly. Come to the blood of the Lamb and be sprinkled. For your cleansing will come from the very place where you brought about your sin. But if you are still bound to the same things even now, what does your abstinence from food mean? Or are you imitating the crocodiles of the Nile, which, they say, weep over the heads of the men they have eaten and lament the killing, not because they repent of what they have done (how could irrational water beasts?), but because they mourn that the head has no flesh and is unfit for eating? And what is the outward form of your fasting! Dances and leaping are the middle and the interludes of your abstinence, a thing at war with the form that appears; for fasting is understood as a tutor of concentration and seemly restraint, while dancing expresses what is dissipated … Remember here the saying of Moses, which says that one must fast on the tenth day of the seventh month. The seventh month signifies the seventh day, and the tenth day the tenth hour, in which the Lord gave up his spirit on the cross. Each thing has its own special forms, which show from their outward appearance the inner disposition of the soul. Why do you mix what cannot be mixed, and confuse together what has been separated? They have other festivals too. One they call Tabernacles; the other, I hear, the Memorial of Trumpets. Without knowing it they are celebrating the mysteries of Christians. For the building of the tabernacle is an enacted prophecy of this Church which our Word has established; that is why they adorn the tent with leaves too, and by the law. And the feast of Trumpets rouses souls to make ready for the resurrection, as Paul says: “For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised.” Our God and Saviour himself teaches in the Gospels: “He will send out his angels with a trumpet and a loud voice, and they will gather his elect from the four winds, from one end of the heavens to the other.” Hearing these words, they will perhaps raise this objection against us: that they offer these feasts in memory of the ancient wonders, as thank-offerings for God's benefits, for Mount Sinai and the trumpet that sounded at the giving of the law. The vain-minded do not know that even then the trumpet was taken up as a type when the law was given. For since the one who receives the law as a rule of life and an orderly way of living ought to fear the punishment that comes from … , for this reason God at once added to the [precepts] of our life the sound of the trumpet as well, a symbol of the resurrection from the dead, so that the disciples of the commandments might, through the resurrection, [expect] the judgment … the decrees of the legislation. So, then, fasting, Tabernacles and trumpets are mysteries of our godliness, hinted at long ago and receiving their fulfilment at the proper time, when the theophany of our Saviour in the flesh was accomplished; to whom be glory and might to the ages of ages. Amen.