Fasting: The Rules, the Range, and the Point

What you'll notice

A catechumen once texted me from the dairy aisle to ask whether margarine counts as dairy. Fair question. I answered it (it doesn't, mostly; I've chosen to believe, on faith, that some nineteenth-century Frenchman patented the stuff specifically to torment future Orthodox catechumens). But the question under that question is the one nearly all of us ask before we notice we're asking it: what am I allowed to do, and what happens if I don't? It's a Wednesday, or it's Lent, and the back of a tub of yellow spread has briefly become the most important theological document of the afternoon.

Spend time around the Orthodox and you'll start to see the pattern. Fish on the menu at the parish dinner on a Friday, or no fish at all. A coworker who brings lentil soup every Wednesday. Coffee hour in Lent that's all hummus and olives. A friend who says, "I can't, it's the Dormition Fast," in August, as if August were a season of the soul. It is, actually.

What it's called

Fasting in the Orthodox sense usually means eating differently, not eating nothing. On a strict fast day the Orthodox give up meat, dairy, eggs, fish with a backbone, and often wine and olive oil. On lighter days some of those come back. Going without food entirely is kept mainly before Communion and on a few days like Holy Friday. The strictest days of the books are days of xerophagy (literally "dry eating," the plainest diet the books allow).

The Church's word for the whole discipline is askesis (training), the same word an athlete would use. The full, strict standard is akriveia (exactness). The word for applying it wisely, person by person, is oikonomia (household management). You'll need both, and you'll need to keep them apart.

What's actually happening

There's a calendar, and it's older than you'd think. The Didache, from the late first or early second century, tells Christians to fast "on the fourth day and the Preparation," Wednesday and Friday.¹ Wednesday remembers the betrayal; Friday, the cross. On top of the weekly rhythm sit four seasons:²

• Great Lent, the forty days from Clean Monday, running straight on into the fast of Holy Week.
• The Apostles' Fast, in early summer: it begins on the Monday after the Sunday of All Saints (the Sunday after Pentecost) and runs until the feast of Saints Peter and Paul on June 29, so its length changes with the date of Pascha.
• The Dormition Fast, August 1–14.
• The Nativity Fast, November 15 to December 24.

Three single days are fasts too: the Exaltation of the Cross (September 14), the Beheading of Saint John the Baptist (August 29), and the eve of Theophany (January 5).³ Those are dates on the Church's calendar; parishes on the Old Calendar keep them thirteen days later by the civil one (Why Is Orthodox Easter on a Different Date? explains).

There are also fast-free weeks, when even Wednesday and Friday are lifted: from Christmas to the eve of Theophany; the week after the Sunday of the Publican and the Pharisee; Bright Week after Pascha; and the week after Pentecost.⁴ The last week before Lent is half-lifted: meat is gone, but dairy and eggs are allowed every day, Wednesday and Friday included.⁵ Saturdays and Sundays are never strict fast days, except Holy Saturday; the canons forbid fasting on the day of the Resurrection and on the Sabbath.⁶

The rule and the range

The Church holds up the full fast as the standard and then applies it person by person, through the priest. Think of a good coach: he doesn't hand you one program and disappear; he runs the whole thing, deciding when to push and when a sore knee means rest. The standard is akriveia, and it stays the standard; oikonomia is the coach's call to bend it for one athlete, for a reason, for a season. The bend never becomes the program.

The Greek Archdiocese's published guidelines say exactly that: the Church "recognizes that not everyone can fast to the same degree," and expects each person to keep the fast prescribed by a spiritual father.⁷ The fasting note in the English Lenten Triodion warns against reading the rules with "dour and pedantic legalism," because "you are not under the law but under grace" (the Triodion's wording; Romans 6:14 in the NKJV reads "not under law").⁸ And the mercy is in the canons themselves. Asked whether a woman who gives birth during the fast before Pascha must keep fasting, Saint Timothy of Alexandria answered that fasting exists to humble the body; a body already humbled by childbirth or long illness should eat what it needs.⁹

So what you'll actually see is a range, around a standard that doesn't move:

• The monastic standard: no meat, dairy, fish, oil or wine on most fast days, smaller meals, sometimes one a day.
• The parish reality: many families keep meatless and dairy-free Wednesdays and Fridays, a strict first and last week of Lent, and a looser middle. Plenty of people keep less, and are working on it.
• Economy (by the priest's blessing, for a reason): pregnant and nursing mothers, the sick, people with diabetes or food allergies, the elderly, small children, travelers, soldiers, and people who eat what's put in front of them at someone else's table. New converts are usually started gently, one season at a time, so they don't flame out by the second week of Lent.

The rule for all of them is the same: the fast you keep is worked out with your confessor, who asks what you're actually able to do and gives you a rule that stretches you without breaking you.

Why it matters

Jesus didn't say if you fast. He said "when you fast," and then told people to wash their faces and keep quiet about it (Matthew 6:16–18). He also said his disciples would fast once the bridegroom was taken from them (Matthew 9:15), and the first Christians did, before big decisions (Acts 13:2–3).

But the Church has never thought the food was the point. Saint John Chrysostom told his congregation in Antioch, in so many words, that fasting's honor isn't in skipping meat but in skipping sin, and that the eye, the ear, the hands and the feet ought to fast along with the mouth.¹⁰ Fasting without prayer and almsgiving is a diet with incense. The three go together. You eat less, so you have more to give (Almsgiving and Stewardship). You're hungry, so you remember who feeds you. You say no to the cheeseburger, and it gets a little easier to say no to the things that actually hurt people.

That's why the Orthodox call the rules tools. A hammer isn't the house. Nobody gets into heaven for avoiding casein. But a person who's spent forty days telling his stomach "not now" has had forty days of practice at telling his anger, his phone and his tongue the same thing. Before you give up meat and dairy, give up the grudge. Which is why Lent opens with Forgiveness Sunday, when it's customary to ask and grant forgiveness all around, and not with a grocery list.¹¹

Field Note: shellfish on a fast day? Usually, yes. The fasting note in the Lenten Triodion forbids "fish with backbones," then adds: "In practice, octopus and shell-fish are also allowed on days of xerophagy," along with vegetable margarine and oils not made from olives.¹² So that's where the margarine answer comes from too. Notice "in practice": it's a note on custom, not a line of the typikon, and the tidy explanations you'll hear (no blood, no backbone) don't come with an old text behind them. The Greek Archdiocese's guidelines permit shellfish throughout the year.¹³ In the Mediterranean, where the custom grew up, that was the cheap food. The irony of a lobster tail on a Lenten Friday in America isn't lost on anyone. The letter allows it. The spirit asks whether you're fasting or just eating expensively.

Where it came from

The one canon that actually commands fasting is short. Apostolic Canon 69 deposes a cleric, and excommunicates a layman, who doesn't keep the fast of the forty days or of Wednesday and Friday, and it writes its own exception into the text: "unless he be hindered by some bodily infirmity."¹⁴ It says nothing about food. The fourth-century Council of Gangra guarded the other side of the road: anathema on ascetics who scorn "the fasts commonly prescribed and observed by the Church," on anyone who fasts on Sunday "under pretence of asceticism," and on anyone who condemns a believer for eating meat.¹⁵

The range is old too. In the mid-third century Saint Dionysius of Alexandria noted that Christians kept the six days before Pascha very differently: some went without food for all six days, some for two or three or four, some for none, and he wouldn't scold the ones who gave out early from exhaustion.¹⁶ A council in 692 extended the Lenten abstinence from eggs and cheese to "the whole Church of God which is in all the world."¹⁷ Nearly everything else, including the other three fasting seasons and the menus (which day gets oil and which gets wine), comes from the typikon, the monasteries' rule book, especially the typikon of Saint Sabbas, which parishes adopted as their pattern. The books describe a monastic standard; most parish families keep less, and nobody is fooling anybody.

Field Note: when fasting and a diet plan collide. A cradle Orthodox friend once told me, probably over hummus, that his aunts all gained weight every Lent; bread and fake meat will do that. Keto, paleo, a doctor-prescribed plan, an eating disorder in your past, a medication that needs food: these meet the fasting calendar every year, and they don't always get along. Your fasting rule bends for health. Tell your doctor about the fast and your confessor about the doctor. The canons themselves make room for bodily weakness, and a rule that harms your body isn't the Church's rule.

What you do

If you're Orthodox: get your jurisdiction's fasting calendar, keep the rule you've worked out with your confessor, and start where you are. Add prayer and giving before you subtract foods. Don't announce your fast, don't try to outmonk the monks, keep your eyes on your own plate, and when someone serves you meat at their house on a Friday, eat it with thanks; hospitality outranks the menu.

If you're visiting: nothing is asked of you. If you're invited to a Lenten meal, enjoy it; Orthodox fasting food is some of the best cooking in the world, because people have had sixteen centuries to make beans interesting. If you're curious, try a Wednesday. Skip the meat, say a prayer at the moment you'd normally reach for a snack, and give the money you saved to someone hungry. That's the whole thing in miniature.

Go deeper

• Matthew 6:1–18; Isaiah 58.
• Saint John Chrysostom, Homilies on the Statues, Homily 3 (NPNF1 9).
• Alexander Schmemann, Great Lent.
• The Church Year and The Communion Fast.

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