How fasting helps the soul—and the modern world
Even if fasting is necessary for mortification, how does it positively assist the spiritual life and the modern world?
Even if fasting is necessary for mortification, how does it positively assist the spiritual life and the modern world?
Editor’s Notes
Fasting is not merely a weapon against sin—St Bernardine and the saints teach that is also a path to wisdom and divine union, not only subduing the flesh but also opening the soul to God’s light.
Not only that, but it a crucial means of helping the modern world rouse itself from its stupor.
In this piece, Fr. Coleridge tells us…
How fasting enlightens the soul: It sharpens the mind, strengthens the will, and aids contemplation.
That fasting is a path to union with God: It eradicates self-love, conquers spiritual enemies, and leads to glory.
Why rejecting fasting is dangerous: Softness and modern errors undermine the discipline that purifies and elevates the soul.
He shows us that fasting is not just mortification but a means of divine illumination and a path to spiritual victory.
For more information on the law itself, see below:
Fasting
The Sermon on the Mount, Vol. II
Chapter IV
St. Matt. vi 16—18
Story of the Gospels, § 33
Burns and Oates, London, 1888
Headings and some line breaks added.
Sung on Ash Wednesday
Four fruits in the illuminative way
Saint [Bernardine] then goes on to speak of the fruits of fasting which belong to the illuminative way. These again are four.
First, he places the enlightenment of the mind, both as to matters of conduct and matters of speculation, then the nourishment of the spiritual faculties, then the healing of mental infirmities—sometimes even of bodily ailments—and, in the last place, the strengthening of the mind and the will. As regards the fruit of enlightenment, he quotes the words of Isaias:
‘Whom shall He teach knowledge, and whom shall He make to understand the hearing? Them that are weaned from the milk, that are drawn away from the breasts.’1
Thus Moses received the law on Mount Sinai after his long fast, while the people at the foot of the mountain were led by intemperance into idolatry. The exercises of prayer and contemplation, in which a clear insight into heavenly things is acquired, reading, preaching, and all others of the same kind, are greatly helped by abstinence. Daniel, Elias, and St. John are instances in Scripture of saints who have received revelations after fasting, and we have in the Church many examples like that which St. Bernardine quotes of St. Francis, who wrote his Rule and saw the vision in which he received the stigmata after a long fast.
As to the second fruit, our Lord in the desert, after His long fast, when angels came and ministered to Him, is the type and pattern of those who are nourished by God, spiritually or even corporally, after such abstinence.
The next two fruits do not need much explanation. The spiritual diseases which are healed by abstinence are many, and it happens not unfrequently that the ailments of the body yield to the same discipline.
In the last place, abstinence strengthens our courage, makes us ready for perseverance, enables us to suffer with patience, to labour with constancy, and to press on manfully and fearlessly along the road of perfection.
Four fruits in the unitive way
The fruits of fasting which relate to the unitive way are also four. St. Bernardine calls them the eradication of self-love, the sacrificing of the body, the triumphing over our enemies, and the opening of the gates of glory.
For the root of self-love is in our sensuality, coarse or refined, and by means of fasting sensuality is destroyed.
Fasting is the beginning and the principle of that sacrifice of the body of which St. Paul speaks when he says:
‘I beseech you, brethren, by the mercy of God, that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, pleasing to God, your reasonable service.’2
The body was intended to be the perfectly docile and willing instrument of the soul in the service of God, which consists in the practice of virtue, and in our present condition it has to be brought back to this state of happy obedience by the discipline of mortification, of which fasting is the beginning.
And then, when the root of self-love has been torn up, and the body subdued to be a holocaust in the worship of God, it is not much to add that our external enemies are conquered by the same holy means. Our external enemies are, in the first place, the devils, who reign and make their abode in souls pampered with luxury, indulgence, and pride, and whom our Lord overcame in the person of their chief in His own fasting. In the second place, our enemies are external trials and sufferings, and in the third place, difficulties and great achievements for the service of God, which are overcome and carried out by means of fasting. Elias is here again the great Scripture instance which is referred to by the saints.
‘When fasting, (says St. Ambrose,) he shut up the heavens, brought down the rain, called fire from heaven, was caught up into Paradise, and obtained admission to the presence of God. The more he fasted, the more he merited.’3
And, as to the fourth of these points, it is but natural that the gates of glory should be thrown open to men by abstinence and mortification, as they were of old closed against us in consequence of self-indulgence.
Great needs of our time
Such, then, are some of the fruits which the saints promise to us as the reward of a faithful obedience to the laws and the spirit of the Church in the matter of bodily self-denial. They deserve special attention in days like our own, when, from various causes, the Church has felt it right to go to the extreme of indulgence in her prescriptions in this matter, and when too many of her children are inclined to seek for still further relaxation of the ancient discipline.
It cannot be denied that there are probably many more in times like ours who are physically unable to observe the old rules, or even the modifications which are now commonly allowed. This may be the result of the increased care taken of sickly children or of invalids of any age, who would otherwise sink into the grave sooner than they do. It is probably, also, the fruit of the great strain and hurry and excitement of modern life, which wears out human vigour sooner than it need be worn out.
Nothing need be said of those who are for so many various causes exempted from the obligation of the full observance of the law, except that they should endeavour to find means for repairing to their own souls the loss which they may incur, though without blame, by their weakness. For there are many kinds of self-denial beside those which affect the strength of the body, and these should be used by such persons with a wise prudence, lest they should be put to shame by the children of this world, who will always make up for necessary losses by industry which is within their reach.
But it is to be feared that the growing eagerness for exemptions from the wholesome discipline of the Church has other causes besides those which have been named. The age is one of great softness, while the false doctrines which practically deny the fall of man and the other truths on which, as we have seen, the system of mortification is rested by the Church, are extremely rife, and affect many who are still nominally believers in revelation.
To fast and practise other mortifications of the kind which seem so degrading to human pride is to protest against these pernicious falsehoods. The Church may be considered to have warned her children against them in her own way, by the definition of the Immaculate Conception of our Blessed Lady—a doctrine which is unintelligible if the doctrine of the universality of original sin and all its consequences be not alike true and most momentous.
And it is curious to remark on the inconsistency of those who exclaim against this definition, and at the same time practically deny the doctrine of the fall of man. Almost in the same breath they tell us that the Immaculate Conception of the Mother of God involves the falsehood that our Lord did not take on Him a nature which was ours, and that the dignity of our nature is too great for us to need the physical discipline of fasting and other mortifications.
But, on the other hand, the more, as children of the Church, we rejoice in the prerogative, by virtue of which Mary was preserved from the common lot of the descendants of Eve, the more, surely, ought we to humble ourselves in the thought of the miserable condition which that common lot entailed upon all others but her.
Nor can there be any more practical way of asserting this truth in the face of an unbelieving and scoffing world than that of the highest possible esteem for those holy exercises which that lot, as inherited by ourselves, has made so necessary for us. It would not be a result out of keeping with the analogy of the history of the Church, if the age which has witnessed the solemn assertion of the truth of our Blessed Lady’s immunity from the sin of Adam should also be marked by a great revival of the ancient and most wise discipline of the Church in the matter of mortification.
Fasting
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Isaias xxviii. 9.
Romans xii. I.
De Jejunio