From Karl Adam Heinrich Kellner, Heortology: A History of the Christian Festivals from Their Origin to the Present Day, London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1908. Translation of Heortologie, oder, das Kirchenjahr und die Heiligenfeste in ihrer geschichtlichen Entwicklung, Freiburg im Breisgau: Herdersche Verlagshandlung, 1901.
The chief festivals are usually preceded by a time of preparation, consisting in many cases of only a single day, the vigil, but the preparation for Easter extends over nine weeks, and is composed of two parts: Lent, the more immediate preparation; and the three preceding Sundays, as a more distant and merely liturgical preparation.
In Lent, it is the fast which plays the chief part, and presents itself as the essential feature of the whole time of preparation. From it, also, the other developments take their rise. [1]
There are indications that, in the earliest times, Christians fasted on all Wednesdays and Fridays throughout the year. This pious custom seems to have been so generally observed that, without having been enjoined by any formal enactment, it had, so to speak, the force of law. It is mentioned in the Didache, in Hermas, and by Tertullian. [2] The latter calls these fasts “station-fasts,” and mentions that the fast lasted until 3 p.m. The custom had possibly been adopted from the Jews, for the Pharisees and Jewish ascetics in the time of Christ were wont to fast twice a week, on Monday and Thursday. [3]
With regard to the East, Clement of Alexandria mentions [4] Wednesday and Friday as fast days, and, which is especially remarkable, these days were also so observed in the period after Constantine, at least for a great part of the year. The Didascalia enjoins that these days be kept as fasts in the time after Whitsunday. The preceding season, the fifty days between Easter and Whitsunday, was a season of unmixed gladness, and so, according to the Didascalia, in Whitsun Week, these days were not fasts. We are led to the conjecture that this custom fell out of use in proportion as fasting became otherwise regulated, and the fast of forty days before Easter became a general law.
That fasting should form an essential feature in the commemoration of Passiontide had already been indicated in our Lord’s words (St Matt. ix. 15): “Can the children of the bridegroom mourn, as long as the bridegroom is with them?” To which question He Himself replied, “The days will come, when the bridegroom shall be taken away from them, and then shall they fast.” The days when the Bridegroom was taken away were held from the first to be those in which He lay in the grave, Good Friday and Holy Saturday. In the earliest times, these days were everyrwhere kept as fasts, and were observed by all, with exception of the quartociedmans, as obligatory fasts of the strictest kind. [5]
This fact is supported by a remark of St Irenaeus, in an official letter addressed to Pope Victor (189-99), on the occasion of the second dispute about Easter. It is given, for the most part, by Eusebius in his history of the Church. [6] This is the earliest evidence for the fast before Easter. It shows that the practice had not yet received a fixed and special form. Some, for instance, thought only one day ought to be kept as a fast, Good Friday; others fasted for two days, Good Friday and Holy Saturday – the two days, as Tertullian says, on which the Bridegroom was taken away. Others again fasted for more than two days (unfortunately, it is not said for how many), and others reckoned as their fast day, forty consecutive hours. That is to say, they kept a continuous fast for forty hours night and day, and regarded this as their fast day. [7] Which these forty hours were is easy to say, for our Lord lay in the grave for about forty hours, from the afternoon of Good Friday until Easter morning, or from Good Friday morning to the evening of Saturday.
Irenaeus and Tertullian know nothing as yet of the fast of forty days, although in their days it was the universal custom to fast, and that very strictly, on the two last days of Holy Week. About the middle of the third century, a week’s fast was customary in many places – the entire Holy Week being fasted on water and bread and salt, while on the last two days nothing whatever was eaten. The Didascalia describes the fast in the same way, and also the Apostolic Constitutions (5, 15). After this manner, accordingly, the fast was observed in Syria, and Dionysius witnesses to the same practice in Alexandria. [8]
However the words, “The fast shall be broken when a Sunday intervenes,” [9] found on the well-known statue of Hippolytus in Rome, show that already, by the middle of the third centmry, the fast extended over several weeks. The fast here alluded to must have extended over fourteen days at least. The disputed canons of Hippolytus (the twentieth and twenty-second) receive some confirmation from this passage.
In the fourth century, many witnesses to the fast of forty days are forthcoming, both writers, such as Eusebius, Cyril of Jerusalem, Ambrose, etc., as well as ecclesiastical enactments, e.g., the sixty-ninth of the Apostolic Canons. The Fifth canon of the First Council of Nicaea, in particular, mentions Lent as an observance already established. Nevertheless it clearly was not as yet uniformly observed in all parts of the Church, as the Festal Letters of St Athanasius bear witness.
These letters are in any case the most important evidence for the fast of forty days before Easter. The first of them, for the year 329, is satisfied with appointing “a holy fast of six days” from the Monday to the Saturday in Holy Week; [10] the second, however, for 330, and all the following require a fast of forty days, beginning on the Monday of the sixth complete week before Easter. [11] The Festal Letters give no direct explanation of how, and for what reason, the six days’ fast was changed into a fast of forty days.
However, the covering letter which Athanasius sent along with his eleventh Festal Letter, written from Rome in 339, throws some light upon the process. He writes, namely, to Serapion, first Abbot and then Bishop of Thmuis, that he may announce the fast of forty days to his brethren and impress upon them the necessity of the fast, “lest, when all the world fasts, we only who live in Egypt be derided for not fasting.” This warning is repeated with still greater emphasis: Serapion is to instruct those under him that they must fast forty days, [12] which seems to show that the custom of fasting for forty days was not yet in force in Egypt, though elsewhere it was universally observed, and especially in Rome. At the conclusion of the nineteenth Festal Letter is found a sharp reproof of those who disregarded the fast. [13] This is the forty days’ discipline (ἄσκησις) observed during the six weeks before Easter according to Eusebius. [14]
The Gallic pilgrim, already so often quoted, gives the following minute information concerning the manner in which the fasts were observed in Jerusalem in the fourth century. The preparatory period before Easter lasted eight weeks, not forty days, as in Gaul, and all the days of the week, Saturday and Sunday excepted, were fasted. Holy Saturday was an exception to this rule, being kept as a fast. Thus there were in all forty-one fast days, which were called in Greek ἑορταί; in Latin, feriae. On Wednesday in Lent, the Psalmody was performed as on Sunday, and the bishop read the appointed Gospel, but the Mass (oblatio) was offered only on Saturday and Sunday. On certain days processions were also made to different churches which lasted until eleven o’clock.
The fare on fast days consisted of water and broth made with flour; fruit and oil and bread were also eaten. The catechumens also fasted on Wednesdays and Fridays. Among the faithful, there were some who ate nothing from their repast on Sunday until the following Saturday, i.e. for five days, and who all the year round took only one meal a day. Others abstained in Lent from all food for two consecutive days, but others fasted by taking nothing to eat all day until the evening. [15] This last recalls the practice described by Irenaeus. Here one may observe that the custom of not fasting on the Saturdays in Lent existed also in Milan in the time of St Ambrose. [16] The fast must have commenced on the Monday after Sexagesima Sunday, since it had to extend over forty days.
With this agrees the directions given in the so-called Apostolic Constitutions (5, 13-20). In these, the fast of Holy Week is called distinctively the fast of Easter (νηστεία του πάσχα), and is distinguished from the fast of Lent. [17] From Monday to Friday in Holy Week, the fast is to be kept on bread, salt, vegetables and water, flesh meat and wine being forbidden. On Good Friday and Holy Saturday, the days when the Bridegroom was taken away, those who are able are to eat nothing whatever until early on Easter Sunday, while the usual fast lasted until 3 p.m., or sunset. [18] On Saturday, people are not to fast, because it is the day on which the Creation was complete, with the excep- tion of the Saturday on which the Lord lay in the earth. [19]
Leo the Great in his sermons teaches us the objects and significance of the fast before Easter. According to him, Lent was appointed in order to prepare souls for a fruitful commemoration of the mystery of Easter. It was to be a time for inner purification and sanctification; a time, first of all, of penance for past sins, and of breaking off sinful habits, a time also for the exercise of all virtues, especially almsgiving, recondUation, and the lajdng aside of enmities. It was in correspondence with the spirit of Lent that the Christian emperors pardoned criminals. [20] Fasting was to form only a part of this penance and preparation, though the most essential part, and Leo declares it to be incumbent upon all, not only the clergy, but all the faithful as well. [21] Leo regarded this fast of forty days before Easter as an apostolic institution. [22]
When the duration of the fast became generally fixed at forty days, a reason for this was not far to seek – the length of the fast of Jesus. From the beginning, however, a difference became apparent, according as Holy Week was either included in Lent or regarded as something distinct in itself. The ante-Nicene practice afforded a precedent for this. The latter practice is adopted in particular in the Apostolic Constitutions, and prevailed in a great part of the East. But in the East, Saturday was exempt from fasting, and so the number of fast days was, as a matter of fact, not greater than in the West, where the other practice obtained. Later, it was expressly set forth that Lent should be a quadragesima, not a quinquagesima, as by the first and fourth councils of Orleans in the sixth century. [23] In some quarters, our informant unfortunately does not say where, Thursday was also exempted from fasting. [24]
Originally, it appears, the fast of forty days, quadragesima, was taken to mean the days before Easter as a whole, Sundays included. This gave for a period of six weeks only thirty-six fasting days, and, where Saturday was not kept as a fast day, only thirty. To rectify this, the number of fast days was increased actually to forty, with the result that in the West, the beginning of Lent (caput jejunii) was put back four days; but in the East, where only five days in each week were fasted, it was put back further still. In the West, especially in Rome, this alteration, by which the fast began on the Wednesday before the sixth Sunday before Easter, had not yet been accomplished by the time of Gregory the Great.
In the East, too, the tendency to make up the full number of fast days to forty was apparent also at an early date. There, owing to Saturday not being a fast day, the beginning of Lent had to be thrown further back than in the West, and Lent began eight weeks before Easter, and since the Saturdays, Holy Saturday excepted, were not fast days, extended actually over forty-one days instead of forty. Abstinence from flesh meat began on the Monday after the eighth Sunday before Easter, corresponding to the Latin dominica sexagesima, which is called the Sunday of Abstinence from Flesh Meat. From the following Sunday, called the Sunday for Eating Cheese, lacticinia are forbidden. The following Sundays are reckoned as merely the first to the fifth Sundays in Lent, and only the first of them has the additional designation of Orthodox Sunday, in commemoration of the settlement of the Iconoclastic controversy. Later on, the Easterns attached great importance to the question whether Saturday ought or ought not to be kept as a fast day. As early, indeed, as the Apostolic Canons, it is expressly forbidden to fast on Saturday imder threat of ecclesiastical penalties. [25] At a later date this difference became one of the points of dispute between the Greeks and Latins.
The assertion of Socrates [26] that in Rome the fast lasted only three weeks is now regarded on aU hands as erroneous, all the more so as Socrates adds – also incorrectly – “Saturdays and Sundays excepted.” In Rome, Saturday was always kept as a fast. His statement cannot be accepted against the clear evidence of Leo I. concerning Lent, even although Valesius and Baillet wish to defend it.
That the fast of forty days was not originally observed in all parts of the Church, and only gradually came into force, can probably be explained by the fact that there were already fast days enough. There are, for instance, many indications that the custom of fasting on Wednesdays and Fridays all the year through – the period between Easter and Pentecost excepted – was fairly generally observed. Wednesday was kept as a fast, because on that day our Lord had been betrayed to the Jews; Friday, because it was the day of His Passion. At Carthage, where we find reliable evidence for the practice, they were called the fasts of the stations. [27] Even in the East, the custom was apparently general. [28] The Apostolic Constitutions are acquainted with it; the so-called Apostolic Canons prescribe it; [29] the Canons of Hippolytus [30] refer to the fast of the fourth and sixth feria as well as the fast of Lent. As these fasts are never mentioned in the literature of a later date, and altogether disappeared from practice, one is driven to the condusion that, as the Lenten fast became more widely observed, these others fell out of use. However, the weekly fast-days continued to be observed for a long time together with the Lenten fast, and, among the Greeks, are observed even to the present day. [31] Not only Augustine mentions that, at the end of the fourth century, in Rome, Wednesdays, Fridays, and also Saturdays were fasted, but Innocent I. regarded it as a duty to fast on Saturday all the year round, and Prudentius also alludes to it. [32] In the Syrian Church the three weekly fasts appear to have been obligatory on Bishops and Priests alone. [33]
After the adoption of the fast of forty days, attempts were made, in the West, to further regulate fasting, but these were confined to certain districts and in course of time ceased. For example. Bishop Perpetuus of Tours introduced a special practice into his diocese, which lasted until on in the sixth century, i.e. from Whitsunday to St John, and also from 1st September to St Martin, two fast-days were observed in each week; from then until Christmas, three; from St Hilary’s Day (14th January) until the middle of February two again. The second canon of the fourth council of Orleans (A.D. 541) opposed the attempts of some bishops to extend the fast over fifty, or even sixty days. Amalarius mentions other divergences from the Roman custom, such as keeping three Lents in the year, one before Christmas, the second before Easter, and the third before Whitsunday, and, again, fasting on the days before the Ascension. [34] In Germany, too, there were peculiarities in the discipline observed with regard to fasting during the eighth and ninth centuries. [35]
The essence of fasting consists in abstinence from meat and drink during a specified time. This in itself is not sufficient, for fasting entails moreover that the food taken after the lapse of this time be of a plainer kind, i.e. abstinence from the better sorts of food and drink, which is now called abstinence in the strict sense. The prohibition of certain meats in the Old Testament must be regarded as of a disciplinary nature, and not as a merely dietary regulation.
In ecclesiastical antiquity, along with abstinence from the usual daily meals, we find certain viands also forbidden – flesh and wine. To this period belong the xerophagiae spoken of by Tertullian, [36] at which people abstained not only from flesh and wine but from liquid food and fruit as well. These, however, seem to have gone beyond the abstinence then usual throughout the Church. The Montanists held these xerophagiae twice a year for fourteen days. [37]
Among Catholics also abstinence was pushed to great lengths. The canons of Hippolytus [38] prescribe for Holy Week only bread and salt. The Apostolic Constitutions will only permit bread, vegetables, salt and water, in Lent, flesh and wine being forbidden; and, on the last two days of Holy Week, nothing whatsoever is to be eaten. [39] The ascetics, whose acquaintance the Gallic pilgrim made in Jerusalem, never touched bread in Lent, but lived on flour and water. [40] Only a few could keep so strict a fast, and generally speaking people were satisfied with abstaining from flesh and wine. But this lasted throughout the entire Lent, and Chrysostom [41] tells us that in Antioch no flesh was eaten during the whole of Lent. Abstinence from milk and eggs (the so-called lacticinia) was also the general rule.
Thus abstinence from flesh meat (i.e. abstinence in the strict sense) was combined with the diminution of the quantity of food taken. It was also voluntarily practised by itself, without being accompanied by fasting (jejunium a carne et sanguine), by pious persons and ascetics, and was prescribed as a duty on certain days in monasteries and other religious communities, as, for instance, among the Canons of Chrodegang.
Throughout the early ages, abstinence was merely a pious custom. It was not until a later date that it was enjoined by law, as, for instance, by the fifty-sixth Trullan Canon, the Decree of Nicholas I. for the Bulgarians, the fourth and eighth councils of Toledo, the seventh canon of the council of Quedlinburg (1085), and the decretal of Gratian. [42] The custom of abstinence was then recognised and prescribed by ecclesiastical law for the whole of Lent, for all Fridays and Saturdays throughout the year, for the Ember Day, and a number of vigils. [43] No authentic document of antiquity is forthcoming to show that abstinence by itself, without an accompanying fast, had been prescribed by the Church. [44]
[1] The history of fasting, abstinence, and kindred subjects is excellently given by Baillet (ix. 37-130), according to the information at his disposal. Of more recent works, Funk, _Die Entwicklung des Osterfastens in seinen kirchengeschichtlichen Abhandlungen, Paderborn, 1897, 241-70.
[2] Didache, c. 8; Hermas, Simil., 5, 1; Tert., De Jej., c. 2, 10, 14.
[3] “Jejuno bis in sabbato” (St Luke xviii. 12); Duchesne, Orig. 218; Funk, Anm. zur Didache, 8, 1.
[4] Strom., 7, 74, ed. Sylburg.
[5] Tertullian, op. cit. 2, 13, 14.
[6] Eus., Hist. Eccl., 5, 24, 11-18.
[7] οἱ δὲ τεσσαράκοντα ὥρας ἡμερινάς τε καὶ νυκτερινὰς συμμετροῦσιν τὴν ἡμέραν αὐτῶν (Euseb., op. cit.). Funk, op. cit., 242 et seq., defends the above interpretation of the passage against Probst.
[8] Origen cannot be quoted for the fast of forty days, for the evidence attributed to him is really that of his translator, Rufinus. Cf. Funk, op. cit.
[9] This passage is not quoted in the treatise of Funk already referred to. His conclusions must accordingly be modified.
[10] Larsow, Festbriefe deshl. Athanasius, 62.
[11] Op. cit. 69.
[12] Op. cit. 127.
[13] Larsow, Festbriefe deshl. Athanasius, 149.
[14] De Paschate, c. 4.
[15] Peregr. Silviae., ed. Geyer, c. 27, 28 (60-62 cod.).
[16] De Elia., c. 10.
[17] Constit. Apost., 5, 13.
[18] Op. cit. 5, 18, 19.
[19] Op. cit. 5, 15, §1.
[20] Leo M., Sermo 40, 5.
[21] Sermo, 1.
[22] Sermo 44, 2; 47, 1.
[23] Aurel. I., A.D. 511, can. 24; Aurel. IV., A.D. 541, can. 2.
[24] Augustin., Epist. ad Januarium, c. 4 ; Migne, Patr. Lat., ii. 202.
[25] Trull., 55.
[26] Hist. Eccl., 5, 22. Sozomen (7, 19) and Cassiodorus (Hist. Misc., 9, 38) have merely copied Socrates.
[27] Tert., De Jej., 2, 10, 13, 14, etc.
[28] Didache, c. 8; Clemens Alex., Strom., 7, 12; Origen, C. Celso., 8, 21.
[29] Constit. Apost., 5, 15, 20; 7, 23; Can. Apost., 69 (68).
[30] Can. Arab., 20.
[31] Alt., 123.
[32] Augustin., Epist., 36, n. 8; Innoc. I., Epist., 25, 7; Migne, Patr. Lat., xx. 555; Prudent., Persist., 6, 52.
[33] Rahmani, Test. I. Chr., 1, 22, 33; 36, 71.
[34] Gregor. Tur., Hist. Franc., 10, 51; Amalarius, De Off. Eccl., 4, 37; Migne, Patr. Lat., cv. 1250.
[35] Binterim, Denkw., ii. 589.
[36] De Jej., c. 1, 2, 5, 9, 12, 17.
[37] Hieronymus, Epist. 27 ad Marcellam.
[38] Can. Arab., 22.
[39] Constit. Apost., 5, 18.
[40] Peregr. Silviae, c. 28, 4.
[41] Hom. de Statius, 3, 4.
[42] Decr. ad Bulg. Epist. 97, c. 4; Migne, Patr. Lat., xcvii. 980. Binterim, Denkw. v. 2, 160 seqq. Dist. 3, de consecr. de esu carnium. Dist. 5, c. Quia dies.
[43] Ferrari, Prompta Bibl., art. Abstinentia, 1, 42.
[44] Since the fasts were very strictly observed in the Middle Ages, it was a custom to have an especially good meal in the day or evening before they began. Hence the German expression “Fastnacht.” Unfortunately the Fastnacht is not limited nowadajrs to one night, but lasts for three days, and even, where possible, right into Ash-Wednesday.