Intermittent fasting? Try the 5th century playbook

Lent is upon us – those 40 days of voluntary masochism that we moderns have mercifully put behind us. Or have we?

Julie Canlis

Julie connects Christian spirituality with ordinary life in Wenatchee, Washington State, where she teaches and writes.

A wine glass of water sits on an empty clean plate.

Daylight fasting.

Jean Fortunet, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Fasting, at least in the health world, is no longer a derogatory term but one in vogue. Particularly the merits of the restricted diet, in which you limit the amount of time you eat either to a day (e.g. to an eight-hour window) or a week (e.g. skip eating on two different days). The latter approach, maybe surprisingly, follows in the footsteps of our religious forebears, who fasted every Wednesday and Friday. Could it be that they’d figured out a practice we are just discovering? And what else were they trying to achieve?

To a medieval peasant in Britain, Lent ratcheted up the twice-weekly fast. It was 40 days of a vegan diet, that often increased in intensity as the body adjusted (though the pregnant, young, sick and old were exempt). Lent also issued in much cultural creativity. Who knew that Cathedral at Rouen was a Lenten by-product, as those desperate for butter could get a dispensation by contributing financially to the Butter Towers (as they became known)? And Britons may have Lent to thank for both black peas, a Lancastrian delicacy, and fish & chips, as cooks were challenged to keep Lenten menus interesting.

Despite our caricatures of Lent as a dour and draconian time, it was essential to the enjoyment of medieval life. The purpose of Lent was not the denial but the renewal of pleasure. Maybe it’s precisely that aspect that has echoed through the centuries, manifesting now in our punishing diets, Tough Mudder races, and endurance stunts. Isn’t that a bit part of why we (well, some of us) do them?

This article was first published on March 15 2023.

'One of the principal rhythms of medieval life was this move from feasting to fasting to feasting again.'

Our modern fascination with fasting can also receive wisdom from Lent, which is that fasting for its own sake will always lead to something unhealthy. It must be for the purpose of something greater. Our forebears worried that physical practices could become idolatry, when wrenched out of their context of repentance. As G. K. Chesterton remarked,

'Physical nature must not be made the direct object of obedience; it must be enjoyed, not worshipped.'

The Old Testament prophets were particularly grumpy about this, insisting that fasting would do no good if it did not also help you love your neighbour more. Or as the early third-century Christians who fled from Roman excess into the deserts remarked,

'If you fast regularly, do not be inflated with pride; if you think highly of yourself because of it, then you had better eat meat.'

Fasting on its own will not make us better people, though we might shed a few pounds. Fasting is to restore the pleasure not only to eating, but also to the soul in need of God. Interesting that one of the primary biblical metaphors for a lively spiritual life is that of feasting and eating. Fasting resets the soul with repentance. It is praying with our body. It is not a negation but a purgation of desire – not denying our desires but resetting them. C.S. Lewis wondered whether our desires are not too strong, but too weak.

'We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered to us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.'

So if you’ve considered intermittent fasting, or even if not but you feel you might need a more balanced perspective on pleasure, consider the Lenten playbook. Feast and fast cyclically. Do it for a greater purpose than just losing weight. Let it change and reset your true desires. And maybe, just maybe, you might discover God waiting for you at the root of all your desires.

How to survive a culture war

Blaise Pascal shows us what really underlies our contemporary battles.

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

Maxime Gilbert on Unsplash.

We often say these days that we are more polarised as a society than ever before. But we're wrong. Maybe the USA is experiencing a particularly sharp divide right now, but they have had their own, much more violent troubles in the past. And in Europe, and especially in Britain, we know a fair bit about culture wars that were literally that – wars.

In the 17th century, we English had our own civil war where we literally killed each other over religion and politics. We even killed a king. The French did something similar and even more vicious just over 100 years later. That is real polarisation. However spiteful Twitter/X arguments may get, I don't think Charles III or even Kier Starmer is quaking in their beds expecting to be put on trial for treason.

So maybe our history has something to teach us about how we navigate culture wars.

The literary critic Terry Eagleton once wrote of our age:

“the world is accordingly divided between those who believe too much and those who believe too little. While some lack all conviction, others are full of passionate intensity.”

We tend to think our contemporary divide between left and right, progressives and conservatives is something new. But we can find echoes of this in previous times.

A case in point was the mid-17th century – the time of many other upheavals in Europe. Part of the febrile atmosphere of the time saw fierce arguments between rationalists and sceptics.

There were at the time, two broad strands of thinking about the human condition. On the one had there were the ‘Dogmatists’ who were sure that they knew everything through use of reason or the application of philosophical or scientific method (like René Descartes). On the other hand, there were the ‘Sceptics’ who thought everything was random, or custom, and there is no final Truth to be found (like a figure from the century before – Michel de Montaigne).

Of course, our own time has its fair share of people with an overwhelming confidence in the power of human knowledge, and the physical sciences in particular, to unlock the secrets of life, the universe and everything. The ‘new atheist’ project of Richard Dawkins and friends was hugely confident in reason and its capacity to tell us all we need to know, dispatching religion to the dustbin of history and instead placing an unshakable faith in the empirical methods of science. It had - and has - definite similarities with this picture of human knowledge.

Yet on the other hand we also have, in the progressive postmodern project, those who reject any kind of underlying rationality or sacred order either above us or beneath us. For them, there is no underlying Truth to be discovered, and they delight in revealing the instability and illusory nature of any claim to truth. It sounds very much like the culture wars of our time.

One enigmatic 17th century figure charted a way through this dilemma - Blaise Pascal. When he looked at his century’s culture war, he thought both sides had a point. There is, he observed…

…open war between men in which everyone is obliged to take sides, either with the dogmatists or with the sceptics, because anyone who imagines he can stay neutral is a sceptic par excellence…. Who will unravel such a tangle? This is certainly beyond dogmatism and scepticism, beyond all human philosophy. Humanity transcends humanity. Let us then concede to the sceptics what they have so often proclaimed that truth lies beyond our scope and is an unattainable quarry, that it is no earthly denizen, but at home in heaven lying in the lap of God, to be known only insofar as it pleases him to reveal it.

So far, he says, the sceptics, like Montaigne, are right. Truth is beyond our grasp, it does not reside here on earth, openly obvious and ready to be found. If it exists, it exists in some world above us, beyond our reach. How do we even know if we are asleep or awake, given that when we dream, we are as convinced that we are awake as we are when we are truly awake?

And so, modern progressives, looking to dismantle the assumed results of previous understanding, due to its inherent colonial, patriarchal or abusive past, delight in showing how random and arbitrary is so much of what we take for granted from the past. And, Pascal would add, they have a point. Many of our legal, political and cultural assumptions are purely cultural and arbitrary, and sometimes simply serve to the advantage of the rich and powerful rather than the poor and marginalised.

Yet on the other side, the ‘dogmatists’, like Descartes, have their strong point, which is that we cannot doubt natural principles. The acids of deconstruction can only take you so far. The most sceptical philosopher still puts the kettle on assuming that it will boil to make a cup of tea. She gets up in the morning assuming that the sun will rise and set again at the end of the day. Despite the corrosive effects of scepticism, Pascal wrote,

“I maintain that a perfectly genuine sceptic has never existed. Nature backs up helpless reason and stops it going so wildly astray.”

Despite all our doubt, we still live in a world with order and predictability. Scepticism keeps bumping up against reality.

So, modern conservatives point to a deeper ‘givenness’ to things, an order within the natural world that we did not create, and yet, mysteriously, seems to be prearranged before we got here. Scientific exploration does make sense. There is a regularity to nature that we can, indeed have to, depend on. Sexual differences exist and can’t be ignored. We are not entirely free to override the natural order of things - there is a deeper rhythm to nature and its capacity for renewal that we only mess with at our peril, as climate change has taught us. As a result, the age-old battle between rationalists and sceptics, progressives and conservatives, will never find resolution, as the arguments flow back and forth.

Christian faith includes both progressive and conservative impulses. Christians are aware of the brokenness of the world and therefore long to see it changed. The progressive impatience with the way things are, and the yearning for a better world has its roots in Christian faith.

Yet at the same time, Christianity discerns a divinely created order to the world, a rhythm to the natural world, that cannot be broken and needs to be respected. Therefore, an inherent conservatism is part of Christian faith as well. In other words, the Christian story can explain both and offer a bigger picture than either.

For Pascal, Christianity offers a diagnosis for this mystery of the human condition, the complex mix of grandeur and misery, infinity and nothing, sceptic and rationalist, in the simple, yet endlessly generative idea that we humans are gloriously created, deeply fallen and yet offered redemption through Jesus Christ. Our sadness is heroic and tragic. In Pascal’s suggestive image, it is “the wretchedness of a great Lord, the wretchedness of a dispossessed king.”

“We show our greatness,” says Pascal, “not by being at one extreme, but by touching both at once and occupying all the space in between.” For him, the very existence of such culture wars points to the truth of the Christian diagnosis of the human condition.

Pascal offers us a way between the Scylla of Progressivism and the Charybdis of Conservatism – or perhaps better, to embrace the best of both. Culture wars are tricky to navigate. Yet they might find resolution if we allow them to point us to a deeper reality - our strange mixture of greatness and sadness. And not losing sight of either side of this enduring truth.

Graham Tomlin is the author of Blaise Pascal: The Man Who Made the Modern World (Hodder) £25.

Watch Graham explain why he is fascinated by Pascal.

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