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.

Explainer

Belief

Culture

22 August 2024

7 min read

The questions that nobody can escape

Seeking answers about beginning, meaning, and of the end, explain why religion refuses to disappear.

Silvianne and Barnabas Aspray

Silvianne and Barnabas are theologians.

An arm and hand stretch out in front of some, a narrow street is the background.

Andrik Langfield on Unsplash.

In the twentieth century many people thought that religion was on the way out. As the political scientist Francis Fukuyama put it, it was broadly assumed that “religion would disappear and be replaced solely by secular, scientiﬁc rationalism.” But few people now believe this anymore. Fukuyama himself has changed his mind and says that the disappearance of religion “is not going to happen.” But why is religion refusing to disappear?

A core reason for the persistence of faith is that there are questions that everyone asks at one point or another that lead in the direction of religion. Religion, or faith, addresses questions that nobody can escape: Why is there something rather than nothing? Where does it all come from? Is there meaning to this life? And what happens after death? Faith traditions are experts in such ultimate questions. Consider the following examples.

These questions of beginning, of meaning, and of the end, are the questions that religion deals with.

When people experience the beginning of life, they are often caught up in wonder. How can it be that a whole new person is growing inside a woman? Even Friedrich Nietzsche, the great critic of Christianity, who famously declared that “God was dead”, also wrote, “Is there a more sacred state than pregnancy?” There is something deeply moving around the beginning of life. Many who become parents, or in some way experience the beginning of life, are led to wonder: isn’t something more than just biology happening here, something deeper? A new life, a whole new person – and our love for that new person – where does all of that come from?

Another group of questions that most people will face at some point in their lives revolves around meaning. What’s the point of growing up, a teenager might ask? What’s the point of my work, we may ask later on. Especially when we face frustrations, failures, challenges we might wonder what difference we are making to the world. Would anyone miss me if I was not here? Will anyone remember me if I die?

Finally, we all at some point come in contact with death. Even if we are spared the pain of friends dying young, it is the natural course of the world that our grandparents and our parents will one day die. What do we do in the face of such loss? It is hard not to ask: Where is my loved one now? And is there hope of seeing them again one day?

These are the kinds of questions that nobody can entirely avoid in their lives: they never fail to arise and press themselves upon our consciousness. Yet these questions of beginning, of meaning, and of the end, are precisely the questions that religion deals with. And here lies one important answer to why faith won’t just go away: Because scientific rationalism cannot really address them.

Faith offers a space in which people can ponder the ultimate questions and find other people who want to do it with them.

To be sure, secular scientific rationalism does offer some answers as to how life begins – we know the biology of it all astonishingly well. And yet, biology is not everything, and in fact, it is not the biological aspects of it all that touch us. The wonder, the hope, the love that we experience when we are faced with the beginning of life is more than what can be rationally or scientifically accounted for.

Similarly, scientific rationalism is not well equipped to answer questions of meaning. Science is great at answering how something works or how it should be done, but why-questions fall into a different category. Many chatbots, when asked about the meaning of life, will answer “42” - which is a reference to the comic sci-fi series “the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” and we intuitively understand that this answer is nonsensical. It is funny precisely because it is nonsensical.

And again, around the end of life: Scientific rationalism cannot and will not, based on its methods and approaches, say anything about the afterlife.

So, the questions of beginning, meaning and end cannot be answered solely by scientific rationalism. And yet they come up in all of our lives. Right here lies an important reason why faith has not gone away. Faith deals with just these questions. It is good at dealing with them – they are the core domain of faith.

Faith offers answers to questions of beginning, meaning and end, but just as importantly, it offers a community in which such questions can be addressed and discussed. It offers a space in which people can ponder the ultimate questions and find other people who want to do it with them, perhaps showing them ways in which they can find answers. Different faiths and different expressions of faiths do this very differently: organised religions do it differently to loose association of the “spiritual but not religious”, but in all cases, it is faith – broadly understood – that addresses and deals with the questions that niggle away and are not otherwise addressed. Faith won’t disappear, because faith’s questions won’t disappear.

But why does this need saying? Is it not obvious that religion is about ultimate questions that concern everyone?

The problem is that modern Western life is full of opportunities to distract us from these questions. We are wealthy, comfortable, bombarded with entertainment, and often very busy with careers and children as well. All these things help us to repress the deeper questions about the origin and purpose of our existence.

Many people treat the question of life’s meaning like a school or University essay that they can procrastinate from indefinitely: “One day I’d like to figure it out: what it’s all for and where it’s all going: but today there’s another episode on Netflix, Instagram to browse, or tennis on the TV.” The entertainment industry offers alluring enticements to money, sex, fame or success. Wealth is particularly useful because it helps us get what we want, when we want it, and prevents us from facing the harsher realities of life. Making ourselves busy is easy, and we can leave ourselves no time for deep reflection on the bigger questions. All of this adds up to what we might call the “narcotic of everyday life” – the ways in which daily life and society act as a drug to cloud our vision, confuse our thinking, and prevent us from clearly facing up to the things in life that matter most.

The “narcotic of everyday life” – the ways in which daily life and society act as a drug to cloud our vision, confuse our thinking, and prevent us from clearly facing up to the things in life that matter most.

But the problem is that even ordinary everyday life is lived according to (at least provisional) answers to those big questions. Every daily decision we make displays our values, what we think matters. If we work late instead of coming home to play with the children – if we fly to New Zealand for a vacation, or buy beef, massively increasing our carbon footprint and contributing to climate change – we are making choices that have an impact on the planet. All our choices are based on values which reveal our beliefs about what makes life worth living and what we want out of life. You cannot be an agnostic. Your life displays belief in one thing or another. Consider one stark example. A pregnant teenage girl simply cannot be agnostic about abortion for very long. She has only two options: abort, or give birth. The choice she makes will be a practical consequence of her beliefs and value judgments. There is no agnosticism, no “not answering” the question.

Like every religious tradition, Christianity calls us to live lives that are rooted in things of ultimate and lasting value, rather than superficial or self-centred concerns. It challenges us to fight against the narcotic of everyday life by constantly drawing our attention back to the things that most matter. Through worship, Bible reading, and prayer, it incessantly asks us those vital questions: Is it really about making money? Is it about getting promoted? What are our ultimate values and how do we show them in our lives? The real power of secularism is not that it offers alternative answers to these questions but that it distracts from the question. All we need to do is un-distract.

Christianity is not just a set of easy answers to these questions. It is a way, a journey towards the truth. To be a Christian means to belong to a community that trusts what Jesus has revealed about our life’s origin, meaning and end. In that community there are some implicit answers to get us started. We live in the belief that life is meaningful, that selfishness and personal pleasure are not the most important thing. There’s plenty of room for debate and discussion, but let’s at least start talking about the things that matter.