The Benefits of Fasting
Archbishop Charles Eyre, of the Western District of Scotland in 1871 writes about the benefit and reasons for fasting. An excerpt.
An excerpt from Archbishop Charles Eyres’ Lenten pastoral letter for the faithful of the Western District written on the 10th February 1871.
Charles by the grace of God and favour of the Apostolic See, Archbishop of Anazarba, and administrator Apostolic of the Western District of Scotland:
To the Clergy, Secular and Regular, and to all the Faithful of the said District, health and benediction in the Lord.
Dearly beloved brethren and children in Jesus Christ,
On the Wednesday after Quinquagesima Sunday, Holy Church commences the annual abstinence and fast of forty days. Because she recognizes it as a practice not only salutary but necessary, she orders her children, in virtue of her authority, and in obedience to an Apostolic institution, to observe, after the example of her divine Master, a forty days’ fast.
The first order ever given by the Creator to His creature, was the precept of abstinence. The command was: ‘Of every tree of paradise thou shalt eat; but the tree of knowledge of good and evil thou shalt not eat;’ – (Gen. ii.1) – and the punishment of the breach of this precept of abstinence, was the dismissal from the ‘paradise of pleasure’ and the sentence on Adam – ‘ Because thou hast hearkened to the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldst not eat, cursed is the earth in thy work; with labour and toil thou eat thereof all the days of thy life… In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread till thou return to the earth out of which thou wast taken; for dust thou art, and into dust thou shalt return’. (Gen. iii. 17, &c.)
The first act of our Blessed Lord, at the commencement of his public ministry, was his forty days fast: ‘ Then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the desert to be tempted by the devil. And when he had fasted forty days and forty nights, afterwards he was hungry’. (Matt. Iv. 1 and 2). His fast was meant as an example to us; for the life of Christ is a model for us, and the rule of our spiritual life.
We are required to fast, in order to satisfy the Divine justice for our sins; as also to enable us to overcome the temptations of our spiritual enemies. ‘Jejuna, quia peccasti-Jejuna ut non pecces’ – say St Chrysostom: ‘ Fast, because thou hast sinned – fast, that thou mayest not sin’.
Fasting is necessary on account of the sins of the concupiscence of the flesh, i.e. of impurity, and of excess in eating and drinking. Fast, because thou hast sinned. ‘By what things a man sinneth, by the same he is also punished’. (Wisd. Xi. 17, is a clause in the code of just retributions. To the same purpose are the words of the prophet Joel: ‘Now therefore, saith the Lord, be converted to me with all your heart, in fasting, in weeping and in mourning’. (ii.2) Again, when Achab (Ahab), King of Israel had been guilty of murder, and robbery and idolatry – and we read of him: ‘ There was not such an other as Ahab, who was sold to do evil in the sight of the Lord’ – (1 Kings xxi. 25) – Elias was sent to him to threaten him with the vengeance of God. ‘And when Ahab head heard these words he rent his garments, and put haircloth upon his fleash, fasted and slept in sackcloth’. (v27). And the Lord spoke again to Elias: ‘Because he hath humbled himself for my sake, I will not bring the evil in his days’. (v29).
Fasting is also necessary as a preservative against sin. Fast that thou mayest not sin. The flesh will rebel if it is not kept under by abstinence and fasting. ‘ By surfeiting many have perished; but he that is temperate shall prolong life’. (Ecclus/Sirach. xxxvii. 34). Prayer alone will not suffice without mortification. Can a sick man look for his cure from prayer, whilst he not refrain from injurious food? ‘ Behold, this was the iniquity of Sodom, pride, fulness of bread and abundance, &c’. (Ezekiel xvi. 49) Judith, the widow of Manasses, ‘fasted all the days of her life, except the Sabbaths and new moons, and the feasts of the House of Israel’. (Judith viii. 6). And the Lord strengthen her and directed her to the cutting off the head of Holofernes, the prince of the enemies of Israel.
Esau, through want of due restraint of his appetite, sold to his younger brother his privilege of primogeniture: ‘and so taking bread and the pottage of lentils, he ate and drank, and went his way making little account of having sold his first birth-right’. (Genesis. Xxv. 34)
For these reasons Holy Church requires her children to keep up a practice that dates from the time of the Apostle; in order that we may do penance for our past sins; that we may be preserved from falling into sin; and that we may imitate the example of our Blessed Lord, who fasted forty days and forty nights.
As the first command given by God to man was the order to abstain or fast, so the first temptation by which the evil one tried to ruin him was the endeavour to lead him to break the law of abstinence. Adam yielded to the temptation; for the fruit looked very tempting, and Eve plucked it and gave it to him to partake of, and the serpent; ‘No, you shall not die the death’. (Genesis iii.4). How many of Adam’s children ignore the lessen taught by his example will not be known till the great accounting day. But we know that it has been, and is, and will be a temptation to God’s creatures to neglect the example He gave us, to ignore His precept on this head and to turn a deaf ear to the voice of His Church.
Notes
Archbishop Charles Eyre lead the Catholic faithful of the Western district of Scotland from 1868, and which until 1878 included the Dioceses of Argyll and the Isles, Galloway and the Archdiocese of Glasgow. Born in Askham Bryan, North Yorks in 1817 he was ordained a Priest of the Northern district (Northern England) in 1842. His main achievements seem to be the commissioning of some of Glasgow’s most beautiful churches (St Peter’s Hyndland) and establishing St Peters College and Notre Dame teacher training college at Dowanhill. When Pope Leo XIII restored the Catholic hierarchy in Scotland in 1878, +Charles became the new Archbishop of Glasgow.
The times had seen joy and sorrow for Catholics as recorded in +Charles letter, including Vatican I and the solemn definition of Papal infallibility; additionally by solemn decree the 8th December would be the feast of St Joseph as patron of the Universal Church. However the sorrow had come the year before this letter (20th September 1870) when the Royal Italian army had entered Rome, unifying Italy and formally and finally ending Papal temporal rule over central Italy after a millennia. Blessed Pope Pius IX was the longest reigning Pope and was thought of at the time a prisoner to the new Italy.