Collected Works 18 part 1/2

HERE BEGINS TERTULLIAN'S BOOK ON FASTING, AGAINST THE PSYCHICS. CHAPTER I. 1. I should marvel at these psychics, if they were held only by luxury — by which they marry the more often — were they not also torn by gluttony, by which they hate fasts. Lust without gluttony would surely be reckoned a monster, since these two are so united and grown together that, if they could possibly be separated at all, the very privy parts would not cleave to the belly first of all. Look at the body, and it is one region. 2. In short, according to the arrangement of the members is the order of the vices. First the belly, and immediately, built upon the padding of the flesh, comes wantonness; through voracity passes lechery.

I recognize, therefore, an animal faith, in its zeal for the flesh — of which it wholly consists — prone as much to much-devouring as to much-marrying; so that it deservedly accuses the spiritual discipline, its rival for the substance, in this species too of continence, which imbues the bridle upon the appetite through meals now and then delayed or dry, just as it does upon lust through single marriages. 3. It irks me now to contend with such people, it even shames me to dispute about those whose very defence is immodest. For how shall I protect chastity and sobriety without a rebuke of the adversaries? Who these people are, I will name once for all: the outer and inner sausages of the psychics. These make controversy for the Paraclete; on this account the new prophecies are rejected;

It is not that Montanus and Priscilla and Maximilla preach another God, nor that they dissolve Jesus Christ, nor that they overturn any rule of faith or of hope, but only that they teach men to fast more often than to marry. (4.) Concerning the manner of marrying we have already published our defence of monogamy. Now, concerning the chastening of our diet, the second (or rather the first) contest of continence lies before us. They charge us that we keep our own fasts as proper to ourselves, that we prolong our stations for the most part until evening, that we even observe xerophagies, drying up our food from all flesh and from every juicy dish and from all the more succulent fruits, and neither eat nor drink anything that savours of wine; and likewise our abstinence from the bath, as befits a dry diet. (5.)

They therefore object that this is a novelty, on the ground of whose unlawfulness they would rule either that it must be judged a heresy, if it is a human presumption, or pronounced a false prophecy, if it is a spiritual injunction—so long as on either count we hear the anathema, we who announce otherwise. Chapter II. (1.) For as regards fasts, they set against us the fixed days appointed by God, as when in Leviticus the Lord enjoins upon Moses the tenth day of the seventh month as the day of atonement: 'It shall be,' He says, 'a holy day for you, and you shall afflict your souls; and every soul that is not afflicted on that day shall be cut off from its people.' (2.) Assuredly, in the Gospel they suppose those days were determined for fasting on which the bridegroom was taken away, and that these alone are now the lawful days of fasting.

Now that the legal and prophetic antiquities of the Christians have been abolished. For wherever they please, they acknowledge what the Law and the Prophets savour of, even up to John. (3.) Therefore, for the rest, one should fast indiscriminately, by one's own choice, not by the command of a new discipline, according to each man's seasons and occasions; and thus the apostles too observed it, imposing no other yoke of fixed fasts to be undertaken by all in common, and likewise no yoke of stations—which themselves indeed have their days, the fourth and the sixth of the week, yet run their course freely, neither under the law of a precept nor beyond the last hour of the day, since even the prayers close as a rule at the ninth hour, after the example of Peter which is recorded in the Acts. (4.)

But as for the xerophagies, they call it the name of an affectation of a novel observance, and one very close to heathen superstition—such purifications as those with which they cleanse Apis, Isis, and the Great Mother by the exception of certain foods—whereas faith, being free in Christ, owes not, even to the Jewish Law, abstinence from any foods; the whole shambles having been once for all admitted by the apostle, who denounces those who, as they forbid to marry, so command men to abstain from foods which God has created. (5.) And therefore, they say, those men were even then foretold, who in the last times depart from the faith, giving heed to seducing spirits of the world, having their conscience branded by the doctrines of speakers of lies. With what fires, I ask you? With those, I suppose, at which we often celebrate marriages and daily cook our suppers? (6.)

So too they say that we, like the Galatians, are smitten as observers of days and months and years. Meanwhile they hurl at us also that Isaiah declared: 'Not such a fast has the Lord chosen'—that is, not abstinence from food, but the works of righteousness, which he subjoins; and that the Lord Himself in the Gospel replied, in brief, to all scrupulosity about diet, that a man is not defiled by the things which enter into his mouth, but by the things which proceed out of his mouth, since He Himself both ate and drank even to the point of being remarked upon: 'Behold a man gluttonous and a winebibber!' (7.) So too, they say, the apostle teaches that food does not commend us to God, neither if we eat are we the better, nor if we eat not are we the worse.

By these and suchlike arguments they now tend so subtly to this end, that everyone the more prone to his belly may reckon superfluous, and not so very necessary, the duties of food that is removed or diminished or delayed—God, forsooth, preferring the works of righteousness and innocence. (8.) And we know what sort of thing the persuasions to carnal comforts are, how easily it is said: 'It is needful that I should believe with all my heart, and love God and my neighbour as myself. For on these two precepts hang all the Law and the Prophets—not on the emptiness of my lungs and intestines.' Chapter III. (1.) Therefore we must first affirm this very thing which is being secretly imperilled and undermined: how much this emptiness avails with God, and above all, from what source the very rationale of thus deserving well of God has proceeded.

For then the necessity of the observance will be recognized, when the authority of the rationale, to be reviewed from the beginning, has shone forth. (2.) Adam had received from God the law of not tasting of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, being destined to die if he tasted. But he too, having then relapsed into the natural (psychic) man after the spiritual ecstasy in which he had prophesied that great sacrament concerning Christ and the Church, and no longer grasping the things that were of the Spirit, yielded to his belly more easily than to God, assented to food rather than to the precept, and sold salvation for his gullet. In short, he ate and perished—he who otherwise would have been saved, had he chosen to fast from one little tree; so that from this very point animal faith may recognize its own seed, deriving thence its appetite for things carnal and its refusal of things spiritual. (3.)

I hold, therefore, that from the beginning the murderous gullet was to be punished with the torments and penalties of starvation, even if God had enjoined no fasts. Yet by showing whence Adam had been slain, He had left me to understand the remedies of the offence—He who had demonstrated the offence. Of my own accord I would reckon food, by whatever means and at whatever times I could, as poison, and take hunger as an antidote, whereby I might purge away the cause of death transmitted from the beginning into me also, together with the very race; being sure that God wills this whose contrary He willed not, and confident enough that the care of continence would please Him from whom I had learned that the guilt of incontinence had been condemned. (4.)

Furthermore, since He Himself both enjoins fasting and calls the soul that has been shaken—assuredly by the straits of food in particular—a sacrifice, who will now doubt that of all the macerations regarding diet this was the rationale: that once again, by the food being forbidden and the precept observed, the primordial transgression might be expiated, so that man might make satisfaction to God through the same material of the cause by which he had offended—that is, through the forbidding of food—and thus might, in a rivalling manner, rekindle salvation by fasting, even as he had extinguished it by surfeit, despising many lawful things in exchange for one unlawful one? Chapter IV. (1.)

This rationale was preserved in the providence of God, who modulates all things according to the seasons, lest anyone from the opposite side, to overthrow our proposition, should say: Why then did God not straightway appoint some chastening of diet—nay rather, why did He even increase the permission? (2.) For in the beginning indeed He assigned to man only herb-food and tree-food: 'Behold, I have given you every seed-bearing herb sowing seed which is upon the earth, and every tree which has in itself the fruit of seed-bearing seed—it shall be for you for food.' But afterward, to Noah, having enumerated the subjection of all the beasts of the earth and the birds of heaven and the things that move upon the earth and the fishes of the sea and every serpent, He says, 'they shall be for you for food:'

'as the green herbs I have given you all things; but flesh with the blood of its soul you shall not eat.' (3.) For by this very thing—that He excepts that flesh alone from being eaten whose soul is not poured out through the blood—it is manifest that He granted the use of all the rest of flesh. To this we reply that it was not fitting for man to be burdened with any further law of abstinence, who most of all could not endure so light a prohibition, namely of a single fruit; and so he, being loosed, was to be strengthened by that very liberty. Likewise after the flood, in the reformation of the human race, it sufficed for the time being that there be one law—of abstaining from blood—the use of the rest being permitted. (4.)

For by now the Lord had shown His judgment through the flood, and had moreover threatened it through the requisition of blood at the hand of a brother and at the hand of every beast. And so, first administering the justice of judgment, He sent forth the material of liberty, tempering discipline through indulgence, permitting all things that He might take away certain things—being about to exact more if more should be committed, about to command abstinence when He had first sent indulgence before it, so that the more (as we have said) the primordial transgression might be expiated by the working of a greater abstinence upon the occasion of a greater licence. Chapter V. (1.)

Finally, when at last a peculiar people began to be chosen for God, and the restoration of man could be initiated, then all laws and disciplines were imposed, even such as should curtail diet, certain things being taken away as if unclean, so that man might the more easily at some time endure perpetual fasts, being accustomed to abstinence in certain things. (2.) For the first people too had re-carved the crime of the first man, being caught more prone to the belly than to God, when, having been snatched by the mighty hand of God and His high arm from the hardness of the Egyptian bondage, their Lord was seen destining them for a land flowing with milk and honey; yet straightway, scandalized at the sight of the barren wilderness, sighing for the losses of Egyptian satiety, they murmured against Moses and Aaron:

'Would that we had died, smitten by the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat over the pots of flesh and ate bread to the full! How have you brought us out into these deserts to kill this whole assembly with hunger?' (3.) With the same preference of the belly they were to bewail those same leaders of theirs and arbiters of God, whom they exasperated by their craving for flesh and their remembrance of the Egyptian abundance. 'Who will feed us with flesh? There came into our mind the fishes which we ate freely in Egypt, and the cucumbers and the melons and the leeks and the onions and the garlic. But now our soul is dried up; our eyes see nothing but manna.' (4.) Thus to them also the bread of angels—a xerophagy—was displeasing; they preferred that garlic and onions should smell rather than heaven.

And therefore from such ungrateful men the more pleasant and toothsome things were all withdrawn, at once to punish gluttony and to exercise continence, so that the one might be condemned and the other trained. Chapter VI. (1.) Now, if we have rashly recalled the rationales of a diet chastened by God and to be chastened by us for God's sake to the proofs of the beginnings, let us consult our common consciousness.

Nature itself will declare what sort of persons we are wont to show ourselves, before food and drink, while our saliva is still virgin, at least in matters to be transacted by the mind, whereby divine things are handled—whether we are not then of much more powerful mind, of much more vivacious heart, than when the whole of that dwelling-place of the inner man, stuffed with food, flooded with wines, already boiling with things to be digested, with excrements, is made an antechamber of the latrines, in which plainly nothing so much remains near at hand as to savour of wantonness. (2.) 'The people ate and drank, and rose up to play.' Understand the modesty of Holy Scripture: it would not have marked the play as anything but shameless. Moreover, how few remember religion when the seats of memory are occupied, the limbs of wisdom hindered?

No one, as is fitting, as is proper, as is profitable, will remember God at that time when it is his custom to lose the very man in himself. Every discipline of diet either kills or wounds. I lie, if the Lord Himself, reproaching Israel with forgetfulness of Him, does not impute the cause to fullness. (3.) 'The beloved grew fat and gross and was enlarged, and forsook God who made him, and departed from the Lord his Saviour.' Finally, in the same Deuteronomy, commanding that this same cause be guarded against, He says: 'lest, when you have eaten and drunk and built goodly houses, your flocks and herds being multiplied and your silver and gold, your heart be lifted up and you forget the Lord your God.' (4.)

He set before the corruption of riches the enormity of voracity, for which the riches themselves make provision. For through that voracity the heart of the people had been made fat, so that it should not see with the eyes and hear with the ears and understand with the heart, being obstructed by the fatty portions which He expressly withdrew from being eaten, unteaching man from being zealous for surfeit. (5.)

But he whose heart was found rather uplifted than fattened—he who for forty days and as many nights prolonged a fast beyond the capacity of human nature, spiritual faith supplying the strength—both saw with his eyes the glory of God, and heard with his ears the voice of God, and grasped with his heart the law of God, who even then taught that man lives not by bread alone, but by every word of God—since indeed the more corpulent people could not steadfastly contemplate even Moses himself, fed by God and fattened in His name by starvation. Deservedly, therefore, the Lord showed Himself in the flesh also to him, the colleague of His fasts, and no less to Elijah. (6.) For Elijah too, by this first act—that he had imprecated famine—had already sufficiently vowed himself to fasting.

'The Lord lives,' he said, 'before whom I stand in His sight, if there shall be dew or rain in these years.' Thereafter, fleeing from the threatening Jezebel, after a single meal and drink which he had found on being awakened by the angel, he too, for forty days and nights, with empty belly and parched mouth, arrived at Mount Horeb, where, when he had turned aside into a cave, with what familiar meeting of God was he received! (7.) 'What doest thou here, Elijah?' Far friendlier that voice than 'Adam, where art thou?' For that voice threatened man who had fed; this one caressed him who had fasted. So great is the prerogative of a circumscribed diet, that it renders God a fellow-lodger with man—an equal indeed with an equal.

For if the eternal God will not hunger, as He testifies through Isaiah, this will be the time in which man is made equal to God, when he lives without food. Chapter VII. (1.) We have proceeded, therefore, now to examples, that by the efficacy of profit we may unfold the powers of this office, which even reconciles an angry God to man. Israel had transgressed at the water-drawing at Mizpah, being gathered by Samuel; but he so straightway washed away his transgression by fasting, that he at once escaped also the peril of battle.

At the very time when Samuel was offering the whole burnt-offering (in nothing do we hear the clemency of God more procured than in the abstinence of a people), and the aliens were bringing up battle, thereupon the Lord thundered with a great voice over the aliens, and they were confounded and fell before the sight of Israel, and the men of Israel went forth from Mizpah and pursued the aliens and smote them as far as Beth-car—the fed by the unfed, the armed by the unarmed. (2.) These will be the strengths of those who fast to God. Heaven fights for such a one. You have a form of defence necessary even for spiritual wars. Likewise, when Sennacherib king of the Assyrians, after many cities were already captured, was directing blasphemies and threats against Israel through Rabshakeh, nothing else turned him from his purpose back to Ethiopia. (3.)

Then what else consumed a hundred and eighty-four thousand of his army through the angel, than the humiliation of King Hezekiah? For indeed, when the hardness of the enemy was announced, he rent his garment, put on sackcloth, and in the same garb bade the elders of the priests approach God through Isaiah—assuredly with fasting accompanying his prayers. For neither is there time for food in peril, nor for satiety among those clothed in sackcloth. (4.) Always starvation is the sequel of mourning, as joy is the accompaniment of surfeit. Through this sequel of mourning and this starvation, even that sinful city Nineveh was delivered from the destruction that had been foretold. For repentance for its crimes had sufficiently commended its fasting, performed for three days, even the cattle being starved, with which God was not angry.

Sodom too and Gomorrah would have escaped, if they had fasted. This remedy Ahab also acknowledges. (5.) When, after his transgression and idolatry and the slaying of Naboth on account of the vineyard—Naboth having been killed by Jezebel—Elijah had reproached him: 'As you have killed and possessed the inheritance, in the place where the dogs licked the blood of Naboth, they shall lick yours also,' he abased himself and put sackcloth upon his flesh and fasted and slept in the sackcloth. And then the word of the Lord came to Elijah: 'You have seen how Ahab has stood in awe before My face: because he has stood in awe, I will not bring the calamity in his days, but in the days of his son I will bring it'—who was not going to fast. (6.)

Thus fasting is a work of reverence toward God, through which Hannah also, the wife of Elkanah, who canvassed God though formerly barren, easily obtained from God to fill with a son—and indeed a prophet—her belly that was empty of food. But fasting shall merit from God not only the changing of nature, or the averting of dangers, or the obliterating of transgressions, but even the recognition of sacraments (mysteries). (7.) Behold the example of Daniel. Concerning the dream of the king of Babylon, all the sophists are troubled; they deny that anything further can be known by human excellence.

Daniel alone, trusting in God and knowing what he should do to earn God's grace, asks for the space of three days, fasts with his brotherhood, and thus, his prayers being commended, is instructed in every part of both the order and the meaning of the dream; the tyrant's sophists are spared, God is glorified, Daniel is honoured—destined afterward also to report no lesser grace of God in the first year of King Darius, when, from his reconsideration of the times foretold by Jeremiah, he set his face toward God in fastings and sackcloth and ashes. (8.) For the angel too, sent to him, straightway professed this cause of the divine regard: 'I have come,' he said, 'to show you, inasmuch as you are pitiable'—that is, by fasting.

If pitiable to God, to the lions in the den he had been terrible—where indeed, to him fasting for six days, the angel provided a dinner. Chapter VIII. (1.) We render the rest also. For now we hasten on to new documents. On the threshold of the Gospel, Anna the prophetess, daughter of Phanuel, who both recognized the infant Lord and prophesied much concerning Him to those awaiting the redemption of Israel, after her distinguished title of ancient and once-married widowhood, is augmented also by the testimony of fastings, showing in what offices one ought to wait upon the Church, and that by none is Christ better understood than by those once married and often fasting. (2.)

The Lord Himself soon dedicated His baptism—and in His own, that of all—with fastings, though able to make bread from stones, and perhaps even to make the Jordan flow with wine, had He been such a glutton and winebibber. Nay rather, He was initiating the new man, in reproach of the old, by the virtue of disdaining food, so that He might show the devil, seeking again to tempt Him through food, one stronger than utter hunger. He thence appointed a law for fasts, to be transacted without sadness. (3.) For why should that be sad which is salutary? He taught also that against the fiercer demons one must do battle with fastings. For what wonder is it if the wicked spirit is expelled by the same working by which the Holy Spirit is introduced? (4.)

Finally, just as the regard of the Holy Spirit, together with the charism of prophecy besides, had hastened upon the centurion Cornelius not yet baptized, we read that his fastings were heard. But I think that the apostle too, in the second to the Corinthians, among his labours and perils and hardships, after hunger and thirst, enumerates very many fastings as well. Chapter IX. (1.) This principal species in the chastening of diet can now prejudge concerning the lower operations of abstinence as well, so that these too may be useful or necessary according to measure. For the exception of certain foods is a partial fast. Let us therefore inspect also the novelty—or the vanity—of the xerophagies, whether there is not in these too the working of a religion as most ancient as it is most efficacious. (2.)

I return to Daniel and his brethren, preferring a diet of pulse and a drink of water to the royal dishes and wine-vessels, and thereby the more comely—lest anyone should fear also for the appearance of the little body—being moreover cultivated in spirit besides. For God gave to the young men knowledge and understanding in all letters, and to Daniel in every word and in dreams and in all wisdom, whereby he might understand this very thing also: by what means the recognition of the sacraments might be obtained from God. (3.) Finally, in the third year of Cyrus king of the Persians, when he had fallen into a reconsideration of the vision, he looked to another form of humiliation.

'In those days,' he says, 'I, Daniel, was mourning for three weeks; pleasant bread I ate not, flesh and wine entered not into my mouth, I was not anointed with oil, until the three weeks were completed.' When these had passed, the angel was sent, addressing him thus: 'Daniel, you are a man greatly pitied; fear not, for from the first day on which you gave your soul to reconsideration and humiliation before God, your word was heard, and I have entered in at your word.' (4.) Thus the pitiableness of the xerophagies both expels the dread of the humbled man, and turns the ears of God, and makes men partakers of hidden things. I return also to Elijah.

When the ravens were wont to feed him with bread and flesh, why afterward, at Beersheba of Judea, when he had been roused from sleep, did that certain angel offer him, without doubt, only bread and water? (5.) Had the ravens failed, which fed him more liberally? Or was it hard for the angel to snatch from the king's banquet some attendant from somewhere with a most well-furnished dish and transfer him to Elijah, just as to Daniel starving in the lions' den a dinner of reapers was presented? (6.) But it was needful that an example be established, teaching that in a time of pressure and persecution and any circumstance whatsoever one ought to live on xerophagies.

With such a diet David expressed his confession, eating ashes indeed as bread—that is, bread like ashes, dry and vile—and mingling his drink with weeping, assuredly in place of wine. (7.) For abstinence from wine also has its titles, which had both vowed Samuel to God and consecrated Aaron. For concerning Samuel his mother says, 'and wine and strong drink he shall not drink'; for such a one she herself also prayed to God. And the Lord to Aaron: 'wine and strong drink you shall not drink, you and your son after you, whenever you enter the tabernacle or go up to the altar, and you shall not die.' (8.) So then those shall die who minister in the Church not sober. Thus too He reproaches Israel with drink among His near ones: 'You gave wine to My sanctified ones.'

And this too—the restriction of drink—is a portion of xerophagy. Yet wherever abstinence from wine is either exacted by God or vowed by man, there let there also be understood a restraint of food, prefiguring a form for drink. For such as the eating is, such also is the drinking. It is not likely that anyone should immolate half his gullet to God—sober in his waters and drunk in his foods. (9.)

But whether the apostle too knew xerophagies—he who had celebrated greater things, thirst and hunger and many fastings, he who had refused drunkenness and revellings—there is proof enough even from his disciple Timothy, whom, while advising to use a little wine on account of his stomach and constant infirmities, from which he abstained not by institution but by devotion (though custom would have profited his stomach more), by this very fact he persuaded of an abstinence from wine worthy of God, which he dissuaded out of necessity. Chapter X. (1.) Likewise they accuse our stations, as being enjoined, and certain of them appointed even into the late hour, under the name of novelty, saying that this office too is to be undertaken by one's own choice and not to be prolonged beyond the ninth hour—according to their own custom, forsooth.

But as regards the question of injunction, I will answer once for all causes. Now, to the proper point of this species—concerning the measure of time I speak—we must first demand of them from what source they prescribe this form of the ninth hour for terminating the stations. (2.) If it be from the fact that Peter and those with him are read to have entered the temple at the ninth hour of prayer, who will prove to me that on that day they had discharged a station, so that the ninth hour should be interpreted as the close and completion of a station? And yet you may more easily find that Peter had at the sixth hour, for the sake of taking food, first gone up to the upper parts to pray, whereby rather the sixth hour of the day might be ended by this office, which seemed about to conclude that meal after the prayer. (3.)

Furthermore, since in the same treatise of Luke the third hour of prayer is also shown—under which those initiated by the Holy Spirit were held to be drunk—and the sixth, at which Peter went up to the upper parts, and the ninth, at which they entered the temple, why should we not understand—while there remains plainly an indifference of praying always and everywhere and at all times—that nevertheless these three hours, as more notable in human affairs, which distribute the day, which distinguish business, which resound publicly, were thus also more solemn in divine prayers? (4.) This the argument of Daniel too commends, who prayed three times a day, assuredly by the exception of certain hours, but of none other than the more notable—thence apostolic—the third, sixth, ninth.

Hence therefore I would say that Peter too, from the older usage rather, observed the ninth hour, praying a third time in the duty of the last prayer. (5.) But these things are for the sake of those who think they are acting after the form of Peter, which they do not know; not as though we spurn the ninth hour, at which we most often discharge our duty both on the fourth day of the week and on the sixth, but because, of those things which are observed from tradition, we ought to adduce a rationale all the more worthy the more they lack the authority of Scripture, until by some heavenly charism they are either confirmed or corrected. 'And if in anything you are ignorant,' he says, 'the Lord will reveal it to you.' (6.)