Ashes and Alleluias: The Western Tradition of Fasting in Great Lent

By: The Most Rev. George (Parrish), First Hierarch, The Orthodox Mission in the Americas 

There is a holy severity to Lent. The Church, like a wise mother, closes the shutters, dims the lamps, and places before her children a simple table. The Alleluia is hushed. The Gloria is veiled. The vestments darken. And the faithful, if they are attentive, begin to feel that they have stepped into a different climate of the soul.

In the Western Orthodox tradition, Great Lent has long been marked not only by prayer and almsgiving, but by a disciplined and deliberate fasting. This fasting is not an innovation, nor a medieval eccentricity, nor a quaint pre-Reformation relic. It is ancient. It is catholic. It is biblical. And it is deeply consonant with the ascetical spirit of the undivided Church.

To understand Western Lenten fasting, one must first understand what fasting is not. It is not a diet. It is not a cultural aesthetic. It is not a self-improvement project. It is not an act of spiritual theater. Fasting is the embodied confession that man does not live by bread alone (Deut. 8:3; Matt. 4:4). It is a voluntary hunger undertaken so that the deeper hunger of the soul may awaken.

The West, like the East, received this discipline from the earliest centuries. The forty days of Lent, patterned after our Lord’s forty-day fast in the wilderness, became firmly established by the fourth century. St. Augustine of Hippo speaks of the “annual solemn fast” known throughout the Church. St. Leo the Great preached repeatedly on the necessity of the Lenten fast, exhorting the faithful to abstain not only from meat but from sin, linking bodily restraint to interior repentance. The great Western father St. Gregory the Great structured the Roman Lenten liturgies with profound theological depth, uniting fasting, almsgiving, and prayer as inseparable companions.

In the classical Western discipline, the Lenten fast involved abstinence from meat for the entire season, and traditionally from dairy and eggs as well, what later generations would call the “black fast.” In many places, only one full meal was permitted each day, taken in the evening. Fish was often allowed, though even this varied by region and era. Sundays were not counted among the forty days, since the Lord’s Day remains always a commemoration of the Resurrection; yet even on Sundays, abstinence from flesh meat commonly continued.

This was not legalism. It was pedagogy. The body, left unchecked, quickly becomes a tyrant. The appetite insists. The passions whisper. The West, like the East, understood that asceticism is not contempt for the body but training of it. St. Benedict of Nursia, in his Rule, prescribed a restrained but steady fasting discipline, especially during Lent, urging monks to “add something” of their own free will to their usual observance—an extra prayer, a further renunciation, an increase in silence. His approach was firm yet humane. He understood human weakness, but he did not flatter it.

The medieval Western Church preserved and refined this inheritance. The Ember Days, the Rogation Days, and the broader penitential calendar reinforced the rhythm of fasting throughout the year. Lent stood at the center, like a mountain range around which the rest of the calendar revolved. Even kings and peasants were bound by its discipline. Markets changed their wares. Kitchens adjusted their habits. Civilization itself bent, however imperfectly, toward repentance.

One may smile at the ingenuity of medieval cooks who invented elaborate fish dishes to compensate for the absence of meat. Human creativity has always found ways to soften austerity. Yet beneath these adaptations lay a serious conviction: the Christian life is not ease. It is warfare. The passions are not tamed by sentiment.

Then came fragmentation. With the upheavals of the sixteenth century, fasting discipline in the West began to erode. Some Reformers retained a modest Lenten observance; others rejected it as superstition. Over time, what had once been a universal and demanding discipline became, in many quarters, optional or symbolic. The cultural memory of fasting faded. The modern West, already inclined toward comfort, required little encouragement to abandon inconvenience.

Yet within Western Orthodoxy, the faithful remnant seeking to live the undivided tradition, there has been a renewed effort to recover the classical discipline of Lent, not as antiquarian nostalgia, but as obedience to the mind of the Church.

It must be said plainly: fasting is scriptural. Our Lord fasted (Matt. 4:2). He taught that when the Bridegroom is taken away, “then shall they fast” (Matt. 9:15). The Apostles fasted (Acts 13:2–3). The early Christians fasted regularly. The Didache, a first-century Christian text, speaks of fixed fasting days. This is not optional piety; it is apostolic practice.

Theologically, fasting is inseparable from repentance. Repentance is not mere regret. It is a turning, metanoia, a change of mind and life. The body participates in this turning. When we restrain our appetite, we declare that our stomach is not our god (Phil. 3:19). We resist the ancient lie whispered in Eden: “Take, eat.” In Lent, the Church reverses the gesture. She teaches us to refrain.

The Western tradition, in its sobriety, emphasizes moderation and perseverance. One meal a day. No flesh meat. Simplicity. No ostentation. The goal is not heroic feats but sustained humility. Fasting without prayer becomes pride. Fasting without almsgiving becomes self-absorption. The three must stand together, as St. Leo the Great insisted: what we deny ourselves must become bread for the poor.

There is also a deeply liturgical dimension to Western Lenten fasting. The suppression of the Alleluia before Lent, the use of violet vestments, the recitation of penitential psalms, and the chanting of the Litany all reinforce the bodily fast. The Church does not leave the faithful to private experiments. She shapes the season communally. Fasting is never merely individual; it is ecclesial.

In a culture intoxicated with consumption, the recovery of Western Lenten fasting is quietly subversive. The modern world catechizes us relentlessly: indulge, upgrade, satisfy. Lent counters with a different anthropology. Man is not a bundle of appetites. He is a creature called to communion with God. And communion requires purification.

It would be dishonest to pretend that fasting is easy. It exposes us. Irritability surfaces. Fatigue creeps in. We discover how dependent we are upon small comforts. In this sense, fasting is diagnostic. It reveals the attachments that bind us. The grumbling Israelites in the wilderness longed for the fleshpots of Egypt. Lent allows us to hear our own murmuring.

Yet fasting is not an end in itself. It is ordered toward Pascha. The deprivation of Lent sharpens the joy of Easter. The Alleluia, silenced for weeks, returns with thunderous clarity. The feast means something because the fast was real. A resurrection without a cross is sentimental; a feast without hunger is trivial.

Western Orthodoxy, in recovering its fasting heritage, does not compete with the East, nor does it dilute ascetic rigor. Rather, it stands shoulder to shoulder with the broader Orthodox world, bearing witness that the undivided Church knew one faith and one ascetical spirit. Local customs varied, but the principle was constant: the body must be schooled in obedience.

There is pastoral wisdom required here. Not all can fast in the same manner. The elderly, the ill, pregnant mothers, and those under strenuous labor, these require guidance and compassion. The Church has always tempered discipline with discernment. But pastoral flexibility is not the same as indifference. Exemptions exist precisely because there is a norm from which one may be excused.

The Western tradition also reminds us that fasting extends beyond food. Speech may be restrained. Entertainment curtailed. Excessive noise quieted. The ancient homilists frequently warned that abstaining from meat while devouring one’s neighbor through gossip is hypocrisy. True fasting, said the Fathers, is to fast from sin.

In an age suspicious of discipline, the call to Lenten fasting can sound archaic. Yet perhaps the very strangeness is its strength. The Church does not mirror the culture; she contradicts it when necessary. Lent is one of her most luminous contradictions.

Recovering the Western discipline of Great Lent is not about romanticizing the past. It is about remembering who we are. The saints of the West fasted. The Orthodox bishops of Rome preached fasting. The monasteries were shaped by fasting. The faithful ordered their lives around fasting. This is our inheritance.

And what is inherited must be stewarded. The ashes upon our foreheads, the empty spaces at our tables, the restrained portions, the quiet evenings, these are not relics. They are tools of sanctification. They train the will. They humble the heart. They clear a space within the soul where grace may take root.

When Pascha dawns, and the bells ring, and the Gloria bursts forth, the joy will not be thin. It will be full-bodied, earned through hunger and hope. The Western tradition of Lenten fasting, rightly embraced, leads us there, not grim, not dour, but sober and expectant.

The Church, in her wisdom, gives us Lent not to crush us, but to free us. The fast is a narrowing of the path so that we may walk it more attentively. It is a deliberate hunger so that we may taste, more deeply, the Bread of Life.

And in that holy hunger, the West remembers that it has always belonged to the same ascetical family as the East: one Lord, one faith, one baptism, and one long, disciplined journey from ashes to Alleluia.