“The Endless Refinement of the Perfect”: The Ascetical Discipline of Fasting and the Holy and Great Council

Fr. Chrysostomos Nassis

“The Endless Refinement of the Perfect”:

The Ascetical Discipline of Fasting and the Holy and Great Council

International Conference on the Tenth Anniversary of the Holy and Great Council
of the Orthodox Church, under the aegis of the Ecumenical Patriarchate 

Chantilly, France, 5-8 October 2026

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Your All-Holiness, Your Beatitude, Your Eminences, Your Graces, Reverend Fathers, Holy Monastics, Distinguished Colleagues, Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,

My first word must be one of thanks to the organizers of this conference, and above all to His Eminence Elder Metropolitan Emmanuel of Chalcedon, for their kind invitation. It is a joy and a privilege to be among you in a gathering so rich in ecclesiastical wisdom, theological learning, and spiritual stature. Ten years ago, on the feast of Pentecost, the Fathers of the Holy and Great Council met at the Orthodox Academy of Crete in Kolymbari. It is right that we meet again and ask what the Spirit who guided them would have us receive from that Council now. I submit the full text of my paper, with its notes, to the organizers. What follows is its spoken heart, the core of my thought, which I would like to share with you this morning.

I. A WORD FROM ALEXANDRIA

Two weeks ago, I found myself in Alexandria for the plenary of the International Commission for the Anglican–Orthodox Theological Dialogue, to continue drafting a common text on mission. At the meeting, the Rev. Dr. Khee-Vun Lin of the Anglican Church in Malaysia, of Chinese descent and a missiologist by training, kept returning to the Holy and Great Council of the Orthodox Church in his intervention. He spoke from the experience of a small Christian community in a religiously plural society with a Muslim majority. Our draft, he argued, for all its merits, still lacked a coherent theological foundation, and he showed us where to look for one. The Orthodox Church, as he put it, “has a more coherent basis of mission based on liturgy and the Church (Crete 2016).” Admittedly, it is not every day that an Anglican from Southeast Asia sends the Orthodox back to read their own Council.

When he had finished, His Eminence Metropolitan Nifon of Târgoviște asked for the floor. Whatever questions may still surround the Holy and Great Council, he said, whether the absence of four autocephalous Churches or the unfinished business of its reception, the Council remains a major event in the life of the Orthodox Church today. This is a fair and sober judgment, and I take it as my point of departure.

II. WAYS OF STANDING BEFORE THE COUNCIL

The Holy and Great Council, this “major event,” to borrow the words of Metropolitan Nifon, is rather like a fire lit in the hearth of the Church. Many have been warmed by it, and some have found their way by its light. Besides this, there are, as far as I can tell, at least four other ways in which people have taken their places before the flame.

Two of them are extreme. Some treat the Council’s light as a second sun, set only a little below the “thrice-radiant Godhead” (τρισήλιος Θεότης) that we praise in our hymns. For them, every word of the conciliar texts is beyond dispute, and anyone who questions but a single formulation is an enemy of the Church. Others regard the same fire as a flame from the very gates of Hades and warn that whoever draws near it is on the road to perdition and eternal damnation. I am exaggerating, of course, though not by much. Both voices can be heard among us, not least in the Orthodox blogosphere, and both spring from a common root. Unrestrained triumphalism and blind condemnation alike are signs of spiritual immaturity, not of a purified soul. The Fathers spoke of the “royal road,” which turns neither to the right hand nor to the left, and both parties, I fear, have wandered off it.

The other two approaches are quieter and, I suspect, more common. Some poke at the logs with a stick, looking for the damp patches: an unhappy quotation, an awkward translation, a paragraph no one remembered to revise. This is not without value. Scholars must do their work, and I will be doing a little poking myself in what follows. Others simply pass the Council by, as though no fire had ever been lit. Of the four, this last approach troubles me the most.

No text of Crete has been more consistently ignored than the one on The Importance of Fasting and Its Observance Today. It has drawn only a modest body of scholarly commentary. In the life of our parishes, and in the pastoral and catechetical ministry of the Church, it has fared still worse: a passing mention here and there, a token nod to the spiritual benefits of asceticism, and little more. In Greece, certainly, I know of no catechetical program that draws on it, and I would be surprised to learn that matters are very different elsewhere. Indeed, I am sometimes surprised by what I see even at our own church gatherings. On a Wednesday or a Friday, not least in the diaspora, at events that include a meal, the fast now and then appears on the menu as one “option” among others, as though fasting were a dietary preference rather than the common discipline of the Church.

III. THE MOST REVISED TEXT

Why this neglect? Was it because the text stirred no controversy? On the contrary. Of all the documents that reached Crete, it was perhaps the most controversial in its preparation, and surely the one that underwent the most radical revision. Other texts were amended; this one was turned on its head. It set out to change the fasting discipline of the Church and ended by reaffirming it in full.

When the question entered the conciliar agenda at Rhodes in 1961, its title told us a good deal about the hopes of that age. “The readjustment of the ecclesiastical regulations on fasting in accordance with the requirements of the present age,” was the proposed title of the text. The first and boldest draft, prepared at Chambésy in 1971 on the basis of studies by the Church of Serbia, began with a frank admission: “the majority of faithful today do not observe all the prescriptions of fasting, whether due to faint-heartedness or their living conditions, whatever these may be.” Remember that sentence; we shall meet it again. The remedy went far. The Nativity fast would be halved, beginning after the feast of Saint Barbara; the fast of the Apostles would last no more than eight days; oil and fish would be allowed on most weekdays of Lent. Never before or since has a pre-conciliar text spoken so plainly about how the discipline of fasting might be “readjusted.”

The turn came at the Second Pre-Conciliar Conference in 1982. Speaking for the Church of Romania, Bishop Vasile Târgovișteanul declared that the fasts fixed by the Church “must remain unchangeable as to their duration and their severity.” In the same breath, however, he allowed the question to be resolved locally by each Orthodox Church. Unchangeable, and yet local. The whole later history of the text is folded into that one intervention. A working committee did not amend the proposals of 1971; it removed them entirely. Fasting, it now said, is not a hygienic or social invention but a divine commandment. No consensus could be reached, and the Conference declared that “the traditional practice should remain in force” until the Council examined it. It was, in effect, a decision not to decide.

In 1986 the reformulation was completed. Lest the word “readjustment” scandalize the faithful, the title was changed to the one the text bears today. The word “unchangeable,” ἀμετάβλητος, was struck out of the first article and replaced by the statement that fasting is “a divine commandment.” Bishop Jeremiah of Wrocław summed up the result in what remains, I think, the most perceptive comment ever made on this document: “In this text everything is correct, but something is missing.”

Thirty years later, Patriarch Kirill of Moscow triumphantly welcomed the text for “dispelling the rumors of the forthcoming annulment of fasts or their reduction at the Council.” Finally, on June 22, 2016, the Council received it as “a complete and comprehensive expression” of the Church’s tradition and accepted it unanimously having undergone few minor final amendments.

IV. RECEIVING THE TEXT: FIVE LINES OF RECEPTION

If the Council said only what every faithful yiayia in our parishes has always known, is the text necessary for the life of the Church at all? And if it is, how might it be received? Allow me to propose five lines of reception, dwelling on the first three.

1. Observance “Today,” and Tomorrow

The first concerns the most neglected word in the title: today. We must note that this “today” is not really 2016 but 1986, that is to say, forty years ago, for the substance of the conciliar document goes back to that year. The Serbian theologian Rastko Jović pointedly titled his study on the conciliar document as follows: “The Importance of Fasting and Its Observance for Tomorrow.” His implicit point is that the aim in any discussion on fasting should be one of diachronicity.

What, then, is the value of the σήμερον of our text? The faithful of 1986 had, for the most part, grown up within the rhythm of the Orthodox calendar of feasts and fasts, at least in Orthodox majority contexts. When Athanasios Papathanasiou wrote, on the eve of the Council, he spoke of “Generation Y.” The children now entering our parishes belong to Generation Alpha.

They have grown up in a world where food is abundant and globalized, delivered to the door, photographed and rated before it is eaten. Many are vegetarians or vegans who already abstain all year from what our typikonforbids only on fasting days. In their world, abstinence has become the mark of the consumer more than that of a believer. Dieting, detox, and intermittent fasting, not to mention more intrusive and dangerous ways of losing weight, make up what has been called the contemporary “religion of thinness.” And every religion has its measure, and a north star by which it steers. The religion of thinness measures the body against an image, and steers its practitioners by what they see in the mirror. Thus, it sets the body against an image. What can fasting mean to a generation for whom not eating is already a lifestyle? The question grows more pointed because this lifestyle has a creed of its own, a creed, indeed, that stands, more often than not, in direct opposition to the teaching of the Church.

The Council’s text does not, at first sight, seem ready for such a challenge. In its eighth paragraph it simply repeats the admission we first met in 1971: “many faithful today do not observe all the prescriptions of fasting.” A tentative answer, however, may lie in a revision that has passed almost entirely unnoticed, and it turns precisely on the matter of measure. The pre-conciliar text of 1986 said, in its fifth paragraph, that ascesis “has no measure,” and that “very few respond to the commands of the lofty Orthodox ideal, so as to be deified while living.” “All the others,” it continued, have the duty “not to abandon the good struggle of fasting.” Fasting, understood thus, was the achievement of a spiritual elite; the rest of us were left to struggle on and rely on mercy.

In the final stages before the Council this was replaced. The measure of perfection is now “the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ.” “Everyone is called to strive, to the best of his or her abilities, to reach the lofty Orthodox standard, which is the goal of deification by grace.” And the Council adds that “ascesis and spiritual struggle, like the refinement of the perfect, are endless in this life.” This is the phrase I have borrowed for my title. It stands in the very sentence in which the Council quietly set aside the notion of fasting as the discipline of the few. Fasting is thus the vocation of the whole Body of the Church.

Here, I believe, is what the text has to say to Generation Alpha. The world already teaches them to abstain, but for the sake of an image of themselves. The Church invites them to abstain for the sake of a Person, and to measure their growth not by the mirror but by “the stature of the fullness of Christ.” The words of the text have changed; whether our habits of mind have changed with them is another matter. Many of us still preach as though real fasting belongs to monks and a few heroic laypeople. Conceived in this manner, the text speaks neither of today nor of tomorrow, but of yesterday. A truer reading of the conciliar document asks us to catch up with what the Council has already said. Otherwise, a generation that receives from us only the discipline of a few will take its measure from the mirror, and make the image of the body a graven image, an idol. Thus, it might never discover in itself the image of God.

2. “Not by Bread Alone, but with Bread”

The second line of reception concerns the body itself. Some twenty-eight years ago, His All-Holiness Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew graciously invited me to accompany him on one of his walks. In the course of our conversation he said something I have never forgotten: “Man shall not live by bread alone… but also with bread” (Οὐκ ἐπ’ ἄρτῳ μόνῳ ζήσεται ἄνθρωπος… ἀλλὰ καὶ μὲ ἄρτο).

The word “alone” is decisive. We do not live by bread alone, but we do live with bread: the bread of our daily labor, the bread we break with others, the bread offered at the altar that becomes the Body of Christ. There is no contempt for bread here. Bread is not the enemy, and an empty stomach buys nothing on its own. Fasting is not a rejection of the material world but a reordering of it. It is the refusal to let bread become the center and purpose of our life, so that bread may become gift and communion.

And because the body is not the enemy, fasting must never become its enemy either. The Council names “physical infirmity” first among the grounds for oikonomia. Here the correspondence of Saints Barsanuphius and John of Gaza says in a few lines what the Council says in canonical language. A brother, distressed because illness kept him from fasting and compelled him to eat again and again, wrote to Barsanuphius, the “Great Old Man.” The letter written in response leaves no room for ascetic anxiety: “Do not grieve,” Barsanuphius admonished, “for God does not require of us anything beyond our strength.” Then, with remarkable concision, the Elder summed up the purpose of fasting: “What else is fasting but discipline of the body, in order to enslave a healthy body and weaken it on account of the passions?” Illness, he adds, “is greater than mere discipline, being reckoned as a substitute for the regular [ascetic] way,” and so: “even if you eat ten times, do not grieve, for you are not condemned.”

In the preceding letter, when the same brother concluded from his inability to fast that he could not be saved, the Elder named despair, not the lack of fasting, as the greater danger saying that despair “brings great joy to the devil.” The sick man was not failing to fast. His weakness had become the arena of another ascesis, namely, receiving food without guilt, enduring illness without resentment, and giving thanks to God in all things. Here the body is neither idol nor enemy. This is diakrisis in its most practical form, and it is in this spirit that the Council’s understating of “physical infirmity” should be read.

3. The Local Church: Oikonomia or Diakrisis?

The third line leads us back to Alexandria. Dr. Lin distinguished between a missionary posture of “come and see,” in which outsiders must learn the Church’s languages and customs, and an incarnational posture, in which the Church enters the lived realities of a people, as Christ entered ours. Our fasting discipline raises exactly this question. The rules of fasting took shape in the eastern Mediterranean, in a world of olive oil, bread, legumes, wine, fish, and seafood. Papathanasiou asks what it means for Orthodox families in the fishing villages of Lake Victoria to read that they may relax the fast by replacing meat with fish, when fish is their daily bread, or to abstain from olive oil where it does not exist at all.

The Council’s answer is the priority of the local Church. It leaves it to the local Churches “to determine how to exercise philanthropic oikonomia and empathy.” But a canonist must ask a deeper question. Is this merely a matter of oikonomia, or of diakrisis? Oikonomia, according to some, is a departure from the norm for the sake of a person’s salvation. Our text seems to presuppose that the norm is the foodstuff known to Mediterranean monastic typicon. Every other context is an exception to it. Instead, Papathanasiou suggests that other cuisines “are not a deviation from the ‘normal.’ They are simply other normals.”

The Council itself points this way, for it speaks not only of oikonomia but of “pastoral discernment,” ποιμαντικὴ διάκρισις. What must remain unchanging is not the menu but the criteria of ascesis: self-restraint, obedience, sharing with the poor, and the expectation of the Kingdom. Here we need invent nothing new. The Church has only to remember what she has learned in her long, and sometimes painful, encounter between the Gospel and culture.

4. Fasting and Justice

The fourth line of reception concerns justice. The most prophetic sentence of the text is found in its third paragraph: “fasting without merciful deeds is dead, especially nowadays when the unequal and unjust distribution of goods deprives entire nations of their daily bread.” It is followed by the sticheron of Wednesday in the first week of Lent, an echo of Isaiah 58: “Let us loose every knot of iniquity… let us distribute bread to the hungry.” The sentence owes much to the discussions of 1986. The delegates of Alexandria, Antioch and Romania insisted then that fasting is not abstinence alone but spiritual and moral edification and penance, and Metropolitan George Khodr asked that the text speak of the social dimension of fasting as well as its spiritual value. Yet the critics are right that the text is “noticeably laconic” here. It affirms this dimension, but it does not develop it.

The early Church knew no fasting without sharing. The Shepherd of Hermas instructs the one who fasts to “estimate the cost of the food you would have eaten on that day and give that amount to a widow or orphan or someone in need.” the apologist Aristides tells us that Christians fasted for two or three days in order to provide for those in need. In the fourth century, the Apostolic Constitutions asked the faithful to give to the poor the food spared by the fast of Wednesday and Friday, and Saint John Chrysostom insisted that abstinence from food means nothing while the hands of the one who fasts go on committing acts of injustice. And a homily attributed to Eusebius of Alexandria puts it most sharply of all: “He who is fasting but does not share his own bread with the hungry cancels his fasting.” The Church still sings this every Lent. On the Sunday of Saint Mary of Egypt we hear the Doxastikon of Orthros: “The Kingdom of God is not food and drink, but righteousness and abstinence with holiness.”

We live in a world of food waste, overfishing and supply chains built on exploitation. In such a world, a “chemical” fasting that scrutinizes ingredients while ignoring the neighbor and creation is a contradiction in terms. Fasting that does not issue in almsgiving and in the correction of injustice is, in the Council’s own word, “dead.”

5. Fasting beyond Itself

Finally, fasting points beyond itself. I am grateful to His Grace Bishop Maxim who, during his presentation yesterday, remined us of the late Metropolitan John of Pergamon’s intervention of on this question. Fasting is never an end in itself. In the Orthodox tradition the fast and feast go hand in hand. The fast is expectation, the feast is fulfilment. In Papathanasiou’s words, “the feast is a sign of the joyful Kingdom, while fasting declares that the Kingdom in its completeness is still expected.” It is the dialectic of the presence and absence of the Bridegroom (Lk 5:33–35), and it brings us back to the Lord’s own words: “the days will come, when the bridegroom shall be taken away from them, and then shall they fast in those days.” Hence the principle of the incompatibility of fasting with the eucharistic feast. Asterios of Amaseia describes fasting as “an icon of the future life.” It introduces into everyday life a foretaste of the eschatological freedom from necessity.

This is also why the ninth paragraph, on fasting before Holy Communion, is the most delicate in the text. If preparation for Communion becomes a price to be paid, the Eucharist is presented as a reward rather than a gift, a danger to which Jović and others have drawn attention. Yet the Council’s own wording points the other way. With St. Nicodemus the Hagiorite, it states plainly that a fast of three or more days before Communion “is not decreed by the divine Canons” and is left to the piety of the faithful. It also links abstinence from midnight and the keeping of the holy fasts to “frequent participation in Holy Communion, which is the most profound expression of the essence of the Church.” Fasting, therefore, in the teaching of the Council, serves the Eucharist; it does not purchase it.

V. CONCLUSION

Παναγιώτατε, εκλεκτή ομήγυρη, the history of this text is a history of readjustment. We set out to readjust the fast and we ended by readjusting the text. The conciliar document on fasting did not change the fasting calendar of any local Orthodox Church. In the end, it was not meant to. But it did something else. It declared that fasting belongs to the whole people of God, both young and old; that it is inseparable from prayer, repentance, mercy, and the Eucharist; and that its pastoral application belongs to the discernment of the local Church.

Bishop Jeremiah of Wrocław was right: in this text everything is correct, but something is missing. What is missing, I suggest, is not another paragraph, nor even a better commentary, but reception in the fullest sense: a truly organic, ecclesial reappropriation of what the text points to. We need a phronema and a lived practice that shows a new generation why the Church fasts at all. We need pastoral discernment that distinguishes the criteria of ascesis from the customs of a particular cuisine. And we need a fasting that becomes visible in the bread we share with the hungry. To be a Christian, Papathanasiou reminds us, is to be “hungry and thirsty for justice. If we are not in a position to testify to this prophetic outlook, what will be left is a task for dieticians and cooks.” And, I would add, what will be left is a flock that, finding no reasons to stay, drifts quietly away from its shepherds and from a discipline which, in the words of St. Basil repeated by the Council, is “as old as humanity itself.”

The Council has lit the fire. It remains for us to keep it burning, “each to the best of his or her strength and ability.” The texts were readjusted; it is we who must now be refined. And that refinement has no end. It is, in a phrase the Council itself gives us, ἡ ἀτέλεστος «τελειότης τῶν τελείων»: the endless refinement of the perfect.

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photo: Nikos Papachristou