The Power of Fasting

The Church has long held the necessity of fasting in the spiritual life. Interestingly, the physiological and psychological benefits of fasting are now indisputable. A recent study found that fasting helps break down and recycle old or diseased cells. This, in turn, reduces inflammation and helps maintain the body's homeostasis. Another study went on to list ample health benefits of fasting. They include the promotion of DNA-based repair mechanisms, stem cell-based regeneration, and the breakdown of plaques and proteins associated with neurodegenerative diseases. Fasting also allows new neurons to develop in certain regions of the brain. Fasting has been shown to improve the quality of your sleep, is attributed to increased clarity, improved mood, lower stress level, a sense of accomplishment, and a heightened awareness of self-control.

Yes, there is a physical upshot to fasting, but what is essential is the spiritual need for fasting. Bishop Fulton Sheen wisely asserted, "Fasting detaches you from this world. Prayer reattaches you to the next world.” Fasting has long been a prerequisite in the life of the faith. The fact that Jesus made it a point to fast for forty days before beginning His public ministry is telling. Then, while preaching on proper spiritual conduct, Jesus inserted the phrase "when you fast," implying that fasting should already be a necessary part of your spiritual practice.

To grasp the solution of fasting, we need to back up to see the full landscape of the human condition. Man was created with a body-soul component. The soul is what lifts up and glorifies the body. Christianity diverged from the religions of the ancient world through its affirmation of the goodness of the body. While pagan philosophers like Plato viewed the body as a prison from which the soul needed to escape, Christian philosophy asserts that the body is good. Because man was created “in the image and likeness of God,” and given the startling claim that God Himself had taken on a body, human flesh is not regarded as corrupt but ascends to a high stature. Man, created in the likeness of God, has been given an intellect and will by which he may both discern truth and choose the good. Given these two ingredients in man's creation, he is made to know God and freely choose to love Him. However, because of the rebellious nature of sin, people have a desire to worship the whims of the creature and not the loving instructions of the Creator.

St. Thomas Aquinas identified three layers of the soul as the intellect, the will, and the passions. He reasoned that while the body is good, it needs to be rightly governed in the precise order of: intellect, free will, and passions. The intellect stands in the category of our higher faculties, which include knowledge, understanding, and wisdom. The passions stand in the grouping of our lower facilities that include the urges of the senses and emotions. The free will is exemplified by the actions of the person. The free will is situated in the middle layer that is designed to listen to and perform the works of the intellect while taking data from the lower appetites. What separates man from the animals is that God gave man the ability to rationally think (intellect) and to act freely (the will). While both man and animals have passions, the intellect and will are what elevate man to God’s image and likeness. A dog has passions, but it doesn’t have an intellect and a will. Therefore, while animals are controlled by passions and were created with programmed instincts, human beings were created with the ability to rationally think before we make a free act.

The divinely established order of man’s lower parts (his passions) being governed by his higher faculties (the intellect and will) is what the Church calls "original justice.” At the fall of man, however, God's order by which man was made to see the truth and choose it was wounded, and man's lower layer came to rule his higher level. We who inherited our first parents' nature have not escaped from this disorder, and mankind continues to struggle under the tyranny of our fleshly desires (Eph. 2:1-3, 1 John 2:16, Romans 7:15-19, 8:5, Gal. 5:16).

In Romans, St. Paul painted a vivid picture of man’s dilemma being governed by his passions not by his will and intellect. “For I know that good does not dwell in me, that is, in my flesh. The willing is ready at hand, but doing the good is not. For I do not do the good I want, but I do the evil I do not want” (Romans 7:18-19). 

St. Paul described the lower faculties of the passions as “the flesh.” His solution to this predicament is to put to death the flesh through self-discipline and live according to the Spirit. St. Paul’s pattern is to allow God to work in you to cultivate a switch in the governing power of the higher faculties over the lower faculties (see Galatians 5:16-24)

To be sure, when the lower appetites partner with the intellect, they provide crucial insight for survival, nutrients, and energy. But the more a person sins, the more there is a rupture between the intellect and the passions. In sin, the intellect and free will get weaker, and the passions get louder and go off-course. Here, the passions abandon their natural form of survival mode and direct the person toward comfort mode. The more you feed these fleshly desires, the louder they become in controlling you. At this stage, a person merely does what feels good without rationally discerning if it is what they were designed to do.

This subtle switch in our faculties has all the hallmarks of a demonic source. Exorcists are quick to point out that demons want us to obsess over our lower order and do everything to prevent us from fasting. Renowned exorcist, Fr. Gabriele Amorth, once said, "Beyond a certain limit, the devil is not able to resist the power of prayer and fasting." Moreover, St. Francis de Sales articulated that "the enemy stands more in awe of those whom he knows can fast."

When Jesus said, "the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak" (Matthew 26:40), He was likely alluding to the battle between man's higher order and his lower order. Presented with this bleak picture, let us realize that Lent is a time to re-order the layers of our soul back to God’s original formula. Anyone who has taken the Lenten fast seriously knows well of the war being waged within man's soul between the flesh and the spirit (CCC 2516). For example, after a stressful week, our passions want to consume an overabundance of alcohol as a means to comfort our anxieties. However, our intellect tells us that drinking alcohol deteriorates our cognitive ability and makes us dehydrated while slowly turning us into an addict. Our will has to make a decision - either listen to the intellect or the passions. Here lies the crux of who's in control of your soul. Flawed human nature continuously listens to the dictatorship of our lower faculties over our higher spiritual faculties. The solution? Take back the kingdom of your soul through fasting. When we fast, we are telling our flesh, our emotions, our appetite no. The reason, the intellect, the mind, and the spirit work together to tell the lower faculties they aren’t in charge anymore. The reclaiming of your higher order over your lower faculties is a painstaking endeavor repeated through grinding effort. Here, when you walk by a tray of cookies, your passions tell you to eat them, but your intellect and free will need to have the mental power to say no and move on. This whole practice of mortification of your fleshly desires realigns the hierarchy of the human soul.

Do not think that fasting during Lent is prescribed by the Church because eating good food is sinful. Rather, the Church fasts and abstains from meat as a way to reassert the control of the intellect over the passions. Man was made for something more than what the flesh has to offer. Our bodies were made to serve our souls, not the other way around. By denying our fleshly desires in little ways, when a true temptation or crisis arises, it will be your intellect that discerns the true good and not your frivolous appetites that lead you. As Saint Leo the Great teaches,

"We cleanse ourselves from all defilements of the flesh and of the spirit (2 Cor 7:1), so that restraining the conflict that exists between the one and the other substance, the soul, which in the Providence of God is meant to be the ruler of the body, may regain the dignity of its rightful authority. We must then, in moderation, use food so that our other desires may be subject to the same rule. For this is also a time for gentleness and patience, a time of peace and serenity, in which having put away all stains of evil doing, we strive after steadfastness in what is good."

Here, Leo the Great is describing man in his preferred state - ruling over his flesh in which he can be closer to God. However, if a person is consumed by the passions, he'll inevitably go down a grisly path. A lack of temperance and control of the passions leads to an inclination to indulge in countless overzealous emotions. And once the emotions run wild, people will be pulled away from their image of God and towards that of an animal.

If we can't fast from our passions and emotions, God's three-step formula will be flipped on its head. In our fallen world, the culture constantly entices our passions, thus putting us under the spell of a powerful compulsion to live by our emotions, feelings, and our appetites. If we give into this message of instant gratification we give the full reigns of our soul over to our dubious passions. At this point, the devil has a field day as we become easily manipulated by his flashy temptations, all the while becoming blind as a bat to spiritual realities. St. John Chrysostom indicated that "The glutton, like an overloaded ship, moves with difficulty; and that, in the first tempest of temptation, he is in danger of being lost and won’t hear God.”

To re-establish God’s order in our soul, we must through the gauntlet down and go through a period of fasting from our lower facilities. In weightlifting terminology, every time we say no to our passions, that “no” equals a rep that inevitably strengthens our free will.

Saint Athanasius said, “To fast is to banquet with angels.” In this spiritual quest of fasting, we allow our higher order to come to the forefront and ascend to a greater level. Instead of fixating on consuming earthly food, we feed off God’s word and grapple with divine insights. Would you rather do what animals do and be obsessed with food and drink, or would you rather get nourishment from heavenly concepts?

In our fallen world, the human person oscillates between living as an animal under the flesh and ascending towards a high order under the spirit. Fasting is one of the tools in asceticism that frees us from descending closer to the beast so we may begin our rise towards the divine.

With fasting, the right order may once again be established in our souls. That, once more, our intellect may see the truth unclouded by the desires of the flesh and choose the true good for which man was made. Even more, in the spiritual realm, fasting offers a profound penance and form of reparation in which a person can work to alleviate the effects of sin. This was one of the messages of Our Lady of Fatima. Even Ahab, the worst sinner in the world, was temporarily freed from destruction by turning to fasting (1 Kg 21:25-29). The Ninevites were also freed from imminent destruction through fasting (Jon 3:5-10). Esther’s fasting helped free the Jewish nation from extermination (Est 4:16), while Joel announced the same call (Joel 2:15). All these people knew the secret of fasting.

What are we waiting for? Let us fast for the freedom of our soul.