Fasting, Feasting, and a Modern Caution

The counterpart of the vice in practice is the discipline of fasting, which Christianity shares with Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Jainism and Hinduism, and which in the Christian calendar structures Lent, Advent and the weekly fast days that the atlas records under Holidays. Fasting in the tradition is a training of the will, not a rejection of food, and the feast is as much part of the pattern as the fast. A caution belongs here that the older sources do not supply: the vocabulary of gluttony has in modern use been turned against people for their bodies, and the moral tradition does not license that. The vice as the tradition defines it is a disorder of desire and of the will, not a matter of size, and eating disorders are illnesses to be treated rather than sins to be confessed.

The Rule of Benedict, written in the sixth century and still followed by Benedictine communities, translates the doctrine of gluttony into concrete regulation, specifying in its thirty-ninth chapter that two cooked dishes should suffice for the daily meal so that a monk unable to eat one might still eat the other, while reserving a third dish of fresh fruit or vegetables and forbidding the flesh of four-footed animals except for the sick, rules later Benedictine congregations have interpreted with varying strictness, illustrating how the abstract vice of gluttony was translated, community by community, into an actual dietary regime rather than left as pure moral theory.