FASTING AND ABSTINENCE
Practically all religions have enjoined fasting as a part of their
practice, either as a sacrifice made to higher powers or a recognition
of the fact that occasional voluntary abstinence from food gave man a
power of control over himself which represented a real religious gain
in his relations with the deity. We have heard not a little in modern
times of the evils to health consequent upon the abuse of fasting and
of the limitation of food generally. Appetite must rule the quantity
to be eaten, and this must not be interfered with by religious motives
or health will suffer. Undoubtedly imprudent fasting, like the abuse
of anything else, no matter how good in itself, has done no little
harm. So much has been said, however, of the hysterical and neurotic
conditions which resulted in women particularly, who out of an
exaggerated sense of piety ate less than was necessary to support
their bodies properly, that a rather violent prejudice has been
created in many minds with regard to fasting as if it were an
old-fashioned superstitious practice which our progress in knowledge
and in the proper understanding of man, and his relations to the
higher powers had enabled us to see the foolishness of and do away
with for good and all.
Careful observations made in the course of the advance of modern
scientific medicine have, however, made it {110} very clear that
periodical abstinences from food, or at least certain foods,
especially among people who are accustomed to eat rather heartily,
instead of being in any way a detriment to health, are practically
always a distinct hygienic advantage. Physicians are not likely to
take seriously such expressions as that most people dig their graves
with their teeth or that eating too much is the bane of the race, but
they appreciate very well that there are a great many people,
especially among the better-to-do classes, who eat more than is good
for them. It is just the people who have least exercise and need the
least food who are tempted by the variety and tastiness of modern food
to eat too much. Any practice that would limit this would undoubtedly
be good. Fasting and abstinence, because periodic, would be especially
valuable, for they are likely to do less harm than any continued
limitation of food. The one phase of modern sanitation and hygiene, as
made clear from the mortality records of the departments of health of
our cities, that has been seriously disturbing in recent years, has
been the increase in mortality among people above the age of fifty. We
have been very properly proud of the fact that we have reduced
municipal death rates and made the average length of life much longer
than it used to be. We have done this, however, by saving more young
children and by greatly lessening the infectious diseases among young
adults, but the deaths from apoplexy, Bright's disease and heart
disease, just when life is at its most valuable stage, have increased
and not diminished. The tendencies to these serious degenerative
diseases are due, it is well understood, ever so much more to
overeating than to undereating. This is particularly true as regards
the overeating of meat and other foods {111} rich in proteid materials
which have been the special subject of religious fasting regulation.
Religion then, by inculcating the practice of fasting and abstinence
from flesh meat at certain times, has conferred a great benefit on the
race. One fish day in the week, for instance, all the year round, has
in the minds of a great many physicians given nearly as much rest to
the digestive tract and certain of the more delicate metabolic
processes of the body as Sunday freedom from labor has given to the
mind and the body generally. The fact that a large part of our
population will eat no meat on Friday and must have fish leads to a
commercial provision of fresh fish on that day in the week, of which
practically all the community, including those who feel no religious
obligation in the matter, takes advantage.
Abstinence from meat, however, is quite a different thing from
fasting, and Friday is a day of abstinence and not of fast. The fast
days come at certain periods of the year, as in Advent and Lent, and
certain days which are specially designated. The keeping of Lent,
during which for forty days people are expected to eat one third less
than they have been accustomed to, is a very valuable institution. I
am not one of those who think, that everybody eats too much and who
like to be constantly insisting that people are destroying their lives
by overeating, but I know very well that considerably more than half
of humanity eat more than is good for them. I know, too, that about
one fourth of humanity does not eat enough for its own good, and that
unfortunately a good many of these are taking the warnings with regard
to eating to heart, though those who need them most are neglecting
them. Practically everybody who is overweight is eating too much and
exercising too little. A {112} good many people who are underweight
are eating too little. Considerably more than one half of adult
mankind, however, would be benefited by keeping rather strictly the
regulations for the Lenten season. The fact that the Sundays are not
in Lent and that good, hearty meals can be eaten on that day gives
assurance that people are not likely to be hurt by the fast. I think
that most of the physicians of the world would agree that the great
majority of men and women would be benefited by the rest and change
which their metabolic processes receive as a result of limitation of
eating, and the observance of ecclesiastical regulations as to the
modification of food.
The reduction in meat eating and the production to some extent of a
taste for the white rather than the dark foods generally, for butter
and eggs and creamed vegetables rather than the meat soups and meat
sauces and the dark, heavy meats, so rich in the irritative
extractives, is undoubtedly of distinct hygienic advantage. Of late
years particularly, probably much more meat than is good for people
has been eaten. The better-to-do classes have gradually come to the
fashion of removing the fat, cutting off all the connective tissue
portions of their meat and serving it or eating it in solid muscular
masses, which is neither conducive to good digestion and elimination
nor to the proper building up of the body. Too many irritant materials
are thus consumed, and it is no wonder that that properly dreaded
disease, arterio-sclerosis, the hardening of the arteries,
representing premature lessening of the elasticity of the tubes which
convey the blood on which vital processes depend to so great a degree,
has begun to be much more frequent than it used to be. There is
agreement among physicians that {113} a rich meat diet has much to do
with this and that excessive meat eating is a growing evil in our
time.
Only religion could accomplish a change in this tendency, for there is
an allurement about meat which grows as more of it is taken. This can
be noticed in children very readily, and human habits in civilized
countries have unfortunately followed a direction in this matter that
requires some profound influence to modify them. Not that meat is of
itself a deleterious substance, nor one that should not be eaten, for
there is no reason in nature for vegetarianism; but excess in eating
it, like excess in anything else, may do serious harm. Nature, and
when we use the word we mean nature's God, set an index that is
infallible as to the variety of our diet when we were given cutting
and tearing as well as grinding teeth. The presence of both these
varieties of teeth, though the meat-eating animals have only the
incisors and canines, while the plant-eating animals have only the
molars or grinders, makes it clear beyond all doubt that human beings
were meant to eat meat, but in this, as in everything else, excess
must be avoided, and if it is not serious consequences follow.
A great many are inclined to think of abstinence as representing
abstinence from food alone, but it must not be forgotten that as
understood in connection with religion it represents abstinence from
all the harmful things. For instance, it represents abstinence from
sleep when that is being taken to excess, and as a rule any healthy
human being above the age of twenty and under sixty who sleeps more
than eight hours in the day needs to practice such abstinence. There
is literally such a thing as oversleeping and thus accumulating more
energy than one has use for. The surplus energy is then used up {114}
within the individual to the disturbance of functions of various
kinds. Many a woman who has no children and who lives in an apartment
hotel and has no duties that she has to get up for eats breakfast in
bed, and does not rise until after eleven o'clock, after having gone
to bed the night before sometime around midnight, and then wonders why
she feels so miserable. Nothing would do her more good than to be out
a little after eight in the morning briskly walking somewhere with the
idea of helping some one else. She needs to practice abstinence of a
very definite kind.
Then there are others who abstain too much from exercise. Whenever
they go out they ride either in a trolley car or in a machine; the
idea of walking a mile is disturbing to them and walking three or four
miles seems utterly out of the question. Some of them are gaining in
weight and are already overweight; they are wondering why they cannot
bring themselves down and perhaps they are practicing abstinence of
all kinds for that purpose. The famous English statesman. Lord
Palmerston, who lived in good health to be a very old man and was for
sixty years very prominent in English politics, was well known for the
amount of exercise that he took. His maxim with regard to it should be
very well known. He said, "Every other abstinence will not make up for
abstinence from exercise." There are a great many people who are
abstaining too much from exercise and need to abstain from rest. If
they would do so for religious motives, and there are a number of
people who keep themselves going when they are tired by these motives,
they would not only accomplish a very great deal for their health, but
they would at the same time make their religion mean ever so much more
in a practical way in life.
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The religious custom of setting a day of fasting before a feast day
and of introducing three Ember Days before some of the larger feasts
and at certain seasons of the year when, owing to the abundance of
food provided for the day of rejoicing, people are likely to overeat,
has been extremely beneficial as a simple matter of health
conservation and prophylaxis against the effects of overeating. It has
always been the custom to provide better and ampler meals on the feast
days and if these are prepared for by a day of fasting, when one third
less at least than usual is eaten, the stomach and digestive tract
generally come to the full table much more ready for the feast. An old
medical friend once suggested that the only things in the world worth
while considering in matters of health are contrast and microbes. From
the fast to the feast one gets the contrast and the variety in life
distinctly makes for better resistance against microbic invasion. The
Church believes in the satisfaction of reasonable appetites and
encourages the feast days and their celebration by a larger provision
of good things, but conserves health and disciplines the moral
character at the same time by inserting the fast days before them. The
occurrence of feast days at regular intervals so that a special
gratification of the appetite is looked forward to has been declared
by most physicians who have considered the subject to be an excellent
thing for health. Monotony of diet begets sluggish digestion.
In some very serious diseases, as for instance occasionally in
Bright's disease and rather more frequently in diabetes, fasting
periods of short duration have been found particularly valuable as
therapeutic measures. In certain forms of digestive disease fasting is
also a valuable adjuvant, though it needs to be used under the {116}
direction of a physician, for people who prescribe their own fasting
often fail to realize that they may weaken their digestive organs
rather seriously by the process. The stomach has a very good habit of
passing on to the other organs the nutritious materials that come to
it and will sometimes drain itself of necessary nutrition in following
out this good habit in this matter. People who are overweight
particularly are often benefited by a fasting period, though here too
care must be exercised.
Ecclesiastical regulations which have introduced fasting at intervals,
but with proper interruptions on Sundays, even when there is a
prolonged period of fasting, have certainly been beneficial to
mankind. The loosening of the bonds of religion in modern times and
the very general persuasion that somehow we are not capable of
standing such abstinence from food as was insisted upon for the people
of long ago are almost surely mistakes. All the nations of the world
found during the war that their men could stand a great deal more than
either they themselves or any one else thought they could. The
soldiers taken out of the comforts of our cities lived in uncovered
ditches in the open fields winter and summer, spring and fall, rain or
shine, hail or snow, often with wet feet and clothes frozen upon them,
with coarse food and not too much of it, taken at irregular intervals
often in cold and unappetizing form, with interrupted sleep amid war's
alarms and yet they actually came out of it in better health than they
were before. We hear much of hurting human nature by deprivations, but
it seems very probable that the old-fashioned habits of religious
discipline with even fasting rigorously enforced, for all who are in
normal health, would do good rather than harm. Not only could men
stand them, though so {117} many fear they could not, but they would
be actually benefited by them. Nothing is so relaxing to the physical
fiber of mankind as overindulgence, especially if continued
persistently.
Undoubtedly the old-fashioned ecclesiastical regulations would do good
to the moral as well as the physical side of man and also to his
mental power. An over-abundance of food sets up irritations of many
kinds which make people restive in mind and body and adds fuel to
passion. The expression in the Scripture is "My beloved waxed fat and
kicked." The people who kick over the traces of the ordinary rules of
conduct in life are much oftener well fed than underfed. I refer, of
course, to the sins against self and others rather than to the sins
against property. Fasting was always recognized as an extremely
valuable adjunct in helping in the control of the passions. The
practice of it made a man much more capable of controlling himself.
The passions are all serious for health when permitted to get beyond
bounds. Many a case of indigestion is dependent on that irritability
of temper which so often develops in good feeders and then proceeds to
form a vicious circle of influence, perpetuating itself. Irritability
of tissues is often in direct ratio to irritability of temper, and not
a few men owe both conditions to overindulgence in the pleasures of
the table and failure to acquire, to some extent at least, such habits
of self-control as the practice of fasting at intervals would help
them to secure.
The bodily passions, especially those related to sex, are particularly
likely to be influenced by overeating and to be brought under
subjection by fasting, while at the same time the practice of this
gives strength to the will in overcoming appetites which is a very
valuable auxiliary {118} for self-denial and self-control. All the
authorities in the spiritual life, that is to say, to use a modern way
of putting it, all the students of psychology in the olden time who
devoted themselves to finding out how man could best regulate his
instincts and train his will to self-control are agreed in declaring
fasting particularly valuable for the proper regulation of certain
very natural physical tendencies that may readily prove the source of
serious temptations involving danger to health as well as to morals.
If fasting had done nothing else in the olden time but help men to
control tendencies to sexual excess, religion, by its encouragement of
the practice, would be a great creditor to health. One of the reasons
why young folks, particularly nowadays, find it so hard and indeed
some of them seem to think almost impossible--to control their sexual
impulses, is that they have had no practice in building up habits of
control of bodily appetites and no exercise of their will power to
help them to suppress the natural tendencies, whenever these threaten
their own good or that of those around them.
Perhaps modern hygiene may in the course of time find it advisable to
reintroduce days of abstinence from certain foods and definite periods
of fasting into the year for the sake of their mere physical benefit,
just as holidays have been reintroduced in the last generation or so
to replace the lost holydays of the older time. There are undoubtedly
corresponding benefits for humanity in both movements. Some of these
have been indicated more in detail in the chapters on Purity,
Mortification and Suffering, so that the specific benefits of the
practice of self-denial with regard to food and drink which religion
has always encouraged may be seen in them. Religion {119} has always
counseled plain food for growing young folks, pointing out the dangers
particularly of overeating, feeding the sex impulses, or at least
making them extremely difficult to repress. This is particularly true
as regards the richer foods specially prepared with condiments that
tempt the appetite and lead to the accumulation of heat-forming
materials for which there is no natural outlet except hard physical
exercise. Sugar and the sweets generally are particularly undesirable
in this respect, hence the benefit of the pious practice which makes
many young folks abstain from candy during Lent.
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