Koinonia

Asceticism and the Eucharist

Asceticism as such is not uniquely Christian.  Much less is it unique to the tradition of the Orthodox Church.  Off the top of my head I cannot think of a major world religion whose adherents do not practice some form of asceticism. What is unique about Christian asceticism is its connection to the Eucharist.

Orthodox asceticism is more than simply a matter of abstaining from food and drink for some period before the reception of Holy Communion.  It is also more than keeping the lenten fasting discipline.  Historically these disciplines have taken different forms.  What is constant is the conviction that ascetical discipline has both its source and goal not in the moral perfection of the individual but rather in the Eucharist.  Ascetical discipline is, as Christos Yannaras argues fundamentally “ecclesial and not an individual matter.”  He continues:

It is the changing of our nature’s individual mode of existence into a personal communion and relationship, a dynamic entry into the community of the life of the body of the Church.  The aim of asceticism is to transfigure our impersonal natural desires and needs into manifestations of the free personal will which brings into being the true life of love (The Freedom of Morality, 1984, pp.109-110).

Yannaras illustrates what he means by looking at fasting which is not, he says, a question of “subjugat[ing] matter to spirit.”  Nor does it reflect “a division of foods into ‘clean’ and ‘unclean.”  No fasting is the transformation of of my ontological individualism “into obedience to the common will and practice of the Church” (p. 110).  In turn this transformation is in the service “of a direct, perceptible experience of the incorruption of life” of which the Eucharist is a foretaste.  “Thus,” he concludes, “bodily asceticsm defines in a tangible and concrete manner the eucharistic character of the Church’s ethos, the way in which the eucharist, holy communion, is extended into everyday life” (p. 117).

The logical order here is important.  Asceticism though essential to the life of the Church is secondary; it is an extension of “the rational and unbloody sacrifice” of the altar (Anaphora, Liturgy of St Basil).  When I make asceticism primary I do so at the cost of its eucharistic content and reduce it to merely one more form of my own “egocentric individuality” which the New Testament identifies with “the flesh” (pp. 110-111).

As always, I welcome your comments, criticisms and questions.

In Christ,

+Fr Gregory