“The Endless Refinement of the Perfect”: The Ascetical Discipline of Fasting and the Holy and Great Council (Chantilly, France, 5-8 October 2026)

 

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

***

Your All-Holiness, Your Beatitude, Your Eminences, Your Graces, reverend Fathers, 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 of the Orthodox Church 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. A Word from Alexandria

Two weeks ago, I was in Alexandria for the plenary of the International Commission for the Anglican–Orthodox Theological Dialogue. Our Commission is currently drafting a common text on mission[1]. In his intervention during the discussion, 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. 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 in the paper he circulated, 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).” This is but one of many similar references he made. I could not help but think: It is not every day that an Anglican from Southeast Asia sends the Orthodox back to read their own Council[2].

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 the 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, in my view, 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 Metropolitan Nifon’s words, 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 they 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 neglected than the document The Importance of Fasting and Its Observance Today. Most of the ink spilled since 2016 has gone to texts that seemed more controversial, above all the document on the relations of the Orthodox Church with the rest of the Christian world. The fasting text has drawn only a modest body of scholarly commentary[3]. 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. The text is seldom read and seldom studied, and it is almost never used in catechesis. 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.

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 as it stands.

The question first came before a pan-Orthodox gathering at the Congress convened in Constantinople by Patriarch Meletios IV in 1923, a ecclesial event whose own reception, as we know, was far from untroubled. On fasting, the Congress directed each Church to be guided by the sixty-ninth Apostolic Canon and, where oikonomia was needed, by Balsamon’s commentary on it. Two principles are already present in germ in that decision. The regulation of fasting belongs to the autocephalous Churches. And each Church must hold together akribeia, so that fasting is not abandoned, and oikonomia, so that it is not imposed as a bare legal obligation[4]. In 1926 the Church of Romania proposed, as a conciliar theme, “a re-evaluation of fasting according to the climate, hygiene of the human organism and their moral influence on the soul.” hen, at Rhodes in 1961, the subject entered the conciliar agenda under a title that tells 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.”[5]

The first and boldest draft came from the Inter-Orthodox Preparatory Commission, meeting at Chambésy in July 1971, on the basis of studies by the Church of Serbia. It 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.” We shall meet this sentence again in discussing Crete. The remedy the Commission proposed shows how far the Churches were then prepared to go. All existing ordinances would be kept in full by monastics and by those clergy and devout laity who wished and were able to keep them. For others, the Church might grant “a gradual easing, depending on the circumstances, as tolerance or a milder form of fasting.” Wednesdays and Fridays outside the fasting seasons would admit oil and fish. Great Lent would keep its full rigor in its first week and in Holy Week, with oil and fish allowed on the other weekdays except Wednesday and Friday. The Nativity fast would either be halved, beginning after the feast of Saint Barbara, or kept at forty days with relaxations. The fast of the Apostles would last no more than eight days, and the Dormition fast, though unchanged in length, would admit oil and fish except on Wednesdays and Fridays. When the feasts of the Holy Apostles or of the Dormition fell on a Wednesday or a Friday, the fast would be lifted altogether[6]. The draft even affirmed that a future Pan-Orthodox Council had the authority to shorten the fasting periods. Never before has a pre-conciliar text spoken so concretely, or so plainly, about how the discipline of fasting might be “readjusted.”

The first great reformulation in answer to this proposal came at the Second Pre-Conciliar Pan-Orthodox Conference, held at Chambésy on September 3–12, 1982. Here the text did not merely change its wording, it changed its nature. Metropolitan George Khodr of Mount Lebanon opened the debate by observing that the draft did not sufficiently bring out the spiritual value of fasting. Metropolitan Kalinik of Vratsa reported that the Holy Synod of Bulgaria accepted some of the Commission’s conclusions but wished others be revised. Metropolitan Juvenaly of Krutitsy and Kolomna objected to the third conclusion, and to calling the final propositions “conclusions” at all. Speaking for the Church of Romania, Bishop Vasile Târgovișteanul, then a vicar bishop of Bucharest, declared that the fasts fixed by the Church “must remain unchangeable as to their duration and their severity,” for to abolish any of them would deprive the Church “of a means of spiritual life in Christ.” Yet in the same breath he allowed that the question might be resolved locally by each Orthodox Church, if each were given greater freedom to do so. Unchangeable, and yet local. The whole later history of the text is folded into that one intervention. Metropolitan Filaret of Kiev, for his part, asked that the very title be changed, so as “not to distract and shock the faithful people of God.”[7]

The draft was then sent to a working committee under Metropolitan John of Helsinki. Its report, presented on September 10, 1982, did not amend the proposals of 1971; it removed them. Fasting, the report said, is not a hygienic, social, or religious invention but a divine commandment, and it is here that the argument from Genesis 2:16–17, by way of Saint Basil, appears for the first time. The committee proposed that the Council should “preserve without alteration the prescriptions of the Church on fasting now in force” and introduce “no modification in the meaning, character, and application of fasting.” The measure of oikonomia in particular cases would be left to the spiritual discernment of the local Churches, to be exercised by the responsible hierarchs and by the spiritual fathers they appoint, “thus softening the astringency of the holy fasts.” It is a lovely phrase, and it has a long life. Thirty-four years later, the text adopted in Crete still speaks of relieving the «στυφόν», the astringency, of the holy fasts, though our English translation, less poetically, calls it their “burden.”[8]

As was to be expected, the new text did not satisfy everyone. Bishop Gregory of Kyrenia, of the Church of Cyprus, put his finger on the question that no draft has ever quite answered: Why do Christians in contemporary society no longer observe the rules of fasting? Metropolitan Parthenios of Carthage, the future Patriarch of Alexandria, simply found the text unsatisfactory. Metropolitan Chrysostomos of Myra noted that it never asked whether fasting could develop at all, and he warned that leaving its regulation to each autocephalous Church might multiply particular practices, with grave consequences for the Orthodox diaspora. Professor Vlassios Phidas, supporting him, reminded the assembly that the canonical tradition regulates only Wednesday, Friday, and Great Lent. The other fasts, he said, were extended to the laity later, after the twelfth century and under monastic influence. No consensus could be reached. The Conference postponed the question and declared, in the meantime, that “the traditional practice should remain in force” until the Holy and Great Synod examined it. It was, in effect, a decision not to decide, and the Church has lived with it ever since[9].

The reformulation was completed in 1986. At a preparatory meeting early that year, Metropolitan Damaskinos of Switzerland presented the observations of the Churches. Among them was the firm position of the Church of Greece, which feared that the debate had come at an inopportune moment and might divide the faithful, and which therefore opposed any amendment of the canonical provisions on fasting, while leaving the local Churches free to apply oikonomia where necessary. The limits now proposed for oikonomia were strikingly precise. There was to be none in Holy Week, none in the length of Great Lent, none on Wednesdays and Fridays, and none on the single-day fasts. Only for the Nativity, Apostles’, and Dormition fasts might the length and the food be eased, and even then the final week before each feast was to be kept in full. As Fr. Răzvan Perșa has observed, oikonomia hemmed in so tightly is in danger of becoming akribeia[10]. 

At the Third Pre-Conciliar Conference, in the autumn of 1986, Metropolitan Damaskinos proposed a new title, and at the urging of Metropolitan Antonie of Transylvania the delegates agreed, lest the word “readjustment” scandalize the faithful. The text then received the name it bears today. In the Conference’s committee, the word “unchangeable” (ἀμετάβλητος), which had stood in the first article, was struck out and replaced by the statement that fasting is “a divine commandment.” Damaskinos had already drawn the distinction that made this possible. It is the institution of fasting, he said, and not its practice, that does not change[11]. The 1971 proposal to lift the fast when the feasts of the Apostles or the Dormition fall on a Wednesday or Friday was quietly dropped.[12] Bishop Jeremiah of Wrocław summed up the result in what remains, I think, the most perceptive comment ever made on this text: “In this text everything is correct, but something is missing.”[13]

After almost thirty years of silence, the Fifth Pre-Conciliar Conference, at Chambésy in October 2015, revisited chiefly the ninth paragraph, on fasting and Holy Communion, at the proposal of Professor Theodoros Giagkou. The Synaxis of Primates of January 2016 approved the text, with the representatives of Antioch and Georgia not signing. Reporting to the Bishops’ Council of his Church in February 2016, Patriarch Kirill of Moscow, whose Church would in the end not be present in Crete, welcomed the text for “dispelling the rumors of the forthcoming annulment of fasts or their reduction at the Council.” He added that it affirmed “for the first time on the pan-Orthodox scale the obligatory character of the Nativity, Apostles’ and Dormition fasts.”[14] 

On the afternoon of June 22, 2016, the Council received the text as “a complete and comprehensive expression of both letter and spirit of the entire age-long ecclesiastical tradition,” noting that it had received “only a minimum of modification” since 1986. It was accepted unanimously, with one small addition to the ninth paragraph made at the suggestion of the late Metropolitan Amfilohije Radović of Montenegro and the Littoral[15].

The original impetus, then, was to update the rules of fasting, a task that in 1961 and 1971 was considered one of the most pressing in the life of the Church. Half a century later, the result was a text that, for many practicing Orthodox Christians, simply states the obvious: fasting is good and ancient; it is centered on Christ and bound to prayer, to almsgiving, and to the Eucharist; and the bishops may exercise oikonomia. On the eve of the Council, Professor Athanasios Papathanasiou granted that, given the widespread conviction that fasting cannot be adjusted at all, “a synodical confirmation of this pastoral flexibility may be of considerable help.” But he could not resist adding: “for a sober ecclesiastical consciousness it may just be much ado about nothing! Normally there is no need for the convocation of a Council if the only thing we have to say is that the observation of the fasting discipline is assigned to the responsibility of the shepherds and the faithful!”[16] Fr. Răzvan Perșa has gone further, speaking of the “total victory” of conservative theological circles and noting that almost forty percent of the text consists of quotations[17].

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.

1. Observance “Today”, and Tomorrow

The first concerns the most neglected word in the title: today. Is a text that bears the word “today” already dated ten years on, or indeed forty years on, since its substance goes back to 1986? The Serbian theologian Rastko Jović, in one of the first studies published after the Council, pointedly retitled it “The Importance of Fasting and Its Observance for Tomorrow.”[18] His point is a fair one. What is our “today”? The faithful of 1986 had, for the most part, grown up within the rhythm of the Orthodox calendar of feasts and fasts. When Papathanasiou wrote, on the eve of the Council, he spoke of “Generation Y”; ten years later we must speak of Generation Alpha. 

The children now entering our parishes have grown up in a world where food is abundant and globalized, delivered to the door, photographed and rated before it is eaten. In that world, abstinence has become the mark of the consumer more than of the believer. Dieting, detox, intermittent fasting, and other practices constitute what has been called “the religion of thinness.” Many young people are vegetarians or vegans who already abstain all year from what our typikon forbids only on fasting days[19]. As early as 1961, Roland Barthes predicted that food would “lose in substance and gain in function.”[20] What does fasting mean to a generation for whom not eating is already a lifestyle?

The text itself admits, in its eighth paragraph, that “many faithful today do not observe all the prescriptions of fasting.” This is the sentence we first met in 1971. As Jović points out, it stands practically unchanged from the text adopted in 1986[21]. Where empirical data exist, they confirm it. A survey in Serbia in 2010 found that only twenty-eight percent of respondents fasted regularly[22]. Is the text, then, simply an admission that fasting is no longer a regular discipline in the lives of many of our Christians?

I would suggest that it is something more. The evidence lies in a revision that has passed almost entirely unnoticed. The pre-conciliar text of 1986 said, in its fifth paragraph, that “the ideal of spiritual perfection is found very high”, 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.”[23] The text, in other words, divided the Church into the “very few” who are deified and “all the others” who struggle on and rely on mercy. 

The Council replaced this. The measure of perfection is now “the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ” (Eph 4:13). “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 “all people are obligated to maintain the good struggle of the fast.” Where the 1986 text said that ascesis “has no measure”, the Council now says that “ascesis and spiritual struggle, like the refinement of the perfect, are endless in this life.” The phrase I have borrowed for my title thus stands in the very sentence in which the Council quietly set aside the notion of fasting as the discipline of a spiritual elite. Fasting is not the privilege of the few; it is the vocation of the whole Body.

The words have changed. Whether our habits of mind have changed with them is another matter. Many of us still think, and still preach, as though real fasting belonged to monks and to a few heroic laypeople, while the rest of the faithful are left to manage as best they can. Here, I believe, the text speaks not only of today but of tomorrow, for it asks us to catch up with what the Council has already said.

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

The second line concerns the body. 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 with bread.” What does this mean?

It means, first, that the Lord’s answer to the tempter (Mt 4:4; Deut 8:3) expresses no contempt for bread. 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. As I put it to our Anglican friends in Alexandria, 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 make bread into a god, so that bread may become gift and communion. His All-Holiness has spent much of his ministry teaching that the answer to the ecological crisis lies in an ascetic and eucharistic ethos: in learning to receive the world as a gift and to offer it back with thanksgiving[24]. For most of us, that lesson begins not in a monastery but at the kitchen table.

What, then, can the Council’s teaching offer concerning the body in a post-modern world? Fr. Răzvan Perșa has observed that the text affirms abstinence from food as “a visible aspect of this spiritual endeavor” but then quickly subordinates it to the spiritual by stating that “food makes us neither more nor less righteous.” This move risks devolving into what he calls a “docetist” view of fasting[25] Our tradition knows better. “The Church,” wrote Fr. Alexander Schmemann “does not separate the soul from the body.” “The whole man has fallen away from God; the whole man is to be restored, the whole man is to return… But the body is glorious; the body is holy, so holy that God Himself ‘became flesh.’”[26] Fasting, therefore, is not a dietary technique, but the care of the temple of the Holy Spirit, that is to say, the body. This is why the tradition is careful when fasting my harm the body. In fact, the Council names “physical infirmity” first among the grounds for oikonomia.

In that same Alexandria paper, I recalled an exchange from the correspondence of Saints Barsanuphius and John of Gaza that says, in a few lines, what the Council’s seventh paragraph 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 answer leaves no room for ascetic anxiety: “Do not grieve, for God does not require of us anything beyond our strength.” Then, with remarkable concision, the Elder sums 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.”[27] In the preceding letter, when the same brother concluded from his inability to fast that he could not be saved, the Elder named despair as the greater danger: “This brings great joy to the devil.”[28] The sick man is not failing to fast. His weakness has become the arena of another ascesis: 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 “physical infirmity” should be read.

3. The Local Church: Oikonomia or Diakrisis?

The third line leads us back to Alexandria and to the mission paper. Dr. Lin distinguished between a missionary posture of “come and see,” in which outsiders are expected to learn the Church’s languages, rituals and systems of meaning, and an incarnational posture, in which the Church enters the lived realities, languages and cultures of a people, as Christ entered ours[29]. Our fasting discipline raises exactly this question. The Orthodox rules of fasting took shape in the eastern Mediterranean, and were elaborated in the monasteries of Palestine, Constantinople and Athos. They presuppose a world of olive oil, bread, legumes, wine, fish and seafood. One delegate at the 1986 Conference observed with disarming frankness: “In the Mediterranean countries we eat seafood: how did that enter into practice? The Russians eat fish: is that in conformity with the rules of abstinence?”[30] Commentators in North America have made the same point. The regulations, they said, were “designed for people living in a particular region.”[31] Professor Papathanasiou asks what it means for Orthodox families in fishing villages on 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[32].

The Council’s answer is the priority of the local Church. The eighth paragraph leaves it “to the discretion of the local Orthodox Churches to determine how to exercise philanthropic oikonomia and empathy.” This is faithful to the principle of 1923 and to the Romanian position of 1982. It also runs straight into the fear that Metropolitan Chrysostomos of Myra voiced in that same year, for in the diaspora, where several jurisdictions share a single city, the question “Which local Church?” is no idle one. But an Orthodox canonists might ask a deeper question still: Is this merely a question of oikonomia or id it a question of diakrisis? In its canonical sense, oikonomia is a departure from the norm for the sake of a person’s salvation. It therefore presupposes that the norm is the Mediterranean monastic typikon and that every other context is an exception to it. Papathanasiou has argued instead that such adaptations should be understood “not as oikonomia but as exactitude”, that is, as the normal application of the rule. “Other cuisines, beyond those of the traditionally Orthodox countries, are not a deviation from the ‘normal.’ They are simply other normals.”[33] The Council itself points in this direction, for its seventh paragraph speaks not only of oikonomia but also of “pastoral discernment” (κατὰ ποιμαντικὴν διάκρισιν).

I would propose that the reception of this text in the missionary Churches and the diaspora of tomorrow depends on reading it in the light of diakrisis. What must remain unchanging is not the menu but the criteria of ascesis and its purpose. These are self-restraint; the formation of the will in obedience, so that, in the words of St. Gregory the Theologian quoted by the Council, “that we might recover by its observance that which we have lost by not observing it”; sharing with the poor; and the expectation of the Kingdom. Here we need not invent anything new. The Church has only to remember what she has learnt from her long and sometimes painful experience of the encounter between the Gospel and culture.

4. Fasting and Justice

The fourth line 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[34]. Yet the critics are right that the text is “noticeably laconic” here. It affirms this dimension, but it does not develop it[35].

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.”[36] 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[37]. 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.”[38] 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.”[39]

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[40]. 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 for reminding us of the intervention of the late Metropolitan John of Pergamon 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[41].

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[42].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

Your Eminences, dear colleagues and friends, the history of this text is a history of readjustment. In the pre-conciliar process, we set out to readjust the fast, and we ended by readjusting the text. Drafts were proposed and withdrawn, titles changed, a single adjective struck out, a paragraph on deification rewritten, and a final paragraph reworked on the eve of the Council. The Council tells us that ascesis and spiritual struggle, “like the refinement of the perfect, are endless in this life.” Perhaps the same is true of the reception of a conciliar text. The document on fasting did not change the fasting calendar of any Church, and in the end it was not meant to. But it did something else. It declared that fasting belongs to the whole people of God; 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, or, rather, a true reappropriation of what the text points to. We need catechesis 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. Professor Papathanasiou ends his study by recalling that to be a Christian 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.”[43] 

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 the Council’s own words, ἡ ἀτέλεστος «τελειότης τῶν τελείων»: the endless refinement of the perfect.

Thank you.

______

1. The working title of the draft of our agreed statement is Witnessing to Christ and Making Disciples in the Contemporary World.

2. Khee-Vun Lin, “Comments on the Mission Paper,” International Commission for the Anglican–Orthodox Theological Dialogue, 4 June 2026 (unpublished), section “A General and Holistic Definition of Mission.” Cf, “The Will that Connects Worship to Mission.”

3. Among the studies, see Veniamin Goreanu, “The Settlement of Canonic Tradition in the Document ‘The Importance of Fasting and Its Observance Today,’” Studia Universitatis Babeș-Bolyai Theologia Orthodoxa 62, no. 1 (2017): 89–91; Rastko Jović, “The Importance of Fasting and Its Observance for Tomorrow,” Studia Universitatis Babeș-Bolyai Theologia Orthodoxa 62, no. 1 (2017): 103–14; Răzvan Perșa, “A Canonical and Theological Reconsideration of the Document ‘The Importance of Fasting and Its Observance Today’ of the Holy and Great Council of Crete,” Studia Universitatis Babeș-Bolyai Theologia Orthodoxa 63, no. 2 (2018): 105–37; Philip Zymaris, “The Holy and Great Council and an Orthodox Theology of Fasting,” in 8th International Conference of Orthodox Theology: On the Holy and Great Council (Thessaloniki, 2020), 416–26. Before the Council, see Athanasios N. Papathanasiou, “Christian Fasting in Postmodern Society: Considering the Criteria,” St. Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 60, nos. 1–2 (2016): 249–68; Panagiotis Skaltsis, “Ἡ νηστεία κατὰ τὶς Προσυνοδικὲς Συζητήσεις,” Θεολογία 86, no. 4 (2015): 213–20; Stelyios S. Muksuris et al., “Reflection on the Pre-Conciliar Document: The Importance of Fasting and Its Observance Today,” in Toward the Holy and Great Council: Theological Reflections, ed. Nathanael Symeonides (New York: Department of Inter-Orthodox, Ecumenical and Interfaith Relations, 2016), 57–61; and the commentaries published on orthodoxcouncil.org by Philip Mamalakis, Nathanael Symeonides, and Gayle Woloschak (“Fasting Reaffirmed”) and by Michael Azar, Elizabeth Theokritoff, and Harry Linsinbigler (“Fasting, the Church, and the World”).

4. Perșa, “A Canonical and Theological Reconsideration,” 106–107, citing Patrick Viscuso, A Quest for Reform of the Orthodox Church: The 1923 Pan-Orthodox Congress (Berkeley, CA: InterOrthodox Press, 2006), 193.

5. Perșa, 108; Skaltsis, “Η νηστεία,” 213–214. The translation of the Rhodes title is mine. Perșa renders it “The adaptation of the rules of fasting to contemporary conditions.”

6. Πρὸς τὴν Μεγάλην Σύνοδον (Chambésy, 1971), 41–42, quoted in Perșa, 109–110, n. 18; cf. Skaltsis, 214–216; Papathanasiou, “Christian Fasting,” 262.

7. Perșa, 111–112, citing IIᵉ Conférence panorthodoxe préconciliaire. Actes (3–12 septembre 1982), Synodika VIII (Chambésy, 1994), 96–101.

8. Perșa, “A Canonical and Theological Reconsideration,” 112–13 and n. 28, citing Synodika 8, 152–56. Translations from the French are mine. For the final text, see The Importance of Fasting and Its Observance Today, §8 (Greek: «ἀπαλύνουσαι … τὸ τυχὸν “στυφὸν” τῶν ἱερῶν νηστειῶν»).

9. Perșa, 113–114, citing Synodika VIII, 158–159 and 182.

10. Perșa, “A Canonical and Theological Reconsideration,” 115–16, citing Anastasios Kallis, Auf dem Weg zu einem Heiligen und Großen Konzil: Ein Quellen- und Arbeitsbuch zur orthodoxen Ekklesiologie (Münster: Theophano, 2013), 474–77.

11. Perșa, “A Canonical and Theological Reconsideration,” 117–118 and 124, citing IIIᵉ Conférence panorthodoxe préconciliaire. Actes (28 octobre–9 novembre 1986), Synodika X (Chambésy, 2014), 77 and 198–201. 

12. Papathanasiou, “Christian Fasting,” 262.

13. “Dans ce texte tout est correct mais qu’il y manque quelque chose”: Synodika X, 84, quoted in Perșa, “A Canonical and Theological Reconsideration,” 120.

14. Perșa, “A Canonical and Theological Reconsideration,” 118–119 and n. 48, citing the report at mospat.ru/en/2016/02/02/news127681/.

15. Holy and Great Council, News Bulletin no. 3, holycouncil.org, quoted in Perșa, 119.

16. Papathanasiou, “Christian Fasting,” 257.

17. Perșa, “A Canonical and Theological Reconsideration,” 105, 115 n. 36 and 120.

18. Jović, “The Importance of Fasting,” 103.

19. Papathanasiou, “Christian Fasting,” 252–53, 255, and 259.

20. Roland Barthes, “Toward a Psychosociology of Contemporary Food Consumption,” in Food and Culture: A Reader, ed. Carole Counihan and Penny Van Esterik (New York: Routledge, 1997), 26, quoted in Papathanasiou, “Christian Fasting,” 251.

21. Jović, “The Importance of Fasting,” 106–107.

22. Jović, 113, citing Religioznost u Srbiji 2010 (Belgrade, 2010).

23. «Κατὰ τὴν ὀρθόδοξον παράδοσιν, τὸ ἰδεῶδες τῆς πνευματικῆς τελειώσεως εὑρίσκεται πολὺ ὑψηλά… Ἀκριβῶς δὲ διὰ τοῦτο ἡ ἄσκησις καὶ ὁ πνευματικὸς ἀγὼν δὲν ἔχει μέτρον, ὅπως καὶ ἡ τελειότης τῶν τελείων. Ἐλάχιστοι ἀνταποκρίνονται εἰς τὰς ἐπιταγὰς τοῦ ὀρθοδόξου ὑψηλοῦ ἰδεώδους, ὥστε νὰ θεοῦνται ζῶντες… Ὄλοι οἱ ἄλλοι ἔχουν… χρέος νὰ μὴ ἐγκαταλείπουν τὸν καλὸν τῆς νηστείας ἀγῶνα…» §5 of the 1986 text, pp. 60–61. Compare §5 of the final text: «τὸ μέτρον τῆς πνευματικῆς τελειώσεως εἶναι τὸ “μέτρον ἡλικίας τοῦ πληρώματος τοῦ Χριστοῦ”… Πάντες καλοῦνται νὰ ἀνταποκρίνωνται, ὅση δύναμις αὐτοῖς… Πάντες ἔχουν… χρέος…». 

24. See, for example, John Chryssavgis, ed., Cosmic Grace, Humble Prayer: The Ecological Vision of the Green Patriarch Bartholomew, rev. ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2009); and On Earth as in Heaven: Ecological Vision and Initiatives of Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, ed. John Chryssavgis (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012).

25. Perșa, 130–131.

26. Alexander Schmemann, Great Lent: Journey to Pascha (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1974), 37–38.

27. Barsanuphius and John, Letters, vol. 1, trans. John Chryssavgis, Fathers of the Church 113 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2006), Letter 78, 103–4.

28. Barsanuphius and John, Letters, Letter 77, 101.

29. Lin, “Comments,” “Engagement – Active or Passive?” and “Incarnational Mission.”

30. Synodika X, 79, quoted in Perșa, 115, n. 37 (my translation from the French).

31. Mamalakis, Symeonides and Woloschak, “Fasting Reaffirmed,” orthodoxcouncil.org.

32. Papathanasiou, “Christian Fasting,” 259–260.

33. Papathanasiou, “Christian Fasting,” 258 and 260.

34. Perșa, 117 and 129.

35. Papathanasiou, “Christian Fasting,” 266; Perșa, 129.

36. Shepherd of Hermas, Parable 5, in The Apostolic Fathers, vol. 2, trans. Bart D. Ehrman, Loeb Classical Library 25 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 327–329.

37. Papathanasiou, “Christian Fasting,” 267, citing Apostolic Constitutions 5.20 and Aristides, Apology 15; John Chrysostom, Homilies on the Statues 3.3–4 (PG 49:51–53), cited in Kallistos Ware, “The Meaning of the Great Fast,” in The Lenten Triodion, trans. Mother Mary and Kallistos Ware (London: Faber and Faber, 1978), 17.

38. Papathanasiou, “Christian Fasting,” 266–267, citing Eusebius of Alexandria, Oration 1, On Fasting, PG 86, 316AB. 

39. The Lenten Triodion, 461.

40. Papathanasiou, “Christian Fasting,” 258 and 264; cf. Azar, Theokritoff and Linsinbigler, “Fasting, the Church, and the World,” orthodoxcouncil.org.

41. Papathanasiou, “Christian Fasting,” 256 and 261, citing Asterios of Amaseia, Oration 14, PG 40, 373D, and Alexander Schmemann, “Fast and Liturgy: Notes in Liturgical Theology,” St Vladimir’s Seminary Quarterly 3, no. 1 (1959): 2–9.

42. Jović, “The Importance of Fasting,” 110–112.

43. Papathanasiou, “Christian Fasting,” 268.

 

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photo: Nikos Papachristou