"ASCETIC FEASTING"

Eid al Fitr is a feast, a communal celebration to mark the end of  Ramadan. Mardi Gras is a feast, a communal celebration. It precedes 40 days of restrained eating.  Feasting is religious because it celebrates a great yea-saying to creation. Fasting is religious  because it acknowledges how the great yea-and-amen saying includes an important ethical dimension: a yea-saying to responsibility. Responsibility means, as the ancient Greeks recognized, responding in a way that finds the right path, a path that typically avoids extremes and seeks balance.  Embodying the right balance in behavior means developing appropriate habits. Developing appropriate habits involves training, exercise and effort. Here is where fasting fits in. Fasting offers a ritualized opportunity to engage in such training.  

Philosophers, sadly, have missed the significance of feasting and fasting. Mind-fixated, they have tended to downplay feasting since it is associated with bodily appetites.  At the same time, they have tended to distort the importance of fasting, describing it in terms of self-discipline as a way to promote the renunciation of bodily desires. The exaggerated positions that result: On one side, all feasting considered as gluttony;  on the other, a need to suppress appetites.

In all of this, a perfectly good word was ruined.  The term

“ascetic” originally meant someone well trained or skilled.  A good athlete would serve as a typical example. So would an accomplished musician. Askein meant to train, i.e. to take natural dispositions and bring them to their proper fruition.  

With regard to virtuous behavior, “asceticism” did not initially mean suppressing or eliminating naturally occurring desires and dispositions. Vice, as excess with regard to desires and appetites, did represent a problem.  The virtuous way to avoid excess was not to suppress the appetite. Rather excesses were avoided by shaping habits, by training, by undertaking an ascesis. Such a training encouraged the development of habits that did not dismiss but rather properly channeled appetites, desires, dispositions. 

For the older, original, meaning of “ascetic” to remain, a particular philosophical position had to be dominant.  Humans had to be understood as continuous wholes, not as bifurcated entities. Once the bifurcation (mind vs body) took hold, once ex-carnation rather than in-carnation became the default understanding, then “ascetic” began to change its meaning.  Ultimately, it became the term we know today, the one that connotes self-deprivation, self-abnegation, self-denial. It is hard for us even to imagine how it once meant something quite different, how it emphasized the need for practices that would help us carry out activities which  brought dispositions to their proper culminations, how athletes and musicians would be good examples of “ascetics.”. 

The shift began with the ancient Stoics as the center of gravity moved from Athens to Rome. For the Stoics, ascesis began its movement toward a particular kind of exercise, one that aimed, not to refine, but to expunge, appetites.  The Stoic understanding, first absorbed and then spread by the Roman empire, eventually became the default position in Europe. 

Swept aside by all this was the pre-Stoic, Aristotelian understanding that emphasized not free exercise vs suppression, but rather behavior that, depending on which habits were cultivated, would become  virtuous or vicious. Virtue and vice did not map simplistically onto suppression or free reign or appetite. Rather virtuous behavior was associated with the proper channelling of appetites, desires, dispositions.   Vice, on the other hand, arose when the proper target has been missed, either by excess or privation. 

To articulate, as best as he could, what it meant to achieve the right target, , Aristotle famously spoke of the “mean.”   We

might translate the “mean” as the right blend at the right time in the right way. Appetites, desires, dispositions are multiple

and a hodge podge of good and bad.  Virtue dominates vice when the better dispositions are cultivated and, via the proper ascesis, well-educated (in the literal sense of drawing out what is already there, making real what initially is present only in the status of possibility).

Food offers a good and prevalent example. Gluttony (nothing but feasting) and anorexia (nothing but fasting) stand as excesses to be avoided.  Eating can be unbounded, careless, sloppy, enslaved by immediate gratification. Overreaction to such excesses can lead to rigid, narrow, schemes of suppression. 

Missing in this wild pendulum swing is the understanding of virtue as the bringing of appetites to their proper consummations. The path of responsibility, of ascesis, of virtue, of getting blends and culminations right in actual practice, is not easy.  But constantly working at getting that blend right is a way to live out the yea-and-amen attitude to the world in which we find ourselves.