Fasting in Lent

Many Christians affirm the observance of Lent, a season of some forty days of fasting, penance, prayer, and almsgiving in preparation for Easter, recalling Christ's forty days of fasting in the wilderness. In the Western churches it begins on Ash Wednesday, when many receive ashes on the forehead with words recalling human mortality, drawn from Genesis, that one is dust and to dust one shall return; the Eastern churches keep a Great Fast of their own reckoning, beginning on what is called Clean Monday rather than a Wednesday, and calculated somewhat differently from the Western season.

The forty-day length was not fixed from the start. The earliest evidence for a pre-Easter fast, from the second century, points to a much shorter preparation, in some places apparently just a day or two immediately before the Easter vigil, and the extended forty-day period seems to have developed gradually over the following two centuries, becoming standard by roughly the fourth century, an era in which the season also became closely tied to the final preparation of catechumens awaiting baptism at Easter itself, so that Lent's penitential character and its role as baptismal preparation grew up together rather than separately.

Lent is kept most fully in the liturgical traditions, Roman Catholic, Eastern and Oriental Orthodox, Anglican, Lutheran, and Methodist, while many other Protestant bodies observe it lightly or not at all, reflecting a Reformation-era wariness of mandated fasts seen as unscriptural human tradition rather than divine command. Even among those who keep it, practice varies considerably: Eastern Orthodox Great Lent traditionally prescribes abstention from meat, dairy, and, on most days, fish and oil, a stricter and more sustained fast than the more limited abstinence and voluntary self-denial typical of contemporary Western Catholic practice, which today generally asks fasting only on a small number of specific days.

Its rhythm of self-denial as preparation for a feast parallels fasting disciplines in other religions, such as the Muslim month of Ramadan, though Lent is tied specifically to the commemoration of Christ's passion and resurrection and is a matter of church custom and discipline rather than binding divine command in most traditions that observe it, a difference in theological status, custom versus command, that itself reflects Lent's distinct historical development compared to fasts commanded directly in scripture.