St. Ambrose: The Power of Fasting

Great is the power of fasting.  Moreover, so beauteous is its bravery that fasting delights even Christ: so strong, that it leads men to heaven.  And, to use human rather than divine examples, a voice sent forth from the mouth of the fasting Elijah closed heaven, due to the sacrilege of the people of the Jews (1 Kgs 17:1).  So, too, when an altar to an idol was set up by King Ahab (1 Kgs 16:32), at the word of the prophet, for three years and six months, the dew of rain did not fall upon the earth.  A worthy punishment which fittingly restrains intemperance: that heaven would be closed to the impious who polluted earthly things.  Worthy, indeed, that, at the condemnation of the king’s sacrilege, the prophet was sent to the widow in Sarepta of Sidon, who, since she offered devotion through food, merited that she alone would not feel the distress of the public aridity.  Therefore, the jug of barley did not lack, when the torrent’s flows were lacking (1 Kgs 17:8-16).

What will I weave from the rest?  Fasting, he revived the son of the widow from the realms below (1 Kgs 17:17-24); fasting, he put away the rains by speech (1 Kgs 17:1); fasting, he brought fire forth from heaven (1 Kgs 17:36-38; 2 Kgs 1); fasting, he was snatched up to heaven in a chariot (2 Kgs 2:11); and, by a fast of forty days, he acquired the divine presence (1 Kgs 19).  Therefore, the more he fasted, the more he merited.  By fasting, he made the flows of the Jordan stand still by speech, and, with a dusty footstep, he crossed the overflowing riverbank, suddenly dry (2 Kgs 2:8).  With merit, the divine sentence judged him worthy of heaven, so that he was snatched up in his body, since he lived a celestial life in the body, and exhibited a supernal manner of conversation on earth.

For what is fasting, except the celestial substance and image?  Fasting is the refection of the soul, the food of the mind is fasting, the life of angels is fasting, fasting is fault’s death, the excision of offenses, the remedy of salvation, the root of grace, it is the foundation of chastity.  By this ladder, one more quickly attains to God; by this ladder, Elijah ascended, before he ascended in the chariot.  Departing for heaven, he left this inheritance of sobriety and abstention to his disciple.  In this power and spirit--that of Elijah--John came.  Therefore, in the desert, he also spent his time in fasting.  But his food was locusts and wild honey (Mt 3:4; Mk 1:6).  And, therefore, since he was bypassing the possibility of human life through continence, he was esteemed as, not a man, but an angel.  Of him we read: Indeed, he is more than a prophet.  He is the one of whom it is written: Behold, I send My angel before your face, who will prepare your way before you (Mt 11:9-10; Mal 3:1).  Who could, by human power, ascend with fiery horses, in fiery chariots, guiding bronze chariots, except he who changes the nature of the human body into an incorruptible nature through the power of fasting?

Nota Bene: The above passage is from St. Ambrose's On Elijah and Fasting II.2-III.4 (PL 14:698A-699C).  In the first paragraph, "bravery" translates the Latin militia, more specifically meaning "military spirit" or "military courage."  

Translation ©2023 Brandon P. Otto.  Licensed via CC-BY-NC. Feel free to redistribute non-commercially, as long as credit is given to the author.

Reopening the Treasury

 I originally started this blog over a decade ago, when I was just a student and had much more time for writing.  Business of life (and a feeling that no one was reading this blog anyway) led me to give it up and leave the field fallow for almost a decade.  Now, though, I feel it is time to restart it, with a bit of a different focus: the main posts will now be translations.

A major question might be: why revive a ten-year-defunct blog for a somewhat new venture?  Why not simply start fresh, with a clean slate?  That's typical nowadays: a new brand for a new venture.

First, there is the simple fact that there might still be a few old-time readers of the blog around, to give a few views; second, there is the fact that the amount of content already here might give a bump in search engines (though I don't know much about how SEO has changed in the last ten years).  Yet those are simply small, practical matters, only really useful if I cared much about earning money off of this.

The real reason is that the blog is still me.  True, I originally wrote it under a pseudonym (Wolfsbane) before changing it; true, I have changed in the past ten years, just as everyone does.  But my past is still my past.  It used to be said that "the Internet is forever": anything posted on the Internet will survive, somehow, to be tracked down again.  Such was the optimism of the old Internet; but the intervening years and losses--Use.net groups, forums, bulletin boards, link rot: so many records vanished--have shown that the Internet's memory is not quite what it was thought to be.  Paywalls and rebrandings have hastened such deletions; old YouTube videos can suddenly be privated and vanish; one's old brand is considered a detriment to a new venture, and promptly erased.  I remember once trying to track down a recipe whose link I'd saved: the link was dead, because the author had rebranded herself a few times, and many of her old recipes had simply vanished.  The Wayback Machine saved the day for me that time, though it's not infallible: some pages no one thought to save, and some are designed in order to be unsavable (such as "infinite scroll" forums).  So the Internet is more fragile than we used to think.

But if that's so, why not try for a blank slate?  Despite this fragility, the Internet's memory can still be shockingly strong: I looked and saw that this old blog had been saved by the Wayback Machine numerous times.  It's already been sealed in our best Internet vault, so it cannot be simply wished away.  My blogging past is my past, and I cannot deny it; better to embrace it, create a continuity, than to claim that I am some Internet new-born.  Why try to hide what cannot be hid?

The fact that I am an independent scholar is certainly a help here: I have no institutional facade to protect.  Is there anything unbecoming in my old posts?  I hope not, but I haven't re-read them all to find out.  My old projects--the Church Documents Index, the Iconic Icons series, the very-short-lived series on Byzantine neumes--will probably stay ruins, long-built then abandoned.  My new project will be an ongoing series of translations, with a linked index.  

I've cleaned up the layout a bit, removing a few pieces of cruft, such as the massive word cloud of labels at the bottom, and the links to other Byzantine Catholic blogs (many of them defunct or rarely posting).  The "Catholic links and blog" section is now simply eparchial and Vatican links, with a few other resources, though I'm not sure how useful it is either; it may go by the wayside for simplicity's sake as well.

This will not be my first attempt at a translation-collection: I hand-coded a website a few years ago--Undusted Texts--with a few translations added.  I really like the aesthetics of that site, but the backend takes more work; Blogger is quite simple in comparison.  My index of translations will include links to my Undusted Texts translations as well; again, why hide what cannot be hid?  Why deny what I myself did?

The Fathers and other theologians will still be the main source of content; my increased love of poetry will probably appear here as well, as it did in Undusted Texts.  Perhaps bits of Catholic or Christian philosophy might make their appearance as well--I've been meaning to dabble in the Christian personalism of Emmanuel Mounier.  All will be free, though; if anyone starts reading, I might create a donation page, but my paid-translation ventures will be elsewhere.  Making money off of scholarly work is a goal, but there is also a good in providing it for free.  Josef Pieper argued against the whole idea of "intellectual work," as he thought the toil of true leisure is a good-in-itself, a realm separate from the money-world, freed from the "total-work" Leviathan.  I've not yet fully subscribed to this idea (partly because I need to make money somehow), but I do believe freely sharing intellectual wealth is a good, and probably the ideal good.  (Though not yet a daily Linux user, I certainly lean towards the open-source philosophy.)  

So here I am, reopening my old treasury, jettisoning a few outdated signs and posters, but rubbishing none of the relics themselves.  My past work is my past me, and my past me--my chain of past me's--build my present me.  To try to deny my past me's is not to destroy them, simply to hide them; so I'm blatantly displaying my connection to my past writing.  

That's enough about me, though: now is the time to start forging new treasures for the treasury.  Since the Great Fast has just started, my early posts will be related to the Fast; in particular, I hope to post a selection from St. Ambrose's On Elijah and Fasting.  (My languages have certainly expanded from "only Spanish" when I began this blog.)  Then I might draw on some Greek homilies for the Fast.  After that, who knows?

May the Theotokos and our Holy Father Joseph guide me in this new endeavor, as they did in the last.

Nota Bene: For more about leisure and intellectual work, see Josef Pieper's Leisure and Cult.  Unfortunately, it cannot be found in English under the original name; instead, in Alexander Dru's translation, it's retitled Leisure: The Basis of Culture, even though the German Kult refers to worship and ritual, not culture.  Liturgy and festivity were key themes for Pieper, in this book and others.