In the Western Christian tradition, the season of Lent begins this week. This season of penance in preparation for Easter is highly relevant to the maintenance of a free and virtuous society.
Last week I wrote about the connection between self-control and self-government. That article highlighted the founders’ insistence that religion and morality were necessary supports to a political system characterized by self-governance, because they promote self-control among the citizenry. The season of Lent invites us to focus more closely on exactly how the virtue of self-control is cultivated.
The three principal practices of Lent are prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. Fasting most obviously involves refraining from food, but it can include abstaining from any otherwise good substance or activity. The Catholic Church and some other churches provide specific guidance about how to fast during Lent, but the details are not important for our purposes. What’s critical is to recognize the salutary spiritual and psychological effect of fasting for the human soul and mind.
Fasting is a form of mortification, which means voluntarily undertaking physical difficulty or deprivation so as to achieve mastery over the body. It is often associated with religious practice and as such has a spiritual dimension, but it also has a purely psychosomatic effect. It is a way to foster the habit of self-control, of training the mind to govern the body and its passions rather than permitting the reason to be a slave to physical desires.
This is why the original Catholic Encyclopedia points out that fasting has a basis in natural law; that is, its purpose is accessible to reason even without the assistance of revelation. The practice of fasting cultivates the classical and cardinal virtue of temperance. Pre-Christian philosophers recommended fasting for this reason—independent of any religious rationale or prescription. Aristotle described temperance as moderation in the pursuit of physical pleasure. Its corresponding vice is self-indulgence. “The self-indulgent man,” the Greek philosopher said, “craves for all pleasant things or those that are most pleasant, and is led by his appetite to choose these at the cost of everything else.”
One who pursues bodily pleasure “at the cost of everything else” does not have control of his passions; his reason is not in the driver’s seat. Individual happiness and fulfillment is one casualty of self-indulgence, but the common good—societal wellbeing—is another. This is because, as last week’s article noted, self-control is indispensable for self-government.
Thus, while Christians and other people of faith may have religious motivations for restricting food or drink or the use of other goods, the virtue that is cultivated through this practice—self-control—is one that is universally desirable. Fasting is therefore one concrete way by which we can foster the personal habits necessary to maintain a thriving society. The Dutch legal philosopher Hugo Grotius summarized the principle in the seventeenth century: “A man cannot govern a nation if he cannot govern a city; he cannot govern a city if he cannot govern a family; he cannot govern a family unless he can govern himself; and he cannot govern himself unless his passions are subject to reason.” The seemingly private and personal virtue of self-control thus has ramifications that project outward and upward, affecting the very stability of a political regime.
In a pluralistic society, not all will observe Lent. Not all will fast. Not all will abstain from meat. But Lent is a reminder that we all need to find a way to practice the subordination of the passions to reason, to cultivate the virtue of self-control. If we do not—if we allow our insatiable physical desires to dictate the contours of our lives—then we imperil ourselves, our communities, and our nation.
