The Fast of the Soul

For it is not an enemy outside us whom we have to fear. Our foe is shut up within us. An inner war is waged by us every day, and if we win it, everything outside will be made weak, and all things will be made peaceful and subdued for the soldier of Christ. We will have no enemy outside to fear if what is within is overcome and made subject to the spirit. And let us not believe that the outward fast from visible food alone can possibly be enough for perfection of heart and purity of body, unless a fast of the soul has been joined to it. For the soul too has its harmful foods. Fattened on them, even without an excess of food, it falls headlong into wantonness. [a]

Slander is its food, and indeed a food very dear to it. An outburst of anger is its food too, even a very slight one, feeding it on miserable food for an hour and destroying it as well with its deadly taste. Envy is a food of the mind, corrupting it with its poisonous juices and never ceasing to make it wretched and miserable at another’s prosperity and success. Empty glory is its food, which pleases it with a delicious meal for a time, but afterward strips it bare of all virtue and sends it away barren and empty of all spiritual fruit, so that it not only loses the rewards of huge labors but also incurs heavier punishments. All lust and the shifty wanderings of the heart are a kind of food for the soul, nourishing it on harmful dishes but leaving it afterward without any share of the heavenly bread and of truly solid food.

If, then, we abstain from these with all the strength we have, in a most holy fast, our keeping of the bodily fast will be both useful and profitable. For labor of the flesh, joined with a crushed spirit, will produce a sacrifice most acceptable to God, and a worthy shrine of holiness in the pure and undefiled inner rooms of the heart. But if, while we fast in the body, we are entangled in the most dangerous vices of the soul, our humbling of the flesh will do us no good at all, while the most precious part of us is defiled. For we go wrong in that very substance by which we are made a shrine of the Holy Spirit. It is not so much the corruptible flesh as the clean heart that is made a shrine for God and a temple of the Holy Spirit. So whenever the outward man fasts, we ought to keep the inner man as well from food that is bad for him. That inner man is the one the blessed apostle above all urges us to present pure before God, so that it may be found worthy to receive Christ as a guest within, when he says, “that in the inner man Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith.”