Great Lent

The forty-day Lenten fast was not part of apostolic practice or the first three centuries. St Irenaeus, writing around 190, records that Christians before Easter kept fasts of widely differing lengths: some for a single day, some for two, some for several, and others reckoning a period of forty hours. Tertullian in the early third century likewise knew only a short paschal fast, not a period of forty days.

The Church's memory of the season's origin links it closely to the baptismal catechumenate. Having established Easter as the solemn day of Baptism, the early Church subjected candidates, the catechumens, to an intensive period of spiritual training and fasting in preparation for their illumination. Their sponsors, relatives, and friends gradually joined them in this discipline, so that a fast begun for those approaching the font came in time to involve the whole body of the faithful. Whereas the earlier fast was a brief paschal observance, the lengthening forty-day fast was bound up particularly with this final preparation of the catechumens for Baptism.

The first official mention of the term Tessarakoste, Greek for fortieth, appears in the fifth canon of the First Ecumenical Council at Nicaea in 325, where it is spoken of as something already familiar rather than a novelty introduced by the council. By 331 St Athanasius enjoined forty days of fasting before the stricter fast of Holy Week, and in 339, after travelling through Rome and Europe, he urged the Alexandrians to keep it as a practice observed everywhere. The Synod of Laodicea, about 360, imposed the obligation of fasting through the forty days before Easter. By the end of the fourth century the Great Fast, called Tessarakoste by the Greeks and Quadragesima by the Latins, was generally observed throughout the Church.

The precise way of counting the forty days varied from place to place. Some regions kept a six-week span and others an eight-week arrangement, as at Jerusalem, with localities exempting Saturdays or Sundays differently in order to arrive at exactly forty actual days of fasting. The Eastern practice that took hold counts the Sundays within the forty days and treats Holy Week as a distinct, more rigorous observance beyond them.

Great Lent teaches that repentance is not a season of gloom but of purification and joy. The Orthodox tradition presents the fast as a return and a renewal rather than a mere ordeal, insisting that it is not a time of morbidity but a time of joyfulness in which the soul is cleansed and turned back toward God.

The Eastern understanding of the fast places its accent less exclusively on penance for sin than on the recovery of humanity's original state. Through the disciplines of the season the Christian is drawn to become, by grace, more godlike, participating more deeply in the life of Christ. Asceticism is offered to each of the faithful according to their own strength, so that the fast is a shared labor of the whole Church and not the work of monastics alone.

The season rests on three inseparable practices, prayer, fasting, and almsgiving, held together and oriented toward repentance and the renewal of love for God and neighbor. The forty days are patterned on the great fasts of Scripture, Moses receiving the commandments, Elijah journeying to Horeb, and above all Christ's forty days in the wilderness, so that the faithful walk with Christ toward His Passion and share, at its end, in the joy of His Resurrection.

The season's most distinctive hymnographic monument is the Great Canon of St Andrew of Crete, the longest canon of the church year, comprising nine odes woven densely from scriptural images of repentance. It is read in portions during the first week of the fast and in its entirety at Matins of the Fifth Week, an observance commonly called the Thursday of the Great Canon.

The hymnody of the Triodion, the service book proper to the season, governs both the pre-Lenten Sundays and the weeks of the fast, giving each Sunday and week its own penitential and preparatory themes.

Great Lent is kept as the most demanding fast of the year, observed as a graded discipline rather than a single uniform rule. The fast sets aside meat, fish, eggs, and dairy, together with wine and oil, for the duration of the season.

Within that general shape the tradition allows customary relaxations: wine and oil are permitted on Saturdays and Sundays and on certain feasts, and fish is permitted on Palm Sunday and on the Annunciation when it falls within the fast. The exact keeping of the fast varies by day, by local typikon, and by pastoral counsel, and the faithful are directed to keep it according to their strength under the guidance of their priest.

Forgiveness (Cheesefare) Vespers on the eve of Clean Monday opens the fast with the ceremony of mutual forgiveness, in which the faithful ask pardon of one another.

The Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts is served on Lenten weekdays, especially Wednesdays and Fridays, since the full eucharistic Divine Liturgy is not celebrated on the weekdays of the fast; the faithful commune from Gifts consecrated the preceding Sunday.

The Saturdays of the Dead (Soul Saturdays) commemorate the departed, kept with kolyva.

Each Sunday of the fast carries its own commemoration: the Sunday of Orthodoxy, St Gregory Palamas, the Veneration of the Cross, St John Climacus, and St Mary of Egypt.

Before the fast itself, the Church keeps a preparatory cycle drawn from the Triodion: the Sundays of the Publican and the Pharisee and of the Prodigal Son, followed by Meatfare and Cheesefare weeks, which gradually withdraw the faithful from rich foods and set the tone of humility and return that the fast will deepen.