Sister Flesh and Brother Wine
Many people eat plenty and grow fat on it. Others abstain from some kinds of food in order to practice asceticism, and condemn those who eat. Put shortly, they have only hazy ideas why they should eat or why they should abstain.
We, on the other hand, when we fast, give up wine and meat, not because we detest them, as though using them were a crime, but because we are hoping for an eternal reward. We willingly go without things that please the senses in order to be able to enjoy the pleasures of the spiritual table: we sow in tears today in order to be able to reap in joy tomorrow.
Do not despise those who eat, when they are eating in order to keep their strength up. Do not condemn those who drink wine in moderation; it does their stomachs good. Never regard meat as an evil in itself. Paul has taken issue with certain people ‘who forbid marriage and enjoin abstinence from foods which God created to be received with thanksgiving by those who believe and know the truth.’ [1 Tim. 4:3]
If you abstain from those foods, do not do so as if they were unclean. Rather think of them as a good thing which you are content to give up for love of a far greater spiritual benefit.
Cyril of Jerusalem, Catecheses, 4, 27ff. (PG33, 489)
Neither Slaves of the Passions nor too Strict in Mortification
Do not devote yourself entirely to disciplining your body. Arrange a programme that is within your capability and then concentrate on your spiritual work.
Those who do not know how to walk in the way of the Spirit are likely to fail to keep a watchful eye on the passions that rage within them, and let themselves be entirely taken up with the body. They then reach one of two opposite states. Either they become gluttonous, profligate, miserable, choleric, full of rancour, and this quenches their spirit, or they overdo the mortification and lose their clarity of thought.
Not one of the things God has put at our disposal is forbidden in Scripture. The Bible limits itself to reproving excess and correcting what is unreasonable.
For example, there is no need to avoid eating, having children, possessing wealth and administering it with justice; only avoid gluttony, luxury, and so forth.
There is a further point. There is no need to avoid dwelling on these matters in your thoughts, they exist because we have thought of them in the first place, avoid only dwelling on them with immoderate eagerness.
Maximus the Confessor, Centuries on Charity, 4, 63ff. (SC9, pp.165ff.)
~Thomas Spidlik, Drinking from the Hidden Fountain: A Patristic Breviary, Ancient Wisdom for Today’s World
