With Ash Wednesday and the beginning of Lent just around the corner, Catholics are beginning to think about how they will observe the penitential 40-day period.
Setting aside a time in anticipation of Easter that is modeled on Jesus’ 40 days of fasting in the desert dates back to at least the early 300s, said Lynne Boughton, a historian and adjunct faculty member at the School of Parish Leadership and Evangelization for the University of St. Mary of the Lake/Mundelein Seminary.
The length of Lent — 40 days — comes straight from Scripture. The Ark of the Covenant spent 40 days and 40 nights on the sea before it landed where God wanted it to be; the Israelites spent 40 years in the desert before they reached their homeland; and Jesus spent 40 days in the desert fasting in preparation of his public ministry, Boughton explained.
But when did the Catholic Church decide the faithful should imitate Jesus in fasting?
“The earliest evidence we have is in about the year 305,” Boughton explained.
This was during the Diocletianic persecution of Christians by Rome. The archbishop of Alexandria in Egypt knew that members of his flock had denied Jesus publicly because of the persecution and then repented.
Their penance for denying Christ, he told them, should be fasting for 40 days just as Christ, who was sinless, did before his public ministry. The archbishop later died in that persecution.
“The first connection that we have of a preparatory period of 40 days connected to preparation for Easter comes only a few years later, in 330,” Boughton said. “Another archbishop of Alexandria, a man named Athanasius, began a practice of publishing something called the ‘festal letter.’”
On Epiphany each year, Athanasius would announce the date of Easter in the letter. The Council of Nicaea in 325 decided that Easter should occur on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox.
Easter’s date changes each year depending upon the astronomical conditions of the sun and the moon, Boughton explained.
“The church had always decided, even as far back as the 100s, that Easter should reflect the cosmological conditions in which Jesus suffered and died, that Easter should not be just pinned to a numerical date on the Julian calendar,” she said.
Boughton also noted that the first full moon after the spring equinox is when the Jewish Passover holiday takes place, and Christ died during Passover.
“So you want to emphasize in Easter the physical reality of the history of Jesus’ death and resurrection,” she said.
In his letter in 330, Athanasius wrote that to determine when the physical and spiritual preparation for Easter begins, the church counts back six days from Easter for the period when Christ came to Jerusalem to ultimately prepare for his crucifixion. This is what the church now calls Holy Week. These six days were also a time for fasting.
Then the church counted back 40 days before those six days, and that is the other period of fasting, according to Athanasius’ letter, she said.
“So essentially you have two periods of fasting — one of 40 days and one of six days, both preceding Easter,” she explained. “We had the original Lent of 46 days.”
The other early evidence of the practice of Lent comes from a nun named Egeria who went on pilgrimage with her fellow sisters in the 380s from modern-day southern France or northern Spain to Jerusalem and wrote about her journey in a diary.
“Once in Jerusalem, she describes the differences between the way Lent is celebrated in the Latin-speaking regions that she and her fellow sisters are used to and the Greek-speaking regions and Syriac-speaking regions around Jerusalem,” Boughton said.
In Jerusalem, she wrote, Lent lasted for eight weeks because in the East, people did not fast on Saturday or Sunday. Egeria explained in her diary how that was different from the West, where Lent lasted six weeks because Saturday was included in the fast.
“In both places you have 40 days, but the distribution differs depending upon how you celebrate the individual days of the week,” Boughton said. “So we find that Lent is a universal practice.”
Further evidence of the celebration of Lent appears in the Gelasian Sacramentary that dates from the 750s, but was copied from a manuscript that dates back to the 500s. A sacramentary contained the special prayers and prefaces the celebrant used on any given day.
In this sacramentary, historians found not only prayers for Lent, but prayers for a shorter penitential season that led up to Lent and started 70 days before — the “Septuagesima.”
“The priest was given prayers for Septuagesima that he is to insert in the course of the Mass to invoke the fact that Lent is approaching,” Boughton explained. “Lent hasn’t started, but we are to begin our preparation.”
This period, which was suppressed during the Second Vatican Council, helped people physically and spiritually prepare for Lent, which was a time of a significantly harder fast than is undertaken today.
“Lent is important. You don’t just plunge into your 40 days of fasting without some sort of preparation, some sort of spiritual preparation,” Boughton said. “Fasting is difficult. In the early church, in the 500 and perhaps even earlier, the fasting during Lent was very strict.”
People not only gave up meat, but they gave up cheese, fish and oil.
“In order to prepare for that kind of stringent fasting, what you did is you had a lighter fast during this period of Septuagesima to get yourself into the spiritual and moral, even physical, condition for the harsh fast of Lent you would have a gentler period of fasting,” she explained. “I think the idea of a pre-Lent period is a wonderful concept for those who are really committed to doing a serious fast or a serious concentration on matters of the spirit. That easing in by the pre-Lent period is something that’s really called for.”
Even though it’s suppressed in the formal liturgy, people can practice it privately.
“The goal was not to punish the person or to starve the person, but to separate him or her from anything that’s ordinary in their life,” she said. “We ordinarily eat cheese. We ordinarily eat meat. We ordinarily put oil on our salads.”
The Gelasian Sacramentary also provides evidence of the practice of giving ashes on the Wednesday before the first Sunday of Lent.
Even in the 500s, confession was private between a penitent and a priest. However, for harsher sins such as murder or adultery, the church asked for a public penance, or separation from the sacraments, for a designated period of time following absolution.
“These people who were penitents, prior to the start of Lent, right after the Quinquagesima, right after 50ish days before Lent, they would approach the bishop, the bishop would sprinkle ashes on their head to remind them that they were completing their period of penance for very serious sins,” she explained. “That’s our early indication of ashes being used in connection with preparation for Lent.”