To Love Fasting

By Adalbert de Vogüé, O.S.B.

To love fasting: An impossible ideal or a fundamentally sound rule for life? Fasting, for centuries, was a constitutive element of religious practice. Yet that practice has waned almost to the point of vanishing, as the world—particularly in the West—has made its appetites like unto gods.

“What are the instruments of good works?” To love fasting.(Rule of Saint Benedict)

With fervor and conviction, Dom Adalbert de Vogüé proposes a re-evaluation of fasting, one that comprehends it not as a punishment for man’s physical shortcomings, but as a joyful liberation of man’s spiritual character. To Love Fasting describes the “regular fast,” observed as a rule of daily life, connecting it with its biblical and patristic origins, discussing its vicissitudes by excess or defect through the centuries, and comparing it with its non-Christian and non-religious analogues throughout the ages.

First published in English in 1989, To Love Fasting is a clarion call to appreciate fasting (like chastity) as an abstinence worthy of being loved, for the simple yet profound reason it purifies the body and pacifies the soul, giving joy and freedom to the whole person, and affording indispensable assistance toward the attainment of union with God.

Adalbert de Vogüé, O.S.B., (1924–2011) was a Benedictine monk of the Abbaye Sainte Marie de la Pierre-qui-Vire. After teaching patristics and the history of monasticism at the Pontifical Athanaeum of Saint Anselm in Rome, he lived as a hermit at La Pierre-qui-Vire until his death in 2011. Besides To Love Fasting, his books in English include The Rule of Saint Benedict: A Doctrinal and Spiritual Commentary (1983); To Desire Eternal Life (1998); and Saint Benedict: The Man and His Work (2006).

paperback, 190 pages