In the same way, be firm in your fasting. If you are tolerant in the time of abstaining, you will also be tolerant in the type and amount of food, and then you will be lax in controlling yourself. This lack of control will accompany you in every detail of your spiritual life.
—H.H. Pope Shenouda III, The Life of Repentance and Purity
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“Make your food boring and your life interesting”
—Andrew Flinders Taylor -
“A mouth denied water will not ask for wine. A stomach denied bread will not ask for meat.”
—St. Syncletica -
O chastity, how greatly thy beauty shines, in sleeping on the ground, and in hunger pangs that drive away sleep through the body’s hardship, and through abstinence from food which produces a deep moat between the ribs and the belly! All food and all leisure that we indulge in create and give birth to shameful images and unseemly idols, and these come forth and are beheld in the hidden place of our minds, enticing us secretly to take part in shameful deeds. But an empty stomach makes our thinking a desert land, arid and silent from any turbulent thought. The stomach that is filled to satiety is a place of spectacles and an arena of vile fantasies, yea even if we be alone in the desert. For, it is said, satiety desires many things.
—St. Isaac the Syrian -
Another spends all he can rap and run on his belly, to be the more hungry after it.
In Praise of Folly, Desiderius Erasmus -
St Macedonius the Anchorite, in order to heal a woman afflicted with bulimia (though eating thirty chickens a day, she could not by surfeit extinguish her appetite but hungered for still more’) came and offered prayers, and by placing his hand over water, tracing the sign of salvation [the Sign of the Cross], and telling her to drink, healed the disease. And so completely did he blunt the excess of her appetite that thereafter a small piece of chicken each day satisfied her need for food.
Mental Disorders & Spiritual Healing: Teachings from the Early Christian East
Jean-Claude Larchet -
The Life of St Theodosius provides us with an example of this. Some monks had turned from the right path by the practice of an aberrant and badly understood form of asceticism and above all in these efforts had placed their confidence in themselves rather than God. As a result they were overcome with psychic difficulties through the activity of Satan. St Theodosius welcomed them into his monastery to care for them. St Theodore of Petra provides us with a similar case:
A number of men in the mountains and in the caves had not led the struggle for a Christian life according to Christ, and, for having practiced a rash form of asceticism with great zeal, were pierced through by the sword of pride. They had attributed their ascetic activities to their own strength and had forgotten that our Lord had said: Without me, you can do nothing (John 15:5). Because of this wasting of the flesh, or having in some way fallen under the judgment of God which surpasses understanding, they were delivered up to Satan, and because of their deranged minds they could no longer control their thoughts.
Mental Disorders & Spiritual Healing: Teachings from the Early Christian East
Jean-Claude Larchet -
St Maximus speaks very clearly to the issue:
The following four things are said to change the body’s temperament and through it to produce either impassioned or dispassionate thoughts in the intellect: angels, demons, the winds and diet. It is said that the angels change it by thought, demons by touch, the winds by varying, and diet by the quality of our food and drink and by whether we eat too much or too little. There are also changes brought about by means of memory, hearing and sight-namely when the soul is affected by joyful or distressing experiences as a result of one of these three means, and then changes the body’s temperament. Thus changed, this temperament in its turn induces corresponding thoughts in the intellect.
Mental Disorders & Spiritual Healing: Teachings from the Early Christian East
Jean-Claude Larchet
SO GOOD QUOTES 