From “The Liturgical Year” By Dom Gueranger
THE forty days' fast, which we call Lent,[1] is the Church's preparation for Easter, and was instituted at the very commencement of Christianity. Our blessed Lord Himself sanctioned it by fasting forty days and forty nights in the desert; and though He would not impose it on the world by an express commandment (which, in that case, could not have been open to the power of dispensation), yet He showed plainly enough, by His own example, that fasting, which God had so frequently ordered in the old Law, was to be also practiced by the children of the new. The disciples of St. John the Baptist came, one day, to Jesus, and said to Him: 'Why do we and the pharisees fast often, but Thy disciples do not fast?' And Jesus said to them: 'Can the children of the Bridegroom mourn, as long as the Bridegroom is with them? But the days will come, when the Bridegroom shall be taken away from them, and then they shall fast.'[2] Hence we find it mentioned, in the Acts of the Apostles, how the disciples of our Lord, after the foundation of the Church, applied themselves to fasting. In their Epistles, also, they recommended it to the faithful. Nor could it be otherwise. Though the divine mysteries whereby our Savior wrought our redemption have been consummated, yet are we still sinners: and where there is sin, there must be expiation. The apostles, therefore, legislated for our weakness, by instituting, at the very commencement of the Christian Church, that the solemnity of Easter should be preceded by a universal fast; and it was only natural that they should have made this period of penance to consist of forty days, seeing that our divine Master had consecrated that number by His own fast. St. Jerome, St. Leo the Great, St. Cyril of Alexandria, St. Isidore of Seville, and others of the holy fathers, assure us that Lent was instituted by the apostles, although, at the commencement, there was not any uniform way of observing it. We have already seen, in our 'Septuagesima,' that the Orientals begin their Lent much earlier than the Latins, owing to their custom of never fasting on Saturdays (or, in some places, even on Thursdays). They are, consequently, obliged, in order to make up the forty days, to begin the Lenten fast on the Monday preceding our Sexagesima Sunday. Exceptions of this kind do but prove the rule. We have also shown how the Latin Church-which, even so late as the sixth century, kept only thirty-six fasting days during the six weeks of Lent (for the Church has never allowed Sundays to be kept as days of fast)-thought proper to add, later on, the last four days of Quinquagesima, in order that her Lent might contain exactly forty days of fast.
1 In most languages, the name given to this fast expresses the number of the days,
. But our word signifies the ; for , in the ancient English-Saxon language, was the son of Spring. Tr.
2. St. Matt. ix. 14.15.
