The patterns we witness across Catholic fasting literature establish how to fast (rationally eschew one’s socialized body hatred to abstain from food for God alone), who can fast (anyone who purely wills it, abjuring the influence of body hatred), and what results from fasting (spiritual growth and not anything associated with body hatred). Common as these views may be, the differentiation between dieting and fasting that underlies this portrait of the liturgical practice relies on an anthropology and a conception of sacramental practice that are theologically and phenomenologically inadequate and also complicit in the ill effects of body hatred.

The view that fasting requires pure intentions presumes a dualistic and decontextualized anthropology. Anthropological dualism contradicts the apparent intent of many authors. Knowing well that the Christian tradition has long defined itself against body dualisms like that of Gnosticism, such writers explicitly position their theologies of fasting over and against the dualistic denigration of the body that they associate with Western culture. Many strive to promote the “sacredness of the body.” Despite this effort, anthropological dualism surfaces in their conceptions of the human will, on which their distinction between fasting and dieting hinges. The suggestion that the human will can exist apart from the influence of its social context implies an ahistorical will; the claim that a faster can—and must—freely exercise this ahistorical will in direct defiance of the pervasive influence of socialized body hated assumes not only the will’s ultimate freedom from culture but also the will’s power over it. This is a hierarchal dualism in that it positions the power of an ahistorical will over historically situated, embodied practices.

This anthropological dualism is not unique to Catholic fasting literature, of course. Philosopher Susan Bordo observes that “the constant element throughout historical variation [in the West] is the construction of body as something apart from the true self (whether conceived as soul, mind, spirit, will, creativity, freedom…) and as undermining the best efforts of that self.” As in Catholic fasting literature, “that which is not-body is the highest, the best, the noblest, the closest to God; that which is body is the albatross, the heavy drag on self-realization.”¹ Bordo’s work, which I explore further in the essay, recognizes that this historical precedent has always also been gendered: male is the “active, striving, conscious subject”—the ahistorical will—and female is the “passive, vegetative, primitive matter”—the historicized body². To the point, Bordo explains that the desires that allegedly weigh the body down from actualizing possibilities of transcendence “have frequently been culturally represented through the metaphor of female appetite.”³

So entrenched are Westerners in this gendered mind/body dualism that even scholars who are aware and critical of this history nevertheless replicate dualistic accounts of the person in their work. Psychologist Sylvia Blood sees this among many social psychological researchers who study negative body image today, for example, and her analysis puts into focus the troubling anthropological assumptions underlying this Catholic fasting literature as well⁴. In psychological literature, Blood explains, the concept of “negative body image” assumes a disjunction between a person’s perception of her body and her “actual” (physical) body. A “normal” woman rationally aligns her body image with her “real” body, whereas a “sick” or “pathological” woman perceives her body as much larger or misshapen than it “actually” is. This common reasoning assumes a separation of the body from the perceiving and willing mind; it also assumes that the mind can control how the person experiences her body, regardless of the person’s historical situation and socialization. This is precisely the logic we see at work in Catholic fasting literature.

Until 16th January enjoy FREE access to Jessica Coblentz ‘s full article Catholic Fasting Literature in a Context of Body Hatred: A Feminist Critique, published in Horizons, Volume 46 Issue 2

¹Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body, Tenth Anniversary Edition (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004), 5.

²Ibid., 12. Though not apparent in the quoted passages from Bordo, she joins other feminists in naming how the gendering of mind/body dualism in the West was—and continues to be—refracted through intersecting structures of marginalization such as race, sexuality, and ableism. For more on this from scholars in theology and religious studies, see M. Shawn Copeland, Enfleshing Freedom: Body, Race, and Being (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2009); Kelly Brown Douglas, Sexuality and the Black Church (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1999), 11–59; Riggins R. Earl, Jr., “Loving Our Black Bodies As God’s Luminously Dark Temples: The Quest for Black Restoration,” in Loving the Body: Black Religious Studies and the Erotic, eds. Anthony B. Pinn and Dwight N. Hopkins (New York, NY: Palgrave, 2004), 249–269; Michelle Mary Lelwica, Starving for Salvation: The Spiritual Dimensions of Eating Problems among American Girls and Woman (Oxford, UK: Oxford, 1999), 33–37; Michelle Mary Lelwica, Shameful Bodies: Religion and the Culture of Physical Improvement (New York, NY: Bloomsbury, 2017), 9–44; Phillis Isabella Sheppard, Self, Culture, and Others in Womanist Practical Theology (New York, NY: Palgrave, 2011), 143–170; Linn Marie Tonstad, Queer Theology (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2018), 6–15.

³Bordo, Unbearable Weight, 8.

⁴Sylvia Blood, Body Work: The Social Construction of Women’s Body Image (New York, NY: Routledge, 2005).