Fasting for Lent, Part 2: Lent in the First Millennium

In the first post of this series, I took a look at the fasting Jesus did in the desert, which is said to be the precedent for the 40-day fast we call Lent. I argued that Jesus was only able to fast from all food and drink for 40 days because He is the Son of God. For the first Christians, who didn't have that supernatural ability, a 40-day fast must have looked a little different. How did Lent come about, and what did it look like for Christians in the first millennium?

Lent may have originated as a time of preparation for catechumens (those preparing to be baptized). Even today, in the Catholic Church, Lent is especially important for catechumens, and adults who convert to Catholicism are almost always baptized on the night before Easter, the Easter Vigil. There are a few early Church documents such as the Didache that mention this. Since spiritual preparation is good before not just baptism but major feasts, it's easy for me to see how a period of spiritual preparation for catechumens would have been extended to the whole Church. By the 4th century, Lent was unofficially observed through the whole Church (later confirmed at the Council of Nicaea), and rules about what the fasting or abstinence looked like appeared in writings by many of the Church Fathers going into the 5th century as well. What were those rules?

In general, the rules for Lenten fasting and abstinence were a lot stricter than most Christians will observe today and are collectively called the Black Fast. No food or drink was consumed until after sunset. After grace, Christians could eat a meal that was completely vegan. Bread and vegetables or "herbs" were explicitly allowed, but no animal products whatsoever were allowed, and neither was any alcohol - just water as far as drinks went. Unlike today in the Catholic Church, fish was not allowed either. As for invertebrate seafood such as shrimp, that's less clear. In Eastern Christianity today, any meat, dairy products, or eggs from vertebrates are not allowed, but meat from invertebrates is allowed. I'm not sure if that's directly traceable to the earliest Lents, or if it's a change that was introduced at some point. After all, Eastern Christianity does permit fish on the Feast of the Annunciation and Palm Sunday, whereas it seems that literally all 40 days were to be fish-less in the first millennium. By the way, since eggs were also prohibited during Lent across Christendom in the first millennium, that's why we have Easter eggs, because eggs were back on the menu when Easter arrived.

This kind of Lenten fasting was the norm across all of Christendom for pretty much that whole time, but it changed slightly by the end of that millennium. The New Advent article on the Black Fast mentions that beginning in the tenth century, the one meal Christians could eat could be eaten as early as 3pm rather than sunset. Other than that, it seems the Black Fast stayed the same.