What Is Lent? Forty Days, Fasting and the Road to Easter

The early church prepared candidates for baptism at Easter with a period of fasting and instruction, and by the Council of Nicaea in 325 a season of forty days before the feast was recognised across the church; the number comes from the forty days of Jesus in the desert, of Moses on Sinai, of Elijah's journey and of the rain of the Flood, and the word Lent is simply Old English for spring, lengthening days. The season's shape was fixed by the sixth century: Ash Wednesday at the start, since Sundays, as feast days of the resurrection, were never fast days and forty fasting days needed forty-six calendar ones; Holy Week at the end, with Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday and Good Friday; and Easter Sunday, on which the fast ended with the greatest feast of the year.

For most of Christian history Lent was a real fast, and its rules shaped diet, trade and cooking:

• •One meal a day, taken in the evening, with meat, eggs, milk, butter and cheese forbidden throughout, which is why fish, dried and salted, was the food of Lent and why the herring and cod trades of the Baltic and the North Sea were built on it
• •Shrove Tuesday, the day of being shriven, of confessing, before the fast: the eggs, butter and fat were used up in pancakes in England, doughnuts in Germany and the whole of Carnival, farewell to meat, in Venice, Rio and New Orleans
• •Dispensations: the rich bought permission to eat butter, the Rouen tower paid for by the butter dispensation is still called the Butter Tower, and beaver, puffin and barnacle goose were ruled to be fish
• •The Eastern churches keep a stricter Great Lent, without meat, dairy, eggs, fish, wine or oil on most days, and begin it on a Monday
• •The Reformation dropped the obligation in Protestant countries, and the Catholic church reduced it in 1966 to fasting on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday and abstaining from meat on Fridays

What remains for most Western Christians is the custom of giving something up for Lent, chocolate, alcohol, social media, meat, and of taking something on, prayer, charity, reading, and the three traditional disciplines of the season, fasting, prayer and almsgiving, are the ones named in the Sermon on the Mount. The purpose, as the church has described it, is not self-punishment but preparation: to loosen the grip of habit, to notice what one depends on, and to arrive at Easter having paid attention. The season has been taken up by people outside the church for the same reasons a January detox is, and the forty-day length, which behavioural research finds long enough to break a habit and short enough to endure, is part of why it has lasted.

Lent is written into the calendars and the cooking of Christian cultures. Carnival exists because of it, the days of feasting before the fast, and Mardi Gras is Fat Tuesday; the pretzel, in one account, was a Lenten bread shaped like arms crossed in prayer; the fish on Friday that survives in schools and canteens across Europe and America is the last trace of the abstinence; and the hot cross bun of Good Friday and the eggs of Easter, forbidden through Lent and back on the table at its end, are the season's punctuation. Mothering Sunday in Britain, the fourth Sunday of Lent, when the fast relaxed and servants were allowed home to visit their mothers, became Mother's Day.

Lent is the forty-day season of fasting and preparation before Easter, fixed by the fourth century in imitation of Jesus's forty days in the wilderness, running from Ash Wednesday to Holy Week with Sundays excepted. It was once a strict fast from meat, eggs and dairy that shaped Europe's diet and the fish trade and produced Carnival and Shrove Tuesday pancakes on its eve; the Eastern churches keep it strictly still, the Western ones reduced it in the twentieth century, and giving something up for the forty days is what most people now do with it.