There is no celebration of the Eucharist on fasting days because the celebration is one continuous movement of joy; but there is the continuous presence of the fruits of the Eucharist in the Church. Just as the "visible" Christ has ascended into heaven yet is invisibly present in the world, just as the Pascha is celebrated once a year yet its rays illumine the whole life of the Church, just as the Kingdom of God is yet to come but is already in the midst of us, so too with the Eucharist. As the sacrament and the celebration of the Kingdom, as the feast of the Church, it is incompatible with fast and is not celebrated during Lent; as the grace and the power of the Kingdom which are at work in the world, as our supplier of the "essential food" and the weapon of our spiritual fight, it is at the very center of the fast, it is indeed the heavenly manna that keeps us alive in our journey through the desert of Lent.
At this point, the next question arises: if Eucharist is incompatible with fasting, why then is its celebration still prescribed on Saturdays and Sundays of Lent, and this without "breaking" the fast? The canons of the Church seem here to contradict one another. While some of them forbid fasting on Sundays, some others forbid the breaking of the fast on any of the forty days. This contradiction, however, is only apparent, because the two rules which seem to be mutually exclusive refer in fact to two different meanings of the term fasting. To understand this is important because we discover here the Orthodox "philosophy of fasting" essential for our whole spiritual effort.
There are indeed two ways or modes of fasting rooted both in Scripture and Tradition, and which correspond to two distinct needs or states of man. The first one can be termed total fast for it consists of total abstinence from food and drink. One can define the second one as ascetical fast for it consists mainly in abstinence from certain foods and in substantial reduction of the dietary regimen. The total fast, by its very nature, is of short duration and is usually limited to one day or even a part of one day. From the very beginning of Christianity, it has been understood as a state of preparation and expectation—the state of spiritual concentration on that which is about to come. Physical hunger corresponds here to the spiritual expectation of fulfillment, the "opening up" of the entire human being to the approaching joy. Therefore, in the liturgical tradition of the Church, we find this total fast as the last and ultimate preparation for a great feast, for a decisive spiritual event. We find it, for example, on the eves of Christmas and Epiphany, and above everything else it is the Eucharistic Fast, the essential mode of our preparation for the messianic banquet at Christ's table in His Kingdom. Eucharist is always preceded by this total fast which may vary in its duration but which for the Church constitutes a necessary condition for Holy Communion. Many people misunderstand this rule, seeing here nothing but an archaic prescription and wondering why an empty stomach should serve as a prerequisite for receiving the Sacrament. Reduced to such a physical and grossly "physiological understanding, viewed as mere discipline, this rule, of course, loses its meaning. Thus it is no wonder that Roman Catholicism which long ago replaced the spiritual understanding of fasting with a juridical and disciplinary one (cf. for example, the power to "dispense" from fasting as if it is God and not man who needed fasting!) has nowadays virtually abolished the "Eucharistic" fast. In its true meaning, however, the total fast is the main expression of that rhythm of preparation and fulfillment by which the Church lives, for she is both the expectation of Christ in "this world," and the coming of this world into the "world to come." We may add here that in the early Church this total fast had a name taken from the military vocabulary; it was called statio, which meant a garrison in the state of alarm and mobilization. The Church keeps a "watch"—she expects the Bridegroom and waits for Him in readiness and joy. Thus, the total fast is not only a fast of the members of the Church; it is the Church herself as fast, as expectation of Christ who comes to her in the Eucharist, who shall come in glory at the consummation of all time.
Quite different are the spiritual connotations of the second type of fasting which we defined as ascetical. Here the purpose for fasting is to liberate man from the unlawful tyranny of the flesh, of that surrender of the spirit to the body and its appetites which is the tragic result of sin and the original fall of man. It is only by a slow and patient effort that man discovers that he "does not live by bread alone"—that he restores in himself the primacy of the spirit. It is of necessity and by its very nature a long and sustained effort. The time factor is essential for it takes time to uproot and to heal the common and universal disease which men have come to consider as their "normal" state. The art of ascetical fasting had been refined and perfected within the monastic tradition and then was accepted by the entire Church. It is the application to man of Christ's words that the demonic powers which enslave man cannot be overcome but by "prayer and fasting." It is rooted in the example of Christ Himself who fasted forty days and then met Satan face to face and in this encounter reversed the surrender of man to "bread alone," thus inaugurating man's liberation. The Church has set apart four periods for this ascetical fast: the seasons before Easter, Christmas, the Feast of SS. Peter and Paul, and the Dormition of the Mother of God. Four times a year she invites us to purify and liberate ourselves from the dominion of the flesh by the holy therapy of fasting, and each time the success of the therapy depends precisely on the application of certain basic rules among which the "unbrokenness" of fasting, its continuity in time, is the major one.
It is this distinction between the two modes of fasting that helps us to understand the apparent contradiction between the canons regulating the fast. The canon forbidding fasting on Sundays means literally that on that day fasting is "broken" first of all by the Eucharist itself, which fulfills the expectation, and being the goal of all fasting, is also its end. It means that Sunday, the Lord's Day, transcends Lent as it transcends time. It means in other terms that Sunday, the Day of the Kingdom, does not belong to that time whose meaning as pilgrimage or journey is expressed precisely in Lent; Sunday thus remains the day not of fasting but of spiritual joy.
But while breaking the total fast, the Eucharist does not break the "ascetical" fast which, as we have explained, requires by its very nature the continuity of effort. This means that the dietary regulations which govern the ascetical fasting remain in force on lenten Sundays. To put it in concrete terms, meats and fats are forbidden, but only because of the "psycho-somatic" character of ascetical fasting, because the Church knows that the body, if it is to be "subdued," must undergo a lengthy and patient discipline of abstinence. In Russia, for example, monks never ate meat; but this did not mean that they fasted on Easter or any other great feast. One can say that a certain degree of ascetical fasting belongs to Christian life as such and should be kept by Christians. But the understanding of Easter, alas so common, as almost an obligation to overeat and overdrink is a sad and ugly caricature of the true spirit of Pascha! It is tragic indeed that in some churches people are discouraged from partaking of Holy Communion at Easter and the beautiful words of St. John Chrysostom's Paschal Sermon— "the table is full-laden, feast ye all sumptuously! The calf is fatted; let no one go hungry away’’—are probably understood as referring exclusively to the rich contents of Easter baskets. The Feast is a spiritual reality and to be properly kept it requires as much sobriety and spiritual concentration as the fast.
It must be clearly understood, therefore, that there is no contradiction between the Church's insistence that we maintain abstinence from certain foods on lenten Sundays and the condemnation by her of fasting on the day of the Eucharist. It is also clear that only by following both rules, by keeping simultaneously the Eucharistic rhythm of preparation and fulfillment and the sustained effort of the "soul-saving forty days" can we truly achieve the spiritual goals of Lent. All this leads us now to the special place in lenten worship of the Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts.