There are complex lusts, like that of the adornment of the body, sports, amusements, idle talk, inquisitiveness, and many others; and there are also fundamental desires, gluttony, idleness, sexual love. And one must begin to contend with these lusts from the beginning, not with the complex, but with the fundamental ones, and that also in a definite order. And this order is determined both by the nature of things, and also by the tradition of human wisdom.
A man who eats too much cannot strive against laziness, while a gluttonous and idle man will never be able to contend with sexual lust. Therefore, according to all the moral teachings, the effort toward temperance commences with a struggle against the lust of gluttony,—commences with fasting. In our time, however, every serious relation to the attainment of a good life has been so long and so completely lost, that not only is the very first virtue,—temperance,—without which the others are unattainable, regarded as superfluous, but the order of succession necessary for the attainment of this first virtue is also disregarded, and fasting is quite forgotten, or is looked upon as a silly superstition, and utterly unnecessary.
And yet, just as the first condition of a good life is temperance, so the first condition of a life of temperance is fasting.
One can wish to be good, one can dream of goodness, without fasting; but to be good without fasting is as impossible as it is to advance without getting up on to one's feet.
Fasting is an indispensable condition of a good life, whereas gluttony is, and always has been, the first sign of the opposite, a bad life; and unfortunately this vice is in the highest degree characteristic of the life of the majority of the men of our time.
Look at the faces and figures of the men of our circle and day,—on many of those faces with their pendent cheeks and double chins, those corpulent limbs and prominent abdomens, lies the indelible seal of a dissolute life. Nor can it be otherwise. Consider our life,
