Page 134 - Orthodoxy Zizioulas

O r t h o d o x y
societies have produced the darkest forms of evil. Knowledge
does not save. Ethics does not heal. Even our most careful
moral actions often conceal their opposite within them.
Nor can ascetic effort alone defeat evil. The saints knew this
well. They struggled, they labored, they endured—but they
did not trust in their own strength. They knew that evil cannot
be overcome by human effort alone. And so they turned to
prayer.
For only God can truly confront and overcome evil.
Prayer, then, is the abandonment of the illusion of self-
sufficiency. It is the confession that salvation does not come
from within us, but from beyond us—from God.
And yet the Lord adds something more: fasting.
Why fasting?
At first glance, it may seem incidental. But it touches the
very roots of human existence. Evil, as the biblical narrative
reveals, entered through food—through the act of taking the
world into oneself in disobedience. This is not accidental.
Food itself embodies a profound paradox: it gives life, and yet
it carries death within it. In order to live, we consume what is
other than ourselves. Our life is sustained by a process that
involves decay and death.
Thus, even in the most basic act of survival, there is an
ambiguity: life and death are intertwined.
Fasting addresses precisely this ambiguity. When we eat
without awareness, we easily turn the world into an object of
consumption, a means of satisfying ourselves. We take, we
absorb, we center everything upon our own existence. This is
what the Fathers call self-love—the root of all evil.
Fasting is not a rejection of food, nor of the world. It is the
purification of our relationship to them. By voluntarily
limiting ourselves, we learn that we are not the center of
134