Mikhail Vasilyevich Lomonosov Makes a Most Unexpected Connection Between the Easter Festivities and a Rise in Mortality
Mikhail Vasilyevich Lomonosov makes a most unexpected connection between the Easter festivities and a rise in mortality. In one of his letters to Ivan Ivanovich Shuvalov, written in 1761, speaking of Easter, Lomonosov describes the dangers to life and the multitude of deaths that overtake the Orthodox people every year. The dead in taverns, in the streets and on the roads, in Shrovetide and in Holy Week. What did these people die of?
Today this may seem astonishing and incredible, but it must be understood that in our day only a handful of people keep the Great Lent, and many of those do not observe great strictness throughout all 48 days.
Yet only two hundred and fifty years ago people died of overeating, gorging themselves on rich fare in anticipation of seven weeks of Great Lent: “…preparing for the abstinence of the great fast, so many people all over Russia stuff themselves to such a degree that no time is left for the fast itself. The dead in taverns, in the streets and on the roads, and the frequent funerals prove it plainly.”
“The breaking of the fast (that is, the end of Lent) is much the same. Nor is there any cause for wonder: besides intemperance in drink and food on the days of the pre-Lenten feast, many make it their business to content themselves for the whole of the great fast with carnal congress, lawful and unlawful alike, and so exhaust themselves by Clean Monday that they cannot by any means repair their health, resorting to coarse Lenten foods, which are burdensome even to a healthy stomach.”
Lomonosov sees the threat not only in the quantity of food taken at one sitting, but in the general weakening of health by spring, when, on the contrary, a multitude of disease-bearing foulnesses become active in nature: “Moreover, the beginning of spring follows soon after, when all the filth accumulated from men and other animals, which was shut up all winter by the frosts, is suddenly set free and fills the air, mingles with the water, and together with the clammy and scorbutic fish pours into our stomach, our lungs, our blood, our nerves and into the whole structure of the vital members of the human body, breeds sickness in the healthy, multiplies it in the sick, and hastens death in those who might yet have lived longer.”
With the coming of Easter, according to Lomonosov, people are “like dogs let off the leash, like pent-up water from an opened dam, like whirlwinds bursting from a cloud: they tear, break, fell, overturn, rend; here lie scattered the broken-up portions of various meats, smashed crockery, spilt drinks flowing; there lie the insensible, weighed down by gluttony and drunkenness; there sprawl, naked and wearied by lechery, the strict fasters of but yesterday. O, true Christian fasting and festival! Is it not against such that God rages through the prophet: My soul hateth your feasts, and your incense is an abomination unto me. Meanwhile the poor stomach, accustomed over a long time to foods of little nourishment, is suddenly forced to take in rich and greasy viands through passages that have contracted and grown weak, and, lacking the requisite abundance of vital juices, sends the undigested food along the vessels: they clog, the flow of blood is cut off, and the soul flies straight out of the cramped body through the paradisal doors then standing open.”
To be assured of this, one may consult the church registers and see around what time of the whole year the priests get the most honey for the funeral kutia. It is beyond dispute that an uneven course of life and a sharply altered diet are not merely harmful to a man but deadly, so that the strict fasters described above, who are at the same time zealous and ardent lovers of festivals, may be reckoned suicides. True, if a man prepares for the fast at Shrovetide by a temperate way of living, does not exhaust himself unduly in Lent, and fasts more in spirit than in belly, and in Holy Week rejoices at having passed the great fast in true virtues, in labours useful to society and pleasing to God, and not at having lived to see licence granted for everything, then he, of course, will feel fewer ill effects from the unwholesome season, and especially if by his labours he sets his blood in motion and, in a word, keeps himself, whether on Lenten or on rich foods, equally temperate, without steep leaps and hillocks.”
