... [T]here was an internal necessity for Christ’s work in His in-humanization to be completed. The Lord could not remain on earth longer than that period of forty days during which were accomplished the mystically definitive glorification of His resurrected Body and the preparation of this Body for Ascension. Just as He had prepared Himself for forty days in the desert for His earthly ministry, so forty days also passed before His Ascension. As long as the Lord remained on earth, the work of salvation and the deification of the human essence were not yet complete.

The Lord came “in order to unite earth with heaven” (according to the kontakion). That is why He came down from heaven and became incarnate from the Virgin Mary, while being true God, “one of the Holy Trinity.” He was also to follow the reverse path, this time not of descent, but of Ascension. The heavens, which opened for His descent down to creatures, also had to open for the Ascension of the Incarnate One. If the Lord had remained on earth and had not returned to heaven, that would have signified that there is no road for the human essence to heaven, and that the One who assumed this essence would have been separated from the Holy Trinity, would have remained powerless, as it were, to deify and glorify the human essence....

The Ascension to heaven and the sitting at the right hand of the Father signify the total and definitive salvation and deification of the human essence: There is no separation between the heavenly and the earthly, for, in heaven, God who bears human flesh sits on the throne.... Christ’s Ascension not only completes His redemptive work; it also opens the way for the descent of the Comforter Spirit into the world, for the establishment of Christ’s Church on earth. The Ascension is the foundation and preparation for Pentecost: “The Lord ascended to heaven in order to send the Comforter to the world” (according to the sticheron).

Sergius Bulgakov, Churchly Joy: Orthodox Devotions for the Church Year, trans. Boris Jakim (Grand Rapids, MI; Cambridge, U.K.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2008), 122–123.

Let us fast, my children, do not listen to those who say that fasting is nothing, and that this is something from monks. This is not from monks, my children, forgive me, God says this. The first commandment of God [in the Garden of Eden] is fasting, and our Christ fasted.

St. Elder Iakovos Tsalikis of Evia, "On Prayer and Fasting," retrieved from Orthodox Path blog, posted February 25, 2025.

As an Orthodox Christian though, I regret that the reform did not happen within the Western Christian community without there being a schism, and I’m especially sad for the multiple fissures that have occurred since that first reaction. These divisions and the multiple communities with their various doctrines are, most Orthodox would say, the inevitable result of individualistic readings of the Scripture that results from a hermeneutic based on sola Scriptura. Instead, we Orthodox hold to a position of prima Scriptura, and that means reading the Scriptures from within church tradition rather than thinking that we can pole jump from our current day back to an original, pristine, unspoiled early era of the church. The Scriptures themselves bear witness to the importance of a holy tradition that has been passed down by Christ and the apostles, a tradition that includes reading the Old Testament in the light of Christ—think of the road to Emmaus.

Edith M. Humphrey et al., TH351 Perspectives on Justification by Faith: Five Views on Its Meaning and Significance, Logos Mobile Education (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2018).

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[St. Anthony said] that it was more fitting for young men to hold to the ascetic life with zeal and not to seek things that enervate the body, but rather to accustom it to labors, bearing in mind the apostle's words, "When I am weak, then I am strong." For he used to say that the nous of the soul is strong when the pleasures of the body are weak....

For a man's whole life is very short when measured by the ages to come; all our time is nothing compared to eternal life. In the world everything is sold at its value and an item is exchanged for its equivalent, but the promise of eternal life is bought for a trifle....

St. Athanasius the Great of Alexandria, Saint Anthony the Great, trans. Saint Anthony’s Greek Orthodox Monastery (Florence, AZ: Saint Anthony’s Greek Orthodox Monastery Press, 2019), 12, 21.