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¹ Otherwise, if we wished to examine your Sabbath fast severely, we could show that it agrees with neither apostolic nor patristic teaching. The apostles themselves decree, against those who fast on the Lord’s Day or the Sabbath—with one exception—excommunication for laymen and deposition for clergy.[1] And you will surely not judge these canons to be spurious interpolations—the very canons the sixth council venerated[2] — the council[3] at which your own Agatho’s legates were present when it defined doctrine, and at which, when it enacted canons, Basil of Otryna[4] was so great a figure that he filled the place of your whole synod.

² But the Fathers at Laodicea too, to whom the sixth council likewise gave every honor, said it was not right to offer bread during the Great Fast except on the Sabbath and the Lord’s Day—a rule they would never have legislated had they known the Sabbath to be a day of fasting. And that this is indeed so, and that we are not merely guessing, is shown by the fact that they also legislate that the birthdays of the martyrs—that is, their commemorations—are not to be celebrated during the Great Fast, but on Sabbaths and Lord’s Days, for these belong to festival, not to the affliction the fast requires of us; and what is more joyous than the remembrance of a martyr?

³ Would you also like me to show you a royal decree on this? Basil the Great, whose power in word and in the Spirit held the whole earth, in his homilies On Fasting, addressed to the fair and great Church of Caesarea—great on his account—numbered the fast at five days in the week, and thereby proved your six-day count an unlawful addition.[5] So that of you too, one might aptly use the words of Isaiah: this is not the fast I chose, says the Lord.