At that time the superstitious observance of Lent had prevailed everywhere, because the common people thought that in it they were doing some exceptional service to God, and the pastors commended it as a holy imitation of Christ. On the contrary, it is plain that Christ did not fast to set an example for others, but to prove, in so beginning to proclaim the gospel, that it was no human doctrine but actually one sent from heaven [Matt. 4:2]. And the marvel is that such sheer hallucination (which is refuted so often and with such clear arguments) could creep upon men of keen judgment. For Christ does not fast often—as he would have to do if he had willed to lay down a law of yearly fasting—but only once, when he girded himself for the proclamation of the gospel. Nor does he fast in human fashion, as would have been fitting if he willed to arouse men to imitate him; but he shows an example rather to transport all men to admiration of him than to arouse them with zeal to imitate him. Finally, his reason for fasting was not different from that which Moses performed when he received the law at the Lord’s hand [Ex. 24:18; 34:28]. For since that miracle was manifested in Moses to establish the authority of the law, it ought not to have been omitted in Christ, lest the gospel seem to yield to the law. But since that time it never entered any man’s mind, on the excuse of following Moses, to establish such a form of fasting among the people of Israel. And none of the holy prophets and patriarchs followed it, even when they had enthusiasm and zeal enough for all pious exercises. For the statement that Elijah went forty days without food and drink [1 Kings 19:8] only served to apprise the people that he had been raised up to restore the law, from which almost all Israel had departed. It was, therefore, mere wrongheaded zeal, full of superstition, that they justified and painted fasting as the following of Christ.
However, there was amazing diversity in the manner of fasting, as Cassiodorus relates from the ninth book of Socrates’ history. For the Romans (he says) had only three weeks, but for them the fast was continuous, except on Sunday and Saturday. The Illyrians and Greeks had six; others, seven; but fasting was at intervals. They differed as much in choice of foods: some ate only bread and water; others added vegetables; still others did not abstain from fish and fowl; others made no distinction in foods. Augustine also mentions this difference in his second letter to Januarius
John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles. The Library of Christian Classics (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2011), 4.12.20.
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I do not observe Lent as Calvin thinks people observe Lent.