costs. There is in mortification a balm and a savor without which
one cannot live when once one has made their acquaintance. There
is but one way in which to give one’s self to God,—that is, to
give one’s self entirely, and to keep nothing for one’s self. The
little that one keeps is only good to double one and make one
suffer.’ Accordingly he imposed it on himself that he should never
smell a flower, never drink when parched with thirst, never drive
away a fly, never show disgust before a repugnant object, never
complain of anything that had to do with his personal comfort,
never sit down, never lean upon his elbows when he was kneeling.
The Curé of Ars was very sensitive to cold, but he would never
take means to protect himself against it. During a very severe
winter, one of his missionaries contrived a false floor to his
confessional and placed a metal case of hot water beneath. The
trick succeeded, and the Saint was deceived: ‘God is very good,’
he said with emotion. ‘This year, through all the cold, my feet
have always been warm.’ ”(178)
In this case the spontaneous impulse to make sacrifices for the pure love
of God was probably the uppermost conscious motive. We may class it, then,
under our head 3. Some authors think that the impulse to sacrifice is the
main religious phenomenon. It is a prominent, a universal phenomenon
certainly, and lies deeper than any special creed. Here, for instance, is
what seems to be a spontaneous example of it, simply expressing what
seemed right at the time between the individual and his Maker. Cotton
Mather, the New England Puritan divine, is generally reputed a rather
grotesque pedant; yet what is more touchingly simple than his relation of
what happened when his wife came to die?
“When I saw to what a point of resignation I was now called of the
Lord,” he says, “I resolved, with his help, therein to glorify
him. So, two hours before my lovely consort expired, I kneeled by
her bedside, and I took into my two hands a dear hand, the dearest
in the world. With her thus in my hands, I solemnly and sincerely
gave her up unto the Lord: and in token of my real _Resignation_,
I gently put her out of my hands, and laid away a most lovely
hand, resolving that I would never touch it more. This was the
hardest, and perhaps the bravest action that ever I did. She ...
told me that she signed and sealed my act of resignation. And
though before that she called for me continually, she after this
never asked for me any more.”(179)
Father Vianney’s asceticism taken in its totality was simply the result of
a permanent flood of high spiritual enthusiasm, longing to make proof of
itself. The Roman Church has, in its incomparable fashion, collected all
the motives towards asceticism together, and so codified them that any one
wishing to pursue Christian perfection may find a practical system mapped
out for him in any one of a number of ready‐made manuals.(180) The
dominant Church notion of perfection is of course the negative one of
avoidance of sin. Sin proceeds from concupiscence, and concupiscence from
our carnal passions and temptations, chief of which are pride, sensuality
in all its forms, and the loves of worldly excitement and possession. All
these sources of sin must be resisted; and discipline and austerities are
a most efficacious mode of meeting them. Hence there are always in these
books chapters on self‐mortification. But whenever a procedure is
codified, the more delicate spirit of it evaporates, and if we wish the
undiluted ascetic spirit,—the passion of self‐contempt wreaking itself on
the poor flesh, the divine irrationality of devotion making a sacrificial
gift of all it has (its sensibilities, namely) to the object of its
adoration,—we must go to autobiographies, or other individual documents.
Saint John of the Cross, a Spanish mystic who flourished—or rather who
existed, for there was little that suggested flourishing about him—in the
sixteenth century, will supply a passage suitable for our purpose.
“First of all, carefully excite in yourself an habitual
affectionate will in all things to imitate Jesus Christ. If
anything agreeable offers itself to your senses, yet does not at
the same time tend purely to the honor and glory of God, renounce
it and separate yourself from it for the love of Christ, who all
his life long had no other taste or wish than to do the will of
his Father whom he called his meat and nourishment. For example,
you take satisfaction in _hearing_ of things in which the glory of
God bears no part. Deny yourself this satisfaction, mortify your
wish to listen. You take pleasure in _seeing_ objects which do not
raise your mind to God: refuse yourself this pleasure, and turn
away your eyes. The same with conversations and all other things.
Act similarly, so far as you are able, with all the operations of
the senses, striving to make yourself free from their yokes.
“The radical remedy lies in the mortification of the four great
natural passions, joy, hope, fear, and grief. You must seek to
deprive these of every satisfaction and leave them as it were in
darkness and the void. Let your soul therefore turn always:
“Not to what is most easy, but to what is hardest;
“Not to what tastes best, but to what is most distasteful;
“Not to what most pleases, but to what disgusts;
“Not to matter of consolation, but to matter for desolation
rather;
“Not to rest, but to labor;
“Not to desire the more, but the less;
“Not to aspire to what is highest and most precious, but to what
is lowest and most contemptible;
“Not to will anything, but to will nothing;
“Not to seek the best in everything, but to seek the worst, so
that you may enter for the love of Christ into a complete
destitution, a perfect poverty of spirit, and an absolute
renunciation of everything in this world.
“Embrace these practices with all the energy of your soul and you
will find in a short time great delights and unspeakable
consolations.
“Despise yourself, and wish that others should despise you.
“Speak to your own disadvantage, and desire others to do the same;
“Conceive a low opinion of yourself, and find it good when others
hold the same;
“To enjoy the taste of all things, have no taste for anything.
“To know all things, learn to know nothing.
“To possess all things, resolve to possess nothing.
“To be all things, be willing to be nothing.
“To get to where you have no taste for anything, go through
whatever experiences you have no taste for.
“To learn to know nothing, go whither you are ignorant.
“To reach what you possess not, go whithersoever you own nothing.
“To be what you are not, experience what you are not.”
These later verses play with that vertigo of self‐contradiction which is
so dear to mysticism. Those that come next are completely mystical, for in
them Saint John passes from God to the more metaphysical notion of the
All.
“When you stop at one thing, you cease to open yourself to the
All.
“For to come to the All you must give up the All.
“And if you should attain to owning the All, you must own it,
desiring Nothing.
“In this spoliation, the soul finds its tranquillity and rest.
Profoundly established in the centre of its own nothingness, it
can be assailed by naught that comes from below; and since it no
longer desires anything, what comes from above cannot depress it;
for its desires alone are the causes of its woes.”(181)
And now, as a more concrete example of heads 4 and 5, in fact of all our
heads together, and of the irrational extreme to which a psychopathic
individual may go in the line of bodily austerity, I will quote the
sincere Suso’s account of his own self‐tortures. Suso, you will remember,
was one of the fourteenth century German mystics; his autobiography,
written in the third person, is a classic religious document.
“He was in his youth of a temperament full of fire and life; and
when this began to make itself felt, it was very grievous to him;
and he sought by many devices how he might bring his body into
subjection. He wore for a long time a hair shirt and an iron
chain, until the blood ran from him, so that he was obliged to
leave them off. He secretly caused an undergarment to be made for
him; and in the undergarment he had strips of leather fixed, into
which a hundred and fifty brass nails, pointed and filed sharp,
were driven, and the points of the nails were always turned
towards the flesh. He had this garment made very tight, and so
arranged as to go round him and fasten in front, in order that it
might fit the closer to his body, and the pointed nails might be
driven into his flesh; and it was high enough to reach upwards to
his navel. In this he used to sleep at night. Now in summer, when
it was hot, and he was very tired and ill from his journeyings, or
when he held the office of lecturer, he would sometimes, as he lay
thus in bonds, and oppressed with toil, and tormented also by
noxious insects, cry aloud and give way to fretfulness, and twist
round and round in agony, as a worm does when run through with a
pointed needle. It often seemed to him as if he were lying upon an
ant‐hill, from the torture caused by the insects; for if he wished
to sleep, or when he had fallen asleep, they vied with one
another.(182) Sometimes he cried to Almighty God in the fullness
of his heart: Alas! Gentle God, what a dying is this! When a man
is killed by murderers or strong beasts of prey it is soon over;
but I lie dying here under the cruel insects, and yet cannot die.
The nights in winter were never so long, nor was the summer so
hot, as to make him leave off this exercise. On the contrary, he
devised something farther—two leathern loops into which he put his
hands, and fastened one on each side his throat, and made the
fastenings so secure that even if his cell had been on fire about
him, he could not have helped himself. This he continued until his
hands and arms had become almost tremulous with the strain, and
then he devised something else: two leather gloves; and he caused
a brazier to fit them all over with sharp‐pointed brass tacks, and
he used to put them on at night, in order that if he should try
while asleep to throw off the hair undergarment, or relieve
himself from the gnawings of the vile insects, the tacks might
then stick into his body. And so it came to pass. If ever he
sought to help himself with his hands in his sleep, he drove the
sharp tacks into his breast, and tore himself, so that his flesh
festered. When after many weeks the wounds had healed, he tore
himself again and made fresh wounds.
“He continued this tormenting exercise for about sixteen years. At
the end of this time, when his blood was now chilled, and the fire
of his temperament destroyed, there appeared to him in a vision on
Whitsunday, a messenger from heaven, who told him that God
required this of him no longer. Whereupon he discontinued it, and
threw all these things away into a running stream.”
Suso then tells how, to emulate the sorrows of his crucified Lord,
he made himself a cross with thirty protruding iron needles and
nails. This he bore on his bare back between his shoulders day and
night. “The first time that he stretched out this cross upon his
back his tender frame was struck with terror at it, and blunted
the sharp nails slightly against a stone. But soon, repenting of
this womanly cowardice, he pointed them all again with a file, and
placed once more the cross upon him. It made his back, where the
bones are, bloody and seared. Whenever he sat down or stood up, it
was as if a hedgehog‐skin were on him. If any one touched him
unawares, or pushed against his clothes, it tore him.”
Suso next tells of his penitences by means of striking this cross
and forcing the nails deeper into the flesh, and likewise of his
self‐scourgings,—a dreadful story,—and then goes on as follows:
“At this same period the Servitor procured an old castaway door,
and he used to lie upon it at night without any bedclothes to make
him comfortable, except that he took off his shoes and wrapped a
thick cloak round him. He thus secured for himself a most
miserable bed; for hard pea‐stalks lay in humps under his head,
the cross with the sharp nails stuck into his back, his arms were
locked fast in bonds, the horsehair undergarment was round his
loins, and the cloak too was heavy and the door hard. Thus he lay
in wretchedness, afraid to stir, just like a log, and he would
send up many a sigh to God.
“In winter he suffered very much from the frost. If he stretched
out his feet they lay bare on the floor and froze, if he gathered
them up the blood became all on fire in his legs, and this was
great pain. His feet were full of sores, his legs dropsical, his
knees bloody and seared, his loins covered with scars from the
horsehair, his body wasted, his mouth parched with intense thirst,
and his hands tremulous from weakness. Amid these torments he
spent his nights and days; and he endured them all out of the
greatness of the love which he bore in his heart to the Divine and
Eternal Wisdom, our Lord Jesus Christ, whose agonizing sufferings
he sought to imitate. After a time he gave up this penitential
exercise of the door, and instead of it he took up his abode in a
very small cell, and used the bench, which was so narrow and short
that he could not stretch himself upon it, as his bed. In this
hole, or upon the door, he lay at night in his usual bonds, for
about eight years. It was also his custom, during the space of
twenty‐five years, provided he was staying in the convent, never
to go after compline in winter into any warm room, or to the
convent stove to warm himself, no matter how cold it might be,
unless he was obliged to do so for other reasons. Throughout all
these years he never took a bath, either a water or a sweating
bath; and this he did in order to mortify his comfort‐seeking
body. He practiced during a long time such rigid poverty that he
would neither receive nor touch a penny, either with leave or
without it. For a considerable time he strove to attain such a
high degree of purity that he would neither scratch nor touch any
part of his body, save only his hands and feet.”(183)
I spare you the recital of poor Suso’s self‐inflicted tortures from
thirst. It is pleasant to know that after his fortieth year, God showed
him by a series of visions that he had sufficiently broken down the
natural man, and that he might leave these exercises off. His case is
distinctly pathological, but he does not seem to have had the alleviation,
which some ascetics have enjoyed, of an alteration of sensibility capable
of actually turning torment into a perverse kind of pleasure. Of the
founder of the Sacred Heart order, for example, we read that
“Her love of pain and suffering was insatiable.... She said that
she could cheerfully live till the day of judgment, provided she
might always have matter for suffering for God; but that to live a
single day without suffering would be intolerable. She said again
that she was devoured with two unassuageable fevers, one for the
holy communion, the other for suffering, humiliation, and
annihilation. ‘Nothing but pain,’ she continually said in her
letters, ‘makes my life supportable.’ ”(184)
So much for the phenomena to which the ascetic impulse will in certain
persons give rise. In the ecclesiastically consecrated character three
minor branches of self‐mortification have been recognized as indispensable
pathways to perfection. I refer to the chastity, obedience, and poverty
which the monk vows to observe; and upon the heads of obedience and
poverty I will make a few remarks.
‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐
First, of Obedience. The secular life of our twentieth century opens with
this virtue held in no high esteem. The duty of the individual to
determine his own conduct and profit or suffer by the consequences seems,
on the contrary, to be one of our best rooted contemporary Protestant
social ideals. So much so that it is difficult even imaginatively to
comprehend how men possessed of an inner life of their own could ever have
come to think the subjection of its will to that of other finite creatures
recommendable. I confess that to myself it seems something of a mystery.
Yet it evidently corresponds to a profound interior need of many persons,
and we must do our best to understand it.
On the lowest possible plane, one sees how the expediency of obedience in
a firm ecclesiastical organization must have led to its being viewed as
meritorious. Next, experience shows that there are times in every one’s
life when one can be better counseled by others than by one’s self.
Inability to decide is one of the commonest symptoms of fatigued nerves;
friends who see our troubles more broadly, often see them more wisely than
we do; so it is frequently an act of excellent virtue to consult and obey
a doctor, a partner, or a wife. But, leaving these lower prudential
regions, we find, in the nature of some of the spiritual excitements which
we have been studying, good reasons for idealizing obedience. Obedience
may spring from the general religious phenomenon of inner softening and
self‐surrender and throwing one’s self on higher powers. So saving are
these attitudes felt to be that in themselves, apart from utility, they
become ideally consecrated; and in obeying a man whose fallibility we see
through thoroughly, we, nevertheless, may feel much as we do when we
resign our will to that of infinite wisdom. Add self‐despair and the
passion of self‐crucifixion to this, and obedience becomes an ascetic
sacrifice, agreeable quite irrespective of whatever prudential uses it
might have.
It is as a sacrifice, a mode of “mortification,” that obedience is
primarily conceived by Catholic writers, a “sacrifice which man offers to
God, and of which he is himself both the priest and the victim. By poverty
he immolates his exterior possessions; by chastity he immolates his body;
by obedience he completes the sacrifice, and gives to God all that he yet
holds as his own, his two most precious goods, his intellect and his will.
The sacrifice is then complete and unreserved, a genuine holocaust, for
the entire victim is now consumed for the honor of God.”(185) Accordingly,
in Catholic discipline, we obey our superior not as mere man, but as the
representative of Christ. Obeying God in him by our intention, obedience
is easy. But when the text‐book theologians marshal collectively all their
reasons for recommending it, the mixture sounds to our ears rather odd.
“One of the great consolations of the monastic life,” says a
Jesuit authority, “is the assurance we have that in obeying we can
commit no fault. The Superior may commit a fault in commanding you
to do this thing or that, but you are certain that you commit no
fault so long as you obey, because God will only ask you if you
have duly performed what orders you received, and if you can
furnish a clear account in that respect, you are absolved
entirely. Whether the things you did were opportune, or whether
there were not something better that might have been done, these
are questions not asked of you, but rather of your Superior. The
moment what you did was done obediently, God wipes it out of your
account, and charges it to the Superior. So that Saint Jerome well
exclaimed, in celebrating the advantages of obedience, ‘Oh,
sovereign liberty! Oh, holy and blessed security by which one
becomes almost impeccable!’
“Saint John Climachus is of the same sentiment when he calls
obedience an excuse before God. In fact, when God asks why you
have done this or that, and you reply, it is because I was so
ordered by my Superiors, God will ask for no other excuse. As a
passenger in a good vessel with a good pilot need give himself no
farther concern, but may go to sleep in peace, because the pilot
has charge over all, and ‘watches for him’; so a religious person
who lives under the yoke of obedience goes to heaven as if while
sleeping, that is, while leaning entirely on the conduct of his
Superiors, who are the pilots of his vessel, and keep watch for
him continually. It is no small thing, of a truth, to be able to
cross the stormy sea of life on the shoulders and in the arms of
another, yet that is just the grace which God accords to those who
live under the yoke of obedience. Their Superior bears all their
burdens.... A certain grave doctor said that he would rather spend
his life in picking up straws by obedience, than by his own
responsible choice busy himself with the loftiest works of
charity, because one is certain of following the will of God in
whatever one may do from obedience, but never certain in the same
degree of anything which we may do of our own proper
movement.”(186)
One should read the letters in which Ignatius Loyola recommends obedience
as the backbone of his order, if one would gain insight into the full
spirit of its cult.(187) They are too long to quote; but Ignatius’s belief
is so vividly expressed in a couple of sayings reported by companions
that, though they have been so often cited, I will ask your permission to
copy them once more:—
“I ought,” an early biographer reports him as saying, “on entering
religion, and thereafter, to place myself entirely in the hands of
God, and of him who takes His place by His authority. I ought to
desire that my Superior should oblige me to give up my own
judgment, and conquer my own mind. I ought to set up no difference
between one Superior and another, ... but recognize them all as
equal before God, whose place they fill. For if I distinguish
persons, I weaken the spirit of obedience. In the hands of my
Superior, I must be a soft wax, a thing, from which he is to
require whatever pleases him, be it to write or receive letters,
to speak or not to speak to such a person, or the like; and I must
put all my fervor in executing zealously and exactly what I am
ordered. I must consider myself as a corpse which has neither
intelligence nor will; be like a mass of matter which without
resistance lets itself be placed wherever it may please any one;
like a stick in the hand of an old man, who uses it according to
his needs and places it where it suits him. So must I be under the
hands of the Order, to serve it in the way it judges most useful.
“I must never ask of the Superior to be sent to a particular
place, to be employed in a particular duty.... I must consider
nothing as belonging to me personally, and as regards the things I
use, be like a statue which lets itself be stripped and never
opposes resistance.”(188)
The other saying is reported by Rodriguez in the chapter from which I a
moment ago made quotations. When speaking of the Pope’s authority,
Rodriguez writes:—
“Saint Ignatius said, when general of his company, that if the
Holy Father were to order him to set sail in the first bark which
he might find in the port of Ostia, near Rome, and to abandon
himself to the sea, without a mast, without sails, without oars or
rudder or any of the things that are needful for navigation or
subsistence, he would obey not only with alacrity, but without
anxiety or repugnance, and even with a great internal
satisfaction.”(189)
With a solitary concrete example of the extravagance to which the virtue
we are considering has been carried, I will pass to the topic next in
order.
“Sister Marie Claire [of Port Royal] had been greatly imbued with
the holiness and excellence of M. de Langres. This prelate, soon
after he came to Port Royal, said to her one day, seeing her so
tenderly attached to Mother Angélique, that it would perhaps be
better not to speak to her again. Marie Claire, greedy of
obedience, took this inconsiderate word for an oracle of God, and
from that day forward remained for several years without once
speaking to her sister.”(190)
Our next topic shall be Poverty, felt at all times and under all creeds as
one adornment of a saintly life. Since the instinct of ownership is
fundamental in man’s nature, this is one more example of the ascetic
paradox. Yet it appears no paradox at all, but perfectly reasonable, the
moment one recollects how easily higher excitements hold lower cupidities
in check. Having just quoted the Jesuit Rodriguez on the subject of
obedience, I will, to give immediately a concrete turn to our discussion
of poverty, also read you a page from his chapter on this latter virtue.
You must remember that he is writing instructions for monks of his own
order, and bases them all on the text, “Blessed are the poor in spirit.”