Mortification

Let us consider next the spirit of mortification, which is at once the necessary outcome and the guardian of contrition, for, in proportion as the spirit of mortification fails, contrition is certain to die out of the soul, and if there be no true contrition, and the soul longs to gain it, one of the surest ways is by mortification. One whose heart is truly penitent, who lives constantly before God, confessing himself a sinner and deserving His condemnation, will instinctively put away many things from his life that are the tokens of a pleasure-loving nature; the outer life is bound to take expression from the inner, and if the penitence be deep and strong, it will not be possible but that there should be the outer tokens of it. If there are no such tokens, we must doubt the reality of the penitence.

Yet the practise of mortification is not easy. It not only makes great demands upon the will, but it needs much wisdom and prayer to practise it.

It is strange how often people are to be found who certainly practise mortification and that in no small degree, who live really ascetic lives, allowing themselves very little in the way of enjoyment or indulgence, and yet who most certainly are not mortified in the proper sense of the word, but, on the contrary, are full of self-will and a certain kind of self-indulgence.

It is necessary, therefore, that in the practise of mortification we should be quite clear what our aim ought to be, and where the danger of self-deception lies, for there is no part of our nature in which self-deception acts with greater subtlety and disaster than in the higher aims of the spiritual life. It would seem almost inconceivable that a person should deny himself in many things that he liked; that he should lead a really austere life, and yet that it could be possible that all this should be a subtle form of self-indulgence, yet it undoubtedly is true. For it is unquestionably true that there may be a very wide difference between the Christian spirit of mortification and asceticism regarded as mere austerity.

There is a strange pleasure to certain temperaments in practising self-torture themselves: it is an end in itself, it reaches out towards nothing, grasps nothing higher; it is the morbid pleasure of inflicting pain upon oneself; it appears to be a greater pleasure to some natures to forego what they like than to take it. This is one of those mysteries of nature which it is impossible to understand; but such a spirit of mortification has nothing to do with Christianity: it is to be found all over the world, and it is often the source of the most dangerous form of pride.

But Christian mortification is wholly different in its motive and its aim. To most people, the motive whence it springs must be penitence; it is the putting away of things that in themselves are lawful because of past sin; the remembrance of past self-indulgence makes the soul long to forego more and more in the spirit of reparation; it ever stands in this fair world, before God, self-condemned, and feeling that it has not the same rights that others have to the free use and enjoyment of all that is good in the world. There is nothing that it has not abused, it has allowed the creature to crowd out the thought of and the love of the Creator; therefore, in the spirit of self-condemnation, it puts away one thing after another.

In such acts of self-denial there is no harshness, no hard condemnation of the things that are put aside; on the contrary, the penitent soul realises that the evil lies not in these things but in itself. All these things are good; they are God's creatures, but they have been abused, and they are put aside with an ever-deepening feeling of its own unworthiness. It feels keenly how sin has marred the order of God's creation, has put man in a false relation to all these things; it has given them a hold upon him, he has sunk under their influence, they have enslaved him; instead of raising him to God, he has allowed them to drag him down and to blind him, so that he cannot see God.

Consequently there is no condemnation of those things which he willingly foregoes; indeed, the mind becomes purified by penitence, so as to see deeper into their meaning and their beauty, and to appreciate their real value more. The penitent soul does not, in stripping itself of all that is fairest in the world, look upon the world with the jaundiced eye of Puritanism, but with a tender love, weeping over his own sin and weakness, which makes him incapable of using what, had he been more true, he might have used, and in using risen through them to God. Nor does he condemn others who do not put away things which he does; no, he feels that his own position is an exceptional one: he is a penitent, one who has abused God's good gifts and therefore does not deserve nor dare to have them. But with others it is different; others, he feels, are not like him, and while stripping himself more and more of all but the barest necessity, he will with the utmost tenderness try to protect others from the deprivations he practises himself.

And thus penitence as the motive for mortification protects him who practises it from hardness and pride on the one hand, and, on the other, from a false condemnation of those things which he surrenders as if they were evil in themselves. As he loosens himself from the dominion of the creatures which had enslaved and blinded him, he understands and appreciates as he never did before their value and their beauty, and he perceives how it is possible for man to rise through them to God. It is impossible therefore to condemn them as evil; he has traced evil to its true source, and has found that it lies in his own heart and will.

Thus in the most mortified and ascetic life, amidst the barest surroundings, stripped of all save the merest necessities, living in the utmost poverty, like Him of whom it was said: 'Foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of man hath not where to lay His head,' (Matthew 8:20) amidst circumstances as hard and stern as these, the Christian displays the most perfect tenderness and gentleness of heart, the clearest sense of the real value of all things, the intensest appreciation of the beauty of nature and the profoundest humility. The school of self-discipline and mortification in which he has placed himself has done its work, and has proved that it is based upon a true principle by the wonderful blending of the most opposite virtues, gentleness and strength, self-condemnation and the appreciation of others - the putting away as evil for him what is valued and esteemed more and more as good in itself. If there were any trace of bitterness, any faintest taint of Manichaean condemnation of God's creatures, any hardness towards those who were not led to a similar life of mortification, we might condemn it, as based upon a wrong principle, but when we see the result we cannot but feel that a principle producing such results must be founded on truth.

But the spirit of mortification does not spring from penitence alone; it grows out of the condition of our life here on earth. It is necessary for all who would be true to God and themselves. As man was originally created, God was supreme Master of his heart and will. He saw, he knew his end, to love God above all things and to serve Him. And he found himself in a world beautiful and attractive, in which every created thing spoke to him of God and pointed him upwards. His nature had many needs, and he found around him all that would supply these needs provided by the loving hand of God, and in satisfying the wants of nature he was drawn more closely to God. His eye was, as it were, illuminated, so that it could pierce through all and see God in all. He took what his nature needed with unerring instinct and without fear or danger of indulgence; all was in order within him and without, and God was over all and in all.

But with the fall all this was changed. Man had chosen the creature before the Creator, and the creatures enslaved and blinded him. He no longer found that created things Lifted him up to God, but that they became an end in themselves. By the order of his creation he needed the creatures; he could not live without them, for they were meant to lead him constantly to God. But now they came between him and God and held him down. As he used them he found himself more and more blinded and enslaved by them. His whole relationship to them was overthrown, the balance was lost; he could no longer see clearly the meaning and purpose of things nor rise through them to God; his will got entangled and his senses ensnared.

The instinct that guided him was gone. He was moving about amidst things that but now lifted his whole being Godward, into the mystery of whose existence he saw as into a crystal stream. And now he moves amongst them as one fascinated and bewildered. He found himself guided in the choice or rejection of things by their appearances and their power of giving pleasure, not by the only true principle, their effects in leading him to or holding him back from God. And thus he judged things by their immediate effects upon himself, and finding in them the power of satisfying many wants of his nature, he took all that his unbalanced nature desired, and did not perceive that created things were gaining a faster and tighter grip upon him, till they filled the whole horizon of his soul and shut out God. And as time went on, every step onward created new wants which Nature supplied from her exhaustless treasury, and the satisfaction of all these wants bound man more fast to earth and to the creatures.

How quickly they ensnare, how easily they blind, how rapidly our needs increase we all know but too well. The man of many needs crowds round his life such vast supplies of earthly and material things that the heart becomes deadened and ceases even to desire spiritual things. How can it rise, bound down on every side? Yet all these things are in themselves good; they are indeed meant to be channels of approach to God - revelations of God - but the channels have become clogged, the creatures have become opaque, and at last they form a barrier between the soul and God.

Therefore we have to keep ourselves loose from the creatures. We have to learn to use them as they were meant to be used, as means to an end, and the end is God. We have to use each thing as it comes, to use it or abstain from its use in so far as it leads us to God. If anything helps us Godward, it should be used so far as, neither more nor less than, it leads to God. They are means to an end, and such is the nature of those things which are means or instruments, that we should consider, in regard to them, if they are, and to what extent they are, useful as instruments for the end for which we propose to use them. We have a difficult task before us. We are obliged to use many things which have in them a most remarkable and strange power of working their way into our lives and enslaving us, and we have to learn so to use them as to keep free from their dominion and to rise through them to God.

To do this we need to hold ourselves well in hand, conquering those things which try to conquer us - not allowing ourselves to go to the verge of self-indulgence, but keeping ourselves more and more free from the dominion of those things which were created to be our servants, not our masters. We must learn to gauge our progress, not by the multiplying of our needs but by minimising them. He who could feed the multitude in the wilderness and calm the storm upon the lake said of Himself, 'The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man hath not where to lay His head.' (Matthew 8:20) He who could rule the creatures would not permit them to rule Him. He deliberately set them aside and lived in poverty. What a perversion of ideas it is that we should look upon those who accumulate round themselves riches and all kinds of luxuries, and consequently multiply their needs, as being great. They are not, after all, the masters but the servants of the creatures that rule them. Our Lord's estimate of greatness and true happiness was different: 'Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.' (Matthew 5:30)

And all this, standing in the right attitude towards the creatures, needs the constant practise of mortification, the holding heart and will free for God. It is not easy, as we find anything getting too strong a hold upon us, to draw back and keep it in check. Food, sleep, pleasure, and a thousand other things, as we touch them they enchant us and call upon us to give in to their enjoyment as much as we desire. The effort to keep all these things in their place involves a mortified life. To stop short of indulgence, to drive away something that we are afraid is beginning to enslave us till we have taught it its proper place and admit it again later into our life as a useful servant; to stand amidst the vast multitude of God's creatures with which the earth teems - persons, places, things, sorrows, joys, pleasure and pains - a free man, enslaved by none but using all fearlessly, neither held back by fear nor attracted by mere pleasure, but using and accepting or rejecting each as it comes, in so far as it leads the soul Godward - this is indeed liberty; but such liberty can only be purchased by mortification.

And such liberty cannot be gained by the mere action of a determined will. No; the will needs a lever to raise the nature out of the bondage to the creatures. And where shall such a lever be found? The power strongest to move the will is love. And there is but one love that can counteract the attraction of the creatures. The love of Him who being God took into Himself a created nature - the sum and consummation of all the creatures - we turn to Him, we cling to His human nature. He is the way out of the labyrinth in which we are entangled to the Father. As our love to the man Christ Jesus grows more and more within us, we feel an attraction that lifts us from the earth and gives the soul once more its balance. We submit ourselves to the slavery of His love, whom to serve is to reign. 'If the Son shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed.' (John 8:36)

- text taken from Some Principles and Practices of the Spiritual Life, by Father Basil William Maturin