Chapter XI: Part 11

Bray’s biographer writes that after he had given up smoking, he
thought that he would chew a little, but he conquered this dirty
habit, too. “On one occasion,” Bray said, “when at a prayer‐
meeting at Hicks Mill, I heard the Lord say to me, ‘Worship me
with clean lips.’ So, when we got up from our knees, I took the
quid out of my mouth and ‘whipped ’en’ [threw it] under the form.
But, when we got on our knees again, I put another quid into my
mouth. Then the Lord said to me again, ‘Worship me with clean
lips.’ So I took the quid out of my mouth, and whipped ’en under
the form again, and said, ‘Yes, Lord, I will.’ From that time I
gave up chewing as well as smoking, and have been a free man.”

The ascetic forms which the impulse for veracity and purity of life may take are often pathetic enough. The early Quakers, for example, had hard battles to wage against the worldliness and insincerity of the ecclesiastical Christianity of their time. Yet the battle that cost them most wounds was probably that which they fought in defense of their own right to social veracity and sincerity in their thee‐ing and thou‐ing, in not doffing the hat or giving titles of respect. It was laid on George Fox that these conventional customs were a lie and a sham, and the whole body of his followers thereupon renounced them, as a sacrifice to truth, and so that their acts and the spirit they professed might be more in accord.

“When the Lord sent me into the world,” says Fox in his Journal,
“he forbade me to put off my hat to any, high or low: and I was
required to ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ all men and women, without any
respect to rich or poor, great or small. And as I traveled up and
down, I was not to bid people Good‐morning, or Good‐evening,
neither might I bow or scrape with my leg to any one. This made
the sects and professions rage. Oh! the rage that was in the
priests, magistrates, professors, and people of all sorts: and
especially in priests and professors: for though ‘thou’ to a
single person was according to their accidence and grammar rules,
and according to the Bible, yet they could not bear to hear it:
and because I could not put off my hat to them, it set them all
into a rage.... Oh! the scorn, heat, and fury that arose! Oh! the
blows, punchings, beatings, and imprisonments that we underwent
for not putting off our hats to men! Some had their hats violently
plucked off and thrown away, so that they quite lost them. The bad
language and evil usage we received on this account is hard to be
expressed, besides the danger we were sometimes in of losing our
lives for this matter, and that by the great professors of
Christianity, who thereby discovered they were not true believers.
And though it was but a small thing in the eye of man, yet a
wonderful confusion it brought among all professors and priests:
but, blessed be the Lord, many came to see the vanity of that
custom of putting off hats to men, and felt the weight of Truth’s
testimony against it.”

In the autobiography of Thomas Elwood, an early Quaker, who at one time was secretary to John Milton, we find an exquisitely quaint and candid account of the trials he underwent both at home and abroad, in following Fox’s canons of sincerity. The anecdotes are too lengthy for citation; but Elwood sets down his manner of feeling about these things in a shorter passage, which I will quote as a characteristic utterance of spiritual sensibility:—

“By this divine light, then,” says Elwood, “I saw that though I
had not the evil of the common uncleanliness, debauchery,
profaneness, and pollutions of the world to put away, because I
had, through the great goodness of God and a civil education, been
preserved out of those grosser evils, yet I had many other evils
to put away and to cease from; some of which were not by the
world, which lies in wickedness (1 John v. 19), accounted evils,
but by the light of Christ were made manifest to me to be evils,
and as such condemned in me.

“As particularly those fruits and effects of pride that discover
themselves in the vanity and superfluity of apparel; which I took
too much delight in. This evil of my doings I was required to put
away and cease from; and judgment lay upon me till I did so.

“I took off from my apparel those unnecessary trimmings of lace,
ribbons, and useless buttons, which had no real service, but were
set on only for that which was by mistake called ornament; and I
ceased to wear rings.

“Again, the giving of flattering titles to men between whom and me
there was not any relation to which such titles could be pretended
to belong. This was an evil I had been much addicted to, and was
accounted a ready artist in; therefore this evil also was I
required to put away and cease from. So that thenceforward I durst
not say, Sir, Master, My Lord, Madam (or My Dame); or say Your
Servant to any one to whom I did not stand in the real relation of
a servant, which I had never done to any.

“Again, respect of persons, in uncovering the head and bowing the
knee or body in salutation, was a practice I had been much in the
use of; and this, being one of the vain customs of the world,
introduced by the spirit of the world, instead of the true honor
which this is a false representation of, and used in deceit as a
token of respect by persons one to another, who bear no real
respect one to another; and besides this, being a type and a
proper emblem of that divine honor which all ought to pay to
Almighty God, and which all of all sorts, who take upon them the
Christian name, appear in when they offer their prayers to him,
and therefore should not be given to men;—I found this to be one
of those evils which I had been too long doing; therefore I was
now required to put it away and cease from it.

“Again, the corrupt and unsound form of speaking in the plural
number to a single person, _you_ to one, instead of _thou_,
contrary to the pure, plain, and single language of truth, _thou_
to one, and _you_ to more than one, which had always been used by
God to men, and men to God, as well as one to another, from the
oldest record of time till corrupt men, for corrupt ends, in later
and corrupt times, to flatter, fawn, and work upon the corrupt
nature in men, brought in that false and senseless way of speaking
_you_ to one, which has since corrupted the modern languages, and
hath greatly debased the spirits and depraved the manners of
men;—this evil custom I had been as forward in as others, and this
I was now called out of and required to cease from.

“These and many more evil customs which had sprung up in the night
of darkness and general apostasy from the truth and true religion
were now, by the inshining of this pure ray of divine light in my
conscience, gradually discovered to me to be what I ought to cease
from, shun, and stand a witness against.”(175)

These early Quakers were Puritans indeed. The slightest inconsistency between profession and deed jarred some of them to active protest. John Woolman writes in his diary:—

“In these journeys I have been where much cloth hath been dyed;
and have at sundry times walked over ground where much of their
dyestuffs has drained away. This hath produced a longing in my
mind that people might come into cleanness of spirit, cleanness of
person, and cleanness about their houses and garments. Dyes being
invented partly to please the eye, and partly to hide dirt, I have
felt in this weak state, when traveling in dirtiness, and affected
with unwholesome scents, a strong desire that the nature of dyeing
cloth to hide dirt may be more fully considered.

“Washing our garments to keep them sweet is cleanly, but it is the
opposite to real cleanliness to hide dirt in them. Through giving
way to hiding dirt in our garments a spirit which would conceal
that which is disagreeable is strengthened. Real cleanliness
becometh a holy people; but hiding that which is not clean by
coloring our garments seems contrary to the sweetness of
sincerity. Through some sorts of dyes cloth is rendered less
useful. And if the value of dyestuffs, and expense of dyeing, and
the damage done to cloth, were all added together, and that cost
applied to keeping all sweet and clean, how much more would real
cleanliness prevail.

“Thinking often on these things, the use of hats and garments dyed
with a dye hurtful to them, and wearing more clothes in summer
than are useful, grew more uneasy to me; believing them to be
customs which have not their foundation in pure wisdom. The
apprehension of being singular from my beloved friends was a
strait upon me; and thus I continued in the use of some things,
contrary to my judgment, about nine months. Then I thought of
getting a hat the natural color of the fur, but the apprehension
of being looked upon as one affecting singularity felt uneasy to
me. On this account I was under close exercise of mind in the time
of our general spring meeting in 1762, greatly desiring to be
rightly directed; when, being deeply bowed in spirit before the
Lord, I was made willing to submit to what I apprehended was
required of me; and when I returned home, got a hat of the natural
color of the fur.

“In attending meetings, this singularity was a trial to me, and
more especially at this time, as white hats were used by some who
were fond of following the changeable modes of dress, and as some
friends, who knew not from what motives I wore it, grew shy of me,
I felt my way for a time shut up in the exercise of the ministry.
Some friends were apprehensive that my wearing such a hat savored
of an affected singularity: those who spoke with me in a friendly
way, I generally informed in a few words, that I believed my
wearing it was not in my own will.”

When the craving for moral consistency and purity is developed to this degree, the subject may well find the outer world too full of shocks to dwell in, and can unify his life and keep his soul unspotted only by withdrawing from it. That law which impels the artist to achieve harmony in his composition by simply dropping out whatever jars, or suggests a discord, rules also in the spiritual life. To omit, says Stevenson, is the one art in literature: “If I knew how to omit, I should ask no other knowledge.” And life, when full of disorder and slackness and vague superfluity, can no more have what we call character than literature can have it under similar conditions. So monasteries and communities of sympathetic devotees open their doors, and in their changeless order, characterized by omissions quite as much as constituted of actions, the holy‐minded person finds that inner smoothness and cleanness which it is torture to him to feel violated at every turn by the discordancy and brutality of secular existence.

‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐‐

That the scrupulosity of purity may be carried to a fantastic extreme must be admitted. In this it resembles Asceticism, to which further symptom of saintliness we had better turn next. The adjective “ascetic” is applied to conduct originating on diverse psychological levels, which I might as well begin by distinguishing from one another.

1. Asceticism may be a mere expression of organic hardihood,
disgusted with too much ease.

2. Temperance in meat and drink, simplicity of apparel, chastity,
and non‐pampering of the body generally, may be fruits of the love
of purity, shocked by whatever savors of the sensual.

3. They may also be fruits of love, that is, they may appeal to
the subject in the light of sacrifices which he is happy in making
to the Deity whom he acknowledges.

4. Again, ascetic mortifications and torments may be due to
pessimistic feelings about the self, combined with theological
beliefs concerning expiation. The devotee may feel that he is
buying himself free, or escaping worse sufferings hereafter, by
doing penance now.

5. In psychopathic persons, mortifications may be entered on
irrationally, by a sort of obsession or fixed idea which comes as
a challenge and must be worked off, because only thus does the
subject get his interior consciousness feeling right again.

6. Finally, ascetic exercises may in rarer instances be prompted
by genuine perversions of the bodily sensibility, in consequence
of which normally pain‐giving stimuli are actually felt as
pleasures.

I will try to give an instance under each of these heads in turn; but it is not easy to get them pure, for in cases pronounced enough to be immediately classed as ascetic, several of the assigned motives usually work together. Moreover, before citing any examples at all, I must invite you to some general psychological considerations which apply to all of them alike.

A strange moral transformation has within the past century swept over our Western world. We no longer think that we are called on to face physical pain with equanimity. It is not expected of a man that he should either endure it or inflict much of it, and to listen to the recital of cases of it makes our flesh creep morally as well as physically. The way in which our ancestors looked upon pain as an eternal ingredient of the world’s order, and both caused and suffered it as a matter‐of‐course portion of their day’s work, fills us with amazement. We wonder that any human beings could have been so callous. The result of this historic alteration is that even in the Mother Church herself, where ascetic discipline has such a fixed traditional prestige as a factor of merit, it has largely come into desuetude, if not discredit. A believer who flagellates or “macerates” himself to‐day arouses more wonder and fear than emulation. Many Catholic writers who admit that the times have changed in this respect do so resignedly; and even add that perhaps it is as well not to waste feelings in regretting the matter, for to return to the heroic corporeal discipline of ancient days might be an extravagance.

Where to seek the easy and the pleasant seems instinctive—and instinctive it appears to be in man; any deliberate tendency to pursue the hard and painful as such and for their own sakes might well strike one as purely abnormal. Nevertheless, in moderate degrees it is natural and even usual to human nature to court the arduous. It is only the extreme manifestations of the tendency that can be regarded as a paradox.

The psychological reasons for this lie near the surface. When we drop abstractions and take what we call our will in the act, we see that it is a very complex function. It involves both stimulations and inhibitions; it follows generalized habits; it is escorted by reflective criticisms; and it leaves a good or a bad taste of itself behind, according to the manner of the performance. The result is that, quite apart from the immediate pleasure which any sensible experience may give us, our own general moral attitude in procuring or undergoing the experience brings with it a secondary satisfaction or distaste. Some men and women, indeed, there are who can live on smiles and the word “yes” forever. But for others (indeed for most), this is too tepid and relaxed a moral climate. Passive happiness is slack and insipid, and soon grows mawkish and intolerable. Some austerity and wintry negativity, some roughness, danger, stringency, and effort, some “no! no!” must be mixed in, to produce the sense of an existence with character and texture and power. The range of individual differences in this respect is enormous; but whatever the mixture of yeses and noes may be, the person is infallibly aware when he has struck it in the right proportion _for him_. This, he feels, is my proper vocation, this is the _optimum_, the law, the life for me to live. Here I find the degree of equilibrium, safety, calm, and leisure which I need, or here I find the challenge, passion, fight, and hardship without which my soul’s energy expires.

Every individual soul, in short, like every individual machine or organism, has its own best conditions of efficiency. A given machine will run best under a certain steam‐pressure, a certain amperage; an organism under a certain diet, weight, or exercise. You seem to do best, I heard a doctor say to a patient, at about 140 millimeters of arterial tension. And it is just so with our sundry souls: some are happiest in calm weather; some need the sense of tension, of strong volition, to make them feel alive and well. For these latter souls, whatever is gained from day to day must be paid for by sacrifice and inhibition, or else it comes too cheap and has no zest.

Now when characters of this latter sort become religious, they are apt to turn the edge of their need of effort and negativity against their natural self; and the ascetic life gets evolved as a consequence.

When Professor Tyndall in one of his lectures tells us that Thomas Carlyle put him into his bath‐tub every morning of a freezing Berlin winter, he proclaimed one of the lowest grades of asceticism. Even without Carlyle, most of us find it necessary to our soul’s health to start the day with a rather cool immersion. A little farther along the scale we get such statements as this, from one of my correspondents, an agnostic:—

“Often at night in my warm bed I would feel ashamed to depend so
on the warmth, and whenever the thought would come over me I would
have to get up, no matter what time of night it was, and stand for
a minute in the cold, just so as to prove my manhood.”

Such cases as these belong simply to our head 1. In the next case we probably have a mixture of heads 2 and 3—the asceticism becomes far more systematic and pronounced. The writer is a Protestant, whose sense of moral energy could doubtless be gratified on no lower terms, and I take his case from Starbuck’s manuscript collection.

“I practiced fasting and mortification of the flesh. I secretly
made burlap shirts, and put the burrs next the skin, and wore
pebbles in my shoes. I would spend nights flat on my back on the
floor without any covering.”

The Roman Church has organized and codified all this sort of thing, and given it a market‐value in the shape of “merit.” But we see the cultivation of hardship cropping out under every sky and in every faith, as a spontaneous need of character. Thus we read of Channing, when first settled as a Unitarian minister, that—

“He was now more simple than ever, and seemed to have become
incapable of any form of self‐indulgence. He took the smallest
room in the house for his study, though he might easily have
commanded one more light, airy, and in every way more suitable;
and chose for his sleeping chamber an attic which he shared with a
younger brother. The furniture of the latter might have answered
for the cell of an anchorite, and consisted of a hard mattress on
a cot‐bedstead, plain wooden chairs and table, with matting on the
floor. It was without fire, and to cold he was throughout life
extremely sensitive; but he never complained or appeared in any
way to be conscious of inconvenience. ‘I recollect,’ says his
brother, ‘after one most severe night, that in the morning he
sportively thus alluded to his suffering: “If my bed were my
country, I should be somewhat like Bonaparte: I have no control
except over the part which I occupy; the instant I move, frost
takes possession.” ’ In sickness only would he change for the time
his apartment and accept a few comforts. The dress too that he
habitually adopted was of most inferior quality; and garments were
constantly worn which the world would call mean, though an almost
feminine neatness preserved him from the least appearance of
neglect.”(176)

Channing’s asceticism, such as it was, was evidently a compound of hardihood and love of purity. The democracy which is an offshoot of the enthusiasm of humanity, and of which I will speak later under the head of the cult of poverty, doubtless bore also a share. Certainly there was no pessimistic element in his case. In the next case we have a strongly pessimistic element, so that it belongs under head 4. John Cennick was Methodism’s first lay preacher. In 1735 he was convicted of sin, while walking in Cheapside,—

“And at once left off song‐singing, card‐playing, and attending
theatres. Sometimes he wished to go to a popish monastery, to
spend his life in devout retirement. At other times he longed to
live in a cave, sleeping on fallen leaves, and feeding on forest
fruits. He fasted long and often, and prayed nine times a day....
Fancying dry bread too great an indulgence for so great a sinner
as himself, he began to feed on potatoes, acorns, crabs, and
grass; and often wished that he could live on roots and herbs. At
length, in 1737, he found peace with God, and went on his way
rejoicing.”(177)

In this poor man we have morbid melancholy and fear, and the sacrifices made are to purge out sin, and to buy safety. The hopelessness of Christian theology in respect of the flesh and the natural man generally has, in systematizing fear, made of it one tremendous incentive to self‐ mortification. It would be quite unfair, however, in spite of the fact that this incentive has often been worked in a mercenary way for hortatory purposes, to call it a mercenary incentive. The impulse to expiate and do penance is, in its first intention, far too immediate and spontaneous an expression of self‐despair and anxiety to be obnoxious to any such reproach. In the form of loving sacrifice, of spending all we have to show our devotion, ascetic discipline of the severest sort may be the fruit of highly optimistic religious feeling.

M. Vianney, the curé of Ars, was a French country priest, whose holiness was exemplary. We read in his life the following account of his inner need of sacrifice:—

“ ‘On this path,’ M. Vianney said, ‘it is only the first step that
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.”

“If any one of you,” he says, “will know whether or not he is
really poor in spirit, let him consider whether he loves the
ordinary consequences and effects of poverty, which are hunger,
thirst, cold, fatigue, and the denudation of all conveniences. See
if you are glad to wear a worn‐out habit full of patches. See if
you are glad when something is lacking to your meal, when you are
passed by in serving it, when what you receive is distasteful to
you, when your cell is out of repair. If you are not glad of these
things, if instead of loving them you avoid them, then there is
proof that you have not attained the perfection of poverty of
spirit.” Rodriguez then goes on to describe the practice of
poverty in more detail. “The first point is that which Saint
Ignatius proposes in his constitutions, when he says, ‘Let no one
use anything as if it were his private possession.’ ‘A religious
person,’ he says, ‘ought in respect to all the things that he
uses, to be like a statue which one may drape with clothing, but
which feels no grief and makes no resistance when one strips it
again. It is in this way that you should feel towards your
clothes, your books, your cell, and everything else that you make
use of; if ordered to quit them, or to exchange them for others,
have no more sorrow than if you were a statue being uncovered. In
this way you will avoid using them as if they were your private
possession. But if, when you give up your cell, or yield
possession of this or that object or exchange it for another, you
feel repugnance and are not like a statue, that shows that you
view these things as if they were your private property.’

“And this is why our holy founder wished the superiors to test
their monks somewhat as God tested Abraham, and to put their
poverty and their obedience to trial, that by this means they may
become acquainted with the degree of their virtue, and gain a
chance to make ever farther progress in perfection, ... making the
one move out of his room when he finds it comfortable and is
attached to it; taking away from another a book of which he is
fond; or obliging a third to exchange his garment for a worse one.
Otherwise we should end by acquiring a species of property in all
these several objects, and little by little the wall of poverty
that surrounds us and constitutes our principal defense would be
thrown down. The ancient fathers of the desert used often thus to
treat their companions.... Saint Dositheus, being sick‐nurse,
desired a certain knife, and asked Saint Dorotheus for it, not for
his private use, but for employment in the infirmary of which he
had charge. Whereupon Saint Dorotheus answered him: ‘Ha!
Dositheus, so that knife pleases you so much! Will you be the
slave of a knife or the slave of Jesus Christ? Do you not blush
with shame at wishing that a knife should be your master? I will
not let you touch it.’ Which reproach and refusal had such an
effect upon the holy disciple that since that time he never
touched the knife again.” ...