Chapter I. Mortification or Active Purification

Spiritual progress, being especially progress in charity, ought to make us fulfill more and more perfectly the two great precepts of love of God and of neighbor, to which the other commandments and the three evangelical counsels are subordinated. In other words, we must make God some return for the love He has shown us in creating us, in preserving us, in having us participate in His intimate life, in increasing the life of grace in us that He may bring us to the life of eternity. Progress in charity is measured not by sensible consolations, which sometimes accompany devotion, but by two essential manifestations: a dying to sin and progressive configuration to Christ Jesus by imitation of His virtues.

Let us consider these two signs of spirtual advancement; and first, the dying to sin. Speaking to all of us, as St. Luke remarks, our Lord said : "If any man will come after Me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow Me." 1 "Let him deny himself": this is the law of mortification, which should be self-imposed. "Let him take up his cross": this is the obligation to bear patiently the trials God Himself sends us to purify us and to make us work for the salvation of souls. To make it clear that renouncement is not an end, but a means, masters of the spiritual life often call mortification active purification because we impose it on ourselves, and the

cross passive purification, because it is imposed on us. Both of these forms of purification we are about to discuss; the former, first.

Mortification and humility as permanently organized in the religious life through the practice of the three counsels of poverty, chastity, and obedience, are things so contrary to the spirit of the world that it feels forced to deny their necessity. Practical naturalism keeps reappearing, in one form or another, and it always makes little of mortification and the vows of religion, fancying that diese vows are not means of deliverance for a man, but an obstacle to the good he ought to achieve. It questions why Christianity talks so much about mortification, if it is a doctrine of life; of renouncement, if its task is to assimilate rather than to destroy human activity; of obedience, if the gospel is a doctrine of liberty. Naturalism contends that these passive virtues have nothing but the force of inertia, and matter little except for negative souls incapable of positive activity.

It asks why we should depreciate our natural activity, reminds us that nature is good and comes from God, who has made it with a bent to love its Author more than itself and above all things. We are told to recall that our passions or emotions, that is, the different movements of our sensible appetite, such as desire and aversion, joy and sadness, are morally neither good nor evil; they become so only through the intention of our will when consenting to them, arousing diem, controlling them, or failing to control them. The point is then made that we need not mortify the passions but only regulate them, as they are forces to be utilized, not destroyed. An appeal to the teaching of St. Thomas follows, noting how much he differs from many spiritual authors and in particular the author of The Imitation.¹ That the expressions found in the latter's treatment of "the different motions of nature and of grace" are somewhat Jansenistic is delicately proposed.

To wage such war on our own judgment and will may make us a prey to scrupulosity, reduce us to a state of servitude, and rob us of all spontaneity. We should not condemn the life of the world, since Providence has placed us in the world, not to fight it but to make it better. The value of religious life can be measured by its social influence. That it may exercise this influence, it must not be hampered by excessive preoccupation with renouncement, mortification, humility, and obedience. On the contrary, it ought to permit the greatest possible development of the spirit of initiative and every natural aspiration. Only in this way can we understand the people of our own time and make contact with a world we should not despise but improve. This is the objection formulated by Americanism and repeated by Modernism, a clever mixture of truth and falsity which invokes St. Thomas' authority for support

St. Thomas does say that the emotions or movements of the sensible appetite, the passions as he calls them, are forces to be utilized and not destroyed. He also says we should regulate and not kill them. Nevertheless we must not forget that as soon as they are not well regulated by temperance, detachment, chastity, strength, patience, humility, meekness, justice, obedience, and the other virtues animated by charity, these passions become the roots of a host of faults and vices. Almost all the virtues, both the theological and the cardinal, as well as the others connected with them, must avoid two contrary vices. Now vices and their consequences ought not simply to be covered up or regulated or moderated ; they must be rooted out. The virtue of penance inspires us to make reparation for our sins by mortification. 3 St. Thomas has laid open to us, in the Secunda secundae of the Summa theologica, the whole field for mortification by his enumeration of the vices: the seven capital sins, progeny of the three concupiscences and parents each to six or seven offspring worse than themselves. 4 St. Gregory describes the terrible progeny of the capital sins as numbering more than forty vices, which happily at least are not connected like the virtues ; for, unlike the kingdom of good, the kingdom of evil can never be one since it has forsaken unity. 5 The material for mortification is scattered but, sad to say, nowhere lacking, whatever amateurs may say of the "short and easy way" to go to God.

Frequently, too, practical naturalism repeats St. Thomas' principle: "Grace must not destroy but perfect nature." The motions of nature, it is added, are not as disordered as the author of The Imitation says; we must have the full development of nature under grace. When a man lacks the true spirit of faith, he misinterprets the very principle he invokes. St. Thomas as here quoted is speaking of nature in the metaphysical and not in the ascetical sense of the term; that is, of human nature as such, the nature of man as abstractly defined, in its essential goodness as a work of God. As such

• Cf . Ilia, q. 85, concerning the virtue of penance and its relation to the other virtues. *Cf. Ia IIacq.84. 6 Ibid., q. 73, a. 1, ad lum.

it certainly ought to be perfected and not destroyed by grace.

In this instance St. Thomas is not speaking of man's fallen and wounded nature deformed by that often unconscious egoism which alloys so many of our actions, human nature as really found in the concrete since the sin of Adam. And it is of just this nature, hurt by wounds so slow to heal even after baptism, that ascetical and mystical works like The Imitation speak. And they are merely restating what St. Thomas himself taught about the results of original and personal sin. 6 The disorder consequent upon sin ought certainly to be destroyed ; and grace works for this destruction, for it not only lifts us up but also heals us, gratia sanans et elevans.

To a thoughtless young man who never left off invoking the principle, "Grace does not destroy nature," a fine priest and teacher once answered: "Grace not only does not destroy nature, but reconstitutes and restores it by destroying the seeds of death in it; that done, grace perfects nature in proportion to the thoroughness of this salutary destruction, as the lives of the saints all show." Only in the saints can we see what the "full development of nature under grace" means. To look elsewhere is to risk a misunderstanding that may end in perverting it completely, by destroying both nature and grace under the pretext of saving everything.

Because the equivocal use of the word "nature" provides the lukewarm and the mediocre with an escape, they are apt to keep and cherish it with swift and disastrous consequences. The tree is judged by its fruits. Because they have cared too much about the world, these new style apostles have not converted the world but have been converted by it. They begin

2 5 o THE LOVE OF GOD by ignoring the consequences of original sin; holding, with the Pelegians and Jean Jacques Rousseau, that man is born good. Next, they forget the infinite gravity of mortal sin as an offense against God; and consider it only from the human, the external, point of view, by the evident evil it works in the present life. As a natural consequence they cannot appreciate at all the gravity of sins of the spirit: incredulity, presumption, pride, and the disorders resulting from these.

Likewise they disregard the infinite sublimity of our supernatural end. Instead of speaking of the beatific vision and the life of eternity, they indulge in talk about a vague moral ideal, tinged with religion, wherein the radical opposition between heaven and hell disappear. Finally, die writers to whom we refer have completely forgotten that our Lord chose the cross as the great means to save the world.

By its four principal consequences this doctrine plainly reveals its sources: practical naturalism or the practical negation of the supernatural, a principle that has at times been openly declared in this form, "Mortification is not essential to Christianity."

According to the teaching of St. Paul, all these more or less cleverly presented inventions clearly have no connection with the life and doctrine of our Lord and the saints. The work our Savior came to do on earth was not human philanthropy, but divine charity; He accomplished it by talking to men more about their duties than about their rights, by telling them diey must wholly die to sin in order to receive new and abundant life; and He willed to prove His love for diem by dying on die cross for their redemption. The saints have followed Him; they have all been marked by the likeness of Christ crucified; they have all loved mortification and the cross, whether they were saints of the primitive Church, like the first martyrs, or saints of the Middle Ages like St. Bernard, St. Dominic, and St. Francis of Assisi, or saints of more recent times like St. Benedict Joseph Labre and the holy Cure of Ars.

Our Lord was speaking to us all when He said: "If any man will come after Me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow Me. For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: for he that shall lose his life for My sake shall save it. For what is a man advantaged, if he gain the whole world and lose himself and cast away himself?" 7 "Amen, amen, I say to you, unless the grain of wheat falling into the ground die, itself remaineth alone. But if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit. He that loveth his life shall lose it, and he that hateth his life in this world keepedi it unto life eternal." 8 Blessed are they who hate themselves in the sense in which the saints use that expression. Because they glorify God by hating that self within them which is compounded of egoism and pride and by loving dieir own souls holily, in and for God, they glorify Him on earth, and His glory will be their song for all eternity. God helps them in this work of dying that He may make them live with new and superabundant life, for He has said: "I am the true vine; and My Father is the husbandman. Every branch in Me that beareth not fruit, He will take away; and every one that beareth fruit, He will purge it, that it may bring forth more fruit." 9 This pruning

8 John 12: 24 f. •Ibid., 15: if- is surely not done without suffering. The mortification and patience demanded in the Sermon on the Mount, 10 as we shall see, go far in that direction.

St. Paul continues the teaching of the Master. He does not merely say, like pagan moralists, that man must restrain his passions. He says: "I chastise my body and bring it into subjection ; lest perhaps, when I have preached to others, I myself should become a castaway." 11 "The flesh lusteth against the spirit, and the spirit against the flesh. For these are contrary one to another; so that you do not the things that you would." 12 "For I am delighted with the law of God, according to the inward man; but I see another law in my members, fighting against die law of my mind and captivating me in the law of sin that is. in my members. Unhappy man that I am, who shall deliver me from the body of tiiis death ?" 18 "And they that are Christ's have crucified their flesh, with the vices and concupiscences." 14 Moreover, by the works of the flesh, St. Paul meant not simply immorality, licentiousness, but also, as he says in the same place: "enmities, contentions, emulations, wraths, quarrels, dissensions, sects." 16 All of these are opposed to the fruits of the Spirit: "charity, joy, peace, patience, benignity, goodness, longanimity, mildness, faith, modesty, continency." 16 That the new man may live, the old man must indeed die. "This then I say and testify in the Lord: That henceforward you walk not as also the Gentiles. . . . You have not so learned Christ: if so be that

ACTIVE PURIFICATION 253 you have heard Him and have been taught in Him, as the truth is in Jesus: to put off, according to former conversation, the old man, who is corrupted according to the desire of its error. And be renewed in the spirit of your mind; and put on the new man, who according to God is created in justice and holiness of truth. . . . And grieve not the holy Spirit of God, whereby you are sealed unto the day of redemption. Let all bitterness and anger and indignation and clamor and blasphemy be put away from you, with all malice. ... Be ye therefore followers of God, as most dear children; and walk in love, as Christ also hath loved us and hath delivered Himself for us, an oblation and a sacrifice to God for an odor of sweetness." 17

"Therefore, if you be risen with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is sitting at the right hand of God. Mind the things that are above, not the things that are upon the earth. For you are dead; and your life is hid with Christ in God." 18 "If you live according to the flesh, you shall die; but if by the Spirit you mortify the deeds of the flesh, you shall live. For whosoever are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God." 19

The law of mortification and the cross applies especially to apostles, who ought to follow our Lord Jesus Christ more closely that they may manifest Him to the world and save souls. This is why St. Paul writes: "We have this treasure [of divine light] in earthen vessels, that the excellency may be of the power of God and not of us. In all things we suffer tribulation, but are not distressed. We are straitened, but are

not destitute. We suffer persecution, but are not forsaken. We are cast down, but we perish not. Always bearing about in our body the mortification of Jesus, that the life also of Jesus may be made manifest in our bodies. For we who live are always delivered unto death for Jesus' sake, that the life also of Jesus may be made manifest in our mortal flesh. . . . For which cause we faint not; but though our outward man is corrupted, yet the inward man is renewed day by day. For that which is at present momentary and light of our tribulation worketh for us above measure exceedingly an eternal weight of glory." 20

St. Paul's words, like his Master's, are a far cry from the practical naturalism we spoke of earlier; for to maintain that mortification is not of die essence of Christianity amounts to saying that Christianity does not teach us to die to sin and its consequences, that the virtue of penance is unnecessary for Christians. The preaching of the Precursor and all diat St. Paul wrote about putting off the old man and putting on the new have no place in such teaching and have to be passed over or suppressed.

PRINCIPLES OF ST. THOMAS AND ST. JOHN OF THE CROSS CONCERNING NECESSARY PURIFICATION

Later, with St. Thomas, we shall study the four great reasons why mortification and the cross are imposed on us; let it suffice us for the moment to recall as a fundamental principle die specific difference he pointed out between Christian or infused temperance, as described in the Gospel and

St. Paul, and acquired temperance, as described by Aristotle and the great pagan moralists.

He thus expresses himself: "Any change introduced into the difference expressed in a definition involves a difference of species. But the definition of infused virtue contains the words, "which God works in us without us." 21 Therefore acquired virtue, to which these words cannot apply, is not the same species as infused virtue. 22

There is a twofold specific difference among habits. The first is taken from the specific and formal aspects of their objects. Now the object of every virtue is a good considered as in that virtue's proper matter: thus the object of temperance is a good in respect of the pleasures connected with the concupiscence of touch. The formal aspect of this object is from reason which fixes the mean in these concupiscences . . . Now it is evident that the mean that is appointed in such concupiscences according to the rule of human reason, is seen under a different aspect from the mean which is fixed according to the divine rule. For instance, in the consumption of food, the mean fixed by human reason is that food should not harm the health of the body nor hinder the use of reason: whereas, according to the divine rule, it behooves man to chastise his body and bring it into subjection (I Cor. 9: 27), by abstinence in the matter of food and drink and the like. It is therefore evident that infused and acquired temperance differ in species; and the same applies to the other virtues.

The other specific difference among habits is taken from the

22 A virtue is therefore essentially infused when it cannot be acquired by the repetition of acts but can be produced in us only by God. By analogy, theologians generally speak of infused contemplation (although contemplation is not a virtue, a habitus, but an act) because, unlike philosophical or even theological contemplation, it is not die result of our personal activity but is produced in us by a special inspiration of God. Infused contemplation is not an act that we can perform at will, like the ordinary acts of faith, hope, or charity or the simple attentive consideration of the mysteries of faith.

things to which they are directed : a man's health and a horse's are not of the same species, on account of the difference between the natures to which their respective healths are directed. In the same sense, the Philosopher says (Polit., Bk. Ill) that citizens have diverse virtues according as they are well directed to diverse forms of government. In the same way, too, those infused moral virtues, whereby men behave well in respect of their being fellow citizens with the saints, and of the household of God (Eph. 2: 19) differ from the acquired virtues, whereby man behaves well in respect of human affairs.

Infused or Christian temperance and the acquired temperance described by Aristotle are virtues of different orders. The Christian virtue, under the direction of faith and the inspiration of charity and penance, requires mortification that acquired temperance does not demand. Ruled by the principles of natural reason, the acquired moral virtues could go on increasing indefinitely without ever attaining the dignity of the correlative infused moral virtues; for the latter have an essentially supernatural object, inaccessible to the natural powers of man or angel; they are ruled by principles essentially supernatural, and thus, in proportion to their formal objects which specify them, they are directly conformed to participation in the divine nature, that is, sanctifying grace as received at baptism. The infused moral virtues do not belong to the natural order, whether human or angelic, but to the supernatural order of the inner life of God. Hence infused temperance, and the virtues annexed to it, are ruled by faith and infused prudence, under the inspiration of charity and penance. This we know from the Church's doctrines on original sin and the gravity and consequences of mortal sin, as well as other teachings of the Church, all of which can come to us only through divine revelation, since they are above the natural grasp of even the angelic intellects.

Lastly, let us remark that, according to St. Thomas, the infused moral virtues ought to keep growing, to climb toward the summit of perfection, without deviating toward their contrary vices on the right or the left; they are something besides and above the social virtues of a good citizen. They progressively merit the name of purifying (purgatoriae) virtues or virtues of the purified soul (virtutes purgati animt). We recall how St. Thomas describes the purifying virtues: "Some are virtues of men who are on their way and tending toward the divine similitude; and these are called perfecting virtues. Thus prudence, by contemplating the things of God, counts as nothing all things of the world, and directs all the thoughts of the soul to God alone; temperance, so far as nature allows, neglects the needs of the body; fortitude prevents the soul from being afraid of neglecting the body and rising to heavenly things; and justice consists in the soul's giving wholehearted consent to follow the way thus proposed. Besides these, there are the virtues of those who have already attained to the divine similitude: these are called the perfect virtues. Thus prudence sees nothing but the things of God; temperance knows no earthly desire; fortitude has no knowledge of passion ; and justice, by imitating the divine mind, is united thereto by an everlasting covenant. Such are the virtues attributed to the blessed, or in this life to some who are at the summit of perfection." 23

According to St. Thomas' teaching, every Christian should become an interior soul and attain to the truly solid, purifying virtues which, with actual grace, are capable of resisting the

temptations of the world, the flesh, and the devil. But these purifying virtues, as St. Thomas has just described them, are conceivable only in a spiritual organism animated by an already high degree of charity and diey must be accompanied by the corresponding gifts of the Holy Ghost, under the direction of the gift of wisdom. 24 Therefore even people in the active life should aspire to complete development of the spiritual organism ; they ought to tend toward perfection not only by the moral virtues, but by the theological virtues and the gifts. Although evidently not called to the life of a Carthusian or a Carmelite, they ought to remember, as St. Thomas says, that the active life disposes us for the contemplative life, 25 that it precedes the contemplative life "as that which is common to all precedes in the order of generation that which is proper to the perfect." 26 The contemplative life belongs properly to the perfect because, as the holy doctor says, "it is directed to the love of God not of any degree but to that which is perfect." 27 By its radiation, love becomes the veri- . table soul of the aspostolate.

Moreover, many Christian souls ought to unite the life of Martha with Mary's in the mixed life. Our Lord willed His apostles to have this type of life. In itself it is higher than either the active or the purely contemplative life. 28 If our own hearts are not purified, if we ourselves are not closely united to God, we cannot snatch souls from evil, make them love Christ more than themselves, and lead them successfully to the works of salvation.

2S IIa Ilae, q.188, a.6; Flla, q.40, a.i, ad 211m; a.2, ad 311m; Ha Ilae, q.182, a. 1, ad ium.

If a truly perfect life requires the full development of the spiritual organism by the virtues and the gifts connected with charity, a profound purification is needed to reach such a development. To obtain a clear idea of this truth, we need only recall that, in our advance toward the summit of perfection, often we deviate from the right path, and we then try to make good our error in one direction by going as far wrong in the other. Without exterior and interior mortification and the testing of purification, we cannot keep to the ascending course traced by the Lord between negligence and oversolicitude, imprudence and cunning, cowardice and rashness, softness and stubbornness, timidity and pride, discouragement and presumption, self-depreciation and bragging, obedience and servility, inept indulgence and excessive harshness.

We find divergence from the right path easy because of secret pride, of subtle self-love worming its way into the apparent practice of the highest virtues. Therefore, at the beginning of the Ascent of Carmel, St. John of the Cross described a symbolic mount at die base of which the soul finds three paths which seem to lead to the summit; although in reality only one path does so. In the center the narrow way of perfection plunges steeply upward. It begins with total abnegation. At the entrance we read : "Nothing, nothing, nothing," and a little fardier on: "Since I desire nothing out of self-love, everything is given to me without my seeking it."

The misguided spirit may take the way of the good things of the earth, where it is written: "The more I seek, the less I find; I cannot climb the mountain because I have lost my way." Whoever takes this route must ultimately make this admission.

The imperfect spirit chooses a third way — wishing to reach

2 6o THE LOVE OF GOD the goods of heaven without too much trouble and stopping to delight in first consolations or even in the exercise of the apostolate. Over this road we read: "I have dallied and so have not gone far or high, for I did not take the narrow path." To arrive at the summit of perfect union with God, we must take the narrow path of mortification and of the purification of the senses and the spirit: "How narrow is the gate and strait is the way that leadeth to life!" 29 But the route that is so narrow at the beginning widens out more and more in the sketch made by St. John of die Cross. He shows that it leads to the four cardinal virtues, to the virtues of the purified soul, then to the seven gifts, to the perfect theological virtues, to the twelve fruits of the Holy Ghost, and finally to the very summit of the mount where we read: "Divine silence, divine wisdom, unending banquet; the glory and honor of God live alone on this mountain." This is truly, as the Psalmist declares, "a mountain in which God is well pleased to dwell" 30 and to which He calls His friends.

Footnotes

1. Bk. HI, chap. 54. ↩