Saint Paul wrote to the Christians of Rome beseeching them, as he besought all the churches, to practice asceticism. It was necessary that they do so if they were to fulfill their vocation as Christians. Self-denial is the characteristic of those who follow Christ, because the sign of the Christian is the sign of the Cross. We are incorporated by Baptism into the Mystical Body of Christ, but we must grow in Him, proving ourselves by good works to be the Sons of God. The principle of this growth and of these works is the Spirit of God, the Spirit of our adoption as sons of God. “Whosoever are led by the Spirit of God,” says Saint Paul, “they are the sons of God. 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.”1 And so, the Apostle adds:2 “I beseech you, therefore, brethren, that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, pleasing to God: your reasonable service.”
What does it mean for us to sacrifice our bodies to God? Christians do not throw themselves into volcanoes, like Aztecs. What is this sacrifice? Saint Thomas Aquinas makes clear the theology of Saint Paul. We can sacrifice our bodies to God by accepting martyrdom—that is to say, by suffering a violent death that is inflicted on us for our faith or for any of the other Christian virtues. We can also sacrifice our bodies to God by fasting and abstinence and other works of asceticism. But we are not permitted, for the sake of self-denial, wantonly to destroy the health of the body. This would incapacitate us for the third way in which we must sacrifice our bodies to God: that is, in good works and worship. Saint Thomas briefly discusses the qualities of this self-sacrifice. He emphasizes the fact that it must be guided by faith and by a pure intention and above all that it must be a “reasonable service.”
Reason brings with it decency and order. Saint Thomas quotes another principle of Saint Paul’s: “Let all things be done among you with decency and in order.”3 Our asceticism is reasonable, orderly, and decent when our exterior actions are ordered to interior virtues and when, among these virtues, all are directed to the growth of the supernatural life of faith, hope, and charity in our souls. Our exterior acts of mortification or prayer are means to a spiritual end, not ends in themselves. Now, the rational use of means to an end demands that the means be proportioned to their end. As Saint Thomas observes, with Aristotelian balance and good sense: “A doctor tries to give his patient as much health as he can, but not as much medicine as he can: for he only prescribes as much medicine as the patient seems to need for his health.”4 A man who takes medicine not because he is ill but because he has a sort of compulsion complex about medicine is a hypochondriac. There are also spiritual hypochondriacs who take many medicines they do not need while at the same time avoiding the penances that would really do them good—the ones that exact discipline from their will and their reason. The true measure of asceticism, says Saint Thomas, is charity. Self-denial is the mark of the Christian only because it is the negative predisposition for that charity by which alone it can truly be known whether or not we belong to Christ. We have to deny ourselves because, in practice, love that is centered in ourselves is stolen from God and from other men. Love can only live by giving. When it steals and is stolen, it dies, because it is no longer free.
Saint John of the Cross repeats the teaching of Saint Thomas and Saint Paul in a passage that will surprise many of those who have never given the Carmelite the benefit of a careful reading. This is another illuminating chapter of The Dark Night of the Soul—one in which Saint John describes a certain self-willed gluttony for exterior penance which he calls an imperfection of “beginners.” He goes on to say that this kind of asceticism is “no better than the penance of beasts.”5
This seemingly contemptuous term has a precise meaning for Saint John of the Cross. He would not have used it otherwise. Why beasts? Remember Saint Paul’s distinction between the “animal man” (animalis homo) who does not understand the things of God and the “spiritual man who judgeth all things.”6 Here is Saint John’s exegesis of the text: “By the animal man is here meant one that uses sense alone; by the spiritual man, one that is not bound or guided by sense.”7 It is the traditional interpretation of these expressions. In fact, the Douay version of the Bible translates animalis homo as “the sensual man.”
Avidity for exterior mortifications is a kind of sensuality in reverse. It drives the penitent to punish his flesh because of the pleasure he takes in these exercises. However, it would betray ignorance of religious psychology to label all such manifestations of religious enthusiasm as “masochism.” A careful distinction must be made between the excesses of a psychologically healthy soul and the aberrations of a neurotic. Saint John of the Cross is not here talking about a sick mind but about spiritual imperfection. Therefore, it must be said at once that no healthy mind takes pleasure in pain as such. A morbid love of suffering for its own sake would be an indication of neurosis. Saint John of the Cross is talking not about neurotics but about athletes. The pleasure such men derive from their fasts and penances springs not from the pain which they inflict upon their bodies but from the sense that they are doing things which are objectively painful without suffering as much as one might expect. In other words, they taste a delightful sense of having somehow risen above pain by courage and moral stamina. Far from being neurotic, this is a very healthy natural instinct. It is good for man to rejoice in the exercise of fortitude. If most men did not feel satisfaction in overcoming obstacles, they would be so weighed down by depression at the labor of negotiating them that they would probably never face them at all. And yet, the highest fortitude is that in which we overcome obstacles without any appreciable feeling of satisfaction. The bravest man is not the one who never feels fear, but the one who overcomes the greatest fear and goes through danger cool in the presence of terror.
But if the instinct to rejoice in one’s moral strength is basically healthy, the abuse of it is a moral imperfection. The purpose of mortification is to liberate the spirit and make it plastic in the hands of God. The man who allows himself to become absorbed in an inordinate attention to penitential exercises for their own sake ends, in fact, by being constantly preoccupied with what he is doing to himself and how he is taking it. Instead of getting away from himself, he has imprisoned his spirit in a labyrinth of self-will and self-deception. The exercises that ought, by rights, to bring him to a state of liberty and detachment have ended, rather, by making him more attached than ever to his own will and his own judgment.
Now, the secret of detachment, as we have seen, consists in acting not according to the impulsions of our own fancy and good pleasure but in following the guidance of reason enlightened by faith, whether the path it points out to us should suit our tastes or not. For members of religious orders the path of faith and reason is also the path of obedience. Here is how Saint John of the Cross describes the imperfection which he calls “spiritual gluttony.” First: What is the essence of this disorder? It consists in following the attraction “of the sweetness and pleasure which they find in [penitential] exercises, and striving more after spiritual sweetness than after spiritual purity and discretion which is that which God regards and accepts throughout the spiritual journey.” 8
The reader should by now be attuned to implications of the word “discretion” in Christian asceticism. It might better be translated here as “discrimination,” and it conveys the idea of a purified spiritual sensitivity by which the ascetic distinguishes what is fine, in the interior life, from what is gross. Discretion in its highest sense is a kind of spiritual instinct by which we immediately recognize the difference between impulsions of pride (even under the most spiritual of disguises) and the inspirations of divine grace.
Saint John of the Cross goes on:
Besides the imperfections into which the seeking for sweetness of this kind makes them fall, the gluttony which they have makes them continually go too far, so that they pass beyond the limits of moderation within which the virtues are acquired and in which they consist. For some of these persons, attracted by the pleasure which they find therein, kill themselves with penances and others weaken themselves with fasts, by performing more than their frailty can bear, without the advice of any, but rather endeavoring to avoid those whom they should obey in these matters; some indeed dare to do these things even though the contrary has been commanded them.9
The situation is one which anyone who has lived in a fervent contemplative monastery will easily recognize. And it must be said that it is perhaps better, after all, when monks are eager to do too much penance than when they seek to do as little as they can. For the passion that drives men to undertake hard and seemingly heroic things provides good raw material for sanctity. With wise direction, you can make something of such men. But what can be done with people who have decided beforehand that every obstacle is insuperable and that all hardships are unbearable and that every mortification is extreme? They turn whole monasteries into hospitals, and their spiritual directors must rest content if they can get them to keep the fasts of the Church and say their prayers of obligation. Returning to Saint John of the Cross and his spiritual athletes, we find the Carmelite mystic once again demonstrating, without any ambiguity or compromise, that reason is the cornerstone of his asceticism. He says:
These persons are most imperfect and devoid of reason; for they set bodily penance before subjection and obedience, which is a penance of the reason and discretion, and therefore a sacrifice more pleasing to God than any beside. [Their attachment to bodily penance] is no more than the penance of beasts, to which they are attracted, exactly like beasts, by the pleasure and desire which they find therein. Inasmuch as all extremes are sinful, and as in behaving thus such persons are working their own will, they grow in vice rather than in virtue.10
It is significant that some of the strongest language used by Saint John of the Cross is poured out on the heads of men who defied reason with an inordinate love of bodily penance. But the most important thing about this paragraph of The Dark Night is that it lays down the fundamental principle to which we have already alluded, and which is the test of true discretion.
The success or failure of a man’s spiritual life depends on the clarity with which he is able to see and judge the motives of his moral acts. To use a term canonized by ascetic tradition, the first step to sanctity is self-knowledge. It is the function of reason to judge these motives, to try the purity of our intentions, and to evaluate the objects of our desire and all the circumstances that surround our moral activity. But this work of reason is obstructed and fouled by a habit of acting on impulse every time we are prompted by the instinctive motions of passion and desire.
Now, the impulsions of desire which present the greatest problem in the ascetic life are not those which reach out for an object that is manifestly evil. On the contrary, the biggest task of reason, in the spiritual life, is to unmask disordered impulsions that seem at first to be spiritual and aimed at the highest good. The reason why so many pious men fail to become saints is that they do evil for the glory of God.
The apparent ruthlessness of Saint John of the Cross consists in the fact that he turns the merciless light of an intellect purified by the fire of God upon scores of objects and desires which seem, to the misguided, to belong to the very essence of sanctity and Christian perfection: and he condemns them all. Not that they are all evil: but the mere fact that they are not good enough means that they are not worthy of our desire. We must turn aside from them and look elsewhere. Not only the good things of the world are to be renounced by the ascetic but even some of the highest gifts and favors of God. Not that we should formally refuse a gift of God: but we must always be careful to receive His extraordinary favors in such a way that our desire is centered on the Giver, not on the gift itself.
But the pleasures of the interior life are so great and so pure; they so far transcend the crude joys of sense and of this world, that they exercise a terrible attraction upon the soul that meets them along its road to God. The thought of these pleasures, the memory of them and the hope of their recapture move a man to the very depths of his spirit and almost turn him inside out with the vehemence of great desire. He will do the wildest things if he believes that it will bring back two minutes of the joy he has once tasted in what seemed to be a vision of God. He will go to the ends of the earth to hear some unutterable word that once left him suspended between time and eternity. He will kill himself to hear some echo of that sweet voice. But Saint John of the Cross tells him that every one of these impulsions must be slaughtered with the blade of reason and that the way to God is a way of emptiness, without refreshment and without pleasure, in which we seek no light but faith and hear no voice but that of faith —so that, in the end, we must always walk in darkness. We must travel in silence. We must fly by night.
That is why some of the saint’s maxims chill the enthusiasm of immature contemplatives with incomprehension and surprise. Is it really the author of The Living Flame of Love telling us these things?
Enter into account with thy reason to do that which it counsels thee on the road to God, and it will be of greater worth to thee with respect to God than all the works which thou doest without this counsel and all the spiritual delights which thou seekest.
Blessed is he who puts aside his pleasure and inclination and regards things according to reason and justice in order to perform them.
He that acts according to reason is like one that eats of substantial food, and he that is moved by the desire of his will is like one that eats insipid fruit.11
Another maxim—this time rather curious—brings us to a new aspect of our subject. It reminds us of the doctrine which readers more readily associate with Saint John of the Cross—that of passive prayer and of the infused light and love of the Holy Spirit. It recalls that sometimes the soul is, indeed, passively moved by spiritual impulsions that proceed from another.
Consider that thy guardian angel does not always move thy desire to act, though he ever illumines the reason. Wherefore stay thou not for desire before thou perform a virtuous deed since reason and understanding suffice thee.12
Perhaps Saint John was thinking of the Quietists, who believed that those who followed the interior way of spiritual prayer could never permit themselves to perform any act of virtue without feeling themselves positively and sensibly urged to do so by an interior impulsion from God.
This is one of the few places where Saint John of the Cross refers to the mediation of angels in our mystical life—a subject which is emphasized by Pseudo-Dionysius. In any case, here he is definitely talking about mysticism. The reason does not play an active part in mystical experience as such. Contemplation is, strictly speaking, mystical in proportion as our faculties are moved passively by special inspirations from God. There is a level of prayer in which the faculties are not totally absorbed in God. But when the will and reason can still act on their own initiative, even though they do so in conjunction with some passive movement received from God, our contemplation is less pure.
Nevertheless, there is an essential continuity between these two levels of spiritual activity. The doctrine of Saint John of the Cross on this point is, once again, based on the teaching of Saint Thomas. Here is the Thomistic principle which is reflected in the maxim we have just quoted from Saint John of the Cross. The spiritual life of the Christian is an ordered ascent to perfection. From the beginning of this ascent to the end, man is moved, enlightened, strengthened, led, and elevated by the action of God. At first, God acts on man through the instrumentality of man’s own reason, enlightened by grace and directed by the virtues. Later on, God moves the spirit of man in a more direct and intimate fashion, through the special inspirations which we are disposed to receive by the seven Gifts of the Holy Ghost. But whether man be led by his reason or moved directly by God, the end is the same and the work done is essentially the same, for in either case God is bringing the spirit of man into divine union by the perfection of faith, hope, and love.