Mortification

MORTIFICATION. - A Christian ascetical term denoting the privations imposed on oneself in order to master the disordered tendencies of nature, with a view to moral and spiritual perfection. The word is of Pauline origin (Col. 3:5; Rom. 8:13).

Mortification presupposes a personal commitment to overcome the world condemned by Jesus Christ (John 17:9-16) and constituted by the "concupiscences of the eyes and of the flesh, and the pride of life" (1 John 2:16), rooted in every man. In order to avoid sin and to advance in the perfect moral life, it is therefore necessary to fight and overcome very many inclinations, which arise from a nature vitiated by original sin. This self-renunciation is rightly called "mortification" insofar as it puts to death the desires of one's own ego. Its object extends beyond what is forbidden or commanded; acts of mortification are performed not only to overcome present temptations, but also to surpass oneself in things that are lawful.

Mortification is "habitual" when the soul is dead to the world of concupiscences: "the followers of Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and its concupiscences" (Gal. 5:24); it is "actual" when an exercise of detachment from the world or of renunciation of one's own tendencies is performed. This happens either by patiently submitting to the various trials, adversities and afflictions that arise independently of one's own initiative, and this is "passive" mortification; or by spontaneously inflicting renunciations on oneself, or by performing painful acts, and this is "active" mortification. According as this happens through predominantly interior acts (humiliations, renunciations of judgment, of curiosity, etc.) or exterior ones (bodily afflictions, austerities, privations of sleep, food, comforts, etc.), mortification is "internal" or "external."

The necessity of mortification for the salvation and sanctification of the soul is a truth repeatedly inculcated by Scripture in the most categorical manner. Already the Old Testament admonished: "Do not follow your passions and turn away from your desires" (Ecclus. 18:30). In the New Testament the teaching of Jesus and his Apostles is explicit: "If anyone wishes to come after me, let him deny himself, take up his cross daily and follow me" (Luke 9:23; cf. John 12:24; Matt. 22:37; Mark 8:35, etc.). The Church, heir of the mystery of the Cross, has always inculcated mortification as an indispensable means for loving God; Innocent XI condemned the contrary doctrine of Molinos (v.), who had maintained: "Crux voluntaria mortificationum pondus grave est et infructuosum, ideoque dimittenda" (Denz-U. 1258-59). All the saints have taught and practiced mortification and the love of the Cross. Even those who apparently followed a gentler life, such as St. Francis de Sales and St. John Bosco, performed extraordinary penances by depriving themselves of sleep, or fasting, or inflicting other austerities on themselves. In fact the Church requires external and even bodily mortification in order to declare the heroic virtues of a servant of God (cf. Benedict XIV, De beat. et can. Sanctorum, III, chap. 28). It does not require a determined kind of mortification, but one or another. The Imitation of Christ, a compendium of evangelical and ecclesiastical teaching, rightly affirms: "As much as you do violence to yourself, so much will you profit" (I, chap. 25).

Indeed, as St. Paul teaches, "we have been buried with Christ through Baptism into death." Our old man was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be reduced to nothing, so that we might no longer be slaves of sin (Rom. 6:6). In the Christian, who must "live for God in Christ Jesus" (ibid., 6:11), sin must not reign, nor must he obey the concupiscences of the mortal body. But since concupiscence persists in man even after justification, left to him in order to exercise virtue (Tridentine, sess. V, decr. super pecc. orig.: Denz-U, 792), he must fight against it, so that it may be held as dead and buried, and the soul may persevere in the state of Grace. Mortification is therefore indispensable, according to Christ's phrase: "The kingdom of heaven is taken by force and the violent seize it" (Matt. 11:12; cf. St. Thomas, Summ. Theol., 2ᵃ-2ᵃc, q. 25 a. 5 and q. 184 a. 2). Mortification, practiced for supernatural motives, is an act of true penance, satisfactory and meritorious. By it all temptations are overcome (in which falls always occur through lack of mortification) and a habitual disposition to humility is generated. By voluntary mortification man remembers that he is a sinner, and fragile; he conceives a spirit of compunction (v.) that prepares the soul for special graces, rendering the Lord propitious to it. Bodily mortification, rather than eradicating vices in an almost physical or physiological manner, removes or reduces them through the supernatural motives that it impresses on the soul and the efficacious graces that it draws from God, which make one hate evil.

Three principal degrees of mortification may be distinguished: a) to overcome in oneself the tendencies to sin, avoiding every attachment to a creature that is against the will of God; by such mortification one regulates everything according to Christian morality (H. Noldin, Theol. moralis, 27th ed., I, Innsbruck 1941, p. 91); this mortification is necessary for salvation, and by it one reaches out toward perfection by combating even the last semi-adverted or semi-deliberate venial faults. b) Not to love or hate any created thing for its own sake, that is, to detach oneself from things, so as to will them only insofar as they are the object of God's will (v. INDIFFERENCE). c) To embrace voluntarily for the love of God things contrary to one's own tastes, to renounce even lawful pleasures, to enjoy them as if not enjoying them (1 Cor. 7:29 ff.) with an interior renunciation, so as to render oneself thus more like Christ suffering, victims with the Victim of Expiation par excellence (cf. B. Rogacci, Dell'uno necessario, Rome 1704-1708, pp. 3, 19). Thus one arrives at the love of the Cross, which consists in preferring, even at equal glory of the Lord, sacrifice rather than pleasure, in order to be able to demonstrate thus more effectively one's love for God, who for love of man chose the Cross (Heb. 12:2). "Since Christ has suffered in the flesh, arm yourselves also with the same mind," says St. Peter (1 Pet. 4:1). Mortification must always be performed with a great spirit, that is, generous, and regulated by prudence.

To the question whether Christian perfection can also require the mortification of the so-called highest "human values" such as art, science, personal independence, civil life, the answer can only be affirmative. Thus in fact Jesus Christ acted, who, especially in his hidden life at Nazareth, almost buried himself, and very many saints did likewise. The justification of this kind of death or destruction in oneself of what is most noble in human life, carried out to the extent that Divine Wisdom may require of its elect in determined circumstances, is deduced first of all from the "full freedom" that the Christian must have before all that is created and even before himself with respect to God, who is above all things, and to his wills. The renunciation of such values, when God requires it, is a concrete demonstration of the "absolute primacy" of God and of supernatural things over all natural things, even the highest. In such cases the soul can practically manifest that it loves God "above all things." This mortification is legitimized by the fact that it is a renunciation of transitory and temporal things in view of those definitive and eternal; there is therefore the sacrifice of the less for the greater. In man fallen through original sin, human nature must be considered in a certain sense burdened with a debt of expiation and satisfaction, and therefore it is understood that God

God could require of it the sacrifice even of things that are precious. Jesus Christ brought his humanity to death on the cross, and the Redemption was thus accomplished. Christian asceticism cannot abstract from the truth defined in the Council of Orange concerning the fallen state in which humanity finds itself and the necessity of a penal restoration; and thus is explained the penitential character of all human history and of every true asceticism that does not wish to be tinged with Pelagianism (cf. Conc. Arausicanum, II: Denz-U, 174; St. Augustine, De nupt. et concup., II, 34, 57: PL 44, 471).

Arnaldo M. Lanz