St Philip Neri, whose feast day was on May 26, had many pithy maxims about the spiritual life. One of them was that you can measure a man’s holiness in the width of three fingers. He would tap his forehead, meaning to signify the extent to which a person’s will – his sense that he knows best – is mortified. There we are straightaway: one of those old-fashioned, off-putting words from spiritual tradition, “mortified”, for which, for it to happen, there is no emotional anaesthetic.
It was recently revealed to me in prayer not only how unmortified my will is, but also that it retains some rebellion. Mortification is not about pain so much as passivity, which is why everything within resists it. It was not being deprived of the taste of forbidden fruit that irked Adam and Eve; it was the thought that God had apparently taken away their agency that gave savour to the serpent’s suggestion.
