Why disgust could become a spiritual test
Pus is a bodily sign of illness, and its smell and appearance can provoke an immediate urge to recoil. In accounts of extreme Christian asceticism, drinking it was presented as a way to confront that recoil deliberately. The act was not about enjoying sickness; it was meant to deny disgust the power to dictate how a person treated someone who was ill.
Humility made physical
Christian humility meant more than thinking modestly of oneself. It could involve giving up claims to comfort, status, or cleanliness—and refusing to regard another person’s suffering as beneath one’s attention. By taking into the body something others would shun, a mystic could enact that refusal in a startlingly concrete way.
Such episodes are reported as exceptional acts of devotion, not as ordinary Christian practice. Their force depended on the very revulsion they challenged: the more powerfully the act crossed a boundary of cleanliness, the more dramatically it could signify surrender of pride. In these stories, humility was not just an inward feeling; it was tested at the moment the body wanted to turn away.
