Transformation in Christ_ On the Christian Attitude - Dietrich Von Hildebrand [120]
Whoever is so imprisoned by his general disgust at contacts that, even though united to another person by such a bond of love, he still feels repelled by the nearness of that person’s bodily sphere of intimacy, gives proof of a kind of cramped egocentrism in his character. More explicitly, he gives proof of the exaggerated stress he lays on his distinctness from others, owing to his overvaluation of his own self. This attitude of a too anxious isolation of self from strange humanity, an overemphasis of one’s inviolable particularity and distance from others, obstructs the free circulation of love. It is incompatible with that bold self-surrender without which no genuine love is possible.
With an important modification, similar considerations apply to the other great classic type of love (as distinct from the conjugal one, which, anyhow, is a priori restricted to the relations between man and woman): the deep love that animates true friendship, particularly such as is embedded in a common allegiance to Christ. Here, to be sure, the other person’s corporeal intimacy cannot become a source of attraction; but here, too, it must cease to have anything deterrent about it.
Whenever the logic of a situation (we are not maintaining that such situations should expressly be sought for) engages one to undergo a contact with that sphere of corporeal privacy, one should not recoil from it nor be so preoccupied about it as to let one’s inner freedom fall a prey to self-consciousness.
Our love of the other person must span the abyss of his bodily strangeness. Then the contact with his sphere of privacy, as typified, for instance, by our having to drink from the same glass, will acquire a trait of neutrality. If viewed against the background of my spiritual communion with him and of the beauty I see in his soul, the other person’s sphere of bodily privacy will gradually become something familiar to me. My contact with that sphere I shall experience as an obvious consequence of my close solidarity with his personal life, inherent in all genuine relations of love—as is, also, a certain community of possessions; that is to say, one’s spontaneous readiness to share what one has with a friend in need.
A man who lives in Jesus will deem it inconsistent with his true freedom to experience the distance between another person’s bodily privacy and his own as an unbridgeable gulf, especially when his relation with that person is such that they may address to each other the words, “The love of Christ has gathered us together” (Antiphon in the Liturgy of Holy Thursday, Washing of Feet). He who is so far dominated by his reactions of disgust as to live in a continuous solicitude about the protection of his bodily privacy, not allowing either the duty of charity (whenever it presents itself in a way requiring the breaking down of those barriers) or a close personal friendship in Christo to interfere with his anxious self-isolation, is most certainly wanting in true freedom. He is imprisoned in an unessential concern. By yielding to this tendency of his nature, he will in time slide into a kind of spinster-like fussiness about his jealously guarded intangibility—an attitude of prim egotism entirely unworthy of a Christian and certain to make its victim more and more incapable of love.
What true freedom implies in this context is not, in a word, a natural lack of sensitivity to disgusting impressions, nor a primary absence of the sense of distance and privacy, as it occurs in rude and primitive people. The right