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It is often easier to profess Christ in big things and even to accept heavy sacrifices for Christ’s sake, than to put up with disdain or derision in the humdrum situations of daily life. And yet we should at every moment be ready—and gladly so—to pass for a fool for Christ’s sake.

This is not to deny that we do well to avoid in our outward bearing all unnecessary demonstrativeness; to observe certain canons of discretion too often neglected by zealous converts; and to take account of the circumstances, including the degree of susceptibility of those who happen to be present. But this must proceed from a state of inner freedom; from a sovereign attitude of mind rising above the situation. Far from allowing our human respect to make us dependent on the unbelievers’ appreciation or letting our behavior be determined by their taste and their measures, we must—in joyful readiness to appear, if need be, as fools for Christ’s soke—be able to decide before God what, with regard to the salvation of the souls of our fellow men, we should do and what we had better omit.

Indifference to human opinion may have good or bad roots

To be unconcerned from natural motives about our social image is not always a virtue. In some cases, it is an outcome of haughty conceit; a defect that deprives one of every sense of the impression one is likely to make on others.

This attitude is not, at bottom, so very different from that of human respect; for both are derivatives of pride. Only, the unconcerned man differs from the other in that he feels secure (he is usually conceited); whereas the slave of human respect, in addition to his pride, labors under a sense of insecurity.

However, there also exists another type of natural indifference concerning one’s social image, which is by no means objectionable. We mean the attitude of the sober kind of person who is always so much absorbed by the objective theme of the situation that it never even occurs to him to examine what others may think of him. The ingenuous kind of people who simply and spontaneously do what seems right to them, without stopping to consider how others may judge it, belong to the same category. Now the sort of people we have here in mind are undoubtedly very much freer than those afflicted with the ill of human respect. They are healthier and more independent of the tyranny of outward agents.

True freedom judges by the standard of Christ

But they, too, do not possess true freedom in the full sense of the term, which implies a supernatural basis and direction. This true freedom requires us to seek and yearn for nothing but Christ; to be dead unto the spirit of the world; to submit willingly to any humiliation and endure any shame for the sake of Christ; in a word, to live up to the principle: To contemn the world: to contemn contempt.

True freedom means that we see nothing either with the eyes of the world or with the eyes of our nature, but in the light of Christ, and with the eyes of the Faith. He who is truly free is not, then, simply unaware of the effect his behavior may produce on others, but essentially independent of it and superior to the plane of considerations to which it belongs. His conduct will be decided by Christ and His holy word, and not determined, for instance, by an inordinate zeal which, spurning the virtue of discretion, gives vent indiscriminately to one’s natural enthusiasm rather than translating into action a true and unreserved surrender to Christ.

A spectator view of ourselves limits our freedom

Besides the first form of human respect, as discussed above, there is a second one, less reprehensible but still an expression of inner unfreedom. We find it in people who so much attune themselves mentally to their environment that they grow accustomed to see their own behavior with the eyes of others, thus becoming unable to behave in company with any degree of spontaneity.

The image of their own person which they attribute to the spectator warps their attention to the given thematic object. In the end they come to observe themselves from the outside