Transformation in Christ_ On the Christian Attitude - Dietrich Von Hildebrand [129]
To him, a thing is valid for the sole reason that it has long been recognized as such. Accordingly, he inclines not so much to excess and indiscretion (as do those who serve the idols of the day) as to mediocrity. He would not dare to think or do anything that is not sanctioned by the milieu which to him incarnates authority—anything in which he does not feel supported by that public opinion to which he adheres.
Yet, that authority is not defined as such by any objective test, but merely by the fact of its constituting the environment in which he has grown up and whose ideological traits he has come to regard as self-evident. The conventionalist cannot do without the support of such a terrestrial public opinion where he may rest comfortably. Hence, he lacks objectivity and freedom in much the same way as does his progressive counterpart; for he, too, is incapable of an adequate response to values. The views the conventionalist borrows from his system of conventions prevent him from understanding such values as have no place in that set of conventions.
Moreover, even his response to the values that do have a conventional standing is incomplete and falsified inasmuch as his appreciation is primarily conditioned, not by their value-significance as such but by the fact that the values in question happen to be endorsed by convention. If, for instance, the conventionalist is a Catholic, he is that because his parents and his ancestors also were Catholics; because it is the thing to comply with one’s duties towards the Church—not because the Church is the surviving Christ and the depositary of infallible doctrinal authority. Or again, he will practice continence because it is looked upon as indecent to have affairs.
Everywhere an objectively unimportant motivation is substituted for the genuine, the objectively valid one. In his stuffy narrowness, the conventionalist in a sense degrades whatever good he may do to a lower plane than the plane to which it intrinsically belongs. He lacks the sense of distinction between things essential and nonessential. He places any conventional taboos that happen to thrive in his milieu on a level with the commandments of God.
Both conventionalism and bohemianism are incompatible with true freedom
The incompatibility between the conventional attitude and true freedom needs no elaboration. The true Christian is of necessity unconventional. The mere fact that something “has always been done that way,” that it is part of a public tradition, is no motive force with him. He accepts unconditionally only what has been willed by God and is pleasing to God. Great and glorious is the tradition of the Church, without doubt; but that tradition is merely a fruit of her continuity, by virtue of which she preserves through all the whirlpools of the times all that is of true value and of divine origin. It is not, by any means, the automatic product of pure conservatism.
Nothing could be falser, however, than the inference that the anti-conventionalism of the so-called bohemian indicates, therefore, the road to true freedom. The bohemian—the sort of person, that is, who dislikes all fixed rules and loyalties whatsoever, who makes an idol of informality and of the unbridled sovereignty of subjective urges, is as unfree as any conventional bourgeois. For he rejects conventions not inasmuch as they embody illegitimate restraints, but inasmuch as they embody restraints as such.
He fails, exactly as does the bourgeois, to distinguish the essential from the inessential. The conventionalist sets mere accidental human statutes on a level with the divine commandments and with the demands of the true values; so also does the bohemian. Only, while the former assents to all these with the selfsame emphasis, the latter repudiates them all. The conventionalist accepts the divine commandments insofar as they fit in with his system of conventions, and in so doing, he is actuated by the objectively invalid motive that those commandments