Transformation in Christ_ On the Christian Attitude - Dietrich Von Hildebrand [133]
However, the mere fact that they bear a responsibility expressible in juridical terms, or that they have charged themselves with a task, does not confer upon the thing they are attending to a surplus of objective significance above everything else, Often, for instance in the minds of such people, vocational obligations will unduly outweigh the demands of charity; or again, kind offices or acts of charity to which they have formally committed themselves will take precedence over others which lack the motive of a formal commitment, even though the latter may imply a deeper meaning and constitute, in the ultimate sense, a higher obligation.
To this type of mind, duty is primarily defined in terms of a tangible, outward, officially sanctioned and specified obligation: one that can somehow be subsumed under the aspect of juridical obligations. They tend to overemphasize such obligations as result from ties either of kinship or of contract, and to underestimate such others as follow inherently (but less automatically, being less susceptible of a statutory formulation) from the logos of a deep and meaningful relation of friendship.
Obligations implicit in the logos of love they will at best take for granted inasmuch as they have their place in the framework of conjugal or family relationships; yet even as regards the sublime and holy obligations inherent in marriage, they will stress their legal aspects in a one-sided approach. Whatever lacks the official hallmark of obligation they would hesitate to recognize as obligatory.
In such cases, then, the consciousness of obligation does not arise organically from a true appreciation of values; it lies rooted, rather, in a general disposition to cramped and constrained states of mind. Persons of this type, as soon as they enter into a situation that implies an element of publicly recognized, formal obligations, develop a kind of interior spasm in which they stay immured, with souls deaf to other and higher demands. Subordinating themselves entirely to the autonomous mechanism of a definite set of obligations, they become unable to see either the duties in question or the hierarchy of values in general according to their true proportions.
Should they even theoretically discern the superiority of some value outside the circle of those duties or recognize the primacy of some demand of another order, in fact they will not be able to relax their taut attention to the task with which they have charged themselves and in which they are held tight as in a strait jacket. They are simply unable to break through the automatism of that self-imposed strain. Though they were ever so much attracted by some other theme, though their heart cried out after that new value—the compulsion is stronger than they. They fail to overcome the delusion that represents to them this pure dynamism of obsession under the specious guise of an objective command. If once in a while they are in some way forced to quit the charmed circle that holds them prisoners, they are tormented by pangs of conscience.
Self-indulgence means yielding to one’s dispositions instead of to values
It must be clearly seen that whenever we yield to these spastic tendencies of our nature—even to this “duty spasm”—we in truth make ourselves guilty of a kind of self-indulgence. For the decisive mark of self-indulgence is not relaxation, but the fact of letting one’s attitude be determined by one’s natural dispositions rather than adjusting it to the demand of the object. What these natural dispositions are varies, of course, according to individual characters, The point at issue, however, is whether one delivers oneself over to the autonomous process of one’s natural tendencies or responds to the appeal of objective values and the call of God.
True freedom overcomes self-indulgence by responding to the call of God
The true Christian never lapses into self-indulgence and therefore is past enslavement to a cramp-mechanism. He possesses that inward attitude of serene aliveness which implies an eager response, unhampered by any tyrannical