Transformation in Christ_ On the Christian Attitude - Dietrich Von Hildebrand [139]
And, because (under the law of true freedom) we seek before all else “the kingdom of God and His justice,” all natural values present themselves to our eyes against the background of the supernatural; therefore, no natural good as such can attract or bewitch us to the point of enslaving us. Its power over us does not extend beyond the limit of its relevancy as viewed in the light of the supernatural. The comparative reserve we impose on ourselves in regard to all genuine goods of the natural order has no meaning but to make us completely free for integral allegiance to the highest good. Once more, the aim is not, as with the stoic, to get rid of all attachments, but to realize one’s unconditional and unhampered attachment to God.
With our entire life informed by the consciousness of “the one thing necessary,” all legitimate ties will assume their proper place as assigned to them by the will of God. True freedom means that, free from all illegitimate ties, we take account of the true hierarchy of values visualized in a supernatural light, and adjust all our attachments to it.
He who is truly free “abides in the truth.” He lives his life in God, before God, and on a basis derived from God. He is no longer enchained to his nature, being able to say with St. Paul the Apostle, “And I live, now not I: but Christ liveth in me” (Gal. 2:20). The free, wide, universal air of the Liturgy breathes through his life.
Freedom means ultimate truth. He who has achieved true freedom is animated by that holy courage, steeped in humility, which says—“I can do all, in Him who is my strength.” Nothing can confound him, for he knows the meaning of St. Paul’s words: “If God be for us, who is against us? He that spared not even his own Son, but delivered him up for us all, how hath he not also, with him, given us all things?” (Rom. 8:31-32).
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Blessed Are They Who
Hunger and Thirst After Justice
THE Sermon on the Mount praises those who “hunger and thirst after justice,” and promises them that “they shall have their fill” (Matt. 5:6). With regard to the state of mind thus glorified, we may distinguish two main types of defective attitudes.
Indifference
First, there is the attitude of general indifference: the unimpassioned dumbness of the kind of man who lacks intensity in all things. This description applies to a great number of psychological varieties. Consider the type of person who is sunk in a sort of placid inertia or the superficial mind flitting from one object to another with no genuine interest in any one of them; the seeker for shallow pleasures or the philistine established in his smug mediocrity, who shuns all greatness, all heroism, all fervor, and contemplates the world through minimizing glasses, as it were; or again, the anxious man who dreads being seized by any object or inflamed by any overwhelming experience—all these have one trait in common: all spiritual hunger and thirst is alien to them.
They do not really hunger, they do not strongly yearn, either for a true value or even for a subjective pleasure; they evince only a languid and conditional interest in anything. It is to such souls that the Apocalypse of St. John refers in these words: “I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot. I would thou wert cold, or hot. But because thou art lukewarm and neither cold, nor hot, I will begin to vomit thee out of my mouth” (Rev. 3:15-16).
Secondly, there are those who do hunger and thirst, not, however, after justice (that is to say, after something valuable in itself), but merely after things that in some way happen to appeal to them personally. Yet these, again, we must divide into two subclasses.
“Hunger” rooted in pride and concupiscence
The first group consists of those dominated by pride or concupiscence, the