Transformation in Christ_ On the Christian Attitude - Dietrich Von Hildebrand [170]
In addition to the above-discussed habitual forms of our lack of peace, we must note certain more transitory forms. In these derangements we have to distinguish different elements.
All heinous attitudes destroy peace of soul
We begin with the gravest one—that which constitutes a material, intrinsic antithesis to peace as actually experienced. What is meant here is a specific type of disharmony, distinct from the general aspect of disharmony which is inherent in all sorrow, pain, and displeasure, and which may engender lack of peace but does not involve it of intrinsic necessity, (For one may feel a deep sorrow while being entirely at peace.) The disharmony we have in mind here bears a characteristically unhealthy note suggestive of inner strife and decomposition.
Once more, a distinction imposes itself: that note of decomposition may reveal a specifically poisonous or a specifically oppressive tinge. The former belongs to morally reprehensible attitudes only, but not to all of them. It should not be confused, again, with the general aspect of disharmony attendant on all sin as such, which is a consequence of our separation from God and finds its expression in our guilty conscience.
The specifically “poisonous” experience of disharmony which concerns us here is always present in a certain class of attitude, even though the subject may not evince a guilty conscience at all. It is a never-absent concomitant of hatred proper. All heinous attitudes exude, as it were, a venom which is responsible for this corrosive experience of disharmony. To be sure, the hater would apply that venom not to himself but to the thing he hates; yet, whatever satisfaction he may derive from thus mentally injuring and corroding the object of his hatred, that venom inevitably affects—eats, as it were—his own soul. The state of mind into which we are driven by hatred, vindictiveness, envy, jealousy or malicious pleasure necessarily embodies a radical antithesis to true peace—and that in a sense more specific than the one implied by sin and our separation from God as such. So long as we harbor this venom in us we can certainly never attain true peace.
Depression engenders disharmony in our soul
The second variety of such an intrinsic disharmony, with its specifically dark or dismal tinge (as distinct from the tinge of poisonous virulence) accompanies all forms of the depressive states of mind, It need not originate in any morally reprehensible behavior or intention. With its leaden atmosphere of gloom, it exercises a suffocating rather than a corrosive effect on our soul and our interior life. It might be compared to a kind of mildew blighting our entire mode of experience. Its action is, if not a poisoning, a palsying one—with the subject playing a much more passive part than in the case of disharmony issuing from hatred.
Whereas, in our heinous attitudes, we in a sense produce ourselves the venom whose toxic effects we cannot escape, the darkness of such depressive states of mind we suffer as an affliction imposed on us entirely from without.
Excitement and agitation disrupt our peace of soul
The second, more superficial, antithesis to inward peace consists in a formal—rather than intrinsic—derangement of our psychic order. It attaches to the various types of excitement or agitation.
By this we do not mean, of course, that inward tension which is inherent in every ordination to a future aim: that is, in every volition, in every anticipation of a joyous event, in all expectation and hope, in all longing and desiring. Tension in this sense, though it undoubtedly contains in contradistinction to the purely contemplative