Transformation in Christ_ On the Christian Attitude - Dietrich Von Hildebrand [172]
He who labors under a severe depression will exhibit, not the specific fitfulness and unrest of agitation, but a similar tendency to evade dealing with the cause of his trouble in conscious clarity, and to let himself be possessed by it in an illegitimate fashion.
He, too, is stuck to something—not in the sense of circling around it restlessly, but in the mode of torpor and stagnation. He, no less than the excited type, loses touch with things and persons, and becomes egocentric, without, again, finding himself or preserving an adequate view of his experiences and aims. To him, too, we might apply the simile of the strait jacket. Or, since in him the place of a senseless and spasmodic activity is taken by a morbid passiveness, we might vary the metaphor and describe him as a person living under a glass cover. An experience—a blow, an impression, a situation—which he has not been able to digest sticks, as it were, in his throat. In his paralyzed state, he cannot get over it, nor advance further. Resilience, hope, and confidence are stifled in him.
Material and formal elements of disharmony sometimes combine in us
Both types of actual or psychic lack of peace—the intrinsic and the merely formal one—imply that some aspect of an experience or an event acquires a subjective emphasis out of proportion with its true significance. The subject accords to it a place in his life which is in no way justified by its objective content.
As we have noted in the context of depression, the derangement of our inward peace may combine, in the concrete case, the material aspect of qualitative disharmony with the formal one of an immanent disorder among the subject’s mental concerns. In fact, this is what happens most frequently. But that is no reason for abandoning the clear distinction between the two types of psychic factors militating against inward peace.
With regard to this double aspect, psychic or actual peace presents a clear analogy with the habitual or superactual one. Just as habitual peace is characterized by a formal and a material element—simplicity and unity on the one hand, the soul’s participation in the qualitative harmony of the Good on the other—actual peace, in its turn, admits of a distinction between its formal and its material sides: the state of habitare secum, of an immanent psychic order, as opposed to the disorder of agitation; and again, the quality of intrinsic harmony as opposed to the note of disharmony, be it of a virulent and poisonous or of a leaden, dismal tinge.
Outward factors may also disturb our inner peace
Now as to the various outward factors that may, even though we be habitually at peace, disturb our peace on the plane of actual psychic life, these are, generally speaking, evils which have befallen us or which threaten us: more particularly, cares or preoccupations of all kinds. The proper root of the disturbance, however, always lies in a false mental attitude within ourselves which allows these outward factors to act upon us disproportionately or lures us into opposing them with exaggerated or irrational reactions.
A threefold division commends itself here. Our inward peace may be marred, first, by an attitude which in itself is morally reprehensible, such as envy, hatred, jealousy, or, at a different level of relationships, impatience.
It may be interfered with, secondly, by responses which are not in themselves condemnable, nay, which in the context of a purely natural outlook appear rational and justified; which, however, in view of an interpretation of the universe as derived from Revelation, and particularly of the consequences of the Redemption, imply, on man’s part, an inadequate response to his essential situation. Especially, the manifold varieties of