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The case of jealousy presents some analogy with that of impatience, although the latter interferes with peace in a more purely formal and far more superficial way. Impatience as such entirely lacks the aspect of virulent disharmony. The unrest it evokes, though apt to be very drastic in a sense (no other emotion, except anger, makes one so quickly lose one’s self-control), does not exhibit the specific marks of what we described above as psychic alteration. It has much less tendency to work a destructive effect in the depths. Its very explosiveness is linked to its transient character. Withal, impatience constitutes a typical and irksome danger to outward peace. (Ch. 12 considered ways to uproot it.)

Inner peace may be upset by non-reprehensible attitudes such as fear or anxiety

Among the second class of factors that may upset our peace of mind, fear—or, more precisely perhaps, anxiety—ranks foremost. Anxiety is not, by itself, a false and immoral response. There are things we justifiedly fear or dread; nor is there anything intrinsically evil about anxiety, It does not, therefore, cany within it what we have attempted to characterize as poisonous disharmony; yet it is associated with that leaden tinge of disharmony which we have seen to belong to the graver states of depression.

Above all, anxiety impinges on our peace in the sense of its formal or structural derangement. There are kinds of anxiety which plunge us into a state of alteration: what may, in particular, exercise such an effect is the torturing vague fear of some uncertain or indeterminate but grave evil: take, for example, our concern about a beloved person of whom, without being able to account for the delay, we have had no news; or again, our fear lest we should lose the affection of a beloved friend. Such anxieties may bring in their trail all the disturbances characteristic of psychical alteration. Furthermore, there is a specific variety of paralyzing fear. When seized by this, we stare at the approaching danger in a helpless state of numbness, like a bird hypnotized by the cat poised to jump.

Now, as has been hinted before, anxiety, justified as it may be in the world, became a false response after the Redemption of the world by Christ. “In the world you are afraid: but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world.” A true Christian must no longer abandon himself to oppressive or benumbing anxiety. He must conquer it with the weapon of his confidence in God; his consciousness that nothing can separate him from the love of Christ—in the spirit of the Psalmist, saying: “For in Thee, O Lord, have I hoped: Thou wilt hear me, O Lord my God” (Ps. 37:16). He must endeavor to rise above his anxiety with the strength derived from his resignation to the will of God, from the virtue of hope, from his awareness of being sheltered in the Divine Love. Thus, will he regain the peace he has lost through anxiety.

Inner peace may be disturbed by legitimate responses

In regard to the third type of peace-disturbing factors, the situation is vastly different. Mistrust; indignation; the struggles we inevitably have to face on earth; the manifold forms of sorrow and pain that beset us in this valley of tears—here are attitudes and states of mind which have not been rendered invalid even by the Redemption. And yet they, too, may—if we abandon ourselves to their autonomous strain—dislodge our inward peace.

Necessary mistrust may threaten our peace

In particular does this apply to mistrust. Whenever we grow to mistrust a person and start to look behind all his actions and utterances for something different from what they pretend to mean, a specific form of peacelessness is likely to arise in us. We are searching restlessly for something hidden. We tentatively interpret that person’s behavior along varying and contradictory lines. We fall a prey to constant doubt, which cannot but make us prejudiced and diminish our freedom. Our primary, basic contact with the person in question becomes envenomed and atrophied.