Transformation in Christ_ On the Christian Attitude - Dietrich Von Hildebrand [203]
Unless we always keep in mind this dual character of our situation, we cannot dwell in truth fully and adequately. We must never, under the spell of the relative reality of present life, lose sight of the proper and absolute reality of the life to come; but neither must we forget that we are as yet citizens of the earth. To think or behave, in a sense, as though we no longer were in statu viae, is as false as to take our earthly passage for ultimate reality.
Man’s dual aspect can be known by natural reason
Even our natural understanding—an understanding not guided by the light of Revelation—may discern this dual aspect in the features of earthly existence. The truly great among the non-Christian thinkers, such as Plato, were well aware of it. Without knowing about original sin, they saw the breach that runs through the world and ourselves. They perceived that man, according to his essence as a spiritual person, is ordained to the Good and destined to rise towards greater heights; but no less clearly did they perceive the downward drift in man’s nature: his natural proclivity towards bad things. They beheld both the primacy of the spiritual and the rebellion of the flesh against the spirit; both man’s faculty of spiritual concentration and his proneness to abject dissipation. They understood that the Good is more proper to man, more adequate to his inmost meaning: yet at the same time, that evil comes easier to him—that as soon as he relaxes his vigilance and yields to self-indulgence he will infallibly gravitate towards the nether regions. The beautiful myth in Plato’s Phaedrus of the two horses pulling in opposite directions expresses this truth forcefully enough.
These great minds grasped both the truth that the genuine, perennial values herald the higher reality which we surmise to be our homeland proper, and the complementary truth that on this earth, inversely, evil prevails. The deeper and more awake a mind is, the mote it will penetrate, even by its own natural lights, the basic duality of our earthly situation.
Materialists overlook the duality in man
Who, on the other hand, are farthest remote from the truth? Those who, without bothering about their metaphysical situation at all, are blind to objective values as such and entirely imprisoned in the world of their daily concerns; and again, those who are unaware of the scissure in our terrestrial being inasmuch as they only grasp its inferior aspect and content themselves with it.
The first of these two categories are the men without yearning, entirely fascinated by material goods and seeking no satisfaction except in these. By the second category, we mean the explicit materialists, who are convinced that man is nothing but a brute with a particularly well-developed brain. They deny all ordination of man to higher ends as well as all absolute values. They do not do so in a spirit of resignation or pessimism: rather, taking such a world deprived of all higher meaning and value for granted, they try to make it out as something cheerful and acceptable. In ignoring all higher values, they overlook the disharmony inherent in this world. To be sure, this implies an illusive effort to pass over or to explain away—or again, to represent as essentially curable—all ineluctable suffering of mankind as long and as far as it seems in any way possible.
Superficial optimists think we can eliminate all disharmony by secular means
Another false attitude is that of optimistic illusionism proper. Those who profess this error do acknowledge objective values; they are not satisfied with a purely subjective well-being nor exclusively busied with the pursuit of their interests. They are enthusiastic about moral values and capable of zeal in the service of ideals.
But they live without any reference to an eternal destination of man; they talk and behave