Transformation in Christ_ On the Christian Attitude - Dietrich Von Hildebrand [204]
These people, then, fail to recognize the character of earthly existence as a status viae. They are bent on interpreting terrestrial life as a self-sufficient and definitive reality, and to this end attempt to relativize all suffering and disharmony in the world to a level of mere accidentality. By sheer progress within the framework of this world, we must be able to get rid of all disharmony!—such is their contention.
And, clinging to the presupposition of this shallow confidence, they—like thoughtless children—pass by the abysses of human nature; the laws of suffering and death, constitutive for man’s earthly state; the primacy in man’s mundane life of evil and of brute force. To sum up, by comparison with the first discussed category of dull or complacent naturalists they may be said to have caught some glimpse of the truth; yet they, too, are a prey to illusion and fundamentally unaware of the character and meaning of terrestrial reality.
Metaphysical pessimists see misery as our ultimate destiny
Others, again, see exclusively the suffering and disharmony abundant in the world. They feel overwhelmed with the immensity of injustice, oppressed with the shackles of the body. They can no longer grasp the promise of a higher reality in values, so they develop into complete pessimists. Though sufficiently alive to the fact of disharmony, they, too, fall short of understanding the cleavage in our terrestrial world. True, they know and appreciate the higher values; but the metaphysical relevancy of value—its being a mark of our ultimate ordination and destiny—escapes them. In despair or resignation, they believe value to be nothing but a fine illusion. Lower reality is reality proper; to its massive laws we are integrally and inexhaustibly subjected; briefly, misery is our real and ultimate destiny. These metaphysical pessimists are also a species of illusionists. Erecting the disharmony of earthly life into an absolute, they in their turn fail to recognize the character of earthly life as a status viae. We may say that though they are aware at least of our need of redemption, they disbelieve in its actual possibility.
Some see the duality, but think human effort alone can overcome it
Of all minds unenlightened by revealed religion, those—as has been hinted above—come closest to the truth which have grasped the double aspect of human nature, the cleavage between its ordination to value and its tendency to break away therefrom. These are neither optimists nor pessimists; their outlook takes account of the ineliminable duality of earthly existence. They recognize both the primacy in man of the spiritual element and his oppressive dependence on the body and its urges.
Aware, in some way, of the proper destiny of man as well as of how unrealizable it is here on earth, they penetrate the character of earthly existence as a status viae—as something provisional, imperfect, and charged with a meaning which points to a reality outside its range. Thus, they neither ignore man’s need of redemption nor despair of its possibility; however, their vision stops short at the necessity for that redemption to be wrought from above. With Plato, they still believe in a Godward evolution immanent to man. They fail to fathom the depth of the abyss, unbridgeable by all human effort, which separates us from God. Man’s need of a Divine Messiah is what they have failed to comprehend.
The Jews saw man’s need for a divine Redeemer
An entirely new position, by contrast to those discussed above, is the one represented by the Old Testament. The chosen people, to whom God has revealed the true situation of man, know that mankind, fallen through original sin, is marred by a mortal wound which only God can heal. Indeed, the chosen people, the