Transformation in Christ_ On the Christian Attitude - Dietrich Von Hildebrand [212]
However dark the griefs and terrible the sufferings a Christian may know, over and above them soars the triumphant luster of joy. This is the spirit of the Liturgy. With all its mournfulness, Passion Week leads up to the definitive and ultimate reality of Easter: the soaring beatitude transcending all time; and from the latter is derived the keynote of the Liturgy of the whole year. The seasons of alleluia far outweigh those in which alleluia is not sung. Even during the time of Advent and of Lent, a ray of hope, and with it of joy, is never absent.
To the Church, which sees everything in the light of eternity, joy is the superior and consummate reality. “So also you now indeed have sorrow; but I will see you again and your heart shall rejoice; and your joy no man shall take from you” (John 16:22).
17
Holy Sobriety
Therefore, let us not sleep, as others do;
but let us watch, and be sober. (I Thess, 5:6)
IF WE examine the lives of the saints we shall find that—notwithstanding their fervor, notwithstanding an intoxication with Jesus—they also possess a trait that may best be described as holy sobriety.
Their hunger and thirst after justice, their obsession with God, their overflowing charity towards God and their fellow creatures, their unlimited confidence in God—these traits are apt to make them appear fools in the eyes of the world. However, they are far removed from illusory exaltation and bloodless idealism.
Holy sobriety is marked by genuineness and simplicity
They bear the stamp of genuineness, of truth, of a classic simplicity. Their boldness in overcoming the world is free from romanticism, from any attempt to deny man’s weakness or his bondage to earthly things, from any contempt for the dangers to which our fallen nature is exposed. It is entirely lacking in the artifices of embellishment or the rhetoric of fictitious importance in interpreting human things. Their lives are pervaded by a holy sobriety, which is as distinct from the vulgar sobriety of the so-called realists as it is from romantic illusionism.
Vulgar sobriety is blind to values and to the supernatural
Vulgar sobriety or common sense represents rather something negative. The people we so describe are such as refuse, either explicitly or at least by their concrete behavior, to recognize the reality of value and of the spiritual universe.
The first species—that of the ideological deniers of the power of values—includes all those who profess a distrust of all higher and sublime things, and would allow for the reality of nothing except the palpable and the trivial. Although they might not deny the existence of a spiritual world, they would by no means rely upon that world. They consider all men who do as victims of illusions. They are prone to attribute all actions and feelings of their fellow men to low and prosaic motives.
Behaving, for their part, on more or less consistently utilitarian grounds, they pride themselves on being realists and flaunt their superiority above the idealists, who draw from them a smile of pitying condescension. Even more do they distrust the world of the supernatural. What they can touch and grasp with their hands appears to them the only solid reality.
Obviously, sobriety in this sense is a defect, since it springs from the failure to grasp what is ultimate reality: the supernatural, and all the hierarchy of the universe. Such people are wrong in believing themselves realists; for they