Transformation in Christ_ On the Christian Attitude - Dietrich Von Hildebrand [218]
The sober man is free from the obsession that he must needs be something unique and extraordinary, and is free from all narrowing crampedness. He takes account of reality as it is—of the whole of reality, to be sure, not (as does the self-styled realist) of its crude and base aspects only. He is aware that by himself he amounts to nothing but that he may say with St. Paul, “I can do ail things in Him who strengtheneth me” (Phil. 4:13). He knows that God can and will regenerate him if he cooperates. He knows that Christ has redeemed him and communicated His holy life to him.
The “natural idealist” is blind to human weakness
His spiritual impetus, therefore, is entirely different from that of the natural idealist. The idealist inclines to overrate the power of the human spirit as such; he believes himself able to rise above his human weakness by purely natural means: that is to say, by sheer moral effort. He is prone, also, to overlook man’s bondage to earthly conditions in general; to interpret the frailty inherent in man’s constitution as a merely accidental shortcoming.
Thus, his lofty mood involves a certain divorce from reality; his bold perspectives are never free from a trait of anemic thinness and of reckless illusionism. He would storm the skies by flight, like Icarus—instead of humbly ascending step by step the narrow, steep, and laborious path that leads to eternity. His attitude has something forced and high-strung about it. His enterprise is doomed to failure, for it rests on a gigantic illusion concerning human nature, whose dismal abysses he hardly even suspects. He fails, in a word, owing to his ignorance of man’s need of redemption.
The saint builds his hopes on confidence in God
Of a wholly different kind is the spiritual elan that characterizes the saint. Humbly aware of his own weakness, clearly conscious of his need of being redeemed, in an unrestrained avowal of man’s frailty and enchainment to earth, he looks up to God and prays: “God, come to my assistance.” He would not, then, start building the tower without knowing the foundations.
But again, full of insatiable longing he looks up to Christ, and unreservedly follows Him who spoke the words, “If any man thirst, let him come to me and drink” (John 7:37). With the Apostles, he responds to the Lord: “Thou hast words of eternal life.”
He builds his life not on ideals but on the supreme and ultimate reality, the Being most real, the ens realissimum: on God. He cooperates in being lifted above his nature by Christ, and unites his will to grace, hoping that grace may not work in him in vain.
His elan is a response to the Lord’s call, “Follow me”: a fruit of his faith in Christ, who has turned a Saul into a Paul, and whom St. John in the Apocalypse heard pronounce the words, “Behold, I make all things new.”
His elan is a fruit of his hope based on the transforming power of grace, which made a band of simple, ignorant fishermen into luminaries of the Church; a fruit of his love for Christ, whose most holy countenance has drawn him into its orbit of light. Therefore, it has nothing superficial and anemic, nothing romantic and unreal about it; it is genuine, strong, and victorious. The saint dwells in the truth fully; he alone takes account of the whole of reality.
Holy sobriety permeates the Liturgy
This spirit of holy sobriety permeates the entire Liturgy, which exhibits no trace of a tendency to cover up painful things, but looks integral reality in the face. No prudishness whatsoever, no illusive denial of human nature is encountered there. But all things are seen in their highest light, and every good is grasped according to its meaning in the order of creation. Human frailty, the dangers which encompass us, all chasms and crevices of our fallen nature—we see them inexorably contrasted with the infinite glory of God and with all values envisioned in their reference to the order of creation. The tension between our fallen nature—the reality we start from—and the goal we are ordained to reach, our rebirth in Christ, is manifested without