Transformation in Christ_ On the Christian Attitude - Dietrich Von Hildebrand [220]
Our supernatural transformation presupposes our free surrender to God
Man is in his innermost essence specifically ordained to God. “Thou has created us for Thee” says St. Augustine (Confessions 1.1). In the measure that man submerges himself in his adoration of God, his personality becomes ampler and richer, and adorned with higher values.
Inversely, in the measure that he is concerned with his own self and the consideration enjoyed by that self, he becomes poorer, narrower, more arid, and jejune. That is why, as the example of the holy Cure d’Ars shows, even a man of scant natural gifts may develop into a great and rich personality, if only he gives himself fully and unreservedly to God; whereas, in comparison with such a man, a person who is endowed with the highest natural talents, but who shuts himself off from God, will emanate a barren and oppressive atmosphere.
To be sure, we receive supernatural life, just as the natural one, as a free gift from God’s hand, without any contribution from our part. Yet we cannot become transformed in Christ unless we lose ourselves in our vision of Christ. Only if we immerse ourselves in a loving adoration of Christ, can we be transformed in Him.
Our supernatural life will not expand automatically without our contribution. It cannot spring into full blossom unless Christ becomes for our conscious experience, too, the actual center of our life—in such a fashion that all our life is directed to Christ and is pervaded by our adoring love of Christ. For the unfolding of supernatural life, again, a self-surrendering response to value—referred, here, to God through the medium of the God-Man—constitutes an indispensable precondition.
Yet, evidently, losing one’s soul in this proper use of the term means more than the surrender implied in every genuine response to value. We must, in a stricter sense, die unto ourselves and become empty so that Christ may unfold His holy life within us. Likewise, our surrender to Christ must far exceed all our other responses to value: it must be an integral surrender of self, such as is possible and proper in relation with the absolute Lord only, “in whom all fullness of divinity dwells.” The motif of losing one’s soul acquires then, here, an entirely new—a much more literal, unequivocal, and definitive—meaning.
Surrender to God does not obliterate our selfhood
However, it would be a grave error to interpret this concept of dying to oneself or losing one’s soul as an extinction of selfhood in the crude sense of a depersonalization or neutralization.
Certain religious theorists today seem to assume that one can only get rid of narrow egotism and become imbued with a truly theocentric attitude if one ceases to attach any weight to one’s relation with Christ insofar as this relation is experienced by one’s own consciousness. They would express their theories something like this: “What am I; what are my longings and my love for Christ—is not all this much too small and unimportant to be something in the eyes of God? The only thing that matters is for us to keep step with the great objective rhythm of the holy Church, and, without thinking of our personal problems and situations at all, dedicate ourselves exclusively to the great community of the Mystical Body of Christ; for the latter alone, and surely not our petty little ego, means something to God.” The more I succeed in effacing my own personality, the more, they would say, my attitude must become an objective and theocentric one.
It is these speculations also that have brought forth an attempt at dividing the saints into those having a predominantly objective outlook and those having a predominantly subjective outlook—as though the idea of a saint of subjective outlook were anything but a contradiction in terms.
Only a full, personal self can give himself