Transformation in Christ_ On the Christian Attitude - Dietrich Von Hildebrand [225]
Yet, they did so, not in an unsanctioned way, yielding blindly to a compelling urge, but in the blissful consciousness which we find in the words of St. Paul, “For I know whom I have believed” (2 Tim. 1:12). They gave themselves wholly to the absolute Lord over life and death, from whom they had received everything. Their departure from the framework of their former lives—their losing of self—bore the most express and most complete personal sanction a human act can bear. Any self-surrender that lacks such a sanction lacks ultimate validity. We must, then, never abandon ourselves to any unsanctioned impulse.
The true state of dwelling with ourselves, again, presupposes what we have called the sanction. But the endeavor to shun all risk and flee all danger of being possessed—to carefully preserve the firm ground under one’s feet—is not consonant (and is even inconsistent) with the true habitare secum, though it represents a kind of illegitimate counterfeit thereof. It is the source of all philistine mediocrity. It is doubtless better to abide on the firm ground of one’s well-ordered natural life than to allow oneself to be swept off one’s feet; but again it is infinitely better to lose oneself in Christ and to be seized by Him than to keep smugly within that secure natural framework.
Not only is such seizure better—it is necessary for us if we are truly desirous of being transformed in Christ. Our abandonment of self is an indispensable condition of the full unfolding in us of supernatural life. For Our Lord says, not only “He that shall lose his life for me shall find it,” but also “He that findeth his life shall lose it.”
We must, then, lose our soul so as to find it. In other words, we should renounce all vain effort to incorporate Christ into our life, but endeavor wholeheartedly, with the full sanction of our central personality, to transpose our life into Christ and entrust it to Him; indeed, to be possessed by Him.
True self-surrender is the antithesis of depersonalization
True self-surrender constitutes the extreme antithesis to depersonalization. In fact, only through such a surrender can we attain the full actualization of our proper personal life—in comparison to which our ordinary self-centered life is but a kind of somnolence. On the other hand, the surrender implied in being carried away by a superior dynamism means a submersion of personality in the vital sphere, an intrinsic degradation of the soul and thus (though not in the sense of becoming a coldly functional instrument of outward aims) it is eminently a process of depersonalization.
True self-surrender clarifies and deepens our vision of things
Furthermore, true self-surrender by no means generates a state of mind in which all things other than those which possess us fade into obscurity, as though immersed in a sort of fog, with their outlines blurred and their distinctions disappearing. Rather, in the new vision bred of true self-surrender, all inferior things are surpassed. The mind is raised into a brighter light, which makes everything enter into its proper place. The depersonalizing type of surrender throws us, on the contrary, into a turmoil, a dull twilight of the mind in which ail higher classes of things lapse into oblivion and invisibility. This kind of experience has the dark lethargic tint of a narcotic trance.
It is true that in the highest form of being possessed—in mystic ecstasy—the mind tends to be aware of nothing besides God. Here all creaturely things may seem plunged in darkness, but this is still an exuberant manifestation of their being surpassed, not a sign of their obliteration. Therefore, as we know from the evidence of the mystics, the mind after its awakening from ecstasy has a clearer and deeper vision of