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By Root 2185 0

of all illusions of complacency, and to detect his particular vices and weaknesses. He must conform to the summons of St. Catherine of Siena, “Let us enter into the cell of our self-knowledge.” But he must not believe that self-knowledge is easy of attainment, nor that—once he forms the desire for self-knowledge—all his defects will reveal themselves to him in due course. With a healthy distrust of himself, he should continue supposing that he is still entangled in a mesh of illusions, and pray: “Cleanse me of my hidden weaknesses.”

Obedience to his spiritual director or his religious superior, above all, is destined to guide him towards the acquisition of genuine self-knowledge and the freedom implied therein. He must be aware of the fact that in order to obtain a faithful portrait of himself he needs the help of others. He must remember the words of the Lord about the mote in our brother’s eye and the beam in our own; and admit that, trusting his own lights without proper guidance, he will remain a thrall to this blindness of fallen man concerning himself. That is why he cannot dispense with the more objective vision of a spiritual director, of a religious superior, of any friend of great wisdom and piety. Yet, much as he depends—in order to attain a true knowledge of his character—on the help of God and on that of his fellow men, one thing he must contribute himself: the unreserved determination of dying unto himself and becoming a new man in Christ, and the strong desire, proceeding therefrom, to see himself as he really is. That desire will impel him to pray: “Lord, that I may see” (Luke 18:41).

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True Consciousness

THE inward progress in the Christian’s life is linked to a process of awakening to an ever increasing degree of consciousness. Conversion itself is comparable to an emergence from a state of somnolence. In rising from self-contained worldliness towards the reality of God, in experiencing the metaphysical situation in which God has placed him and the new light in which all things and his own self are now appearing, the person attains to a new level of consciousness. The convert, in Cardinal Newman’s words, is like a man ascending from a mine to behold daylight for the first time. He looks back upon his former life as a state of somnolence, a twilight of semiconsciousness.

Types of false consciousness

Again, with our unreserved decision to imitate Christ, a new brand of consciousness will necessarily permeate our life. However, there are many kinds of consciousness, only one of which will constitute the proper mark of our process of transformation in Christ. There also exists a false kind of consciousness which tends to corrode our interior life, and which is definitely opposed to true consciousness. Before discussing this true Christian consciousness, which indeed marks the “measure of the age of the fullness of Christ” (Eph. 4:13), we must first identify and discard that false way of being conscious.

Its prime characteristic is this. The man who is falsely conscious is no longer capable of full response to an object or situation. His mind is no longer able to sense the substance of things or of situations, nor the appeal which emanates from them; the normal contact between subject and object appears severed. We may distinguish two basic forms of this false type of consciousness.

First, there is the mental perversion which consists in the fact that we destroy the attitude of genuine absorption in the object by an excess of reflective self-observation.

Secondly, there is the tendency to over-intellectualism, implying that even in a situation which calls upon us to decide or to act rather than merely to know, we persevere in a purely cognitive attitude.

Excessive self-observation

We begin with the description of the first form of false consciousness. There is a type of person whose glance is always turned back upon his own self, and who is therefore incapable of any genuine conforming to the spirit of an object. If, for instance, he is listening to some beautiful music, he at once develops