Transformation in Christ_ On the Christian Attitude - Dietrich Von Hildebrand [32]
Or again, a certain situation happens to remind them of some former experience of an unpleasant character; and, in this case they do not heed the fact that in its objective contents the new situation has no kinship whatever with that former one. These people develop a hopeless uneasiness and aversion on the ground of sheer association of images.
Accordingly their attitudes lack objectivity and conformity with reality. A person who is conscious in the more proper sense of the term will, on the contrary, orient his essential behavior so as to answer the objective meaning—the relevant content—of the situation. He is not so fully submerged in himself, not so completely a servant of his nature, as to seriously consider invalid, illegitimate, and incidental aspects. He can distinguish valid impressions from invalid ones. Here the mental form of meaningful intentional object-reference has asserted itself successfully against psycho-physical impulses or purely associative prejudices.
It is, indeed, the prime characteristic of intellectual maturity (“majority”) that in our mental life the structural trait of intentional reference comes to prevail over the power of mere associations of ideas, and states of mind. In infantile thought, associations and body-conditioned states of mind still play a very great part; more important still, impressions thus gleaned are not then clearly distinguished from impressions legitimately founded in the things themselves. Also, mere images of fantasy freely fuse with, and are more or less assimilated into, the concepts of reality. There is as yet no clear-cut distinction between imagination and fact.
To be mentally grown up is to have one’s reactions adjusted to the immanent logic, the proper meaning of things; to have established intentional object-reference in a ruling position in our mental lives. In this sense, an adult is more conscious than a child. To advance in that consciousness and to overcome all infantilism is a necessary condition for attaining the “measure of the age of the fullness of Christ,” and thus imperative for the Christian. A consideration of all things in conspectu Dei, and a response to them conceived according to the spirit of Christ necessarily presupposes the supremacy of intentional object-reference, of a mode of response directed to the central meaning of things, over all merely associative and physiologically conditioned reactions; in particular, it presupposes the capacity of discrimination between valid and invalid aspects.
True consciousness responds appropriately to values
Another characteristic of true consciousness is closely connected therewith. It is the awakening to full moral majority, the discovery of the capacity of sanctioning. The behavior of unconscious persons is dictated by their nature. They tacitly identify themselves with whatever response their nature suggests to them. They have not yet discovered the possibility of emancipating themselves, by virtue of their free personal center, from their nature; they make no use as yet of this primordial capacity inherent in the personal mode of being. Hence their responses to values, even when they happen to be adequate, will always have something accidental about them. Their attitudes lack that character of explicitness and full consciousness which is a prerequisite of meeting in a really apposite way the demand embodied in the values. For what the values claim of us is not assent pure and simple, an assent which might as well be a fortuitous efflux of our natural dispositions; it is a fully conscious, rational, and explicit assent, given by the free center of our personality. By such an answer alone