Transformation in Christ_ On the Christian Attitude - Dietrich Von Hildebrand [33]
A truly conscious person has so far advanced over his nature that he no longer agrees implicitly to all its suggestions. Should an impulse of malice or envy surge up in his mind, he, actuated by his free personal center, will seclude himself from that impulse, and disavow it. Instead of endorsing it as a free personality, he expressly renounces all solidarity with it. True, such an act of disavowal is not by itself sufficient to render the impulse in question nonexistent or to eradicate it; yet that impulse is invalidated, as it were, and, in a sense, decapitated and deprived of its malignant potency. On the other hand, when faced with a genuine value the conscious person will not content himself with a contingent response to it, due to its fortuitous consonance with his nature; he also will respond with his free personal center; his response will bear the sanction of this free personal center.
Obviously enough, it is only such sanctioned responses to value which attain to a full degree of freedom and spiritual reality. It is through that actualization of the free and conscious center of his soul that a person comes of age morally and acquires the ability to utter that “yes” in the face of God which He demands of us. Not otherwise can our life obtain that inner unity and that establishment in God which elevates it above the accidents of our nature. In this sense, the Christian can never be conscious enough.
True consciousness serves continuity
With this aspect of true consciousness, a further one is closely associated: that of continuity—a subject which has already aroused our attention in Chapter 1. Unconscious man gives himself entirely over to the moment’s experience. He allows the present impression (which, of course, is conditioned, in an extra-conscious sense, by many anterior experiences) to capture him. The truths he has previously gotten hold of, and the values he has sensed, are not preserved by him as an imperishable possession; they are swamped under the impact of the present impression; nor is the latter confronted with them. The life of a certain type of unconscious man never ceases to change with every change in his milieu. Or again, we have the conservative type: this kind of unconscious man remains attached to certain strong impressions of his past and is unreceptive toward new ones, yet he clings to those old impressions not by reason of their ascertained importance and validity but because they have been the first to affect him or because he has grown accustomed to them. True continuity however has nothing to do with a mere natural disposition toward conservatism (as predicated, sometimes, of a peasantry) and much less with being a slave to the force of habit.
A person who really has continuity persists in his affirmation of all truths and genuine values once they have become manifest to him. While open to every new truth and every new value, he confronts them (in a self-evident and organic way of procedure) with all those he is already familiar with. He knows that no contradictions exist in the world of being nor between values; and he longs to see all things in their proper interconnection, that is, ultimately in the light of God. Thus alone can man establish that inward order in his life which makes it possible for him to distinguish between valid and invalid impressions. It is only by virtue of continuity that man can be objective in his judgments and his behavior, for continuity preserves him from attributing to the present an illegitimate priority over the past and thus makes his decision dependent on the objective content and the relevancy of an experience alone.
Above all, the person with continuity is fixed in awareness of the ultimate truths, never sacrificing them to the self-contained dialectic of a transient situation which happens to arrest his attention. He views every event of life in the perspective of man’s metaphysical