Transformation in Christ_ On the Christian Attitude - Dietrich Von Hildebrand [34]
Without continuity, no transformation in Christ is possible. For that transformation requires that the light of Christ should pervade all our life and that concerning everything we should ask whether it can stand the test before His face. By confronting all things with Christ we also confront them with one another. Continuity, too, vouches for the possibility of true penitence. By virtue of continuity, we understand that a human action loses nothing of its relevance merely because it belongs to the past; that the evil inherent in a sin is not decreased by the fact of its chronological remoteness.
Wakefulness enhances true consciousness and continuity
Consciousness and continuity are also linked to wakefulness, or alertness—to what we might call an attitude of being awake. Unconscious man entrusts himself to the flow of events, without setting them at a distance; therefore he is incapable of surveying them. Though he may have single impressions of great intensity, no single fact will reveal itself to him in its full significance and purport, for each lacks connection with the other, and above all, with the primal cause of being and the ultimate meaning of the world. His life is wrapped in a cloud of obscurity. Perhaps such a person will receive, time and again, a strong religious impression, and in its consequence grasp, for a moment, the metaphysical situation of man; but he fails to awaken once for all, and no sooner is his mind distracted by some other impressions than the sphere of ultimate reality has again vanished from his sight. Yet, he who is awake maintains that sphere present, over and above the concerns of the business of the moment. He always takes a synoptic view of things. He does not erect into an absolute the small accidental section of reality which just happens to occupy his mind, but views it against the background of integral reality.
This is what wakefulness means: to live in conspectu Dei; to interpret everything in the context of our eternal destiny, in its nexus with all our previous valid experiences, and most of all, in its function as a token and a representation of God.
Wakefulness in this sense and true consciousness are closely interrelated. Conscious man, and he alone, avoids being submerged beneath things or living among them in the interstices of reality, as it were: he incorporates everything in the objectively valid order of ultimate reality. Only the Christian can be truly conscious in the full sense of the term. For he alone has a true vision of reality proper and a true conception of God and the supernatural realm, from which everything derives its ultimate meaning. All those who have not yet risen to the brightness of the lumen Christi are (in this higher and qualified use of the term) still unconscious; they are still asleep. The measure in which someone lives in the light of the Christian revelation, maintains it continually present, and keeps in continuous awareness of it at all moments, determines the degree of his real consciousness.
Wakefulness perfects man as a person
The wakefulness of the truly conscious person also determines a more real and more significant mode of living. He alone, as we have seen, has a genuine comprehension of values; he recognizes their essential demand, and meets it with an explicit response. That eminently personal (and, as it were, sanctioned) form of response not only guarantees a conduct more deeply conceived from the moral point of view; in a direct sense also, it represents a reaction more adequately aimed, more bright with meaning, than is possible on the part of such a lack consciousness proper.
The conscious person’s contact with the objects is not deformed by an overestimation of accidental features; and an integral, explicit comprehension of values is equally his privilege. In his sanctioned, express, and integrally shaped response to values, and in such a response only,