Transformation in Christ_ On the Christian Attitude - Dietrich Von Hildebrand [35]
We are now in a position to appreciate the vast difference between the false and the true kind of consciousness. Whereas the former precludes a real contact with the objects, and condemns its bearer always to watch himself without ever being touched by the logos of things that are, true consciousness postulates and establishes that genuine object-relationship. Here, man communes, he conspires, as it were, with the proper and valid meaning of what is: here, the true dialogue between subject and object takes place. All befogging twilight, all blind yielding to accidental impulses, all forms of determination by things taken as forces of nature instead of as intentional objects have disappeared: the response to values becomes clear and explicit, yet all the more intense and charged with experience.
True consciousness implies a recognition of our defects
Finally, true consciousness implies an intimate recognition of our defects (cf., Chapter 3). A person who is thus conscious, who has emancipated himself from his nature and no longer agrees automatically to its suggestions, who is awakened to a sense of his free personal center and of the essential, express, and lasting response which God demands of him, has also cast off his illusions concerning himself. His own being, too, is illumined by the light of God and he allows that light to penetrate into all corners of his soul. He spreads out his whole life before the face of Christ and suffers no hidden currents of life which have escaped a clear recognition by him and a confrontation with Christ, to be active in him. The spiritual vision, illumined by Christ, of his central personality clears up all recesses of his being and sees through all illusions. Hence, he leads a unified life—in contrast to unconscious man in whom disparate currents of life can exist side by side without his seeing their essential inconsistency with one another.
True consciousness unifies the soul
Frequently we come across people who reveal entirely disparate aspects of character, of which now one and then another prevails, so that on different occasions such a man or woman may almost strike us as a different person. According to the varying elements of his environment, with their fluctuating appeal to this or that strain in his mental composition, a person of this kind may seem again and again to change his identity. Not so the person with genuine consciousness. He always remains himself; his life is integrated, because he has brought everything to one denominator, with no hidden particle of his self escaping the formative effect of his basic direction towards Christ. In the highest sense of the term, he has become simple.
A classic example of true consciousness is St. Augustine in his Confessions, confronting all things with God and discussing them with fearless clarity before His face, and thus also attaining full consciousness of them himself.
It must be the purpose of a true Christian that his entire life be suffused by that light of truth, the lumen Christi. He must endeavor to become fully capable of personal sanction, to rise to a wakeful conduct of life, to acquire complete continuity. The more we are awake and in possession of continuity, the more we are able to light up even our present life with a ray from that wealth of splendor that shall brighten us in the life to come: “We see now through a glass in a dark manner; but then face to face” (1 Cor. 13:12).
True consciousness is the foundation of our free response to God
By virtue of consciousness alone can we give the answer which God demands of us. For it is that unconditional and explicit assent on our part, sanctioned by our central personality, which He demands of us; and for the sake of that assent He has endowed man with freedom of will, entailing the enormous risk that man, misusing his freedom, may sin. Thus, in the fact of our consciousness our entire earthly task is, as it were,