Transformation in Christ_ On the Christian Attitude - Dietrich Von Hildebrand [60]
Most important of all, our loving approach is caught up, as it were; our response is directed to an object which is itself responsive to our love, our awareness of this aspect, again, coloring our very experience of the object in question. Thus, the object not merely happens to be a person but formally confronts us qua person, which renders possible a far greater intensity of contact. In this case alone will the fact that our object is of a personal nature manifest itself fully in our mode of approaching it. Thus, in 1-thou contemplation the contemplative attitude acquires new, specific features of metaphysical perfection; a greater actualization of the receptive aspect of contemplation; and—something entirely new—the counter-response of the object, with the enhanced personalization of the contemplative relationship which results therefrom.
The perfections in It-contemplation
On the other hand, there is also (as has already been hinted) a metaphysical perfection specific to what we called it-contemplation, an exclusive privilege of this form insofar as we confine ourselves to objects of contemplation belonging to the realm of created things. In it-contemplation, which presents the object strictly qua object (even though it be a person), a broader, a more serene, a more purely contemplative attitude of spiritual immersion is realized than is possible in I-thou contemplation.
With this point reached, a further important division of contemplative attitudes becomes discernible.
Sometimes contemplation intensifies our experience of a particular moment
On the one hand, contemplation may mean a halt at a real moment in the flow of time, a “now” in which we are fully present and concentrated on a concrete object likewise present to us. Here, the normally latent—or, superactual—depth of our personal essence undergoes an actualization. When in the mutual spiritual interpenetration we drink, as it were, the being of the beloved, the rest of the world fades away around us. Dismissing all preoccupation about aims, I am then only directed towards the beloved, entirely immersed in his being and I nevertheless do not withdraw from the framework of temporal actuality but experience a more condensed, a fully valid actuality. I realize a unique and express now, I am aware—if the phrase be permissible—of a particularly momentous moment. The world of true and ultimate reality, the world of what soars above all transient aims and objects—a world to which I am only related, as a rule, in a superactual manner—enters my life, here, in the form of such a contemplative, presence; it actualizes itself in the real stream of my life.
Sometimes contemplation seems to lift us out of time
It is quite different with those more frequent instances of the contemplative attitude when I visualize and experience a great truth, a high value, or even the essence of a beloved person, from an extra-temporal level of vision, Then I withdraw, as far as the center of my consciousness is concerned, from my actual life, emerging towards the world of genuine and ultimate things which I now see ordered in the perspective of eternity, located as it were in their topos uranios (“celestial place”).
I do not, in this case, realize an express moment which is only raised above the rest of life by virtue of its specific quality of inward wealth and depth; rather I ascend, so to speak, a high peak soaring above my actual life and beyond the level of time experience. From that point of vision I perceive all things in their remoteness and their timeless being, independent of their real presence, penetrating their essence entirely at rest, in a specifically contemplative mode of consciousness. Let us think of