THE Sermon on the Mount praises those who “hunger and thirst after justice,” and promises them that “they shall have their fill” (Matt. 5:6). With regard to the state of mind thus glorified, we may distinguish two main types of defective attitudes.

Indifference

First, there is the attitude of general indifference: the unimpassioned dumbness of the kind of man who lacks intensity in all things. This description applies to a great number of psychological varieties. Consider the type of person who is sunk in a sort of placid inertia or the superficial mind flitting from one object to another with no genuine interest in any one of them; the seeker for shallow pleasures or the philistine established in his smug mediocrity, who shuns all greatness, all heroism, all fervor, and contemplates the world through minimizing glasses, as it were; or again, the anxious man who dreads being seized by any object or inflamed by any overwhelming experience—all these have one trait in common: all spiritual hunger and thirst is alien to them.

They do not really hunger, they do not strongly yearn, either for a true value or even for a subjective pleasure; they evince only a languid and conditional interest in anything. It is to such souls that the Apocalypse of St. John refers in these words: “I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot. I would thou wert cold, or hot. But because thou art lukewarm and neither cold, nor hot, I will begin to vomit thee out of my mouth” (Rev. 3:15-16).

Secondly, there are those who do hunger and thirst, not, however, after justice (that is to say, after something valuable in itself), but merely after things that in some way happen to appeal to them personally. Yet these, again, we must divide into two subclasses.

“Hunger” rooted in pride and concupiscence

The first group consists of those dominated by pride or concupiscence, the slaves of sensual desire, insatiably craving gratification; the avaricious; those engaged in a passionate pursuit of honors and prestige; those covetous of power. All these are not filled: they hunger and thirst for that only, however, which is of a nature to satisfy their pride or their concupiscence and yet fails to satisfy them when they possess it, but stirs up their thirst the more and makes them crave for further gains or lusts, so that their lives are comparable to an incessant hunt for gratification.

In certain cases belonging to this category, what the subject so passionately desires is not personal possession or pleasure in the primitive sense of the term but an idol—a fake ideal—for the sake of which he even makes sacrifices and endures privations of all kinds; in other words, he displays an apparently selfless service of “higher” aims.