The criterion of objective value holds their attention, therefore, not only in ruling their own behavior but in considering that of others, too. Any wrong done by others pains them, no matter whether or not it involves any personal disadvantage for them. Any injustice, impurity, unfaithfulness or falseness they experience as an evil, whether they notice it in themselves or in strangers.

Persons of this kind we may rightly credit with a basic, if imperfect, hunger and thirst after justice. For they know the happiness derived from the victory of the good as such—happiness of a quality that no advantage, no success, no accumulation of gifts of fortune can ever procure or equal. Still, their interest in justice is only one among others; in spite of its essential primacy, it has not yet blossomed out into a devouring passion of the soul that would obscure all other desires or concerns.

Passionate, unconditional supernatural zeal for the kingdom of God and His justice

From these, again, we must distinguish those rare personalities which, like Socrates, are wholly possessed by their preoccupation with value—who consider everything primarily from this point of view and let all other points of view fade into insignificance. Here we have a true and perfect hunger and thirst after justice on the natural plane.

With persons of this category, the passion for the victory of the good has acquired an unconditional and actual primacy over all other concerns; it has become, as it were, the form of their lives. What is the objectively right, the morally good, the valuable thing?—this query controls their orientation in all situations, relegating all desire for earthly goods and advantages into the background. It constitutes the self-evident rule of their attitude in regard to all objects; and it alone can evoke a passionate interest on their part. In a more permanent and universal sense, they suffer from the ocean of injustices and wrongs that fill the world. No personal success or happiness can dull the edge of their interest in the victory of justice or soften their pain at the triumph of evil.

Men and women of this kind are in constant danger of being misjudged; they are apt to scandalize many of their fellow beings. The reason is that their emphasis on the primacy of value tends to interfere with the quest of happiness that is natural to others. Their passion for the victory of the good constitutes a virtual menace to the framework of ordinary people’s lives. Their ardent pursuit of justice cannot but be misinterpreted by those enfolded in the tissue of their ego-interests.

Ordinary men will mostly try to construe the behavior of such persons of exceptional nobility in terms of some hidden ressentiments or other motives of disguised self-seeking—there being no other explanation for such a passionate “taking sides” that they can conceive of.