Yet, evidently, losing one’s soul in this proper use of the term means more than the surrender implied in every genuine response to value. We must, in a stricter sense, die unto ourselves and become empty so that Christ may unfold His holy life within us. Likewise, our surrender to Christ must far exceed all our other responses to value: it must be an integral surrender of self, such as is possible and proper in relation with the absolute Lord only, “in whom all fullness of divinity dwells.” The motif of losing one’s soul acquires then, here, an entirely new—a much more literal, unequivocal, and definitive—meaning.

Surrender to God does not obliterate our selfhood

However, it would be a grave error to interpret this concept of dying to oneself or losing one’s soul as an extinction of selfhood in the crude sense of a depersonalization or neutralization.

Certain religious theorists today seem to assume that one can only get rid of narrow egotism and become imbued with a truly theocentric attitude if one ceases to attach any weight to one’s relation with Christ insofar as this relation is experienced by one’s own consciousness. They would express their theories something like this: “What am I; what are my longings and my love for Christ—is not all this much too small and unimportant to be something in the eyes of God? The only thing that matters is for us to keep step with the great objective rhythm of the holy Church, and, without thinking of our personal problems and situations at all, dedicate ourselves exclusively to the great community of the Mystical Body of Christ; for the latter alone, and surely not our petty little ego, means something to God.” The more I succeed in effacing my own personality, the more, they would say, my attitude must become an objective and theocentric one.

It is these speculations also that have brought forth an attempt at dividing the saints into those having a predominantly objective outlook and those having a predominantly subjective outlook—as though the idea of a saint of subjective outlook were anything but a contradiction in terms.

Only a full, personal self can give himself freely to God