Obviously enough, it is only such sanctioned responses to value which attain to a full degree of freedom and spiritual reality. It is through that actualization of the free and conscious center of his soul that a person comes of age morally and acquires the ability to utter that “yes” in the face of God which He demands of us. Not otherwise can our life obtain that inner unity and that establishment in God which elevates it above the accidents of our nature. In this sense, the Christian can never be conscious enough.

True consciousness serves continuity

With this aspect of true consciousness, a further one is closely associated: that of continuity—a subject which has already aroused our attention in Chapter 1. Unconscious man gives himself entirely over to the moment’s experience. He allows the present impression (which, of course, is conditioned, in an extra-conscious sense, by many anterior experiences) to capture him. The truths he has previously gotten hold of, and the values he has sensed, are not preserved by him as an imperishable possession; they are swamped under the impact of the present impression; nor is the latter confronted with them. The life of a certain type of unconscious man never ceases to change with every change in his milieu. Or again, we have the conservative type: this kind of unconscious man remains attached to certain strong impressions of his past and is unreceptive toward new ones, yet he clings to those old impressions not by reason of their ascertained importance and validity but because they have been the first to affect him or because he has grown accustomed to them. True continuity however has nothing to do with a mere natural disposition toward conservatism (as predicated, sometimes, of a peasantry) and much less with being a slave to the force of habit.

A person who really has continuity persists in his affirmation of all truths and genuine values once they have become manifest to him. While open to every new truth and every new value, he confronts them (in a self-evident and organic way of procedure) with all those he is already familiar with. He knows that no contradictions exist in the world of being nor between values; and he longs to see all things in their proper interconnection, that is, ultimately in the light of God. Thus alone can man establish that inward order in his life which makes it possible for him to distinguish between valid and invalid impressions. It is only by virtue of continuity that man can be objective in his judgments and his behavior, for continuity preserves him from attributing to the present an illegitimate priority over the past and thus makes his decision dependent on the objective content and the relevancy of an experience alone.

Above all, the person with continuity is fixed in awareness of the ultimate truths, never sacrificing them to the self-contained dialectic of a transient situation which happens to arrest his attention. He views every event of life in the perspective of man’s metaphysical situation and against the background of eternity. He alone is able in every situation to hang on to the basic truth and thus to see everything in the light of God.