A classic example of true consciousness is St. Augustine in his Confessions, confronting all things with God and discussing them with fearless clarity before His face, and thus also attaining full consciousness of them himself.

It must be the purpose of a true Christian that his entire life be suffused by that light of truth, the lumen Christi. He must endeavor to become fully capable of personal sanction, to rise to a wakeful conduct of life, to acquire complete continuity. The more we are awake and in possession of continuity, the more we are able to light up even our present life with a ray from that wealth of splendor that shall brighten us in the life to come: “We see now through a glass in a dark manner; but then face to face” (1 Cor. 13:12).

True consciousness is the foundation of our free response to God

By virtue of consciousness alone can we give the answer which God demands of us. For it is that unconditional and explicit assent on our part, sanctioned by our central personality, which He demands of us; and for the sake of that assent He has endowed man with freedom of will, entailing the enormous risk that man, misusing his freedom, may sin. Thus, in the fact of our consciousness our entire earthly task is, as it were, condensed. For that task consists ultimately in our express assenting to be apprehended and transformed by God. It possesses this “yes” which God, when He awarded us His highest gift of inconceivable sublimity, the incarnation of the Eternal Word, also required to hear from Mary the Blessed Virgin: “Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it done to me according to thy word” (Luke 1:38).

This is the primal word, which God has called upon mankind to utter. God expects each of us individually, and man as the highest and most lavishly endowed of His creatures, to say this word. It is the constitutive core of consciousness; and it cannot be spoken too clearly, too wakefully, too explicitly. It is, therefore, one of the basic tasks imposed on every Christian to rise to a state of true consciousness, thus infusing an integral meaning into his life. Based on that primal word, life attains great simplicity, and with that word alone can we “live in that great secret of the adoration of God which is Christ.”

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True Simplicity

THE Gospel intends us to attain to true simplicity: simplicity in the sense of an inward unity of life.

Simplicity contrasts with disunity

Such a simplicity contrasts, in the first place, with the disunity in the soul of those whose lives are filled, now by one thing, now by another; who lose themselves in the motley variegation of life, who do not seek for an integration of their actions and conduct by one dominant principle. A similar disunity is manifest in lives controlled by diverse and mutually contradictory currents, which develop side by side, each according to its immanent law, without being coordinated or confronted with the other. A person of this kind is said to be split; his life lacks inward unity. Such a deficiency often occurs in those who also lack consciousness and continuity.