As I mentioned in my initial post, it has been my habit, when reading, to enter into a notebook some of those words which I come across that either resonate with a truth I have previously internalized, or which, although not patently true, seem to be worthy of additional contemplation. The excerpt below, from a book by the Catholic writer and thinker, Hans Urs von Balthasar, falls into the latter category.
I previously posted a piece on the authentic life, my stated position therein being that it is only saints, artists, and outlaws who have a good shot at actually living one. Here, Balthasar seems to me to be expounding upon the mechanics involved in a saint attaining his sanctity. Note also the second-to-last sentence, with reference to the Simone Weil aphorism on contemplation in the sidebar:
The man obedient to his mission fulfils his own being, although he could never find this archetype and ideal of himself by penetrating to the deepest center of his nature, his superego or his subconscious, or by scrutinizing his own dispositions, aspirations, talents, and potentialities. Simon, the fisherman, before his meeting with Christ, however thoroughly he might have searched within himself, could not possibly have found a trace of Peter. Yet the form “Peter”, the particular mission reserved for him alone, which till then lay hid in the secret of Christ’s soul and, at the moment of this encounter, was delivered over to him sternly and imperatively – was to be the fulfillment of all that, in Simon, would have sought vainly for a form ultimately valid in the eyes of God and for eternity. In the form “Peter” Simon was made capable of understanding the word of Christ, because the form itself issued from the word and was conjoined with it. When ever Simon follows the light of “Simon”, his own self, he will always be wrong and dangerously so; he only acts truly when he “takes no heed to flesh and blood”, but is obedient to his mission, through which he knows the Father’s will.
Once we see this, we must admit the possibility of a real hearing of the word, and so of contemplation.
…Here the Trinitarian background of faith is fully evident – we are rooted in the Son analogously to the way in which the Son is rooted in the Father.
Hans Urs von Balthasar, Prayer
The question that this raises for me is: does a man, by being "obedient to his mission" and thereby fulfilling "his own being", live an authentic life (such as would satisfy a secular existentialist), even though, as Balthasar claims, "he could never find this archetype and ideal of himself" on his own?
