Life is not merely a matter of physical vigor, or of health, or of the capacity to enjoy oneself. What is life? It is something far more than the breath in our nostrils, the blood beating in our wrists, the response to physical stimulation. True all these things are essential for a fully human life, but they do not themselves constitute that life in all its fullness. (7).

The mark of true life in man is therefore not turbulence but control, not effervescence but lucidity and direction, not passion but the sobriety that sublimates all passion and elevates it to the clear inebriation of mysticism. (8).

Man, then, can only fully be said to be alive when he becomes plainly conscious of the real meaning of his own existence, that is to say when he experiences something of the fullness of intelligence, freedom and spirituality that are actualized within himself. (9).

Man is fully alive only when he experiences, at least to some extent, that he is really spontaneously dedicating himself, in all truth, to the real purpose of his own personal existence. In other words, man is alive not only when he exists, not only when he exists and acts, not only when he exists and acts as a man (that is to say freely), but above all when he is conscious of the reality and inviolability of his own freedom, and aware at the same time of his capacity to consecrate that freedom entirely to the purpose for which it was given him.

And this realization does not come into being until his freedom is actually devoted to its right purpose. Man “finds himself” and is happy, when he is able to be aware that his freedom is spontaneously and vigorously functioning to orientate his whole being toward the purpose which it craves, in its deepest spiritual center, to achieve.

This purpose is life in the fullest sense of the word—not mere individual, self centered, egotistical life which is doomed to end in death, but a life that transcends individual limitations and needs, and subsists outside the individual self in the Absolute—in Christ, in God. (11).