Evolution of the Human Personality

Does the religious state hinder the harmonious evolution of the human personality? Does it compel it to remain in a certain "infantile" state, as some people claim?

Let us then observe without prejudice the behavior of men and women who belong to the states of perfection. No one would dare say that the majority of them are suffering from infantilism in their intellectual and emotional life, or in their actions. But, pursuing the objection further, one could not claim either that, at least, the communities and Superiors compel them, with the passing of time, to adopt modes of thought and action that would lend themselves to this censure.

Those who make this complaint should remember that when St. Paul established for the faithful the goal of an ordered life according to the faith, he invited them to grow in the "building up of the body of Christ" until they all attained "perfect manhood, to the mature measure of the fullness of Christ."

"And this," he adds, "he has done that we may be now no longer children" (Ephesians 4:12,13). The Apostle therefore does not allow the faithful to yield to infantilism, but he demands that they become "perfect men."

Furthermore, in the first epistle to the Corinthians, he rejected most explicitly in adult Christians all the mannerisms of thought and feeling that characterized childhood. "When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I felt as a child, I thought as a child. Now that I have become a man, I have put away the things of a child" (I Cor. 13 :11).