Dietrich von Hildebrand on how to develop your personality

Twenty years ago when I was applying for seminary, one of the steps in the process was to take a psychological survey that identified my temperament (melancholic-choleric, basically meaning I think I’m right all the time and am sad that no one else realizes it). It was a helpful exercise that helped me know myself better, but I never wanted to let my temperament become an excuse for bad behavior.

It isn’t as though a melancholic person gets a free pass to be depressed and lethargic, or a choleric gets to stomp around and throw tantrums. No, those traits are the worsts expressions of those particular temperaments, but if I act in those ways, it’s important that I be held accountable. I have chosen to act that way.

Our unique temperaments are neither good nor bad. There is no one temperament that is superior to another. Each has strengths and weaknesses and what really matters is how we develop our personalities on top of our temperaments. It is the personality that makes each of us who we are.

It can be tricky to define how a temperament and a personality are different. I was recently reading Dietrich von Hildebrand’s book Liturgy and Personality, and he offers a definition of personality that I find helpful. He notes that to be a personality means to stand out from the crowd and make decisions based not on what everybody else is doing or emotions or some other external stimulus but, rather, to act according to an interior value response. It’s what a modern sociologist might call, “agency.” The personality is best developed by a person with a strong spiritual and moral vision.

Becoming a personality isn’t as simple as sticking out like a sore thumb and making a spectacle of myself by behaving oddly. If I were to define myself in opposition to the crowd, then I would still be reacting to the crowd because, whatever other people think, I would automatically think the opposite. I still wouldn’t be in full control of my self.

A personality, someone who is in full possession of his person, responds not to the crowd but to his own interior values. He is free to be his own person.

This means that, in order to develop my personality and achieve my highest potential, I need to seek values of the highest order and form my perception by them. I must learn to love those values, desire them, and respond to them. This is actually how freedom is conditioned, by what we love.

Think of it this way: As I develop my personality, I become freer to become who I am meant to be (instead of acting in ways I later regret, indulging behaviors I wish weren’t part of me, and finding myself captive to my flaws).

Personality is shaped by the temperament, but ultimately it is up to each one of us to master our temperaments and bring out the best aspects of them. We can decide to seek that which is good and build a habitual value response to the good. For instance, as a melancholic I can either wallow in existential angst or I can choose to use that angst as motivation to curate an appreciation for creativity, beauty, and spiritual devotion. It’s up to me.

For von Hildebrand’s purposes in his book Liturgy and Personality, the highest good is found in the love of Christ through the liturgy of the Catholic Church, but leaving aside that specific argument, he points out a few, more general indispensable traits in people who have fully developed personalities.

Von Hildebrand writes, “reverence is the essential basis for...a perception of values.” Later, he calls it, “the mother of all virtues.” He explains that reverence is an attitude of wonder and respect for everything around us. This openness is what enables us to perceive real knowledge from outside of ourselves, and in particular to possess knowledge of values. Only a reverent person takes the time to contemplate the depth and purpose of life, to question his opinions, and continue to develop his personality based on new experiences and information.

Reverence is a necessary precondition to form a personality because it widens our outlook to identify value and orient ourselves toward it.

An arrogant person will never be reverent, because an arrogant person is dismissive and presumptive. Someone who has fallen into the habit of pride filters everything through his own ego. He will never be able to perceive any value outside of himself. This means that an arrogant person is incapable of personal development. He’s stuck. Ironically, pride is the illusion within us that we have already “arrived,” and that a perfect personality has already been formed, but arrogance is the very vice that prevents such a development.

Humility, on the other hand, is always open to new information. A humble person, by thinking less of himself, develops a stronger personality because he is always unlocking more potential.

The other roadblock to forming an authentic personality is the vice of filtering everything through a desire for pleasure. Similar to arrogance, this attitude prioritizes the ego. As von Hildebrand puts it, “He... circles around in the narrowness of his own self.” He tries to use everything and everyone around him for his own pleasure, and so misses out on the “breadth, height, and depth,” of existence, “its richness of values.” In the end, the search for pleasure alienates a man from his own self by starving him of anything that would help him develop his personality. All he seeks is comfort.

On the contrary, if we are able to take the best parts of our temperaments and offer them for the benefit of others, the self-abandonment displayed in that sacrifice (an act that is almost certainly uncomfortable and not pleasurable) calls us into a greater participation in the virtue of love. We become fully formed persons and achieve our potential precisely in this way, by our love.

In the end, it doesn’t so much matter what each our temperaments are, or what talents and accomplishments we have (or don’t have). In order to become a personality, a person in full possession of the self, all that is required is to seek the highest values – faith, hope, love – and pursue those values whole-heartedly.

Our temperaments will never change but, although it may be slow and halting, personality can and does change if we are intentional about it and develop virtuous habits. We can develop, improve, and every day uncover more of our potential.