Maturity: When?

The achievement of maturity requires time, but time alone does not produce maturity. Occasionally maturity outruns time, which may occasion the remark, “He is exceptionally mature for his age.” Or maturity may lag behind, as when one scolds an adolescent by asking, “Why don’t you act your age?” Indeed, we may despair of maturity ever catching up with time, as when we say of an adult, “He will never grow up.” So the graph of maturity does not bear a straight-line relationship to time. The curve may rise sharp and steep in the precociously mature, or it may level off in a sustained plateau that remains far below expectation in the adult who remains immature.

“When” has two possible meanings. As an adverb, it may signify time, as in the common questions “When do we eat?” and “When can I drive the car?” As a conjunction, “when” may stand for the fulfillment of certain conditions: “You may eat when you have washed your hands,” or “You may drive when you have earned your license.”

Since time is not the most important criterion of maturity, we turn to some of the conditions that may be signified by the question “When?”

The most obvious condition of maturity is the acquiring of knowledge. There is a lot one must learn before he can be called mature. We may say in excusing the misadventures of a child, “He doesn’t know any better.” Most children learn rapidly, and we hold or should hold them responsible in proportion to their knowledge. The learning process ought to continue throughout life, so maturing should be an ongoing process. Unless one keeps on learning, the process of maturing is likely to level off. There is an essential intellectual component of maturity.

But knowledge is not enough. We can all think of persons who despite their learning do not exhibit maturity. Profound learning does not necessarily prevent a person from carrying temper tantrums into adult life from childhood. Emotional arousal may sometimes overwhelm and supersede intellectual elements in the control of behavior, leading to conduct that is more characteristic of childhood than of adult life. In the grip of fear or anger, persons may behave in ways that are later embarrassing, even though they “know better.” Bringing the unruly emotions under control is an essential part of growing up. There is thus also an emotional component of maturity.

Even when knowledge and emotional control have been mastered, maturity may still be out of sight. The egocentricity of childhood may appear in adult life in the form of self-preferment, ruthless competition, or even antisocial conduct. Psychiatry has borrowed from mythology the term narcissism to designate inordinate selfishness or self-love. Such a person may ignore or violate the rules of courtesy, fairness, and even the law of the land to favor himself or his own interests. We have all heard of the coldly calculating sociopath who is intellectually keen and emotionally controlled, but whose ethic is wholly self-centered. When an egocentric person trespasses on the rights of others, we condemn his conduct and urge that he live up to an ethic that takes equal account of his fellow men.

A person may be emotionally stable and intellectually competent, but if he violates the rules of courtesy and the rights of others, his ethical system is defective and he must be considered in some degree lacking in maturity. Hence ethical development, as well as intellectual and emotional development, is a necessary condition of maturity.

The Ethical Component

Up to this point the conditions of maturity may be called psychological, because psychology has devoted much study to learning and emotional control. However, the recognition that there is an ethical component of maturity makes it necessary for psychology, with its rigid restriction to the empirical, to acknowledge its incompetence and drop out. Since ethics always asserts that one kind of conduct is better than another, an ultimate basis for comparison is implied. Therefore, ethical choices are basically theological, since they imply loyalty to God or to some principle that stands in the place of God as an ultimate referent.

The point may be illustrated by the old story of two men concluding a business transaction. The one asks, “Shall I give you a receipt?” The other replies, “No, God is our witness.” “Do you believe in God?” asks the first man. “Yes,” answers the second, “don’t you?” “No.” “Then give me a receipt.”

The intellectual and emotional components of maturity can be developed by effort, such as self-discipline, devotion to learning, and the cultivation of habit. But theological questions demand commitment. To live is to act, and to act one must make assumptions about the origin, meaning, and end of life. Every decision has ethical implications and is therefore in some sense a theological commitment, for it expresses the judgment that one value is better than another.

Acceptance of the idea that an adequate ethic is one of the conditions of maturity necessitates a choice among competing ethical or theological systems. Freud affirmed his faith in naturalism, choosing to believe that in spite of present deficiencies, science will eventually have answers to all our questions. This view, which gained its momentum during the scientific revolution in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, has wide acceptance in our time.

Another view places man rather than nature at the center, and makes a declaration of faith in his inborn capacity for self-enhancement and actualization. Even though both naturalism and humanism deny the objective reality of God, they are theological in the sense that they establish an alternative principle in the place of God.

The Judeo-Christian faith asserts that both naturalism and humanism present truncated views of man. With Augustine, Christians declare that human personality bears a built-in capacity for apprehending the transcendent, that man is made for God and is restless until he finds rest in God. This faith is supported by a massive weight of human testimony from every century which asserts that communion with God as person may be as real as with any human being.

Psychology has long been reluctant to acknowledge any limitations in its handling of the data of human existence. When confronted by the testimony of religious experience, the psychologist must either admit his ignorance of it or deny that it is based upon objective reality. Many psychologists have chosen to deny rather than concede that religious experience is beyond the grasp of their science. Feuerbach, Freud, and many others have said flatly that religion is nothing but illusion. “Nothing but” declarations are examples of what logicians call the fallacy of reduction.

The psychologist’s denial of validity recalls the legend of the mountaineer who is said to have exclaimed on seeing a giraffe for the first time, “There ain’t no such animal!, “assuming that his own constricted experience embraced the whole of reality. Reductionism is a fallacy because one can validly deny only if he possesses total knowledge; denying the reality of the divine-human encounter is really only an argument from ignorance. The psychologist who declares the experience unreal cuts himself off from an aspect of reality that has always been open to acquaintance by personal experience.

Transcendental Reality

Man may deny his need of God and otherwise rationalize his anxiety, but he cannot escape the overwhelming evidence for transcendental reality. Our “little systems” elevating nature or man may be brave, but they are seen to be shallow and inadequately based credos when competing, as they must, with the mature Judeo-Christian doctrines of God and man.

If there is indeed a transcendental component of reality, as Christian faith and a great weight of human testimony declare, then spiritual awareness must be included in any complete portrait of maturity. Sensitivity to divine reality is something more than intellectual understanding, although the person’s knowledge of existence is enlarged by such an awareness. It is something more than emotional stimulation, for the emotions may be subordinated and brought into subjection by aligning the self with a spiritually discerned truth. It is more than ethical choice, although profound ethical consequences may follow a commitment by faith to the Lordship of Christ.

Since the reality of the divine has proved in human history to be such an important aspect of existence, the ability to perceive this reality must be included, along with intellectual, emotional, and ethical elements, in the inventory of qualities that make up maturity. The person who fails to develop a sensitivity to spiritual reality is deficient both intellectually and emotionally, since he is unable to know or to feel the reality of the divine. However well adjusted he may be to his cultural milieu he has a maturity deficit.

The Whole Person

The question, “Maturity: When?” is now partly answered. One is mature, not after a certain lapse of time, but when certain intellectual, emotional, ethical, and spiritual conditions have been met. But personality is not divisible into parts. If we speak of a person as mature or immature in this or that aspect of his personality, we employ an artificial subdivision. Even the present four-part analysis of maturity is artificial. The self functions as a whole, whether we describe its activities as intellectual, emotional, or volitional. Since maturity is a property of the whole person, deficiency in any aspect bespeaks some degree of immaturity.

It is currently fashionable to talk about maturity. The layman, as well as the psychologist, pronounces rather freely upon the maturity of his fellows. Psychology may be entitled to generalize concerning knowledge and emotional stability as conditions of maturity, but it has no credentials for offering guidance in the less tangible areas of ethics and spiritual awareness. Psychology itself is too young, has too much theory, too many competing systems, too many conflicting spokesmen, too little consensus, too restricted a perspective, to formulate alone a balanced definition of maturity. Those who have had deep spiritual perception must also be consulted.

The Apostle Paul had penetrating insight into the process of spiritual maturation. “That we may no longer be children,” he wrote, “we are to grow up in every way … to mature manhood.” Paul recognized, as we do, that maturity has many components. Various facets of personality must undergo development before one can claim to have reached maturity. Growth in knowledge is development in relation to our world. Growth in emotional control represents development in understanding and managing ourselves. Ethical growth requires development in our attitude toward other persons. Paul added to these the most important component of all, development in relationship to God, an ingredient often missing from contemporary definitions of maturity.

When Paul spoke of maturity he used the Greek word teleios, which signifies the final state in a progressive process. Teleios is sometimes translated “perfect,” as when Jesus refers to the perfection of God. “You therefore must be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect” can only mean being filled with the kind of love that comes from God. Paul singles out love as the most important ingredient of maturity when he writes in his Colossian letter, “Above all these put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony.” Thus, the teleios-maturity of Paul and the teleios-perfection of Jesus both point to the possession of agape, divine love, as the consummation of all other achievements. Agape is the “bond of perfectness,” the binder-together of both perfection and maturity.

This unifying ingredient of maturity, the capacity to bestow unearned and undeserved love upon others, finds little understanding in psychology. Freud pronounced the command to love one’s neighbor as oneself “unpsychological” and “impossible to fullfill.” He declared that nothing is so completely at variance with human nature; men are savage beasts. Freud, unacquainted with divine grace and unwilling to explore religion at first hand, generalized from his acquaintance with unregenerate man. He saw only one side.

There is a sense in which Freud’s contention is true, that loving the unlovable is unpsychological. It is both contrary to man’s natural inclination and beyond the reach of his unaided ability. But Paul knew something about man that Freud never learned—what divine love can accomplish in human personality. “You,” he wrote to the Colossians, “who were once estranged and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds [describing unregenerate man], he has now reconciled, in order to present you holy and blameless and irreproachable before him.” So does Paul describe the action of divine grace upon human nature.

Reconciliation with God introduces man to the “more excellent way” of love and sets him on the long path to true maturity. The egocentricity of natural man gives way to the agape of God, which is “poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit.” Without this infusion of divine grace we can muster neither the inclination nor the ability to accomplish what Freud declared impossible.

Individual Responsibility

One condition remains before we can give a full answer to the question, “when?” As a complement to divine grace, Paul’s imperatives imply that man has an important measure of responsibility for his own development. He admonishes, “Put to death … what is earthly in you … immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire and covetousness.… Put them all away.… Put on … compassion, kindness, lowliness, meekness and patience.” Then comes the ultimate ingredient of maturity: “Above all these put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony.”

We now return to our title question: “Maturity: When?” Those conditions to be fulfilled include growth in knowledge, emotional control, ethical sensitivity, spiritual awareness, and, most important of all, the unifying constituent that binds them all together, agape, divine love.

Is maturity a real destination? How much love is required? We open ourselves to the divine agape, we add the full strength of our human effort, and still find ourselves frustrated by inadequacy and failure to achieve teleios-perfection. The more saintly the person, it seems, the more sensitive he is to his own shortcomings, and the more modest his claim to holiness. When does maturity come?

There is no terminus in this life. The reach for maturity is a dynamic process that may continue as long as we live. Teleios-perfection is always in the future, for the destination is an ultimate one. Some degree of teleios-maturity is for all of us as pilgrims in the way. We should be more mature today than we were yesterday, and we should reach higher levels tomorrow as we grow in grace. In the lofty language of Paul, “all of us, reflecting the splendor of the Lord in our unveiled faces, are being changed into likeness to Him, from one degree of splendor to another, for this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit” (2 Cor. 3:18, Goodspeed).

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