Hollis is describing something real, but the logic underneath it deserves scrutiny. The man who "has nothing more to prove" arrived at that ground by being tested — and proved worthy. The worthiness is still the hinge. The aggression, the bluster, the hostility toward women or toward other men, all of it is accounted for as compensation, as the outward sign of an inner lack. Remove the lack and the hostility dissolves. This is true as far as it goes. But it does not go far enough.

The soul that no longer needs to prove itself has not necessarily escaped the proving-structure. It has satisfied it. The hunger that drove the testing has been fed, at least temporarily, and the relative quiet that follows reads as wholeness. What Hollis names "healing" may be a satiety, not a liberation. The man still lives inside a grammar where worthiness is something that gets conferred — by ordeal, by initiation, by the approval of the father-principle — and the measure of his integration is how fully he has metabolized that conferral. The shame is gone because the test was passed, not because the test was recognized as something other than the final word about who he is.