Fri 9 Apr 2010
What is true Freedom? The modern way of thinking basically suggests that true freedom is having lots of choices. So how’s this for an idea? An ancient way (including an ancient Christian way) of viewing freedom is that true freedom means less choice, not more! I know, it doesn’t sound right. Have a read of a section of David Bentley Hart’s book about deluded Atheists. While plugging Hart’s book yesterday, I was reminded of a section of the book that sums this thought up nicely. Have a read:
It should not be forgotten that the concept of freedom that most of us take for granted, at that is arguably modernity’s central “idea,” has a history. In the more classical understanding of the matter, whether pagan or Christian, true freedom was understood as something inseparable from one’s nature: to be truly free, that is to say, was to be at liberty to realize one’s proper “essence” and so flourish as the kind of being one was. [...] We become free, that is, in something of the same way that (in Michelango’s image) the form is “liberated” from the marble by the sculptor. This means we are free not merely because we can choose, but only when we have chosen well. For to choose poorly, through folly or malice, in a way that thwarts our nature and distorts our proper form, is to enslave ourselves to the transitory, the irrational, the purposeless, the (to be precise) subhuman. To choose well we must ever more clearly see the “sun of the Good” (to use the lovely Platonic metaphor), and to see more clearly we must continue to choose well; and the more we are emancipated from illusion and caprice, the more perfect our vision becomes, and the less there is really to choose. We see and we act in one unified movement of our nature toward God or the Good, and as we progress we find that to turn away from that light is ever more manifestly a defect of the mind and will, and ever more difficult to do. Hence Augustine defined the highest state of human freedom not as “being able not to sin” [...] but as “being unable to sin” [...]: a condition that reflects the infinite goodness of God, who because nothing can hinder him in the perfect realization of his own nature, is “incapable” of evil and so is infinitely free. (Atheist Delusions, 24-25).