Fourth of July: Freedom and Decency

 The following are all quotes from an essay by an Eastern Orthodox theologian and professor, David Bentley Hart. I know it is a lot of "academic" verbiage to wade through, but I found his thoughts on freedom very thought-provoking and I find myself agreeing with a lot of what he has to say.

"This is the crucial issue, I think: not what we understand decency to be, but what we mean when we speak of freedom. [. . . ] We have come to believe—more or less unreflectively—that the will necessarily becomes more free the more it is emancipated from whatever constraints it suffers.”

Hart, David Bentley, “Freedom and Decency”  In the Aftermath: Provocations and Laments, p.77

“[. . .] freedom is possible only through constraints [. . .] True freedom, at least according to one venerable definition, is the realization of a complex nature in its proper good (that is, in both its natural and supernatural ends); it is the freedom of a thing to flourish, to become ever more fully what it is.  An absolutely ‘negative liberty’—the absence of any religious, cultural, or social restrictions upon the exercise of the will—may often seem desirable (at least for oneself) but ultimately offers only the ‘freedom’ of chaos, of formless potential.

[. . . .] For instance, if one wishes to become honorable (a word so quaint and antique as now to have the power to charm but not to compel), one must accede to any number of elaborate restrictions upon one’s actions and even thoughts; and these restrictions unquestionably confine and inhibit desire and volition, and are themselves often more a matter of ritual comity and factitious grace and painful reserve than of practical necessity.  And yet, as one learns to consent to a common and demanding set of conventions and duties, one also progressively acquires an ever greater purity of character, a stability and hence identity, a unified ‘self’; one emerges from the inchoate turmoil of mere emotion, and is liberated from the momentary impulses and vain promptings of the will, and arrives at what can truly be called one’s essence.  The form, as Michelangelo liked to say, is liberated from the marble.”

[. . . .] This understanding of freedom, however, requires not only a belief that we possess an actual nature, which much flourish to be free, but a belief in the transcendent Good towards which that nature is oriented.  This Christians, Jews, and virtuous pagans have always understood: that which can endure in us is sustained by that which lies beyond us, in the eternity of its own plentitude. To be fully free is to be joined to that end for which our natures were originally framed, and for which—in the deepest reaches of our souls—we ceaselessly yearn.  And whatever separates us from that end—even if it be our own power of choice within us—is a form of bondage.  We are free not because we can choose, but only when we have chosen well [. . .] The consummation for which we should long, if we are wise, is that ultimately we shall, in St. Augustine’s language, achieve not only the liberty enjoyed by Adam and Eve—who were merely ‘able not to sin’—but the truest freedom of all, that of being entirely ‘unable to sin’, because God’s will works perfectly in ours.”

Hart, David Bentley, “Freedom and Decency”  In the Aftermath: Provocations and Laments, p.78-9

“Democracy is not an intrinsic good, after all.  Where the moral formation of a people is deficient, the general will malign, or historical circumstance unpropitious, is quite unambiguously wicked in its results [. . .] And a society that can no longer conceive of freedom as anything more than limitless choice and uninhibited self-expression must of necessity progressively conclude that all things should be permitted, that all values are relative, that desire fashions its own truth, that there is no such thing as ‘nature,’ that we are our own creatures.  The ultimate consequence of a purely libertarian political ethos, if it could be taken to its logical end, would be a world in which we would no longer even remember that we should want to choose the good, as we would have learned to deem things good solely because they have been chosen.  This would in truth be absolute slavery to the momentary, the final eclipse of rational dignity, the triumph within us of the bestial over the spiritual, and so of death over life.”

Hart, David Bentley, “Freedom and Decency”  In the Aftermath: Provocations and Laments, p.80