Intimidation vs. freedom in religion | Katie van Schaijik
Tags: freedom, intimidation

Several years ago Jules and I heard Cardinal Schönborn give a lecture about the then newly released Catechism of the Catholic Church.  Afterwards, someone in the audience asked the Cardinal what the Church was going to do about dissenting theologians and catechists.  He answered with moving humility that he himself, who had headed the group that had authored the catechism, had been unable to stop the teaching of heterodoxy in his own diocese of Vienna.  Then he told us that he had recently found himself sitting beside a highly-placed Muslim cleric on an airplane who had asked a similar question: Why did the Church not crack down on dissent within its ranks?  His response was to point to the mystery of freedom in the Christian vision. 

Yesterday I spoke with a friend who had just run into a friend of hers and discovered that he had left the Church months ago.  She was full of sorrow for him and remorse that she had not even known—had done nothing to reach out to him.  She prayed with him on the spot and recommitted herself to being a better friend from here on out.

When Ayaan Hirsi Ali was asked whether she was concerned about the influence of fundamentalist Christians in our society, she said (paraphrasing from memory), “No.  When Christians ask me if I’m a believer and I say, ‘no’, they don’t try to kill me; they say they’ll pray for me.”

After posting the entry below, I found (by way of the Drudge Report) another article, this one in the New York Times, on Scientology and its defectors.  It featured a young couple who had been raised in Scientology, who had been true believers and had dedicated themselves to working for it for years.  Over time, witnessing the way staff were treated, and sensing the whole thing was a giant sham, they grew disillusioned and wanted to leave.  But,

They could not just up and go. For one, they said, the church had taken their passports. But even more important, they knew that if they left the Sea Org without going through the church’s official exit process, they would be declared “suppressive persons” — antisocial enemies of Scientology. They would lose the possibility of living for eternity. Their parents, siblings and friends who are Scientologists would have to disconnect completely from them, or risk being declared suppressive themselves.

“You’re in fear,” Mr. Collbran said. “You’re so into it, it’s everything you know: your family, your eternity.”

I am appreciating more and more the place of freedom in personal life, and the wrong of all forms of coercion and intimidation in religion.  And I am thanking God for the radical difference on that score between Christianity and other faiths.

UPDATE:  Later in the NYT article, a current spokesman for the church of Scientology defends their practice of shunning apostates this way:

Mr. Davis, the church’s current spokesman, said Scientologists are no different from Mormons, Catholics, Jehovah’s Witnesses and Amish who practice shunning or excommunication.

“These are common religious tenets,” he said. “The very survival of a religion is contingent on its protecting itself.”

Excommunication in the Catholic Church, as I understand it, is not something the faithful do to the sinner, so much as what the sinner does to himself.  In any case, it does not entail shunning the ex-communicant personally.  It means rather that he may not receive the Sacraments of the Church unless and until he repents.

Freedom 7: The first three evidences for human freedom | Josef Seifert
Tags: freedom

1. The Immediate Evidence of Freedom in the Cogito
A first answer to our question imposes itself on us: The god-like attribute of the free human person:  „for if we will, it is; if we will not, it is not…,” as Augustine says, is given just as immediately as our own existence in the experience of consciously living our being and performing free acts. (After ending this series on freedom, I will send to the Personalist project my whole text that underlies these blogs, namely a more extensive article with all the quotes.)

We can reach the knowledge of the real existence of our freedom in actually experiencing it from within – as part of the indubitable evidence of the cogito; it can be known with the same immediacy as our own existence, or in a sense even more immediately; because, as Augustine says, even if we were mistaken, per impossibile (which is impossible), about our own existence, it would still be evident to us that we would not want to be deceived, and in this will not to be deceived we experience our freedom with evidence.

Thus we may say that nothing is more evident to us than our freedom: Our very existence and conscious life are not more indubitably given, though perhaps more easily understood, than our freedom. And indeed we know of our freedom with the same type of immediate and thereupon reflective evidence with which we know of our own existence.

[Investigating this matter more closely, we could distinguish between the evident givenness of freedom on different levels: a) in the immediate inner conscious living of our acts, b) in what Karol Wojtyìa calls „reflective consciousness” (which precedes the fully conscious self-knowledge), and c) in explicit reflection and self-knowledge properly speaking in which we make our personal freedom the explicit object of reflection, d) in the insight into the nature of freedom, an insight which grasps the necessary and intelligible essence of personhood, which is realized in each and every person, and e) in the clear and indubitable recognition of our personal individual freedom, an evident knowledge which depends, on the one hand, on the immediate and reflected experience of our being and freedom, and, on the other hand, on the essential insight into the eternal and evident truth of the connection between freedom and personhood.]

The awareness of our own free will – a knowledge which is so evident that it cannot be deception – is in fact part of the evidence of the famous Cogito in René Descartes and even more in its richer and more adequate Augustinian version.

And the existence of free will in us is so evident that its evidence in a certain sense is more primary and indubitable than that of all other evident truths given in the knowledge: I think, I experience, I am.
And the existence of free will in us is even so evident that its evidence in a certain sense is more primary and indubitable than that of all other evident truths given in this knowledge (the Cogito).
Of course, this priority is not to be understood absolutely: for without the evidence of our existence and thinking activity also our freedom and will could not be given. Nevertheless, Augustine’s remark is valid in the following sense: even if we assumed, per impossibile, that all other truths given to us would be doubtful, we could still be certain that we would freely want and wish to avoid error and to reach the truth. For even if we could be in error about all things, it would still remain true that we do not want to be in error and of this free will we can have certain knowledge, as Augustine states:

Likewise if someone were to say: ‘I do not will to err,’ will it not be true that whether he errs or does not err, yet he does not will to err? Would it not be the height of impudence of anyone to say to this man: ‘Perhaps you are deceived,’ since no matter in what he may be deceived, he is certainly not deceived in not willing to be deceived? And if he says that he knows this, he adds as many known things as he pleases, and perceives it to be an infinite number. For he who says, ‘I do not will to be deceived, and I know that I do not will this, and I know that I know this,’ can also continue from here towards an infinite number, however awkward this manner of expressing it may be.

And again Augustine says:

On the other hand who would doubt that he … wills…? For even if he doubts, he … wants (wills) to be certain….

René Descartes gains the same insight as Augustine that we possess freedom of choice and know this from within our own experience of the free dominion over our acts, and expresses it in the following way:

[Descartes says that our freedom of choice] “is so evident that it must be counted among the first and most common notions that are innate in us.”

Thus, starting from the immediate self-experience of our conscious life, we gain the evidence that we possess the freedom to will not to err, and in a similar manner proceed to the more general evident knowledge of our freedom expressed by Saint Augustine thus:

for we do many things which, if we were not willing, we should certainly not do.  This is primarily true of the act of willing itself - for if we will, it is; if we will not, it is not…

Augustine continues a little further down:

…Our wills, therefore, exist as wills, and do themselves whatever we do by willing, and which would not be done if we were unwilling.

The evidence of this knowledge cannot even be refuted by any and all possible forms of self-deception because these imply or presuppose already the evidence of free will, particularly the evidence that we can will “not to be deceived,” as Augustine says.

2. The Evidence of Our Own Freedom in the Light of the “Eternal Truths” or “Necessary and Supremely Intelligible Essences and Wesensgesetze”
An extremely important advantage of the Augustinian over the Cartesian Cogito lies in Augustine‘s clear grasp that the unique inner perception or grasp that we really exist through our intimate conscious contact with our being and life “from within” is connected with the light of eternal truths, an insight into necessary essences and states of affairs that are quite independent from our individual person but without knowledge of which we could also not understand the existence of anything: for example, we do not only immediately perceive from within that we live and are conscious but we understand at the same time the universal truth of the principle of contradiction “nothing can exist and not exist at the same time and in the same sense” or: “Deception and error requires the real existence of the person who errs or is deceived; therefore, nobody who errs and is deceived can fail to exist”. And as we perceive the concrete fact of our own existence in the light of these eternal truths, so we can also perceive our own freedom in the light of the eternal truths about the essence of freedom we discussed above. Thus we could formulate: in understanding what freedom is, we at the same time perceive in ourselves the actually existing power to act freely. As it were the light of the insights into the universal facts we discussed above about the nature of freedom at the same time allows us to understand clearly the instantiation of freedom in our own being and conscious life.

3. The Knowledge of Freedom through the Mediation of the Experience of Moral Calls and Oughts
There is another way to know that we are free: we all experience that we ought to do and not to do certain things. But an ought would not only lose any sense without freedom but in its experience freedom is co-given with the same evidence as the ought itself. In a similar way, the call issued from all objective values to give them their due response, explained so well in Hildebrand’s Ethics, which is, as a matter of fact, the main rational reason for an ought, cannot be perceived without at the same time knowing our freedom, without which we could never respond to the call for a due value response. For while we can also give an affective response, that is not within our free power to engender and still is due to a great work of art or to a beloved person, this due response as well calls for a free sanction without which our response as it were does not enter fully in relation with due-ness. Therefore in the experience of any “ought” or call to give a due response we are given with the same evidence with which we know that we ought to do or to omit something, or to perform an inner act due to a beautiful or good object or person, also our freedom, which is the only conceivable addressee of an ought or call for a due response. No conceivable totally unfree reaction can ever properly respond to an ought or to a call from a value per se. We can say: nobody can know of an ought or call to give an adequate response to a good without knowing that he is free; hence as we do know of many such oughts and calls for a due response, we know that we are free.

Freedom 6: Are we really free?  Can we know it? | Josef Seifert
Tags: freedom

In our discussion of the essence of freedom we already presupposed all along, and as we shall see with good reason, that we as human persons are free. We spoke of us being able to take free stances, to command actions, to cooperate, etc. Nevertheless, we must distinguish sharply between knowing the essence of freedom and knowing the existence of human freedom. In principle, to gain an insight into all we saw about the essence of freedom does not yet imply that we actually are free, that freedom actually exists in the human being, either in actu or in potency, as fundamental faculty of the person. Especially when it comes to freedom, we can well understand the fundamental difference between grasping the essence of freedom and knowing the existence of human freedom.  This is evident because the determinist who denies the existence of human freedom has as well to understand the essence of freedom whose existence in man he denies.  He cannot deny freedom without some grasp of what the freedom is the existence of which he denies. Can we then know that human freedom exists and that we actually are free?

If human freedom did not exist, human beings would not be persons, as we have seen – but why should this be impossible?  Maybe humans are not persons, as those countless philosophies imply that deny human freedom.

That it is one of innumerable „eternal truths” that “person and freedom are inseparable,” leaves the question unanswered: Does freedom exist in man? All the facts about the essence of freedom and personhood say nothing yet about human beings’ actually possessing this astonishing faculty.
Is it not a prerogative of God to be Lord over the being and the non-being of a thing by a simple inner word or fiat, without the person being determined to such a fiat by any cause other than his or her free center itself?

Is there then such a god-like quality in any finite person as to be the lord over the being and non-being of her acts?  Answering this question affirmatively, as we implicitly did, obliges us to answer also how we can know that we are free? I will present in the following six ways in which we know that we are free or “six proofs of freedom.”

Freedom 5: Inner Freedom and Cooperative Freedom | Josef Seifert
Tags: freedom

Inner Free Acts
Thus I can act in the outside world, realize states of affairs or prevent them, but I can also take inner stances, respond by speaking a free “yes” or “no” to something. Besides such actual free responses, which I experience here and now and direct to an object, there are also superactual free responses in a person.  These continue to exist in us even when we do not actually experience them or think of them.  As we know many things superactually even when we do not think of them, so we find also that concretely lived free acts and responses do not exhaust themselves in our actually experiencing them.  Both our responses to individual beings (such as our love for our wife or child) and to general types and whole spheres of value, such as attitudes of reverence, the virtues of justice, of purity, etc. can last in the form of superactual acts.  They manifest themselves in our emotions, feelings, concrete responses and actions, etc. All virtues and vices are superactual acts.  They profoundly influence the concrete actual consciousness of a person and are as it were a basso continuo which accompanies the actual melodies of our daily life.  Finally, there is the so-called fundamental moral option for or against all morally relevant goods, for or against God and the whole world of values. This response has the most universal scope of objects at which it is directed. If it gains sturdy roots in a person, it becomes more than an “option,” it becomes the most fundamental moral attitude; this attitude may also be called the general moral attitude.

Cooperative Freedom and the Gift of Self as Supreme Fulfillment of Persons
It is clear that we cannot directly realize superactual attitudes and virtues by a simple fiat.  We can engender freely general moral intentions, yes, but they neither immediately take root in the person nor acquire instantaneously the personal depth proper to superactual virtues.  Similarly, we cannot, by a simple fiat of our will, bring about affective responses such as grief or love, joy, compassion, or repentance, however appropriate also these spiritual affections are to their objects, as Dietrich von Hildebrand has shown in his books The Heart and The Nature of Love. Yet this does not imply that we have no freedom or responsibility with respect to our superactual attitudes or to our spiritual affective responses such as love, repentance or grief.  We come to recognize here two further important manifestations of freedom: (1) the indirect role of our free acts, and (2) cooperative freedom.

(1) A single free action of helping someone lies within the power of our immediate freedom (in spite of the difficulties and limitations we may experience with respect to its actualization), and has an immediate and direct effect in the world and on our conscious life.  Yet each action has also indirect effects on ourselves; it will influence and gradually change our superactual attitudes and the kind of emotional responses (love or hatred, warmth or envy and bitterness) we give to others.  This applies to good as well as to bad actions. We cannot directly bring about with our free fiat attitudes towards persons or values which result indirectly from many free actions nor can we immediately evoke affective responses of repentance, compassion, or love, which often arise in our nature without participation of our freedom and which nevertheless can be morally and humanly speaking adequate or inadequate to their human or divine object.  Now the fact that all of these acts and feelings do not obey our immediate free command does not impede that they are in many ways influenced indirectly by our free acts. Thus the free acts of repeated adultery will give rise to an impure and unfaithful attitude and to kinds of feelings towards his wife and other women which the faithful husband will not experience. Thus we come to understand that our freedom has an enormous indirect influence distinct from direct freedom by which we bring about free acts.

(2) Even more amazing is what we might term „cooperative freedom.“  Besides indirect freedom exerting great influence on such data of the moral life as virtues and vices and our affections, we also have another important capacity: namely that of cooperative freedom, of relating freely and in a particularly intimate way to those realities in us that arise without freedom.  We can conspire freely with the tears of repentance that arise in us, or suppress them; we can freely disavow feelings of hatred or identify ourselves with them. We can cooperate with emotions of love and form them freely from within by sanctioning them. We touch here upon what constitutes the very heart of human freedom.

Recognition of cooperative freedom even modifies what we have said about freedom at the beginning of this series, describing freedom in terms of being „the lords over the being and the non-being of our acts.“ This characterization of freedom in terms of autonomy does not describe adequately many aspects of freedom such as the freedom in the grateful receiving of gifts, in gratitude as such, and in cooperative freedom.  In many cases, of which the highest involve divine grace, we find in our soul gifts and experiences of joy or love which arise in us without depending on our freedom.  Yet inasmuch as such movements of our soul are adequate or inadequate to their object, good or bad, we must not let them arise in us without involvement of our freedom.  When they are bad, we ought to disavow them, thereby not immediately eradicating them but „decapitating“ them, as it were.  We can freely speak a ‘no’ to our feeling of intense envy, when we realize its evilness and inappropriateness.  This is not an act of repression but, on the contrary, an act of conscious confrontation with ourselves.  By disavowing feelings of envy, the person disassociates herself from them.  Thus they become movements of the soul for which we are no longer responsible in the way in which we are responsible when we let envy grow in us without taking such a free stance.  Much more profound is the interpenetration of freedom and affective responses – or other non-free experiences and gifts in us – in the positive case.  When a deep love or feeling of repentance is granted to us – a feeling or movement of our soul which we never could have given to ourselves – our freedom is not fated to remain outside such gifts.  It can join in with the gift.  We can freely sanction our affective response or an attitude of our will of which we recognize that it gives a due response to an object or a person and that it has gift-character and does not stand simply within our power. By such a free sanctioning of these acts, we integrate them into our free life.  Analogously, we can appropriate and accept into our freedom all intentional and good acts which arise in our soul, including our acceptance and conviction of the truth. Also in the sphere of the intellect we can integrate by a free sanction, and affirm from within, convictions which arise organically and without being free acts from our cognition. Given the rationality of the conviction and its character as a theoretical and adequate response to reality (states of affairs), we can also sanction it or add to convictions resulting simply from knowledge (being convinced by the object known) convictions which have the character of free real assent.  We can speak a free yes to truth, a response which takes on a new role when it is not merely based on evident knowledge but on probable knowledge or on faith. We can turn that which is given to us as a gift into a free act, by freely sanctioning such gifts.  Gift and freedom interpenetrate each other here.  We might speak of a spiritual wedding of our will with our affections and with other noble movements or acts in us, including the assent to truth.  By affections which well up in us as gifts, such as deep emotions of love, our will is enriched and allowed to partake as it were in the wealth of those affections and of other movements of the soul which possess gift character.  Thus the deepest dimensions of freedom do not actualize themselves simply by the free center of the person alone.  They are not even only formed by, as well as dependent on, the value of the object which gives purpose and meaning to our freedom.  Rather, the deepest dimension of human freedom requires a gift which precedes it and in cooperation with which alone freedom can attain its supreme dignity. This is true in a special way of the deepest act of freedom realized only in love and in the gift of Self, in which we give to the other not only a response or something in ourselves, do not only perform acts, but give our very self to the other. This self-donation in love requires, in its fullness, on the human level, also the gift of the affective response to the beloved person which we cannot produce but sanction by our free will.  In this ultimate sense, then, „to be free“ means to cooperate with gifts on the natural (and, as the Christian believes, also the supernatural) order. Without using our freedom in cooperation with such gifts we can never attain the highest perfection to which the person is called nor fulfill what it means „to be a person.“

Three Levels of Freedom that Belong Essentially to the Person
We said that already on purely philosophical grounds freedom inseparably belongs to personhood. Now we have to make some fundamental distinctions within what we call freedom, namely between: 1) freedom as a faculty (power) inseparable from personhood; 2) freedom as ability here and now to perform free acts; and 3) freedom as activation of this ability in actually performing free acts. Only the latter two imply the conscious life, self-determination and other traits of freedom spoken of above. The faculty of freedom or the free will (sense 1) belongs substantially to the person qua person and exists in every person even prior to awaken to consciousness. This is not true of freedom in the senses (2) and (3). Certainly, also the faculty of freedom is ordained to be exercised in conscious actualizations of it in which alone we encounter and experience freedom, and from whence alone we gain the metaphysical insight into its bearer, the person, and into the existence of the free power and of free potentialities which must exist prior to their actualizations in free acts. On the other hand, and equally certainly, neither the actual ability to perform free acts nor the actual use of it in these acts themselves is inseparable from personhood. They are not found in embryos and new-born babies, unconscious or comatose patients and in persons afflicted by certain types of grave mental retardation or psychic compulsion, and are absent in all human beings during sleep. But it is a most wrong consequences many bioethicists draw from this by holding that embryos and infants or mentally impaired persons are not persons. While they cannot exercise their freedom, they still are free: to be a person entails the fundamental metaphysical faculty, a capacity in principle to perform free acts. As faculty, freedom resides on the level of the substantial being of the person or, more precisely, is inseparable from the substantial spiritual being of the person.

Freedom 4: What Is Freedom? Can We choose Radically Different Lives? | Josef Seifert
Tags: freedom

Freedom is one of those arch-data that cannot be defined in terms of something else or reduced to anything besides itself. It includes, however, many dimensions and traits which can be unfolded and analyzed (as this has recently been done in deep works of Karol Wojtyla and Dietrich von Hildebrand): It is not only a freedom from determining causes, an „I can but I do not need to,“ but also the power of self-determination that makes free acts utterly different from chance-events, with which Heisenberg and many physicists and philosophers of science confused it. Freedom also involves a special form of possession of one’s being, which is only possible in and through the free agent’s rational consciousness and capacity of self-governance and self-determination. To a person’s free determining and governing herself corresponds also the person’s being governed and determined by herself.

None of this can be understood if we do not recognize that free acts necessarily presuppose and entail consciousness, not only immanent conscious states such as fatigue but an intentional conscious directedness to something over against freedom, to some object of which we are conscious, to which we can refer in free acts only because we also are related to them through some rational knowledge and thought: “nothing is willed if it is not known before”; or: “nothing is willed that is not first conceived in thought”, one could formulate roughly the immensely differentiated relation between freedom and objects of consciousness. But consciousness of some objects is not only presupposed by freedom, it characterizes free acts themselves: they relate consciously to their object.

Free acts, however, not only presuppose some objects, perhaps neutral objects such as the number of little pebbles on the street which can be objects of our perception or knowledge. Rather, free acts presuppose an object of some weight or importance, some good we aspire to or some evil we seek to avoid; otherwise freedom would sink down to the level of a totally sense-less exercise of changing neutral facts. We cannot meaningfully speak of a free act in an axiological void; in a meaning- and valueless universe free acts would not have any sensible motivation and freedom would sink down to the level of pure empty arbitrariness, like: “I am free to move pebble # 2,000.019 from its position at the right of the adjacent pebble to its left.”

The object of a meaningful free act must therefore possess some importance that lifts it out of neutrality. The importance of the object of a free act can be positive or negative. It also can take fundamentally different forms, which explains the drama of human freedom: it can move just on the level of the merely subjectively satisfying or dissatisfying; pleasure is very often a desirable good but it can continue to motivate us even when such a satisfaction is neither objectively good for us but destructive nor good in itself; thus we can consume drugs even if we know that they destroy our health, life, and happiness, or turn us into thiefs. The Good can also be an objective good for us, lie in our true interest, which can happen even when we feel subjective dissatisfaction, as when we get freed from a drug-addiction. A being can thirdly also possess value in itself, an intrinsic preciousness calling upon our adequate response, such as when we say that the human person deserves respect in view of her dignity.

Freedom is thus not only a freedom from and self-determination, lordship over our own acts, but also a freedom for, the ability to speak a free yes or no to some object. The close connection between freedom and an object of which we are conscious and which possesses positive or negative importance, is good or bad, entails the all-important power to engender from oneself acts of freely responding and taking stances towards objects and other persons, to fulfill oughts and obligations issuing from them, to give them their due response, as well as the capacity of serving goods and other persons, and of self-donation. But we are also free to ignore the call of objective values and for example use or rape a girl without any concern for her intrinsic dignity and for what truly is best for her and for us. All these are aspects of the “freedom for” or the “freedom to”.

Freedom is also intimately connected with the life of the intellect and involves the capacity to open one’s mind in knowledge in order to receive information, to love the truth, to cooperate freely with the process of knowledge, and to consent to some extent freely to that which is known to us.

Two Dimensions of Human Freedom and Morality
In order to understand the relation of freedom and the different kinds of acts which it renders possible, we must first distinguish two quite different dimensions or perfections of freedom.  The first one unfolds in relation to the important object; it involves a free ‘yes’ or a free ‘no’ spoken to it.  It is the freedom to respond, to take a stance, affirming or rejecting an object or state of affairs.
The second dimension of freedom consists in the will being able to engender free outward-directed actions, and to initiate new causal chains, thereby also becoming the lord over our external actions and being able to initiate activities which then might lead to the realization of states of affairs which we realize in the outside world, after „affirming“(willing) them freely in an inner response. The second dimension of freedom may also lead to the making or creating of objects, works of art, etc., which are not reducible to states of affairs.

The first perfection of free will is deeper and has a much wider scope than the second.  It encompasses also all purely inner responses, including those directed to objects which the free agent can in no way change, such as God or our neighbor, perhaps a more gifted person than we are, whom we can freely respect, affirm in love, or reject in hate and envy, or a cross or illness, which we cannot alter but can freely and humbly accept or rebel against.

The second dimension of human freedom chiefly refers to free actions in the strict sense, i.e., to acts which aim at the realization of things that are not yet real but can be realized through me. Within the things that can brought into being by free acts we distinguish the object-sphere of acting in the narrower sense of this term, through which we bring about states of affairs, such as saving a person’s life who fell into deep water and cannot swim, from the object-sphere of making, through which we can make or produce things such as handiwork or works of art.  In such actions or creative acts which are geared to the real world outside of ourselves, we initiate those activities which bring about the intended states of affairs or objects of making.

Both dimensions of freedom involve the mysterious inner power to engender acts without any preceding cause or our nature forcing us to act.  This essence of freedom is common to all free acts and actions and entails an absolutely astonishing feature: due to our freedom we are „the lords over the being and the non-being of our act[ion]s.”

The first perfection of the will, the responding one, can not only freely affirm a good without choosing properly speaking, but it also includes the freedom of choice. Free choice, at least in finite persons, is not restricted to the choice of the proper means to achieve the good as final end, as Aristotle thought: a free person does not want with necessity as final end the intrinsic good or the happy life or the realization of moral values and the adequate response to the truth and especially to morally relevant goods.  Alas, he can fail to will the first and most important objective goal of freedom – to conform his life to the truth and to true goods.  He can instead choose a life of subjective satisfaction in indifference towards intrinsic values and morally relevant goods, and even in indifference towards his own objective good, or even in hatred of these objective values and of God.  Thus a free finite person can choose between ultimate ends, between good and evil, between the love of God up to the abandon of self (amor Dei usque ad contemptum sui), and the self-love and lust for pleasure up to the contempt of God (amor sui usque ad contemptum Dei), as Saint Augustine expresses it.  This choice between the ultimate ends is the chief drama of human freedom.

What freedom is not | Katie van Schaijik
Tags: freedom

The July 6, 2009 issue of National Review includes a review by the excellent David Pryce-Jones of a new book about the demented and destructive sex life of Lord Byron.

Bertrand Russell, of all philosophers, pointed out that Byron’s concept of freedom was the same as that of a German prince or a Cherokee chief: the pleasure of doing as one pleases and not having to account for it.

Pryce-Jones ends the review with a melancholy reflection that Bryon’s notion of freedom has become mainstream.

Byron opened the way for men and women everywhere to indulge in whatever they like without moral judgment or acceptance of responsibility.  Conduct that was once offensive has become commonplace.  The outrage and destructiveness that surged around Byron have long dissolved into a sense that his poetry is a full and complete justification of the man.  Radical politics like his have become a standard intellectual property, and transgression in personal relations and matters of art is considered perfectly normal, altogether in the order of things.  Where once this singular English peer staggered the world by abusing the privileges of his class and his times, now innumerable demotic copycat Byrons feel born to opposition of their society, and they too have no idea that they are spoiled, abusing the very things that have protected them and made them what they are.

Contrast this notion of freedom with the Christian personalist notion, as expressed, for instance, in this article by John F. Crosby.

Defending the Freedom of wearing Veils and Burqas | Josef Seifert
Tags: burqa, freedom, freedom of religion, islam

I think that not even the most literal interpretation of the Koran’s dressing codes for women, wearing burqas, ought to be outlawed in the West, let alone Muslim women covering of heads by normal veils (which are equally outlawed in many Western countries). It seems to me that any observance of a religious tradition that is not in any way in itself evil, or criminal, or offensive, ought to be permitted by the law and never be banished or outlawed, which does not exclude to persecute domestic crimes even if justified in the shariah.
Not only is there a sacred right to the freedom of religion and to the freedom of conscience to obey one’s positive religious mandates as long as they do not entail crimes or oppression bordering on crime (which wearing the nice burqa that underlines the mystery of the woman’s body, certainly does not). One may remind oneself that also Saint Paul demanded that women cover their heads in Church as sign of their submission to their husbands and of their respect for the angels. Should it be outlawed that women wear veils in our Churches (which is still being done in some places)?
The comparison with religious habits of nuns is not that far-fetched. There is a Catholic nun’s order of the “slaves of Christ” in Spain, and some other Eucharistic feminine orders, who wear almost the same veils that completely cover their faces. Should this be outlawed?
Moreover, in general the outlawing of any dresses that do not offend public morality is an assault against freedom, even if these dresses have nothing to do with religion.
Besides, to want to forbid pious Muslim or Hindu women (in the name of fighting oppression!) to wear veils or other dresses that correspond to their beliefs, while we do nothing to solve first our problems with women’s dresses, as an extremely witty Muslim Professor remarked when called to speak out in the veil-processes in England, seems doubly wrong.
There is another reason against this. It seems in general quite wrong to support any kind of pressure (as in Mexico for decades in regard to the Catholic priests and nuns and now increasingly in the West) that demands that nobody may wear in public places or private schools symbols of their religion.
Moreover, it is ludicrous, grotesque and utterly hypocritical that in Germany, France, England, or the USA, Muslim women should be forced to take off their veils against their conscience, while our women may wear the most offensive and unbelievably impure dresses in public, indulge in the most shocking public seduction, for example as naked prostitutes on TV commercials giving their phone numbers and “prices,” pose in offensive nakedness in Playboy and other magazines, without being outlawed!
Finally, a country that forbids burqas but “legalizes” the murder of one’s own children is in my opinion absolutely cynical and grotesque!

Freedom 3: But are we free? Five questions | Josef Seifert
Tags: freedom

But are we free? Do we possess freedom? And can we know this with our pure human reason or only accept it on faith? We need to distinguish here five questions, two general and three more specific ones:

(1) What is the nature of freedom? In what does it consist? This we must understand not only in order to assert the existence of human freedom but also in order to deny it. If we did not know WHAT freedom is and what we mean by this word, we could neither assert nor deny the existence of freedom because we would not understand at all what we are saying when we say “We are free” or what we are stating when we claim “We are not free.” Both judgments make no sense without understanding what freedom is.
(2) The second fundamental and quite independent question is: Does freedom exist?

This second question can again be divided into three distinct questions:
(a) whether human (and angelic) freedom or
(b) [only] divine freedom or
(c) both human and divine freedom do exist.

A most fundamental question for all our understanding of the human person, is no doubt whether WE are free, whether human freedom exists.

But can we truly know that we are free? Before we can answer the question whether we are free and how we can know this, we have to inquire into the nature of freedom, as we have already said. But this first huge question has to be tackled another time.

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Freedom 1: Are we free? Are we persons?
Freedom 2: Why nothing is left of Jewish Christian Faith if we are not free

Freedom 2: Why nothing is left of Jewish Christian Faith if we are not free | Josef Seifert
Tags: christian faith, freedom, personalism

1. Without acknowledging freedom of the created person, God would be the origin of all evils and thus a hyper-demonic being: Each metaphysics, which denies the freedom of humans and of angels, and more precisely the abuse of freedom, as source and first cause of all the manifold evils that obviously exist in the world blames these evils on God or, if he is an atheist, on an unfree natural cause. In either of these two cases moral evil would not exist at all in humans. Because if humans and angels were determined to be evil, they would be innocent like lambs or like puppets; God, however, as long as his existence is not altogether denied, as the source of all evil and suffering, would be himself evil. Therefore each denying of human and angelic freedom either leads to atheism or to polytheism, or to a transformation of God into a super-demon (infinitely more terrible than Satan, because all evils from the beginning to the end of the world would be God�s fault alone, which cannot be said of Satan. In contrast to Satan�s limited causal role regarding other evils besides his own). If man and angels were not free and if therefore, granted his existence, God had brought into the world all meanness, all lies, all adulteries, all perjuries, rapes, murders, thefts, tortures, hate and envy, genocide and other crimes (including Satan�s and his angels� sins) or if He had determined angels and humans to commit them, He would be the only ultimate source of evil (which cannot be said of Lucifer). One cannot imagine a more terrible destruction of the idea of God. God would be an Anti-God. In this case, Ivan Karamazov�s rebellion against God as responsible for all evils would be wholly justified.

2. Without divine freedom there could not be any contingent world and particularly no created free person: The origin of non-necessary beings in the world, and particularly of created free agents, could not be explained without creation being a free act of God, because a contingent and temporal world cannot proceed from God by a necessity rooted in the eternal and necessary divine nature but only from a free divine choice, and even more clearly: never could unfree causes in nature or in God explain the wonder of a free will in finite beings. Freedom in the world can come into being only from a free act of the absolute Being. Therefore, if God were not free, neither the contingent (non-necessarily existent) world nor free agents in it could exist. Therefore, do deny God�s freedom of choice, still retaining His existence, will lead to some form of pantheism that dissolves human personhood and freedom. Moreover, if the world and even evil flows necessarily from God, God would, if not freely, so necessarily, become the cause of evil as well, as Schelling suggests in his thesis that everything flows with absolute necessity (at least moral necessity) from God.

3. Without divine freedom there would also be no divine holiness: Each adequate idea of God implies His freedom also for another reason: as the condition and origin of His justice, mercy, and Holiness as the highest perfection of any person qua person: Without God�s supremely perfect freedom the core of divine perfection would be null. God would no longer be just, merciful and holy, and hence not God.

4. By denying divine, angelic and human freedom the entire Judeo-Christian revelation is being denied and Holy Scripture rendered a worthless book:
Without freedom, God would not be our creator, nor our redeemer, nor would there be divine forgiveness of sins, nor any reason for gratitude towards God for our creation, redemption or for the forgiveness of our sins, because if these were not works of divine free choice, they would be nothing.
Likewise without freedom of God, of angels and of humans all anthropological contents and teachings of Sacred Scripture and of the Church would lose their foundation: We would not be creatures but some moments in a necessarily self-unfolding life of God. There would be no original sin, no personal sin, no redemption from them, no meaning of the divine commandments, nor of any divine promises. The Sermon on the Mount and the call to holiness would not have any sense any more let alone eternal rewards or punishments. All talk of a purgatory, of moral conscience, of the sacraments of confession and baptism or the unction of the sick would be senseless babbling.

In a word: without freedom no Christianity! And also no Judaism and no Islam which recognize many of the same truths about God and man!
Therefore hardly any truth is more important not only for the metaphysics of the person and our personal life, but also for the Christian and any other theistic faith than this one: that the person, whether human and finite or divine and infinite, is free.

��Other entries in this series��
Freedom 1: Are we free? � Are we persons?
Freedom 3: But are we free? Five questions

Freedom 1: Are we free?  Are we persons? | Josef Seifert
Tags: freedom, personalism, persons

The Immense Importance of the Question whether We Are Free

There is hardly anything that could be more fundamental for personalist philosophy, for the understanding of the human being qua person, than the comprehension of the nature of freedom and an answer to the question whether we humans are in fact free. Already a purely philosophical grasp of the person is enough to see the inseparable link between person and freedom so that one can say on purely philosophical-rational grounds: an “unfree person” is a contradictio in adiecto, a contradiction in itself — just like an “iron wood.”

Freedom belongs so essentially to personhood that no being can be called a person if he or she, in principle and as subject awakened to rational conscious life, were entirely determined from without, by physical forces, by his or her own nature, by other persons or even by God — rather than being capable of engendering acts by her free center, by her herself. Even a child’s pre-philosophical experience of freedom is enough to see that if a person were not free, responsibility and morality could not exist, good and evil would be illusions, there would be no guilt, no merit; praise and blame would be just as senseless as punishment and reward, and moral conscience that urges us to do the good when we hesitate doing it and makes present to us our obligations, warns us not to commit evil, or reprimands us for having done something wrong, would be based on a big delusion; promising, breaking or keeping promises, or giving a gift would all cease to be what they are and be reduced to their semblance; gratitude or reproach would all be absurd nonsense — all these dimensions so essential to personal human life would be deprived of their foundation if human persons were not free.
Thus it is not amazing that we encounter profound statements on human freedom in philosophers and cultures of all epochs — in Socrates, Plato, Sophocles, Aristotle, Cicero, Seneca, Augustine, and many others.

Aristotle left us with possibly the most metaphysical characterization and affirmation of human freedom, stating: “For he [man] is the lord over the being and over the non-being of his actions.”

Aristotle calls freedom in other texts “the first principle,” “the cause” and the “master of action”. Hence the common (partly Hegelian) opinion that only Christianity introduced the idea that all human beings are free is not true. We find it very clearly expressed in ancient thought, not only in Plato and Aristotle, but also in Seneca’s magnificent texts insisting that even slaves are free qua human beings.
Nonetheless, what remains true in Hegel’s position is that a full acknowledgment of human, angelic and divine freedom is indeed far more clearly and centrally contained in the contents of the Christian faith than in any other religion or philosophy: Christianity (but in the last analysis also Judaism and Islam) would be an absurdity without human and divine freedom: Without the person possessing freedom, which implies that the free subject is not wholly determined by nature or by any cause extrinsic to herself, none of the chief Christian beliefs would be true. One might say without exaggeration: the entire internal structure of the Christian faith, at least its logical conditions, would break down without humans and angels, and without God truly possessing freedom.

Freedom 2: Why nothing is left of Jewish Christian Faith if we are not free
Freedom 3: But are we free? Five questions

Obama utters a truth he defies in practice | Katie van Schaijik
Tags: coercion, freedom, obama

In a speech today (hat tip, Andy McCarthy at the Corner), President Obama remarked:

[T]here are some who advocate for democracy only when they are out of power; once in power, they are ruthless in suppressing the rights of others. No matter where it takes hold, government of the people and by the people sets a single standard for all who hold power: you must maintain your power through consent, not coercion[.]

The first sentence calls to mind the intimidation campaign unleashed by homosexual activists against the supporters of Proposition 8 in California. It reminds me of Obama’s pet organization ACORN, which demand “justice” while it commits fraud and thuggishly shakes down banks. Obama calls for a post-racial politics, then nominates for the Supreme Court a woman who seems to have made identity politics the cornerstone of her judicial philosophy. His treatment of GM is textbook example of the strong-arm tactics he deplores.

But what I really want to say here is that I have seen this same problem in many Catholics. They speak the language of democracy and stand on their rights, but they do it tactically. They are not committed to those things in principle. Rather, they are exploiting the virtues of a free society to acquire power and influence for themselves. Once they have it, they use it to force their will on those under them. They justify themselves on the grounds that “the Church is not a democracy.”

This is something we have to resist with all the strength we can muster, after the example of the non-violent moral resistance of a Gandhi or a Martin Luther King, Jr., or the Solidarity movement in Poland.

Truth and goodness cannot be imposed on individuals or on societies.