10
True Freedom
BY true freedom, as it will be discussed in this chapter, we mean that ultimate and blissful freedom which Christ—and He alone—can give us, if we give ourselves to Him without reserve. Negatively speaking, it consists in the dissolution of all spasms of egotism, in getting rid of all inhibitions. It must not be confused, of course, with the freedom of man, in general, including the two dimensions of which we spoke in the preceding chapter; nor must it be confused with the potentiality, not always actualized, of moral freedom.
True freedom is a consequence of our transformation in Christ
As distinct from these, we are now concerned with that freedom which one cannot possess except as an element of Christian perfection: in other words, which constitutes a goal which is reached in our transformation in Christ.
Possessing this freedom, we participate in a higher life. We are lifted by Christ above our nature, including all factors that tend to weigh us down. We no longer live, as it were, on the natural plane but in the perspective of Christ, released, in a sense, from all the weight of our nature. In this freedom, we experience the truth of St. Paul’s words: “Who then shall separate us from the love of Christ?” (Rom. 8:35), Nothing but a complete and unreserved surrender to Christ—meaning that we fling ourselves in His arms without any thought of a natural security or stronghold, that we burn the bridges behind us, that we answer the call sequere me unconditionally—can give us this freedom of the children of God.
Let us now examine the chief obstacles that hinder us from achieving this ultimate freedom; the bonds we have to break so that we may attain to it. (The sequence followed in our enumeration of the obstacles to freedom is not meant to express their order of importance.)
Egotism hinders attainment of true freedom
Most obvious is the hampering effect of our various egocentric preoccupations. A certain type of man feels, on every conceivable occasion, that his rights are threatened or trespassed upon. He always keeps on his guard lest some impairment of his rights should escape his attention. Dominated by his fear of such an injury or encroachment, he seldom stops to consider whether a thing is valuable in itself or not, whether it glorifies God or offends Him. Hence, his vision of various situations is obscured, his capacity of adequate judgment is blunted. He is incapable of a free, unwarped response to values.
In his mind, the theme of his rights overshadows the question of the objective value involved; thus, instead of a disinterested love of truth and of right he is likely to develop a bitter and cantankerous attitude. Indeed, summum jus, summa injuria, his inordinate insistence on his rights may sometimes tempt him to ride roughshod over the rights of others. Such people, in their cramped egotism, are as far removed from true freedom as it is possible to be.
In others, morbid egocentrism takes the form of over-susceptibility. Every now and then they feel slighted, offended, treated with disregard or, at any rate, unkindly. They are always on the lookout for slights inflicted upon them. Their capacity for objective judgment is also gravely impaired. An elaborate set of inhibitions prevents them from displaying an adequate response to values. They are crushed under a heavy burden; they are continually moving in a circle around their ego. They never raise themselves above a situation in which the consideration due to their person seems to be involved, and must in their turn be qualified as specifically unfree.
Disgust about unsavory things can hinder freedom
An entirely different but scarcely less important form of unfreedom is that which proceeds from the attitude of disgust. In various situations, certain people labor under grave inhibitions owing to the fact that they feel disgusted at the thought of any closer contact with others. The theme of the situation escapes them because of their preoccupation lest they should have to touch something that inspires them with disgust. They would shudder, for instance, at the idea of drinking from a glass from which someone else has drunk.
Of course we must distinguish between the different types of disgust. The disgust evoked by really and obviously unsavory things—such as dirt, purulent sores, and so on—is in itself perfectly legitimate; a complete indifference in this respect betrays a coarseness and crude lack of sensibility, which is anything but a virtue. Even this normal reaction of nausea, however, must not reach the point of hampering us in the practice of charity. It must never keep us from helping a person in need; furthermore, while tending a sick person we must so repress it so that it is unnoticeable to the patient. Certainly it is not a duty to emulate those saints who kissed the fetid sores of lepers; that was in response to a particular vocation. Yet, whenever the situation objectively requires us to undergo contact with such things—whenever, that is to say, it does become a duty of charity—we must silence the voice of disgust in us, and subordinate everything to the imperative of love. Our failure to do so proves our deficiency of inner freedom.
Disgust at naturally private things may hinder freedom
Another type of disgust refers to a too intimate bodily contact with other persons. Certain things that are not really disgusting by themselves may, as possible vehicles or symbols of such an intimate contact, become vicarious objects of disgust. Here, again, sensibility as such is by no means a defect: it is right to be aware of the fact that things of this order belong to man’s corporeal sphere of privacy, and to shrink from penetrating into that sphere.
Take, for instance, the case of conjugal love. Here the intentio unionis is a predominant theme and can legitimately unfold itself; accordingly, the bodily sphere of privacy is itself translucent with the precious radiance that pervades and represents the being (in its totality, comprising also the outward aspects) of the beloved person. The feeling of embarrassment otherwise evoked by all intimate proximity with a strange body yields its place here, normally, to a feeling of joy—not devoid of, but on the contrary, based upon reverence—at being allowed to participate, in a sense, in the other person’s corporeal privacy. It is as though the negative note otherwise attached to this whole sphere were transformed, here, into a positive one.
Whoever is so imprisoned by his general disgust at contacts that, even though united to another person by such a bond of love, he still feels repelled by the nearness of that person’s bodily sphere of intimacy, gives proof of a kind of cramped egocentrism in his character. More explicitly, he gives proof of the exaggerated stress he lays on his distinctness from others, owing to his overvaluation of his own self. This attitude of a too anxious isolation of self from strange humanity, an overemphasis of one’s inviolable particularity and distance from others, obstructs the free circulation of love. It is incompatible with that bold self-surrender without which no genuine love is possible.
With an important modification, similar considerations apply to the other great classic type of love (as distinct from the conjugal one, which, anyhow, is a priori restricted to the relations between man and woman): the deep love that animates true friendship, particularly such as is embedded in a common allegiance to Christ. Here, to be sure, the other person’s corporeal intimacy cannot become a source of attraction; but here, too, it must cease to have anything deterrent about it.
Whenever the logic of a situation (we are not maintaining that such situations should expressly be sought for) engages one to undergo a contact with that sphere of corporeal privacy, one should not recoil from it nor be so preoccupied about it as to let one’s inner freedom fall a prey to self-consciousness.
Our love of the other person must span the abyss of his bodily strangeness. Then the contact with his sphere of privacy, as typified, for instance, by our having to drink from the same glass, will acquire a trait of neutrality. If viewed against the background of my spiritual communion with him and of the beauty I see in his soul, the other person’s sphere of bodily privacy will gradually become something familiar to me. My contact with that sphere I shall experience as an obvious consequence of my close solidarity with his personal life, inherent in all genuine relations of love—as is, also, a certain community of possessions; that is to say, one’s spontaneous readiness to share what one has with a friend in need.
A man who lives in Jesus will deem it inconsistent with his true freedom to experience the distance between another person’s bodily privacy and his own as an unbridgeable gulf, especially when his relation with that person is such that they may address to each other the words, “The love of Christ has gathered us together” (Antiphon in the Liturgy of Holy Thursday, Washing of Feet). He who is so far dominated by his reactions of disgust as to live in a continuous solicitude about the protection of his bodily privacy, not allowing either the duty of charity (whenever it presents itself in a way requiring the breaking down of those barriers) or a close personal friendship in Christo to interfere with his anxious self-isolation, is most certainly wanting in true freedom. He is imprisoned in an unessential concern. By yielding to this tendency of his nature, he will in time slide into a kind of spinster-like fussiness about his jealously guarded intangibility—an attitude of prim egotism entirely unworthy of a Christian and certain to make its victim more and more incapable of love.
What true freedom implies in this context is not, in a word, a natural lack of sensitivity to disgusting impressions, nor a primary absence of the sense of distance and privacy, as it occurs in rude and primitive people. The right freedom concerning the sphere here referred to consists not in a natural antithesis to the state of feeling disgusted as such, but in the capacity, originating in a supernatural basic attitude, of responding to the call of God as transmitted by a given situation without being inhibited, in so doing, by the trammels of disgust: or, to put it differently, in the habit of a prompt and quasi-automatic control of disgust whenever an objective situation arises with which it appears incongruous, and which demands its exclusion.
True freedom means, to sum up, the primacy of love: its victory over all feeling of strangeness and all seclusion of self; an openness of the soul by virtue of its ultimate and unreserved dedication to Christ.
Disgust is sometimes associated with a certain vague fear of contagion, of infectious diseases one might catch from other people. In these cases of squeamishness, the stranger makes us shrink back as a possible carrier of germs. Of course, in dealing with persons who really suffer from some contagious disease, it is our duty to protect ourselves against infection as far as possible; for our health, too, is a talent given by God, of which we must make the most. But whenever a duty of charity requires that preoccupation to yield, it is charity that ranks supreme.
Apart from this obvious principle, what concerns us here is our duty of controlling the tendency to suspect all possible diseases in others, a suspicion which, with little or no basis in reality, serves unconsciously to encourage our inclinations towards fastidiousness and disgust. As long as there is no solid reason for it, we must not look upon our fellow man as a possible carrier of diseases, for this is a bad mental habit which hampers the free flux of love and fosters our tendency to egocentric self-isolation.
Fear of illness hinders freedom
In an even more general sense, the exaggerated fear of illness constitutes a notorious form of unfreedom. There is no merit in neglecting our health, but our preoccupation with it should be kept in bounds by our confidence in God, and in this respect as in others we should fear above all the danger of self-centeredness. The hypochondriac with his imaginary diseases also presents an example of egocentric unfreedom. So long as there is no manifest ground for anxiety we should not waste our time with apprehensions concerning a possible deterioration of our health.
Nor should we allow ourselves to slip into that perspective of generalized fear in which one regards the ambient world primarily as a source of possible dangers to one’s health—the expression of a cramped anxiety about the safety of the ego, which strikes at the very root of freedom. To overcome this vicious evil, we must keep well aware of the truth that our lives rest in the hands of God: “My days are in Thine hands” (Ps. 30:16).
Feelings of inferiority diminish freedom
Let us take now another type of unfreedom, different in character but equally an expression of the ego-spasm, and one very frequently to be met with. It is that which consists in being dominated by an inferiority complex. Feelings of inferiority must not be confused with humility: on the contrary, they proceed from a basic attitude essentially, though not completely or overtly, controlled by pride and egocentrism. He who is afflicted with them is primarily anxious to represent something and count for something; but he is bothered by fears that the account he really gives of himself does not answer his wishful picture of his own person.
In most cases, inferiority feelings refer to defects that are either imaginary or real but devoid of culpability. One such person regards himself as inferior because he is of humble birth; another, because he is poor; another, again, because he has no academic degree. Their fear lest the “disgraceful” fact that worries them should become public knowledge oppresses the hearts of such persons like a coat of mail and prevents them from reacting adequately to most of the situations in which they are engaged.
With others, again, the “disgraceful blot” whose possible revelation they dread is of a morally relevant (or at any rate, more unusual) character, but still no fault of theirs: that one’s father has gone bankrupt or drinks; that one is an illegitimate child or the issue of an unhappy marriage; or, that one is afflicted with some crippling bodily defect.
Yet, even in cases where one tries to hide a shortcoming for which one is actually responsible, so that its becoming manifest would justifiedly evoke in one a sense of painful humiliation, the desire to keep that guilt secret at all costs betrays a certain inner unfreedom. A true Christian will accept even this highly unpleasant kind of penance should his consideration for some important value demand it. But, above all, he will never allow his dread of shame to become the paramount factor dominating his inner life. For he knows that the wrong he may have committed is an evil merely for the reason that it offends God, and in comparison to that, the “disgrace” means nothing—it may constitute a well-deserved and salutary punishment.
Ultimate freedom removes all things into the public medium of Heaven, in whose perspective earthly publicity with its standards dwindles into irrelevancy. That is why, in primitive Christianity, confessions were public—or why, in later times, a St. Margaret of Cortona publicly accused herself of her sins from the top of her house.
The true Christian must see everything in conspectu Dei and lift himself above all terrestrial standards to the point of no longer according his dread of disgrace any part in his life. He must habitually remember that “one thing only is needful”: his obsession with Christ must be so powerful as to deprive such mundane concerns of all power over him.
Fear, in general, is one of the greatest enemies of our freedom—be it the fear of physical danger, the fear of poverty, the fear of incurring somebody’s hatred, the fear of becoming an object of people’s talk, or, above all, the fear of being doomed to sin in spite of all moral efforts. Of this last-named important variety of fear which is commonly referred to as scrupulousness, we need not treat here especially, as it has been discussed in Chapter 8 on “Confidence in God.”
Concern for human respect diminishes freedom
We shall pass now to a further type of unfreedom, closely akin to the one engendered by fear—the unfreedom due to what is currently termed human respect. This means, in particular, that we make our judgment of ourselves, and with it, largely, our mood, dependent on the impression we seem likely to produce on others, on the social image we believe we present. Two forms of human respect may conveniently be distinguished.
The first form is that which deserves a more severe censure. Here, it is a combination of pride and a sense of insecurity that causes the subject to base his appraisal of self on the image other people may have of him rather than on the picture of himself he may derive from his confrontation with God.
In the first place, therefore, he will be anxious not to appear stupid, crack-brained, backward, and in general, ridiculous in the eyes of others. Hence, in many cases, he will shrink from professing his faith before others, dread being seen in church, refrain from crossing himself at table in the presence of unbelievers, and so forth. This type of unfreedom is particularly obnoxious in a Christian. Of course, it will hardly ever occur in such blatant forms in the case of a person who has determined to follow Christ unreservedly; but in a more mitigated form, at least, it easily steals into anyone’s mental constitution.
Yet, the true Christian should be completely free from this pitiable dependence on the world. Knowing that Christ must be a “scandal to the world,” he should serenely endure being deemed by the world a fool, ridiculous, or narrow-minded. He ought never to forget these words of Christ: “If you had been of the world, the world would love its own: but because you are not of the world, but I have chosen you out of the world, therefore, the world hateth you” (John 15:19).
It is often easier to profess Christ in big things and even to accept heavy sacrifices for Christ’s sake, than to put up with disdain or derision in the humdrum situations of daily life. And yet we should at every moment be ready—and gladly so—to pass for a fool for Christ’s sake.
This is not to deny that we do well to avoid in our outward bearing all unnecessary demonstrativeness; to observe certain canons of discretion too often neglected by zealous converts; and to take account of the circumstances, including the degree of susceptibility of those who happen to be present. But this must proceed from a state of inner freedom; from a sovereign attitude of mind rising above the situation. Far from allowing our human respect to make us dependent on the unbelievers’ appreciation or letting our behavior be determined by their taste and their measures, we must—in joyful readiness to appear, if need be, as fools for Christ’s soke—be able to decide before God what, with regard to the salvation of the souls of our fellow men, we should do and what we had better omit.
Indifference to human opinion may have good or bad roots
To be unconcerned from natural motives about our social image is not always a virtue. In some cases, it is an outcome of haughty conceit; a defect that deprives one of every sense of the impression one is likely to make on others.
This attitude is not, at bottom, so very different from that of human respect; for both are derivatives of pride. Only, the unconcerned man differs from the other in that he feels secure (he is usually conceited); whereas the slave of human respect, in addition to his pride, labors under a sense of insecurity.
However, there also exists another type of natural indifference concerning one’s social image, which is by no means objectionable. We mean the attitude of the sober kind of person who is always so much absorbed by the objective theme of the situation that it never even occurs to him to examine what others may think of him. The ingenuous kind of people who simply and spontaneously do what seems right to them, without stopping to consider how others may judge it, belong to the same category. Now the sort of people we have here in mind are undoubtedly very much freer than those afflicted with the ill of human respect. They are healthier and more independent of the tyranny of outward agents.
True freedom judges by the standard of Christ
But they, too, do not possess true freedom in the full sense of the term, which implies a supernatural basis and direction. This true freedom requires us to seek and yearn for nothing but Christ; to be dead unto the spirit of the world; to submit willingly to any humiliation and endure any shame for the sake of Christ; in a word, to live up to the principle: To contemn the world: to contemn contempt.
True freedom means that we see nothing either with the eyes of the world or with the eyes of our nature, but in the light of Christ, and with the eyes of the Faith. He who is truly free is not, then, simply unaware of the effect his behavior may produce on others, but essentially independent of it and superior to the plane of considerations to which it belongs. His conduct will be decided by Christ and His holy word, and not determined, for instance, by an inordinate zeal which, spurning the virtue of discretion, gives vent indiscriminately to one’s natural enthusiasm rather than translating into action a true and unreserved surrender to Christ.
A spectator view of ourselves limits our freedom
Besides the first form of human respect, as discussed above, there is a second one, less reprehensible but still an expression of inner unfreedom. We find it in people who so much attune themselves mentally to their environment that they grow accustomed to see their own behavior with the eyes of others, thus becoming unable to behave in company with any degree of spontaneity.
The image of their own person which they attribute to the spectator warps their attention to the given thematic object. In the end they come to observe themselves from the outside constantly and habitually, in a fashion apt to prevent them from taking up a genuine and independent position in any matter at all. Thus, for instance, they would feel it to be a profanation of their prayer if it were said in the proximity of others, whom it might impress as fanatical, in bad taste, or excessively pious.
Not that pride impels them to attach an undue importance to their social image; it is merely that they are to such a degree swayed by the (real or imaginary) impression they produce on others that their genuine experiences and spontaneous impulses are crushed beneath the weight of that all-comprehensive dependence.
The perspective in which they suppose others to see things destroys their contact with the objects that solicit their response. Hence, their behavior becomes the function of whatever, at the moment, happens to be their environment. In the company of people whom they know or suspect to be irreligious, for instance, they will be ashamed to cross themselves at table or to say their Breviary in the train.
Love may sometimes call us to moderate the display of our convictions
Of course, it is not a good thing either to lack all faculty of empathy—of sensing and being in tune with other people’s emotions—and, confining oneself entirely to the thematic object of one’s attitude, to be wholly unconcerned with the effect it is bound to produce. As has been hinted above, both natural ingenuousness and a primary emphasis on being in harmony with other people’s states of mind are inadequate.
True freedom means, not either of these, but the habit of seeing everything in conspectu Dei, and hence giving heed to the state of mind prevailing in one’s environment.
Thus, there are situations in which charity requires me to exercise particular discretion lest I should perplex or repel others; in which, that is to say, the emphatic profession of my faith might act as an irritant to such persons around me as are neither firm believers nor perhaps very decided unbelievers, and embitter their opposition.
Love, then, may secondarily compel us to ponder the impression our behavior is likely to produce; but on no account must the thought of that impression substitute itself for the free unfolding of our own experience and thus automatically govern our conduct. We must never, from natural weakness, become dependent on the anticipated and often, in fact, merely imagined impression on others. This secondary, shadowy, and false aspect must not come to dominate objective reality to the point of making us unable to give adequate response to God or values because others might misconstrue it.
This automatic deformation of our own experience, this illegitimate dependence on the errors and delusions of others, has nothing in common with a conscious and superior consideration—sanctioned by our free personality—for our brethren of an infirm faith, which causes us to omit certain manifestations of our religious allegiance in the sense of an express sacrifice.
As we have said, this second form of human respect is an offspring not of pride but of a general weakness and an excessive receptivity to impressions. We can overcome it, too, however, by the spirit of a basic surrender to God. It depends on our free will whether we simply deliver ourselves to its compulsion or withstand it. By yielding to this tendency in our nature, we become more and more slaves.
On the other hand, if we combat it resolutely—if, again and again, we follow the spontaneous impetus of our experience, for the sake of God and in conscious disregard of our environment—we shall not fail gradually to free ourselves from the tyranny of that extraneous domination.
Only let its magic circle be pierced frequently (and with conscious design, not merely by accident owing to the intensity of our emotion) and it will ultimately fade away.
Pliability of views may hinder freedom
Close to this second form of human respect, we find a further type of unfreedom: that which results from too great a receptivity to outside influences as such. Certain people are inclined to become dependent in their inner lives on others simply because these are possessed of a more dynamic personality. A man typifying this kind of unfreedom will, for instance, rally to another’s opinion, not as a result of his having been convinced of its objective truth, but just because it has been set forth with an impressive vigor.
After a time, it is true, when his contact with the person superior in dynamism has ceased, he will very probably dismiss that opinion again. But, for a while, another’s view of the subject in question has overlain, in his mind, his own; and the same thing will continue to happen, in regard to other alien opinions and under the impact of other vigorous personalities.
The mental dependence of persons thus generally subject to alien influences is more far-reaching even than the one inherent in human respect. For not merely does it stifle the outward manifestation—nay, not merely interfere with the inward unfolding—of one’s own genuine attitude in the presence of others; worse than that, a person of so malleable disposition goes to the length of subordinating his concrete decisions to the dictate of a stronger will confronting him and for no other reason than that it is a stronger will; or even, frequently, of adopting slavishly the opinions and attitudes of others with the force of a more aggressive temperament behind them.
In most cases, it is true, this mental dependence will not bear upon one’s ultimate principles or fundamental convictions and positions but rather, only, on one’s judgment of concrete situations or newly arising matters. That judgment will be inspired, illegitimately, by the suggestions of others taking the place of a consistent application of the principles one really holds.
Ways to combat pliability of views
This grave danger to one’s freedom must be combatted with the utmost energy. If we are aware of having such a pliable disposition, we must, in the first place, avoid contact—as far as possible—with persons who excel us in dynamism and who, at the same time, represent a false outlook. It would be unjust to despise such a withdrawal as cowardice; it is, in fact, the wholesome fruit of a humble self-knowledge—of a correct estimate of our forces.
Secondly, so far as we cannot evade contact with persons of this kind, we must expressly gird ourselves beforehand against their influence. In a healthy distrust of our weakness we must first collect ourselves in God, and, as it were, barricade ourselves inwardly against the influence which we know is going to impinge upon us.
Not for a moment should we allow ourselves, in the presence of such people, to relax mentally, nor to assume the attitude—though it is otherwise the right and indeed self-evident one—of being open and permeable to the radiation of a fellow soul. Here, we must sternly deny ourselves the natural enjoyment of concord and sympathy. We must learn how to distinguish the situations in which it is well for us to fling the gates of our souls wide open from those which require us to bolt them fast; so also do we breathe deeply in pure mountain air but hold our breath when traversing a locality where the air is foul. A true Christian who inclines towards this weakness must, before he enters into a situation that is dangerous in the sense here indicated, prepare for it adequately in obedience to the advice of his spiritual directors.
Pliability in conduct diminishes freedom
There is, also, another form of pliability affecting the soul less deeply but still a source of unfreedom: namely, false compliance. Some people, in whom good-naturedness degenerates to weakness, are unable to offer any resistance to the desires and requests of others. While they do not adopt slavishly the opinions or positions of other persons, in their outward conduct they allow themselves to be persuaded by the representations, entreaties, and objurgations of anybody who needs their cooperation for some purpose of his own.
To be sure, if their consent is solicited for things which they look upon as definitely wrong—things against which their conscience would vehemently revolt—they will resist. Not so, however, if it is a question of neutral things, or such as they deem merely useless or irrelevant. All of us have known such helpless persons whose kindness is presumed on by everybody and who squander their time and their energies because they are not able to refuse any request of others. Perhaps it is that, at a given moment, they would think it discourteous to refuse what is asked of them; or that they are moved to compassion; or they feel that they cannot face the ill humor their refusal would evoke—anyhow, they yield and thus easily lapse into servility. In more extreme cases, compassion can even seduce them into conniving at some definite wrong or at least tolerating it passively.
Ways to combat pliability of conduct
Obviously, this pliancy, too, endangers freedom, and should be fought if present in one’s character. Holy obedience—a strict conforming to spiritual advice—is eminently helpful in such cases. Here, again, the subject should consciously develop moral armor and put it on before he enters a situation that is likely to test his firmness of will. Even to become well aware of being afflicted with this defect of excessive pliability will by itself mark a first step towards his cure.
He must recollect himself in conspectu Dei, and engage in a systematic campaign against his weakness. Having regard to his particular case, he must train himself to mistrust the suasions of compassion in general. Also, he must learn how to refuse a request firmly from the outset and how to cut short an interview immediately when he feels his resistance to be wavering. He may resort to specific ascetical practices calculated to increase his firmness of character.
Above all, he must see to it that he fulfills punctually all his actual obligations towards others, lest he should develop a guilty conscience, which would further aggravate his natural proneness to yield. As far as possible, he should avoid being in the debt of others. If, nevertheless, such a situation emerges, he should consider it soberly in its true proportions—again in conspectu Dei, that is—endeavoring to conceive of his indebtedness as the concrete and limited thing it is rather than derive from it a generalized guilty conscience tinging his relations with his fellow men indiscriminately. He should also, of course, hasten to acquit himself of that debt—taking care, however, not to magnify its dimensions.
Compulsive independence as a limiter of freedom
A certain contrast to the defects we have now discussed is offered by another type of unfreedom, which we might call the complex of independence. There is a category of people who feel irked by being in any way obliged to others. They think their freedom curtailed by any debt of gratitude. The truth is that their state of mind—the delusion that being obliged to others takes away from their freedom—is itself a manifestation of their lack of inner freedom. He who is truly free enjoys the gratitude he may owe to his fellow men.
The stickler for independence sees his ideal in being able to go through life in a state of splendid indifference to others, avoiding all obligation towards them. At heart (we may refer, in this context, to Chapter 7) it is a certain kind of pride that makes him feel the consciousness of owing anything to others as an intolerable burden. The true Christian will abhor this complex of independence in all its varieties. To him it must be clear, not only that he owes everything to God—that he is, and shall be, a beggar before God—but that he is dependent on the help of other men. He will receive a benefit he is accorded with happy gratitude. The consciousness of being obliged to others will not weigh him down, since he looks upon the duty of gratitude as self-evident and since the ill-conceived ideal of outward independence has no appeal to his mind.
Of course, we are not referring here to the case of benefits accorded with the intention of securing thereby some kind of unjustified influence. It is entirely right to avoid becoming indebted to people whose purpose it is thus to secure a hold on us so as to wring from us this or that illegitimate concession. In such cases it is our downright duty to refuse the benefits we are offered.
Compulsive intellectual or spiritual independence diminishes freedom
If this independence complex—taken in its general and material sense—is a bad enough thing, a similar attitude in regard to one’s intellectual or spiritual possessions is even more to be warned against. It is utterly unreasonable to shy at the idea of receiving any intellectual help or guidance from others, to insist on working out one’s ideas all by oneself and to remain uninfluenced throughout.
Certainly, again, we do well to endeavor to keep our minds shut to all illegitimate influences—the suasions of suggestion, the techniques aimed at producing an impression, etc.—but nothing could be falser than to extend this wholesome caution into resenting the intellectual help of others communicating genuine new values to us, and lifting us to a higher level, as an encroachment upon our spiritual independence.
The desire to elaborate one’s outlook all by oneself is a typical offspring of pride, and entirely at variance with the mind’s true attention to its object. For if we are really concentrated, as we should be, on the purpose (the only justified one as far as our intellectual pursuits are concerned) of enriching our vision of the values and of widening our access to the truth, we shall care little about whether we achieve this through our own forces or with the help of strangers—a question of no objective relevancy at all.
But, generally speaking, the true Christian is aware of the great extent to which he is dependent on the help of others and sees in this inescapable dependence—which is as necessary for the nourishment of a spontaneous inner life as the servile, illegitimate kind of dependence is detrimental to it—a realization of community in which he has every reason to delight.
He is aware of the heritage he receives through tradition, of all that he owes to the Liturgy and the great Doctors of the Church whose words they hand down to him. Animated by his zealous wish to be transformed in Christ, he will joyously grasp the helping hands of all those who have advanced nearer to God than he has, He desires to learn from others; nor does the consciousness of having acquired a knowledge alone, without the cooperation of anyone, fill him with particular satisfaction. For he seeks after nothing but a closer union with Christ, and is wholly unconcerned about the part played by his own forces in securing that aim.
Public opinion may limit freedom
Separate consideration, again, must be given to that form of essential unfreedom which consists in our dependence on public opinion. The views currently professed beyond the limits of a particular milieu, in the public sphere as a whole—the ideas which, at a given time, permeate the entire intellectual medium of a nation, or even of a wider zone of culture—often influence to a high degree the mental cast of such persons even as can by no means be called weaklings. Many people adopt opinions of this kind as a matter of self-evidence without probing into the question of their truth; without, indeed, confronting them with the basic principles they themselves hold. They come to share those views simply because they cannot resist the dynamism of the dominant atmosphere of their age.
In branding this as a form of illegitimate suasion, we are anxious to avoid a possible misconception. We do not mean to deny that public opinion may also act as a vehicle for men’s contact with true values, thus paving the way for their genuine and spontaneous experience of such values or value-realities as would otherwise have remained inaccessible to them.
The Christian who has received the gratuitous gift of absolute truth must beware of all illegitimate and imperceptible influences. He must not let anything pass before he has confronted it with God and His holy truth; nothing that is out of accord with the doctrine of the holy Church must be accepted. He must grant no influence to any dynamic pressure in his life, It is this conclusive confrontation that St. Paul has in mind when he says, “But prove all things: hold fast that which is good” (1 Thess, 5:21).
Ways to combat illegitimate influences of public opinion
Public opinion as such should have no hold whatsoever on a true Christian. With his vision enlightened by the divine Truth, he must not attach any weight to the fact that a certain opinion is held by a great number of people or that a certain point of view is modern or fashionable.
His life is lived in the sight of Him in whose eyes “a thousand years . . . are as yesterday, which is past” (Ps. 89:4), He says with the Psalmist: “They shall perish but Thou remainest: and all of them shall grow old like a garment. And as a vesture Thou shalt change them, and they shall be changed. But Thou art always the selfsame: and Thy years shall not fail.” (Ps. 101:27-28).
He should regard public opinion with a healthy distrust, for it is only a work of man and a nursling of the spirit of the world. In order to make himself impermeable to all mere currents of the age, he must look for a support in the doctrine of the Church. He must turn his eyes away from the garish pageant of the idols of the day and shut his ears to the noise of ephemeral appeals.
Above all, the Christian must be on guard against the subtle poison of public opinion which is ever trying imperceptibly to seep in through his pores. He must not for a moment forget this danger of contagion and must systematically immunize himself against it by absorbing the right spiritual counter-poisons.
Again and again, he should represent to himself, together with all their implications, the eternal truths of God; again and again, he should open his mind to the radiation of the light of Christ, and in that light examine with unbending sternness whatever the spirit of the age offers and suggests. He must never breathe the air of a profane environment in the attitude of naive trustfulness. Let him be always conscious of his own frailty and of Christ’s warning: “Beware of false prophets.”
For he will not have attained to true freedom until public opinion no longer has any hold on his spirit; until he no longer knows any dependence but one—an unconditional dependence on Christ, to whom he has given himself, for all times, by a free and full decision which involves his whole personality.
There are, however, two distinct forms of dependence on public opinion. The one we have just discussed consists in being fascinated by that which is topical: the salient ideas of the age. The mind of such a person is captivated by the mere fact that a thing is vital in this external sense of publicity and topicality; he disregards its particular meaning and content. He delights at being in tune with things coming and new, with whatever is in the air, with the great forces of the future. He is intoxicated with the dynamic impetus of an intense movement.
Conventionalism diminishes freedom
The other form of dependence on public opinion lies in the opposite direction. It is present in those who feel secure and comfortable in their unreserved adherence to a stable public opinion hallowed by tradition, the attitude of conventionalism. The first form of dependence on public opinion is the great danger to characters eager for novelty and sensation, discontinuous, over-susceptible to the charms of dynamism; the second form is likely to occur in the narrow-minded, habit-ridden type of man.
The conventionalist is more or less immune to the seduction of the changing ideas and fashions that dominate public opinion, so impressed by its spirit of the new. All the more however, is he anxious to conform to a medium of ideas upon which tradition and long custom have placed a stamp of valid public authority. He cleaves to what has always been held; what his fathers and forefathers have deemed right. By contrast to the worshipper of the moment’s idols, who succumbs to the impact of current opinions and newly surging enthusiasms, owing to his conservatism the conventionalist falls short of an objective vision of things unobjective.
To him, a thing is valid for the sole reason that it has long been recognized as such. Accordingly, he inclines not so much to excess and indiscretion (as do those who serve the idols of the day) as to mediocrity. He would not dare to think or do anything that is not sanctioned by the milieu which to him incarnates authority—anything in which he does not feel supported by that public opinion to which he adheres.
Yet, that authority is not defined as such by any objective test, but merely by the fact of its constituting the environment in which he has grown up and whose ideological traits he has come to regard as self-evident. The conventionalist cannot do without the support of such a terrestrial public opinion where he may rest comfortably. Hence, he lacks objectivity and freedom in much the same way as does his progressive counterpart; for he, too, is incapable of an adequate response to values. The views the conventionalist borrows from his system of conventions prevent him from understanding such values as have no place in that set of conventions.
Moreover, even his response to the values that do have a conventional standing is incomplete and falsified inasmuch as his appreciation is primarily conditioned, not by their value-significance as such but by the fact that the values in question happen to be endorsed by convention. If, for instance, the conventionalist is a Catholic, he is that because his parents and his ancestors also were Catholics; because it is the thing to comply with one’s duties towards the Church—not because the Church is the surviving Christ and the depositary of infallible doctrinal authority. Or again, he will practice continence because it is looked upon as indecent to have affairs.
Everywhere an objectively unimportant motivation is substituted for the genuine, the objectively valid one. In his stuffy narrowness, the conventionalist in a sense degrades whatever good he may do to a lower plane than the plane to which it intrinsically belongs. He lacks the sense of distinction between things essential and nonessential. He places any conventional taboos that happen to thrive in his milieu on a level with the commandments of God.
Both conventionalism and bohemianism are incompatible with true freedom
The incompatibility between the conventional attitude and true freedom needs no elaboration. The true Christian is of necessity unconventional. The mere fact that something “has always been done that way,” that it is part of a public tradition, is no motive force with him. He accepts unconditionally only what has been willed by God and is pleasing to God. Great and glorious is the tradition of the Church, without doubt; but that tradition is merely a fruit of her continuity, by virtue of which she preserves through all the whirlpools of the times all that is of true value and of divine origin. It is not, by any means, the automatic product of pure conservatism.
Nothing could be falser, however, than the inference that the anti-conventionalism of the so-called bohemian indicates, therefore, the road to true freedom. The bohemian—the sort of person, that is, who dislikes all fixed rules and loyalties whatsoever, who makes an idol of informality and of the unbridled sovereignty of subjective urges, is as unfree as any conventional bourgeois. For he rejects conventions not inasmuch as they embody illegitimate restraints, but inasmuch as they embody restraints as such.
He fails, exactly as does the bourgeois, to distinguish the essential from the inessential. The conventionalist sets mere accidental human statutes on a level with the divine commandments and with the demands of the true values; so also does the bohemian. Only, while the former assents to all these with the selfsame emphasis, the latter repudiates them all. The conventionalist accepts the divine commandments insofar as they fit in with his system of conventions, and in so doing, he is actuated by the objectively invalid motive that those commandments are sanctioned by a traditional public opinion.
The bohemian, in his turn, also takes the divine commandments and the demands implied in true values for mere human statutes, deriving their claims from the stamp of tradition; hence, he rejects them along with what are in fact mere conventions. For he would have nothing of rules or restraints whatsoever. He is just as ignorant of the true nature of divine commandments and genuine values as is the conventionalist. He is not a whit less unfree nor more capable of an adequate response to the object.
True freedom clearly distinguishes between human statutes and divine commandments
True freedom, on the other hand, consists precisely in establishing a clear distinction between mere human statutes and divine commandments, and adjusting one’s orientation in all things to the will of God. It requires of us that we not allow our position to be determined by any natural preference for, or by any natural aversion to, accepted standards; by any love or by any hatred of custom and usage.
We must base our position exclusively on what is important in itself and pleasing to God.
He who is truly free will joyfully assent to every rule that in some sense is of divine origin, because it expresses an aspect of the divine order and makes evident an act of the divine will. He will disregard any mere traditional human rule whenever a superior value demands it.
He is untrammeled by any prejudice. Yet, for the sake of his fellows, he will respect all conventions so far as they contain nothing that infringes the commandments of God or bears a note of petty triviality which can have no place in the world of God. Within such limits he will appreciate and loyally observe all customs and conventions prevailing in his environment. Insofar as they were once invested with a deeper meaning but have in time become mere conventions, he will seek to restore them to their original content.
But he will always keenly distinguish them from the eternal laws. He will not cherish them to the point of refusing to disregard them even when his love of God or his neighbor, or some higher value of another order, demands that he should do so.
On the other hand, the mania for challenging all conventions—so as to prove oneself a superior person—is nothing but another variety of unfreedom.
Propriety differs from holy reserve
Above all, we should take care not to confuse the sacral reserve that marks those who bear “the yoke of Christ” with the attitude of reserve displayed by the conventionalist, which issues from considerations of mere propriety. To be sure, the saints always avoid behaving in a loose or free and easy way. On every occasion their bearing reveals them to be a property of Christ, shaped and contained by His holy law. Nor is the monk allowed to indulge in any kind of free and easy behavior. In various situations his state imposes on him a duty of holy reserve. This holy reserve is an expression of his inward poise, his spiritual governance of self, his habitare secum; first and foremost, of the fact that he is a property of Christ. His reserve exhales an atmosphere, not of social decorum but of mystic consecration. Nor is it at all inconsistent with the boldness of a heroic love or of losing one’s self in Christ. That holy reserve was not alien to a St. Francis of Assisi, although he was a fool for Christ’s sake, a soul drunk with Jesus, who—the son of a wealthy merchant, leading the life of an errant beggar—trampled under foot all purely earthly conventions. Again, it is one thing to shun indecent or ambiguous themes out of a mere conventional sense of propriety and another to shun them because they cannot bear confrontation with Christ.
Sacral reserve is an offspring of true freedom, for it flows from our free and unconditional dedication to Christ. It is based on our response to value, and constitutes an entirely legitimate restraint. It means setting ourselves at a distance from the world: the opposite of all facile sociableness and easygoing automatism. Hence, it can never impede our integral obedience to the call of Christ, sequere me. Sacral reserve grows, after all, from the same root as the fervent Christian’s characteristic indifference to conventional decorum. He who possesses it is by the same token able to disregard all outward considerations whenever a superior value requires it. That is why this holy reserve is realized most perfectly in the saints, who at the same time are the most unconventional of men.
Prejudices can enslave us
Akin to the conventionalist’s type of unfreedom is another one, which consists in the subject’s enslavement to prejudices. In one class of instances, the prejudices are themselves conventional in origin; in other cases, however, they are traceable to purely personal experiences. Thus, some men are woman-haters because they have had one or several unpleasant experiences with women. Some people abhor all animals because they have once been bitten by a dog. Others are forever angry at Italy because they have once been cheated there. Others, again, are confirmed anti-Semites because they have come across a number of unattractive Jews. There are. even people who, owing to some distasteful memories that cling to their school days, refuse to appreciate ancient culture.
Briefly, although many prejudices are rooted in conventional traditions, many others have their source in rash generalizations. Now prejudice always means unfreedom, seeing that it means the obscuring of objective judgment by mere accidental impressions. Above all, it implies a shrinking of one’s intellectual horizon. Prejudiced people are in an eminent sense narrow-minded.
Our lack of true consciousness, too, can be held accountable for our prejudices. We allow our judgment to be guided by mere associations which interpose themselves between the object and our vision, and so falsify our impression. Instead of letting the thing itself, with its true content, speak to us, we suffer our position to be determined by some association which in our mind, from purely subjective causes, happens to adhere to that thing.
For instance, we find a place unlovely and depressing because on some earlier occasion we were ill there. A melody seems to us devoid of beauty because it reminds us of a gloomy period of our life. We feel repelled by a person because he was present at some painful, humiliating episode of our past; or again, we close our mind to a certain truth because it was a person we dislike who first drew our attention to it.
The true Christian must be entirely free from prejudices. In him, all prejudices must be uprooted, so that unhampered by any conventions and any fortuitous experiences and associations, he may accord to every good the response that is objectively due to it in conspectu Dei. And, conversely, the more one has made one’s home in Christ and boldly moved one’s center of gravity into the supernatural realm, the more those shackles will tend to fall away.
Rancor diminishes true freedom
Rancor on account of some (real or imaginary) wrongs one has suffered, and similar experiences of resentment, are always likely—unless they have been consciously effaced in confrontation with Christ—to injure the freedom of the soul. An insult that rankles will, even though it may not engender any generalized prejudice, create a spasm thwarting the free flow of love.
All such inveterate grudges, which one simply leaves alone instead of dissolving them in Christ and sublimating them into a mood of calm and serene melancholy, continue eating one’s heart and destroying one’s peace of mind, and inevitably conjure up certain aspects of egocentrism. Our consciousness of every wrong we have suffered and have not truly forgiven before Christ forms an obstacle to the unfolding of supernatural life within us. An inward inhibition extending far beyond the sphere of our relations with the perpetrator of that wrong is created. The deeper the insult has wounded us, the stronger is the inhibition it produces.
In order to lift that paralyzing effect, a mere formal pardon on our part does not suffice. We must forgive really and truly, dissolve all bitterness and resentment of the wrong endured, and make an end to all sulking, retirement into ourselves and hardening of heart that has issued from it. All this must be expressly eradicated before the face of Christ: nothing less than our immersion in the stream of His inconceivable, all-conquering love will restore our inward peace.
Self-indulgence is a form of unfreedom
Another mainspring of unfreedom, one of a very different kind, lies in the various forms of self indulgence. This is easiest to recognize when manifesting itself in the form of an inordinate attachment to this or that pleasure or urge-gratification. In one case, food and drink are the object of that excessive and tyrannical attachment; in another, it is sleep; in a further one, smoking; again, it may be certain kinds of entertainment or certain comforts.
Any one of these pleasures may, by becoming so indispensable that missing it makes us preoccupied and restless, maim our inner freedom. Such bodily ties are apt to prevent our souls’from attending to all values in a free and unhampered way, according to the will of God. With this form of unfreedom we are all familiar; indeed, to free us from these inordinate attachments is an elementary task of asceticism.
However, the unfreedom implied by certain other types of self-indulgence is often less clearly recognized; or, rather, it is the presence of self-indulgence itself which in such cases escapes recognition.
Here we refer to the tendency displayed by many people to yield to certain obnoxious natural dispositions, which may be of various kinds and which are less patent to the observer’s eye than the need for such concrete pleasures as those listed above. We shall examine, in particular, two antithetic types of such psychic dispositions, both fairly frequent and both fraught with dangers. One is the cramped character, revealing what we may call, a spastic disposition; the opposite type, again, is afflicted with an inordinate propensity to relaxation.
A “cramped” character reflects a subtle form of self-indulgence
Let us take the cramped character first. How does a person belonging to this category behave? Now he ruminates incessantly, as though he were spellbound, over some irrelevant idea, or uselessly reiterates some long-exhausted chain of considerations that can no longer yield any further result; now he overstrains his will, pressing himself to unnecessary and meaningless sacrifices, or trying to force things which by their very nature cannot be commanded, such as joy, sorrow, or enthusiasm. Or again, he flogs himself into certain kinds of eccentric attitudes that bear a note of specious sublimity: an ungenuine heroism, for instance, or an excessive contempt for the body and its needs with an oriental or gnostic flavor about it. This very crampedness he may often experience as the manifestation of an extraordinary will power and hence as a sure sign of his freedom.
Because he never relaxes, he forms the conviction that he always maintains himself on a level above the situation, that he makes no concessions to his nature, and that therefore he is eminently free. Is he not always watchful, always on his guard, always keeping out whatever might be interpreted as self-indulgence?
Yet in fact he is guilty of self-indulgence, inasmuch as he obeys the dictate of a spastic automatism that is prevalent in his nature. The strain he constantly displays does not spring from a vital response to values. It expresses a general tendency of his nature, which discharges itself in the way of a functional necessity, without any proportionate foundation in the respective objects. Such a person is, in truth, characteristically unfree.
The “duty complex” is a form of unfreedom
The cramped attitude may also manifest itself in reference to the fulfillment of one’s duties. The duty complex is an important source of unfreedom, Some people are possessed by certain duties or are hypnotized by certain tasks they have taken upon themselves, to the point of no longer being capable of responding to any higher demands.
However, the mere fact that they bear a responsibility expressible in juridical terms, or that they have charged themselves with a task, does not confer upon the thing they are attending to a surplus of objective significance above everything else, Often, for instance in the minds of such people, vocational obligations will unduly outweigh the demands of charity; or again, kind offices or acts of charity to which they have formally committed themselves will take precedence over others which lack the motive of a formal commitment, even though the latter may imply a deeper meaning and constitute, in the ultimate sense, a higher obligation.
To this type of mind, duty is primarily defined in terms of a tangible, outward, officially sanctioned and specified obligation: one that can somehow be subsumed under the aspect of juridical obligations. They tend to overemphasize such obligations as result from ties either of kinship or of contract, and to underestimate such others as follow inherently (but less automatically, being less susceptible of a statutory formulation) from the logos of a deep and meaningful relation of friendship.
Obligations implicit in the logos of love they will at best take for granted inasmuch as they have their place in the framework of conjugal or family relationships; yet even as regards the sublime and holy obligations inherent in marriage, they will stress their legal aspects in a one-sided approach. Whatever lacks the official hallmark of obligation they would hesitate to recognize as obligatory.
In such cases, then, the consciousness of obligation does not arise organically from a true appreciation of values; it lies rooted, rather, in a general disposition to cramped and constrained states of mind. Persons of this type, as soon as they enter into a situation that implies an element of publicly recognized, formal obligations, develop a kind of interior spasm in which they stay immured, with souls deaf to other and higher demands. Subordinating themselves entirely to the autonomous mechanism of a definite set of obligations, they become unable to see either the duties in question or the hierarchy of values in general according to their true proportions.
Should they even theoretically discern the superiority of some value outside the circle of those duties or recognize the primacy of some demand of another order, in fact they will not be able to relax their taut attention to the task with which they have charged themselves and in which they are held tight as in a strait jacket. They are simply unable to break through the automatism of that self-imposed strain. Though they were ever so much attracted by some other theme, though their heart cried out after that new value—the compulsion is stronger than they. They fail to overcome the delusion that represents to them this pure dynamism of obsession under the specious guise of an objective command. If once in a while they are in some way forced to quit the charmed circle that holds them prisoners, they are tormented by pangs of conscience.
Self-indulgence means yielding to one’s dispositions instead of to values
It must be clearly seen that whenever we yield to these spastic tendencies of our nature—even to this “duty spasm”—we in truth make ourselves guilty of a kind of self-indulgence. For the decisive mark of self-indulgence is not relaxation, but the fact of letting one’s attitude be determined by one’s natural dispositions rather than adjusting it to the demand of the object. What these natural dispositions are varies, of course, according to individual characters, The point at issue, however, is whether one delivers oneself over to the autonomous process of one’s natural tendencies or responds to the appeal of objective values and the call of God.
True freedom overcomes self-indulgence by responding to the call of God
The true Christian never lapses into self-indulgence and therefore is past enslavement to a cramp-mechanism. He possesses that inward attitude of serene aliveness which implies an eager response, unhampered by any tyrannical inhibitions, to the call of God. Such a response precludes any obligation he has contracted from dominating him as a sovereign absolute. He is ready to desist from everything, give up everything, leave everything as the disciples left their boats and fishing nets at the call of the Lord. He who is truly free preserves a constant readiness to speak, as Abraham did, the Adsum of full self-dedication whenever the Lord calls him.
A Christian must attain to this true freedom. The virtues of true self-knowledge and true consciousness will help him to recognize all cramped attitudes he may observe in himself as a form of self-indulgence, and thus to overcome them in the spirit of holy obedience. He must install guards in himself to watch this danger; and, again and again, meditate before God the perennial truth, “But one thing is necessary” (Luke 10:42).
He must shatter the spell of obsession by relinquishing everything, from obedience, as soon as a higher value calls him. Whenever he feels in danger of succumbing to the tyranny of such a cramp, he must flee to Jesus and collect himself before His face, thus restoring his roots in the depths of his being and thereby recovering a serene detachment and an inner distance in regard to any given situation and particular concern.
Spiritual relaxation also inhibits true freedom
Now, as we said above, there are many people whose danger lies in an opposite direction: in the tendency, that is, to a false relaxation. These are characters inclined to drift along and to take easy whatever matters they have to deal with. They live in a thoughtless abandonment to the moment, and are happy if they can elude any consciousness of obligation. They are prone to disorder and an illegitimate love of comfort; they show little accuracy in redeeming their promises; they exhibit a lax and loitering behavior in general.
The unfreedom entailed by such an attitude is obvious. Persons of this type very often fall short of their chosen aim because they shun the tensions and efforts implied in its realization. They complacently submit to their natural aversions and inhibitions. They unreservedly surrender to whatever element or theme in a given situation happens to appeal to their nature. Any occasion for prattle is likely to seduce them into neglecting their duties. They waste the time assigned for work by dozing or daydreaming.
Without regard for the hierarchy of values, they obey the tendency of their nature to prefer always the easy way, to choose in any alternative what is more comfortable, less arduous, requiring less effort and involving less asperity.
Their unfreedom consists in the fact that, instead of a true response to value engaging their personality, they follow the pull of their nature and without resistance yield to its tendency towards the peripheral and the irrelevant and whatever is devoid of tension.
This glib submission to their natural tendencies many of them mistake for freedom, seeing that they always do what they like, without feeling constrained by any shackles. Others, again, rightly experience their inability to convert their resolutions into acts as a painful lack of freedom; their laxity appears to them a disgraceful sign of their decadence. Yet, they continue drifting along, without ever taking any measures to stop the rot. On the contrary, the consciousness of their profligacy renders them the more passive; they apply less and less effort to halt their downward drift. “Now,” they would say to themselves, “it is too late anyway.” The disorder that engulfs them grows from day to day; they are buried under a thicket of unfulfilled duties, self reproaches, and aching fears concerning the initial effort towards order they feel to be necessary but dreadful.
We must uproot self-indulgence of every sort
This state of unfreedom is the utmost antithesis to the state of self-possession, of habitare secum. A Christian who has lapsed into this paralyzing form of self-indulgence must wage a relentless war against it. He must find out his particular inhibitions, and fight them by a systematic ascetical practice.
Whatever the dispositions of his nature, the law of his life must be taken not from his nature but from Christ. Above all, he must dishabituate himself from self-indulgence in general. He must take care never on any occasion to throw off the holy restraints imposed upon him by his awareness of the metaphysical situation of man and his membership in the Mystical Body of Christ.
In holy wakefulness he must beware not to give free rein to any impulse lacking the sanction of his conscious central personality. He must never, as it were, say, “Well, in the rough my daily work is done, so now I may let myself go.” Rather he must uproot his specific inhibitions and thus break a path for himself across the underwood of his nature, so that he may at any time follow the call of God uninhibited.
Habit may constrict our freedom
A heavy curtailment of our freedom arises from our frequent subjection to the force of habit. The mere fact that we often do or undergo a thing, or that we are accustomed to certain conditions, fosters a tendency in us to stick to those things or to maintain those conditions, whatever their intrinsic merits. This tendency reflects a general trait in human nature, but we must not suffer it to govern our feelings and acts unchecked. The mere familiarity of a thing is not by itself a legitimate reason for our cultivating it.
Two cases may be distinguished here. On the one hand, there are things which have no primary attraction for us at all which owe their power over us to the force of habit only. To this purely formal dominance of habit as such a Christian ought never to submit. He should never allow a thing of neutral content to become indispensable to him through habituation alone. For this means a ballast thwarting his free response to the call of God; an illegitimate power gradually fettering him with invisible chains. He should combat a habit of this kind whenever it raises its head, by specific ascetical practices.
On the other hand, there is the case of habit reinforcing our allegiance to things that do attract us by virtue of their content itself. Thus, we may grow habituated to things really valuable, such as an orderly regulation of our daily life; to things merely agreeable, certain comforts for instance, or smoking and drinking; or again, to outright vices. In respect of this second case, our task is not to fight the power of habit as such but to place it at the service of our free will. We must not leave to chance which habits we contract.
Habit must play no part in value-response
We must allow this power a claim in regard to such things only as we have chosen according to a free response to value. In this sense asceticism, too, makes use of the force of habit. Strictly speaking, it is not so much things absolutely valuable that are meant here as, rather, means to some good purpose: a training that enables us to attain something properly valuable. The technique of good works alone, never the value itself, should become the object of a habit. Thus, for example, we may train ourselves for early rising by acquiring the habit; yet, in the motivation of our hearing Mass every morning the fact that it has become a habit with us must play no part whatsoever.
Even as regards the technique of good works, however, the power of habit should not extend beyond its usefulness as a means in the service of our freedom. We must preserve the freedom to discontinue without great difficulty, even a salutary habit whenever that is demanded by our obedience to the call of God.
In other words, we must remain masters even of our good habits; and much more must we guard against allowing anything that is merely pleasant or comfortable to become our master, just because we have grown accustomed to it. It is not the accident of habit that ought to determine our orientation but we who ought freely to direct the evolution of our habits.
Habit may decrease our sensibility to genuine values
There is another side to the possible danger involved by habit. It may not only enchain us to certain things which it causes us to overvalue; it may also numb our aliveness to genuine values.
This, again, may happen in various manners. First, habit as such may sometimes bring about a general decrease of our sensibility to true values. Man is so fashioned that whatever he experiences for the first time—whatever he has just discovered—is likely to evoke in him a particularly vivid and plastic impression. It need not be his first actual contact with a thing—what we mean is the moment when the true significance of that thing first dawns upon him. After a while, the impression will in many cases tend to fade; familiarity with an object is apt to breed, if not contempt, a kind of indifference. This we cannot but register as the manifestation of a specific and ineradicable human weakness.
To be sure, in regard to many things it really means a gift of divine mercy. Inasmuch as it results in a mitigation of physical pain, of the suffering caused by want, of the terror inspired by perilous situations, the blunting effect of habit deserves to be considered a happy and liberating influence in the lives of men.
Yet, in relation to true values, the power of habit takes on a negative character; because here, no blunting effect should take place. The degree of this unfavorable influence varies according to individual dispositions. The more vividly a person reacts to impressions—the greater his responsiveness to the stimulus of novelty—the more liable he is to the danger of disregarding the perennial relevancy of genuine values, the never obsolescent meaning of truth, and of developing a certain dullness in regard to such values and truths as have become familiar to him. This is especially the case with people who are eager for sensations.
We must deliberately fight this effect of habit by again and again recalling the valid first impression that the value in question produced upon us and thus evoking in our mind its timeless meaning and its never-aging splendor. At least we must always bear in mind that what has lessened our receptivity towards that value is merely deficiency on our own part. On the other hand, by adapting our intellectual judgment of a value and our affective attitude to it, to the evanescence of the vivid impression it has once created in us, we give proof of a deep lack of freedom.
Habit may diminish our gratitude
Nor is this the only form in which the dulling effect of habit can manifest itself; it may also impinge on our gratitude for the gifts of divine mercy. Thankful as we may have felt at first for those gifts accorded to us—a great love or friendship, for example, or our being allowed to live in a beautiful country or again, some special grace of God—all too soon we grow accustomed to them and cease to appreciate them in any adequate degree. We are no longer aware of their character as gifts; our gratitude for them, if not obliterated, has become dormant.
Is not our life a continuous succession of the mercies and charities of God, and at the same time, an incessant display of ingratitude on our part? How scantly disposed are we to sing again and again the litany of the mercies of God; and even though we sing it, how many particular mercies do we not forget! If we take advantage of the inconceivable gift of daily attendance at Mass, of daily Holy Communion—how sadly is blurred, through habit, our clear perception of its being an inconceivable gift!
This deadening effect of habit on our awakeness again means unfreedom. We permit our value-responses to be hampered by the completely illegitimate power of habit. We must combat it expressly by calling to mind on all occasions how great the gift is that we enjoy; also, what our situation was before we had received it and what our situation would again be if it were withdrawn from us.
Habit can dull our sense of the horror of particular sins
Neither should we simply get accustomed to the hard trials imposed on us by God—such as the loss of a beloved person, or again, the state of spiritual dryness. We should certainly bear them in patience, but at the same time clearly perceive their character as a cross, and endeavor to discern the meaning God intends them to convey to us.
Least of all should we suffer habit to make us obtuse in regard to sin. Repeated lapses into the same kind of sin may easily dishabituate us from a keen perception of the antithesis to value it embodies: we tend to consider the offense in question no longer as “so very bad,” and allow certain channels to form in our mental world through which we may all the more glibly slip into that sin.
We must fight this tendency with the utmost determination, particularly in the following way. We should never repress (that is, dismiss or crowd out from our memory) any wrong we have done, nor content ourselves with a mere passive guilty conscience, but work out an explicit and active repentance of any transgression we may have committed, disavowing our wrong expressly before God, and accusing ourselves in Confession; whereby the barrier that separates us from sin is restored, the trench we filled up when committing the first sin is dug out again, and the grooves of sin are prevented from forming.
Habit may lead us to consider blessings as if they were due to us
Finally, habit has also the bad effect of tempting us to regard the blessings of God as something self-evidently due to us, something to which we are strictly entitled as it were. Habit is apt to make us not only ungrateful but arrogant. The unmerited gifts that the “Father of all lights” bestows upon us we easily come to claim as our legitimate property so that, should any new benefits we covet be denied us, we shall be inclined to believe ourselves wronged. We shall deem our temporary separation from a beloved person, for instance, an intolerable hardship instead of considering what an immense gift the union of loving hearts represents in itself.
He who is truly free knows—with a living knowledge—that everything is an unmerited gift of the merciful goodness of God; that before him we are beggars devoid of any claim whatsoever.
From our very existence, our vocation, and our redemption, to every ray of the sun that enlivens us with its warmth and its luster, and to every drop of water that quenches our thirst—everything is a gratuitous gift of His inexhaustible goodness. All the truths we are blessed in knowing, all beauty we are allowed to enjoy; every moment of good health and every bit of nourishment we take—all these are undeserved benefits in no wise due to us. How often do we misuse the gifts of God; with how much ingratitude and indifference do we requite His blessings!
Yet, as soon as habit deludes us into misjudging our metaphysical situation, as soon as (under the influence of habit) our nature represents to us any possessions or privileges we enjoy as self-evident rights, we have to ipso renounced true freedom. For all subjection to illusions, and in particular, all misconceptions of our situation relative to God, necessarily imply a privation of freedom.
Inordinate shyness restricts freedom
Finally, we may set aside one more form of unfreedom: that which has its psychological source in shyness. This should not be confused with that virginal bashfulness which causes a person to recoil from any too spontaneous manifestation of his interior life, and frequently to blush whenever the attention of others is focused upon him. The desire to hide, in the sense of shunning publicity, is in itself a fine and praiseworthy trait. But this desire of remaining unnoticed may reach a point where it becomes an obstacle to freedom, inasmuch as it constrains us to remain in our retirement even in situations that require us to intervene openly and to profess publicly our conviction.
He who is truly free will be happy if he can escape notoriety, but will also be ready to face the light of publicity whether restricted or wide, by expressing his opinion and making valid his standpoint in words or deeds as soon as the call of God demands it.
A certain type of person, however, is forcibly hindered from doing so by his inveterate shyness. People of this kind cannot manage to contradict an assertion, though in the circumstances it is objectively necessary. They are barely able to mumble a word when asked a question; they keep an obstinate silence in company, thus laying themselves open to accusations of pride. From mere shyness they sometimes display a definitely unkind behavior. The fear of being observed makes them feel insecure to the point of a veritable paralysis of will, which in circumstances may prevent them from performing imperative duties. Confession, too, is apt to be exceedingly difficult for them owing to their inhibitions.
To be sure, shyness of this kind is a natural disposition for which the subject is not responsible; but whoever aspires to true freedom must take care not to abandon himself to it. For it hampers one at every movement as does a strait jacket, and introduces into all situations an element of superfluous complication.
A person subject to this weakness should systematically seek to overcome it by ascetical practices adapted to the purpose, He must learn to fling himself entirely into the arms of God, in an attitude of holy unconcern. Just as a man’s aversion to water is best cured by his jumping into it boldly and with closed eyes, a sufferer from shyness should—in the spirit of holy obedience to spiritual counsel, preferably—force himself to jump into the thick of certain embarrassing situations. Having again and again pierced the charmed circle, he will gradually get rid of his disability and become fit to follow the call of God unhampered.
Secretiveness may diminish freedom
The fear of disclosing certain secrets of one’s life may similarly depress one’s freedom. True, we are wholly justified in spreading a veil over our deep inward experiences, religious or personal, and in protecting them as far as possible from profanation by an incompetent and unsympathetic public. One who is bent on divulging and publicizing everything cannot but be a superficial person devoid of the virtue of discretion.
To this, however, should be added a twofold consideration. First, we must derive no pleasure from secrecy as such, and guard against wantonly inserting in our lives a great number of secrets. Secondly, we must not lapse into the habit of entering every situation a priori with a fear lest something we intend to keep secret should be revealed—a warped attitude of self-consciousness that is sure to prevent us from paying adequate attention to the theme of the given situation. For instance, somebody tells us about a grave inner crisis through which he is passing and seeks our help; yet, we listen to him only distractedly, being preoccupied by the possibility that in the course of the conversation something might come to the surface that had better remain hidden.
This concern about the safety of our secrets must never become the primary category under which we consider the various situations that make up our life; for this, again, might easily develop into a cramp of egocentrism numbing our response to the call of God.
It need not be emphasized that what has been said here does’ not in any way apply to others’ secrets, which we are in duty bound to preserve.
Only true freedom enables us to respond properly to all legitimate goods
To sum up—true inner freedom means that we have relinquished our natural standpoint and live through Him, with Him, and in Him. This implies an unequivocal renunciation of the basis that had formerly provided us with a sense of natural security. Egocentric biases, complexes of fear, psychic cramp as well as laxity and self-indulgence of every kind—in a word, all illegitimate preoccupations, all that is not rooted in the call of God or in the appeal of true values—must be dislodged and stripped of their empire over us.
To all legitimate interests and obligations, on the other hand, we must remain and become fully alive. Hence, true freedom is not the equivalent but the opposite of those stoic ideals of apathy and ataraxy which require us to become insensitive to all goods, so that we derive a sense of mastery from being subject to no obligations. True freedom does not make us insensitive to either the sufferings imposed on us or the blessings lavished upon us by God; on the contrary, because we are free from all irrelevant and illegitimate ties, everything that bears on true values has a far deeper and stronger impact on our hearts.
And, because (under the law of true freedom) we seek before all else “the kingdom of God and His justice,” all natural values present themselves to our eyes against the background of the supernatural; therefore, no natural good as such can attract or bewitch us to the point of enslaving us. Its power over us does not extend beyond the limit of its relevancy as viewed in the light of the supernatural. The comparative reserve we impose on ourselves in regard to all genuine goods of the natural order has no meaning but to make us completely free for integral allegiance to the highest good. Once more, the aim is not, as with the stoic, to get rid of all attachments, but to realize one’s unconditional and unhampered attachment to God.
With our entire life informed by the consciousness of “the one thing necessary,” all legitimate ties will assume their proper place as assigned to them by the will of God. True freedom means that, free from all illegitimate ties, we take account of the true hierarchy of values visualized in a supernatural light, and adjust all our attachments to it.
He who is truly free “abides in the truth.” He lives his life in God, before God, and on a basis derived from God. He is no longer enchained to his nature, being able to say with St. Paul the Apostle, “And I live, now not I: but Christ liveth in me” (Gal. 2:20). The free, wide, universal air of the Liturgy breathes through his life.
Freedom means ultimate truth. He who has achieved true freedom is animated by that holy courage, steeped in humility, which says—“I can do all, in Him who is my strength.” Nothing can confound him, for he knows the meaning of St. Paul’s words: “If God be for us, who is against us? He that spared not even his own Son, but delivered him up for us all, how hath he not also, with him, given us all things?” (Rom. 8:31-32).