By Stephen P. White
Americans have a special obsession with freedom. We didn’t invent freedom—not even in the limited sense of political freedom—though we sometimes like to think (and occasionally act) as if we had an unbreakable monopoly on it. The land of the free, and all that.
Nevertheless, the American difference with regard to freedom is not a difference of human nature. The deepest sources of American freedom do not belong to us because we are Americans, but because we are human. And if there is a genius in our political traditions, it resides in an extraordinary political system that we did not conceive ourselves, but simply inherited.
Citizenship always has a custodial character. We are responsible for the preservation and transmission of something precious that we did not create. For most Americans, our citizenship is not even something we chose; we were born with it. It could even be said that, for most, the rights and responsibilities of citizenship were imposed on us at birth. Not all impositions are unjust; some are immense gifts.
Gifts can be taken for granted. Complacency and a sense of entitlement can, slowly and even imperceptibly, suffocate the virtues necessary for self-government. For a people to be free, they must be willing and able to live freely.
That is why the Church has always insisted that true freedom is more than the untrammeled exercise of the will. Such freedom does not deserve the name. It is a false freedom, which the ancients knew to be a form of slavery, however veiled by power. This same false freedom, a disobedient freedom, alienates us from one another and from God, as made clear in the third chapter of Genesis.
The Christian faith proposes another path to freedom, not through power, pride, or dominion, but through obedience. Jesus himself makes it clear in the Gospel of John:
Jesus then said to the Jews who had believed in him: “If you remain in my word, you will truly be my disciples; you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”
They answered him: “We are descendants of Abraham and have never been slaves to anyone. How do you say, ‘You will be free’?”
Jesus answered them: “Truly, truly, I say to you: everyone who commits sin is a slave to sin.”
Many modern Popes have warned of the consequences of separating freedom from truth, making this theme one of the permanent axes of the Church’s social doctrine, from Pope Leo XIII to our own day. As St. John Paul II wrote in 1991, the teachings of Leo XIII:
drew attention to the essential bond between human freedom and truth, so that a freedom that refused to be bound to the truth would fall into arbitrariness and end up submitting to the most vile passions, to the point of self-destruction. Indeed, what is the origin of all the evils to which Rerum novarum sought to respond, if not a certain freedom that, in the sphere of economic and social activity, separates itself from the truth about man?
It goes without saying that this “truth about man,” to which our freedom is so intimately bound, has implications that go far beyond how we should order our economic, political, or social activity. In fact, it has consequences that far exceed what we usually consider ethical or moral issues.
The “truth about man” proclaimed by the Church includes countless fundamental realities: that we are created and loved by God; that we exist as a union of mortal body and immortal soul; that we share nature with the Second Person of the Most Holy Trinity, who suffered and died to save us from sin; that we exist within time and space and experience them; that we depend on others and are responsible to them; that we are contingent beings, deeply shaped both by our environment and by our own actions; and so on.
Some of these truths, like the Incarnation, are known through revelation. Others are so evidently clear through ordinary experience that it is almost impossible to imagine they could be otherwise (for example, existing within time). Some seem to expand the horizon of human possibilities (we have rational souls, immortal souls), and others seem to limit or confine us (we are mortal, contingent, and dependent).
Some of the most important truths about man have to do with the ordinary form of human life: how we come to exist through the union of a man and a woman, how we are raised and cared for, how we live together, and how we come to know and worship God.
Sometimes it is difficult, even painful, to live within a family, being responsible for people—or dependent on them—to whom we are bound but whom we have not chosen. Sometimes it is not easy to live in society, with its conventions and expectations of conformity, which can range from the tedious and ridiculous to the perverse and violent. And even life within the Church can seem tense and discouraging at times, full as it is of sinners.
At certain moments, it may seem good to free oneself from all these bonds. But here is another “truth about man”: the bonds that tie us—to our families, to society, to the Church—are not restrictions on our freedom; they are necessary for it. They are the very means, though distorted by sin, of our perfection.
Aristotle famously wrote that he who is incapable of living in society, or who does not need it because he is self-sufficient, is either a beast or a god. If we cut the ties that bind us to one another, we will not become gods—we have heard that lie before, and not from Aristotle. By breaking the bonds, what remains, if Aristotle is right, is something inferior to what we were made to be: less perfect, less fully human, less free.
Let us give thanks to God for the bonds that tie us and for the freedom they grant us.
About the author
Stephen P. White is executive director of The Catholic Project at the Catholic University of America and a fellow of the Catholic Studies program at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.