Dear Friends,
In the second reading today we hear St. Paul saying to the Galatians, “For freedom Christ set us free; so stand firm and do not submit again to the yoke of slavery. For you were called for freedom, brothers and sisters. But do not use this freedom as an opportunity for the flesh; rather, serve one another through love.” What St. Paul is saying struck me because I am reading a book that critiques the notion of freedom that has arisen since the Enlightenment and that this understanding of freedom is at the root of so many of the problems we are facing in our world.
The author, Patrick Deneen, writes about how in the past our freedom was controlled by the teaching of the virtues by Christians and in schools. Culture, itself, taught people to act in a disciplined manner. We learned that the choices we made in our freedom defined us and made us into the people we are. However, for most people today freedom is simply the ability to choose to do whatever I want as long as it does not harm another. Without the restraints of religion and culture, it has fallen upon the state to continue to create laws to govern human behavior. We end up with more and more laws, we end up with more and more people in prison, we end up with more and more government employees, etc. Politics, in this scenario, becomes the domain in which we negotiate the boundaries of our freedoms with each other.
Kierkegaard, in his writing about freedom, talks about this present sense of freedom as being a lessor sense. This is the freedom of the adolescent and is characterized by the right to avoid making choices. For example, the unmarried man is free to let his eyes and mind wander among the unattached females of the species. What the person is saying is that he is guided by his immediate needs, which, in turn are guided by his appetites. He is functioning slightly above the powers of an animal, but not very far. Neither his will nor his reason have been decisively engaged.
The truth is that such undisciplined freedom is destructive. The paradox we learn from St. Paul and from Jesus is that there is the greatest liberty when there is restraint. Freedom through limitations is a fundamental part of life with numerous applications. One example of this is through the arts.
The English author G. K. Chesterton expressed these ideas in Orthodoxy: “It is impossible to be an artist and not care for laws and limits. Art is limitation; the essence of every picture is the frame. If you draw a giraffe, you must draw him with a long neck. If, in your bold creative way, you hold yourself free to draw a giraffe with a short neck, you will really find that you are not free to draw a giraffe. The moment you step into a world of facts, you step into a world of limits… The artist loves his limitations: they constitute the thing he is doing. The painter is glad that the canvas is flat. The sculptor is glad that the clay is colorless.”
Igor Stravinsky, the twentieth century composer, explained the role of limitations in his own work when he said, “…my freedom will be so much the greater and more meaningful the more narrowly I limit my field of action and the more I surround myself with obstacles. Whatever diminishes constraint diminishes strength. The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees oneself of the chains that shackle the spirit.”
The disciple of Jesus chooses limits and commitments, and in so doing chooses the infinite, God. For concrete love is the infinite act of an eternal being. In choosing to love another person, one is making a decision to give of themselves to another. To choose to give of my time, my energy, my very self is to choose to be both more and less at the same moment. This is the paradox. This is what the artist knows, my limitations set me free.
Peace,
Fr. Damian