So, what is man? He’s intentional in his moral nature. He’s born to acquire certain moral behaviors towards mother and father and brethren but mostly towards his mother because of the special bond. He’ll recognize her very smell and her body is changing in certain ways to adapt itself to the care of a baby and especially the particular baby who developed in her womb. It’s plausible to claim that all human behavior, moral and otherwise, is built from a small stock of behaviors and attitudes and tendencies that are inborn and show up without habituation or thought in the relationship between mother and child.
Relationships are key. We are contextual beings, all creatures we know of are contextual. It’s wrong to think of ourselves as free-standing beings thrown into this world, as many modern thinkers and some ancient thinkers have taught. If anything, we are shaped by our relationships, to our mothers and our fathers and our brethren, to more distant relatives and neighbors and friends, to clergymen and teachers and doctors. The underlying substance which is the physical entity in these relationships is literally brought into existence by the relationship God has chosen freely — He brought us into being because He loved us before we were conceived by our parents. I spoke of this way of viewing Creation in one of my entries, A Christian view of Einstein’s and Bohr’s debate on the meaning of reality. This way of viewing Creation, or rather the substance of Creation, draws upon both the theology of St. John the Apostle and also the so-called Copenhagen school’s interpretation of quantum mechanics.
Relationships are primary, substances are brought into existence by relationships. As I said in the prior paragraph, only God can give existence, so He plays not just the main role but the only role in bringing stuff into existence from nothing. But we play roles in the shaping of the particularized beings and things though God is still the primary, and absolutely dominant, shaper of even the most particular of things.
Man is a rational, dependent animal. As a rational animal, he is — or should be — aware of his dependencies, should be consciously aware of most of his relationships. To form a legitimate moral intention requires an awareness of a relationship or an aspect of a relationship of which you’re already aware — not necessarily an awareness which comes from the intellect. Some of those relationships are dependencies of ourselves on others, some are dependencies of others on us, and some are more casual — light friendships or perhaps an admiration for a great musician or tennis-player.
Our primary dependency is upon God and our rationality demands that we recognize that only He exists in a true sense. Our existence is a gift from Him. It is a result of the relationship of love He established before we were conceived. He is an all-loving God and He is all-powerful. We are dependent upon Him for our very existence.
So how can we be free if we are creatures formed by relationships of dependency, especially if our dependency upon God is even for our very existence? The answer is that we can’t be free in the modern sense, or rather we can be free only by taking actions that destroy our own moral nature and our relationships. Since human societies are formed by relationships, that means we damage our societies by trying to live outside of our proper dependencies.
I know the final answer but I don’t understand how we get there. After all, the final answer was given to us in the Bible, most especially in the words and life and death and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ. That final answer is:
When we unite with God by allowing ourselves to be merged into the Church, the very Body of Christ, we don’t become slaves but rather children of the Father. We become truly free because we share in the Life of Father and Son and Holy Spirit. We become sons of God, alongside the Son. Hence, we share in the Freedom of God.
Much of this current inability to speak revealed truths is due to our all being liberals in this day and age. The most traditional of Christians has to fight against the presumption buried in our words and concepts that we are autonomous agents if we are free and we are free if we try to play the role of autonomous agents.. When some traditionalist Christians try to break away from modernistic thought, they speak in terms of slavery, slaves of the heart of Jesus or the heart of His most holy mother. While it’s true that we’re slaves in this mortal life, the Father has promised to raise us to the state of being His sons. Being sons, we share in the divine state, which includes a truer and purer form of freedom, not slavery.
For all who are led by the spirit of God are sons of God. For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the spirit of sonship. [Romans 8:14-15]
The problem is not trivial but it’s also not insurmountable. We need a new language. The modern liberal idea of freedom is grossly defective and any review of modern neuroscience would let the reader know that apostles of radical individualism, such as Ludwig von Mises or his left-wing counterparts, had little true understanding of human nature. What they understood was a man who exercised a parasitic form of freedom in a well-formed Christian society. Not only parasitic, that form of freedom makes no sense, proposing we should select bundles of goods, including life-styles, as if shopping for shampoo.
That’s not freedom and, after centuries of increasing exploitation by those trying to exercise that parasitic freedom, we’ve destroyed much of the moral structures of our society and find that the younger generations are barbarians. To glorify what entertainment industry executives and movie-stars do as freedom is to pretend a disease is health just because the diseased human being seems to be in good health even while he’s killing others with his disease.
We need a new way to view freedom and the major clue we have is that only God is truly free. As I argued in my book, To See a World in a Grain of Sand, using modern theories of random numbers, only God could make a random number and only God could choose to act in a random way — with complete freedom.
Let’s return to a more basic point:
Only God truly exists, and He brings into existence all of Creation — all of contingent being.
We have been granted limited life, a mortal and tentative existence, by He-who-is. God has promised to bring His chosen ones to a more complete and richer life, a true life, even to a share in the Life of God.
We have been granted limited freedom, a constrained and sometimes crippled freedom, by He-who-is. Can it be that the truer life that God gives to His chosen ones will also include a share in the true and absolute freedom of Father and Son and Holy Spirit?
This is the promise of Christ but I can’t yet speak it in a way that makes sense to us modern men and women. Before such things can be stated clearly and coherently, we need a re-definition of words and concepts which have been corrupted to the needs of modern liberalism. We need to be purged of our unhealthy belief that we come into this world as autonomous agents, free-standing individuals who make a life by selecting from various stands in the marketplace. It’s not a task to be completed in a single essay and maybe not a task to be done by one thinker or even one generation of thinkers.