freedom | Glossary Term | The Komorebi Effect

enjoyment of the highest good through a learned capacity to overcome the slavish pursuit of base desire
the absence of constraint, i.e. open-ended possibility

What is freedom for?

Freedom is requisite for love; no amount of force can coerce love. The moment it becomes compulsory it ceases to be love. The law is necessary in that it gives sin a name, but insufficient in that it will never make men good.¹

The Christian gospel is a message of freedom through grace and we must stand fast in the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free. But what shall we do with our freedom? The Apostle Paul grieved that some of the believers of his day took advantage of their freedom and indulged the flesh in the name of Christian liberty. They threw off discipline, scorned obedience and made gods of their own bellies.

A.W. Tozer, Man – The Dwelling Place of God

Bounded Freedom

There’s been a rejection of the ancient concept of liberty on which liberalism is founded. Liberty was once broadly understood as the learned capacity to conquer slavish pursuit of base desires gained through the faculties of reason and through the cultivation of virtue. Liberty is now largely understood as the condition in which one acts freely and unconstrained. This type of negative freedom is now the only freedom recognized by most. They prefer open-ended freedom. But their freedom is really more like a straitjacket. They say things like, “The golden rule is that there is no golden rule.”² Chesterton strenuously objected to idea. He wrote that this simply “pretends to free men, but really restrains them from doing the only thing that men want to do… what is the good of telling a community that it has every liberty except the liberty to make laws? …what is the good of telling a man that he has every liberty except the liberty to make generalizations? …that there is no golden rule is itself a golden rule, or rather it is much worse than a golden rule. It is an iron rule; a fetter on the first movement of man.³

Liberty, in its highest and truest sense, is not simply doing whatever one wants. That more closely resembles slavery to one’s appetite. Freedom is not the absence of all restrictions. Is a fish a slave to water? Quite the contrary, water is the context for the fish’s freedom. A gymnast who disciplines and trains the body is free to vault through the air, whereas a middle-aged chain smoker is justly denied that freedom. Just because we have a will and the freedom to do as we please, this does not mean we ought to do whatever we please. There are some acts of so called ‘freedom’ that actually destroy one’s freedom. Offer yourself to sin and it will be your last free act.⁴ The Creator gives us incredible liberty. We are free to love or to hate, to give or to take, to comply or to rebel. We are free to engage in substance abuse or to incur too much debt.

The free man owns himself. He can damage himself with either eating or drinking; he can ruin himself with gambling. If he does he is certainly a damn fool, and he might possibly be a damned soul; but if he may not, he is not a free man any more than a dog.

G.K. Chesterton, broadcast talk, June 11, 1935

But we are never free to determine right and wrong or to choose which moral standards to adopt. No one writes the terms for their own existence. We are participants in a life that was given to us. “The liberty the fathers won in blood the sons may toss away in prodigality and debilitating pleasures. Any nation which for an extended period puts pleasure before liberty is likely to lose the liberty it misused.”⁵

A learned freedom

Each of us has a will and the power to act. But that does not mean that we are born free. We all recognize that a child should not have unfettered freedom. The child has to learn how to navigate the world, how to interact with others, and how to reciprocate. Rather than being born free, we must be set free. This used to be the whole point of a liberal education. Today education is treated as vocational training. Questions of transcendence and ultimate truth are actively suppressed. Education effectively makes us “servants to the end of untutored appetite, restlessness, and technical mastery of the natural world.”⁶ Schools promote the mythical idea of a value-neutral education. They refuse to promote norms of modesty, dignified conduct, and academic honesty. And when they’re met with unruliness and cheating they respond not with more liberty, but with rules, surveillance cameras, and metal detectors, none of which are the least bit value neutral.

The secular liberal idea of freedom so popular in the West, and among many in this postcommunist generation is a lie. That is, the concept that real freedom is found by liberating the self from all binding commitments (to God, to marriage, to family), and by increasing worldly comforts–that is a road that leads to hell.

Rod Dreher, Live Not by Lies

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