Freedom

Freedom is a being’s power to flourish as what it naturally is, to become ever more fully what it is. The freedom of an oak seed is its uninterrupted growth into an oak tree. The freedom of a rational spirit is its consummation in union with God. Freedom is never then the mere “negative liberty” of indeterminate openness to everything; if rational liberty consisted in simple indeterminacy of the will, then no fruitful distinction could be made between personal agency and pure impersonal impulse or pure chance. And this classical and Christian understanding of freedom requires a belief not only in the reality of created natures, which must flourish to be free, but also in the transcendent Good toward which rational natures are necessarily oriented. To be fully free is to be joined to that end for which our natures were originally framed, and for which, in the deepest reaches of our souls, we ceaselessly yearn. Whatever separates us from that end, even if it be our own power of choice, is a form of bondage to the irrational. We are free not because we can choose, but only when we have chosen well. And to choose well we must ever more clearly see the “sun of the Good” (to employ the lovely Platonic metaphor), and to see more clearly we must continue to choose well; and the more we are emancipated from illusion and caprice, and the more our will is informed by and responds to the Good, the more perfect our vision becomes, and the less there is really to choose. Thus it is that Augustine could say that the consummation of freedom for a rational creature would be to achieve not the liberty attributed by tradition to Adam and Eve, who were merely “able not to sin” (posse non peccare), but rather the truest liberty of all, that of being entirely “unable to sin” (non posse peccare). To this state one can attain only when one’s nature has been so emancipated from error that nothing can prevent it from reaching and enjoying the only end that can fulfill it: God. Only then is a rational being not a slave to ignorance and delusion.
That All Shall Be Saved, Hart