Freedom and Necessity: St. Augustine's Teaching on Divine Power and Human Freedom

3. The Nature of Freedom in the Mind of Augustine

49 chapter 3 The Nature of Freedom in the Mind of Augustine freedom may be understood as the absence of constraint, the capacity to follow one’s own desires and inclinations without hindrance. In the human animal, a being endowed with reasoning powers, freedom increases with maturity and is, indeed, a sign of maturity. A child, in its own interests, may be allowed freedom only to a limited degree, because it has only limited judgment. As the individual becomes an adult, more and more freedom may be accorded, and not only accorded but deemed desirable. A grown man or woman is expected to exercise free will, and not be continually turning to another person for authority to act. The evil of slavery is that it deprives the slave of freedom of choice and makes his actions dependent upon another’s will. Admittedly , complete freedom of action, unrestrained by reason or charity, is the mark of the tyrant or the madman; but servitude, the state of being a slave, takes away an essential element of the human condition. To be truly human the individual needs a measure of free choice and individual responsibility. The recognition of this necessity inspires a distinct variety of modern atheism.1 When the public avowal of unbelief became permitted, if hardly welcomed, in Western Europe in the eighteenth century, athe1 . See Patrick Masterson, Atheism and Alienation (London: Pelican Books, 1973), and Marcel Neusch, The Sources of Modern Atheism, trans. Matthew J. O’Connell (New York/ Ramsey, N.J., 1982). Also James Thrower’s article in The Oxford Companion to Christian Thought (Oxford, 2000), 49–51. 50 ist thinkers were primarily concerned to repudiate any ultimate dualism of matter and spirit, such as had been assumed in the philosophy of Descartes and his disciples. Science, and particularly the system expounded by Isaac Newton, could be used to make matter the basis of spirit, and not spirit the basis of matter. The reply of the astronomer Laplace, when asked by Napoleon about the place of God in his System of the World, is well known: “Sire, I have not had need of this hypothesis .” This type of atheism, based upon scientific discovery, continues, and can today be morally reinforced by reference to the many apparent imperfections of the world as we know it: “How can I be expected to believe in a god who allows the anopheles mosquito to spread malaria, with its horrible consequences for human beings?” There is, however, another type of atheism, which attacks belief in God not simply because it is mistaken, but because it is held to prevent the human race from realizing its full potentialities. This type looks back to Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–72), who saw the idea of God as a projection by man of his own best qualities. In denying God, Feuerbach claimed to be emancipating man. In place of a fantastic heavenly state, he affirmed relations between real men. Karl Marx (1818–83), encouraged by the writings of Feuerbach, held that the rejection of religion must be total: man alone is the only absolute. Meanwhile, perhaps borrowing an idea from the Christian writer Friedrich von Hardenberg (Novalis) (1772– 1801), Marx saw religion as “the opiate of the people.” “The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness. The demand to give up the illusions about its condition is the demand to give up a condition which needs illusions.”2 Human happiness is to 2. Marx, Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, quoted by Neusch, Sources of Modern Athiesm, p. 67. Novalis was not speaking of the proletariat but of the Philistine: “Philister leben nur ein Altagsleben....... Ihr sogennante Religion wirkt bloss wie ein Opiat: reizend, betäubend, Schmerzen und Schwäche stillend” (Blütenstaub [1798]). Charles Kingsley is credited with writing: “We have used the Bible as if it were a mere special constable’s handbook, an opium dose for keeping beasts of burden patient, while they were being overloaded” (G. D. H. Cole and Raymond Postgate, The Common People, 2nd ed. [1938], 322, with comment: “..... so sending on its travels a phrase which was to end up on the walls of the Red Square in Moscow in 1917”). The long-enduring the nature of freedom 51 be found in the real world of social relations, not in the imagined world of religion. Nietzsche (1844...