Scholasticism and Politics

CHAPTER V. THE THOMIST IDEA OF FREEDOM

CHAPTER V THE THOMIST IDEA OF FREEDOM I THE Two KINDS OF FREEDOM I would like to note at the very beginning ofthis essay that the word freedom,-like all big words for which men are ready to die, and which are laden, not only with the riches of the object, but with the desires, the dreams and the supreme generosities of the subject,-the word freedom conveys a great number of meanings; and yet these meanings, though widely different, have something in common. If we seek to limit ourselves to the essential, we shall behold , by attentively considering this variety of meanings, two directions, two principal lines of significance. One of them concerns freedom as an absence ofconstraint; as a bird is free when it is not in a cage, which does not mean that the bird possesses free will. The other concerns freedom as an absence of necessity or of necessitation, which is precisely the case offree will: when Samuel Adams decided to throw the tea of the East India Company into the waters of Boston Harbour, his decision was not only a spontaneous act, an act without constraint, but it was also an act which neither outer nor inner circumstances, motives, impulses, inclinations, etc., had necessarily determined; he could indeed have made a contrary decision. What he did was an act of free will; no outer or inner necessity determined it. [ II8 ] One of the causes of obscurity and confusion in the elaborate discussions offreedom and grace which occupied the seventeenth century was the fact that the two lines of significance which I have mentioned were not clearly distinguished . It is these two lines and these two primordial meanings ofthe word, and oftheconcept, offreedom,-freedom of choice (absence ofnecessitation) and freedom ofspontaneity (absenceofconstraint),-whichwe mustfirstofalldistinguish. It is perhaps suitable to observe, concerning these two kinds offreedom, that the specialists in knowledge,-I have in mind the philosopher and the theologian,-are mostly interested in the freedom of choice, in free will, no doubt because this subject gives rise to the most arduous problems. Whereas the average man is mostly interested, not in free will,-about which he troubles himselfvery little, knowing he possesses it,-but in the other kind of freedom, the freedom of spontaneity in its highest forms, where it means emancipation and personal independence (in this case we shall call it freedom of autonomy and freedom of exultation ); and this interest arises from the fact that this kind of freedom must be dearly and strenuously bought, and because it is continuously threatened. II FREEDOM OF CHOICE Let us now, by placing ourselves in the perspective of Thomist philosophy, consider the mysterious nature of the first freedom, or human free will. I shall not discuss here its existence, as each ofus knows by experience the existence of his own freedom. Moreover, the way in which St. Thomas clarifies for us the nature offree will, is at the same time the [ II9 J proof that the latter necessarily exists in every intelligent nature. Let us try to scrutinize the nature of the freedom of choice. The ancients took care to emphasize primarily the transcendence ofthe intellective appetite, or of the will, with regard to every sort ofgood except happiness. For St. Thomas, the will is an appetite, a power ofdesire and of inclination, creating in the soul spiritual weights which attract the whole ofit; its primordial act is to love. Now, all appetite is rooted in knowing or awareness. What the scholastics call sensitive appetite, the power ofdesire and emotion which is common to men and animals, has its root in the knowledge ofthe senses. The will, that is, the power of spiritual appetition, is, on the contrary, rooted in the intellect. And it is because the intellect possesses the notion of what is good, of the good in itself, abstracted in its proper objectivity and in its universality , and co-extensive with the notion of the being,-it is for this reason that in every intelligent nature, there must exist a power of desire and of love essentially distinct from the sensitive appetite, and tending toward the good known as such, in so far as it transcendentally imbibes all good things, toward the good intelligibly grasped, and not toward this or that particular good thing known only through the senses. And this power of desire and love is the rational appetite or will which...