Freedom and the Fearful Symmetry: Theological Reflections on Freedom's Relationship to Truth

Tiger, tiger, burning brightIn the forests of the night,What immortal hand or eyeCould frame thy fearful symmetry?

—William Blake

In the winter of 1932, when Malcolm Muggeridge was in Moscow as a foreign correspondent, he would often walk the streets and observe the Muscovites. He relates that, as he walked among them, he had a strange, almost mystical certainty that: "As they were, so we were all fated to be. In them, for those with eyes to see, might be discerned the fearful symmetry of things to come."¹ Muggeridge was captivated by William Blake's notion of a "fearful symmetry" in creation. Throughout his long literary career, as he made his slow and circuitous journey toward faith and the Catholic Church, Muggeridge deepened his understanding of this symmetry. At first, long before he was a believer, as he reported on the events of the world, he began to notice that they seemed laced with comic irony. Events that at first glance seemed meaningless and absurd, on closer inspection, often seemed perfectly tailored to reveal—and comically punish—human folly. As he himself would later describe it, the "Theatre of the Absurd proves on closer examination to contain within itself a Theatre of Fearful Symmetry."² Muggeridge began to discern that there was order underlying apparent confusion, meaning underlying apparent meaninglessness. He began, as he would later describe it, to hear "the still, small voice of truth that makes itself heard above thunderous falsity."³ From personal experience and observation, he came to believe that freedom was dependent on fidelity to the truth, to both that truth inscribed in nature and the truth who is Christ. Indeed, for Muggeridge, the theatre of fearful symmetry is ultimately the stage of God's providential action in creation: it is grace mercifully leading each heart to see itself as it truly is and to find its salvation in Christ.

In those desolate years, Muggeridge was not the only one to discover freedom's dependency on truth or its relationship to Christ. In the summer of 1942, while the Nazis' reign of terror was in full force throughout Poland, two young intellectuals where clandestinely exchanging letters as they labored to survive in that apocalyptic landscape that was Warsaw. Czesław Miłosz, already a published poet, writing to his friend, Jerzy Andrzejewski, makes the following confession: "The spiritual ruin that has befallen Europe has not passed us by, either; rather, it played out in us first."⁴ He adds, "How difficult it is to look clearly at oneself and at others, to not tell lies, not create myths."⁵ Miłosz, however, joins his voice with those who affirm that "what constitutes the sickness of contemporary culture is the repudiation of truth for the sake of action. … Like Pilate, [contemporary] culture asked, 'What is truth?' and washed its hands."⁶ The Polish poet adds wistfully, "Does not the same yearning that I feel in myself resonate in millions of human beings?"⁷ Others in Poland were filled with a similar yearning. The young Karol Wojtyła, for example, who at that moment was a clandestine seminarian in Krakow, had penned a play in which he affirmed, "One must throw truth across the path of lies. One must throw truth into the eye of a lie." This is so because "in truth are freedom and excellence," while the betrayal of truth leads only to slavery.⁸ Later, when Wojtyła was Pope, he would offer his mature Christological reflections on freedom's dependency on truth:

Jesus Christ meets the man of every age, including our own, with the same words: 'You will know the truth, and the truth will make you free' (Jn 8:32). These words contain both a fundamental requirement and a warning: the requirement of an honest relationship with regard to truth as a condition for authentic freedom, and the warning to avoid every kind of illusory freedom, … every freedom that fails to enter into the whole truth about man and the world.^9...