Christian Freedom
AMONG SO MANY fundamental things that are being called in question by the present world crisis none is more important than the issue of religious freedom. No one can doubt it is in danger today in many countries and from many causes, and it is an urgent necessity that all Christians should become fully conscious of the changed situation. In this country and in America it is, perhaps, exceptionally difficult to do so, because religious freedom has been accepted for so long as a matter of course that it has become commonplace. It may even be felt that we have had too much of it, as we have had too much economic freedom, so that it is responsible for the loss of a clear sense of objective spiritual truth. But religious freedom is not the same thing as spiritual disorder, and, as the Pope has said in his Jubilee address a few weeks ago, the danger to religious freedom is at the same time a call to Christian unity.
It is no longer possible to defend religious freedom on the basis of nineteenth-century individualism and spiritual laissez-faire—a basis which was, in fact, never acceptable to Catholic tradition. What is at stake is the very existence of Christianity in a world hostile to Christ. “The new conditions have nothing in common with the learned controversies of the past”; they are like those which the early Church had to face, so that “today Christians are being reproached for the same offences against the law as those for which Peter and Paul were reproached by the Casars of the first century.1
At first sight it seems as though the conditions under which the Church existed at that period made any kind of religious freedom impossible. But in fact this was not so. By a spiritual law of compensation the external pressure of persecution and proscription strengthened the sense of interior liberation and spiritual freedom which was so characteristic of primitive Christianity. For freedom is not something exterior to religion—in a profound sense Christianity is freedom, and the words which have become canonized and set apart as the classical terms of Christian theology—redemption, salvation [and three Greek words which cannot be transliterated here]—possessed for their original hearers the simple and immediate sense of the delivery of a slave and the release of a captive.
It is difficult to exaggerate the importance of the concepts of freedom and slavery in the thought of the ancient world. The society of the ancient world was built on the institution of slavery, as that of the modern world is built on capital and labour, and the wars and confiscations of the first century B.C. had both increased its extent and destroyed its traditional character, so that men of education and culture, the very opposite of Aristotle’s “natural slaves,” might find themselves reduced by some accident of world politics to a state of subhuman rightlessness. And behind this condition of personal servitude, which was the framework of social life, there were the traditions of corporate national servitude which formed Jewish thought in a pattern of social dualism.
The two cities—Babylon and Jerusalem—were the archetypes of this spiritual tradition; on the one hand, the predatory world empire or slave state which was the embodiment of human pride and power, on the other the holy community which was the representative of God’s purpose in the world and the guardian of the Divine Law. For centuries the holy community had been a captive and an exile under the hard yoke of successive world empires, and the whole spiritual energy of Israel was concentrated on the hope of deliverance, the return of the exiles from their captivity and the coming of the Kingdom of God and of His people.
The Gospel of Christ was essentially the good news of the coming of the Kingdom, but at the same time it raised the whole idea of redemption and deliverance to a new plane. It was no longer a question of national deliverance by the establishment of a social or political theocracy. It was the reversal of a universal cosmic process which had reduced the whole human race to a state of slavery. It was a moral deliverance, but it was also much more than that. We are so accustomed to the traditional Christian terminology of sin and redemption that we are apt to forget what these words meant to the early Christians. For to them sin was not simply unethical behaviour, it was a real state of slavery to powers outside humanity and stronger than man, the spiritual forces of evil which were the rulers of this dark age.
Modern writers, like Schweitzer and Warneck, have described almost precisely the same conceptions and the same psychological attitude among converts from paganism in the world today. The latter writes: “The insurmountable wall that rises up between the heathen and God is not sin, as among ourselves; it is the kingdom of darkness in which they are bound. That bondage shows itself in the fear that surrounds them: fear of souls, fear of spirits, fear of human enemies and magicians. The Gospel comes to unloose these bonds. It stands forth before their eyes as a delivering power, a redemption.”
Thus humanity left to its own resources has no freedom and no power to free itself. It is involved in a progressive state of disorder which is at once physical and metaphysical, moral, social and political. This is quite a different conception from the Calvinist doctrine of the total depravity and reprobation of human nature, though the latter, of course, based itself on the same literary tradition and made use of the same theological language. But the view of the New Testament is based on a vision of a cosmic situation, while that of the Reformers is a theological theory based on a priori reasoning. The solidarity of mankind under the reign of evil is not an abstraction, it is a fact of experience, which has been recognized by philosophers and religious thinkers of every age from the time of Buddha to our own days. To quote a modern example, Tolstoy writes: ‘‘People bound together by a delusion form as it were a collective cohesive mass. The cohesion of that mass is the evil of the world. All the spiritual activity of humanity is directed towards the destruction of this cohesion. All revolutions are attempts to break up that mass by violence. It seems to people that if they break up that mass, it will cease to be a mass; and therefore they strike at it; but by trying to break it, they only force it closer. The cohesion of the particles is not destroyed, until the inner form passes from the mass to the particles and obliges them to separate from it.”
Now the Gospel is the record of the dramatic irruption of Divine power into this closed order. “Now is the judgement of the world; now shall the prince of this world be cast out” (John xii, 31). The prince of this world is like a strong man guarding his house by force of arms, until a stronger than he comes and conquers him and takes away the armaments in which he put his trust (John xi, 21-2). Thus the Redemption is the turning-point in the history of humanity and inaugurates a vital process of liberation which is destined to integrate humanity in a new spiritual solidarity. The old world remains, superficially its power and its cohesion are unaffected, but under the surface a new vital process is at work, and men have only to adhere to this new principle of life to be freed from the immense and complicated burden of hereditary evil and to be reborn. “Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature. Old things are passed away. Behold all things have become new” (2 Cor. v). “Awake thou that sleepest and arise from the dead and Christ shall shine upon thee.” It was from this total psychological point of view that the Christian of the first century conceived the idea of freedom. Freedom was inseparable from Redemption. It was something entirely independent of external circumstances, a divine gift which the powers of this world could not limit or destroy. “If the Son shall make you free, you are free indeed.” “Where the Spirit of God is, there is freedom.”
Yet, on the other hand, it was also power. It flowed forth into the world, creating a new bond of community and overcoming the physical and social barriers that stood in its way, so that even fundamental differences of race and class and personal status were transcended and appeared insignificant. It was, in fact, a new kind of freedom that was entirely different from the civic freedom of the Greek city state which had been the dominant social ideal of the ancient world, though it sometimes made use of the same terminology. Nevertheless it was undoubtedly an effective freedom, something which really delivered men from real evils and servitudes and which transformed man and society, more completely than any political revolution has ever done.
Christian freedom entered the world as something Divine and miraculous. “The blind see, the lepers are cleansed, the poor have the Gospel preached to them.” It is essentially theocentric—God-given and in no way dependent on human rights or human powers. It is an emancipation from the servitudes that seem to be the natural condition of human nature and an admission into the glorious liberty of the children of God. Yet it does not mean a withdrawal from social and physical reality like Buddhist asceticism and Neoplatonic mysticism which were also conceived as ways of deliverance. It was essentially a world-transforming power, and it manifested this power from the beginning in the creation of a new community and new forms of social action. Never, in fact, have individual and social consciousness been more completely identified than in the early Church. Christian freedom was from the beginning embodied in the life of a community, and the individual could only possess it in fellowship as a member of the new society which was more than a society, since it was a true spiritual organism, the divine body of the new humanity.
Nevertheless in spite of its mystical and transcendental aspects this society was conceived as the continuation and fulfilment of the Jewish community. In the ancient Paschal liturgy, the Church prays that “all the nations of the world may become the children of Abraham and partakers of the age from the time of Buddha to our own days. To quote a modern example, Tolstoy writes: “People bound together by a delusion form as it were a collective cohesive mass. The cohesion of that mass is the evil of the world. All the spiritual activity of humanity is directed towards the destruction of this cohesion. All revolutions are attempts to break up that mass by violence. It seems to people that if they break up that mass, it will cease to be a mass; and therefore they strike at it; but by trying to break it, they only force it closer. The cohesion of the particles is not destroyed, until the inner form passes from the mass to the particles and obliges them to separate from it.”
Now the Gospel is the record of the dramatic irruption of Divine power into this closed order. “Now is the judgement of the world; now shall the prince of this world be cast out” (John xii, 31). The prince of this world is like a strong man guarding his house by force of arms, until a stronger than he comes and conquers him and takes away the armaments in which he put his trust (John xi, 21-2). Thus the Redemption is the turning-point in the history of humanity and inaugurates a vital process of liberation which is destined to integrate humanity in a new spiritual solidarity. The old world remains, superficially its power and its cohesion are unaffected, but under the surface a new vital process is at work, and men have only to adhere to this new principle of life to be freed from the immense and complicated burden of hereditary evil and to be reborn. “Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature. OId things are passed away. Behold all things have become new” (2 Cor. v). “Awake thou that sleepest and arise from the dead and Christ shall shine upon thee.”
It was from this total psychological point of view that the Christian of the first century conceived the idea of freedom. Freedom was inseparable from Redemption. It was something entirely independent of external circumstances, a divine gift which the powers of this world could not limit or destroy. “If the Son shall make you free, you are free indeed.” “Where the Spirit of God is, there is freedom.”
Yet, on the other hand, it was also power. It flowed forth into the world, creating a new bond of community and overcoming the physical and social barriers that stood in its way, so that even fundamental differences of race and class and personal status were transcended and appeared insignificant. It was, in fact, a new kind of freedom that was entirely different from the civic freedom of the Greek city state which had been the dominant social ideal of the ancient world, though it sometimes made use of the same terminology. Nevertheless it was undoubtedly an effective freedom, something which really delivered men from real evils and servitudes and which transformed man and society, more completely than any political revolution has ever done.
Christian freedom entered the world as something Divine and miraculous. “The blind see, the lepers are cleansed, the poor have the Gospel preached to them.” It is essentially theocentric—God-given and in no way dependent on human rights or human powers. It is an emancipation from the servitudes that seem to be the natural condition of human nature and an admission into the glorious liberty of the children of God. Yet it does not mean a withdrawal from social and physical reality like Buddhist asceticism and Neoplatonic mysticism which were also conceived as ways of deliverance. It was essentially a world-transforming power, and it manifested this power from the beginning in the creation of a new community and new forms of social action. Never, in fact, have individual and social consciousness been more completely identified than in the early Church. Christian freedom was from the beginning embodied in the life of a community, and the individual could only possess it in fellowship as a member of the new society which was more than a society, since it was a true spiritual organism, the divine body of the new humanity.
Nevertheless in spite of its mystical and transcendental aspects this society was conceived as the continuation and fulfilment of the Jewish community. In the ancient Paschal liturgy, the Church prays that “all the nations of the world may become the children of Abraham and partakers of the dignity of Israel,” and in fact the historic vicissitudes of this particular people became the archetypes of Christian spiritual experience. The consequence of this is that every Christian people possesses a double tradition and a double citizenship, and this duality is reflected in the Western conception of freedom, which even in its most secular form depends half-consciously on spiritual values that belong to the common inheritance of Israel and Christendom.
This inheritance of the tradition of Israel with its consciousness of social continuity and separateness was, however, combined with a sense of liberation from tradition which finds such a clear and even revolutionary expression in St. Paul’s attitude to the Law. There has never been a more drastic indictment of religious traditionalism in its external negative and repressive aspects than that of St. Paul. Nothing that modern rationalists and humanists have said about religion as the enemy of freedom is stronger than St. Paul's picture of the miserable state of humanity labouring under the bondage of the Law. “The yoke which neither our fathers nor we were able to bear.” Even the high spiritual vocation of Israel did not save the chosen people from this bondage. They were the children of Agar the slave woman who was the archetype of Jerusalem “that now is, and is in slavery with her children. But Jerusalem which is above is free, which is our mother. We are not the children of the slave, but of the free, by the freedom wherewith Christ has made us free.”
But to St. Paul the Law was not merely the yoke that enslaves, it was also the barrier that divided the Jews from the rest of humanity. The Jews, though under the Law, had their privileged position as the people of God. The Gentiles were free from the Law, but they were left without God and without spiritual hope. The great fact of the redemption was the breaking down of this barrier and the uniting of the two peoples in the unity of spiritual freedom. “For Christ is our peace who made both one and broke down the middle wall of partition…in order to create in himself of the two One New Man.” Therefore the Gentiles were no longer foreigners and exiles, but fellow citizens with the saints and of the household of God. One living temple founded on Christ, and built up by the apostles and prophets as a house for God in the Spirit.
Christian freedom has its beginning and end in this creative act of redemption and reconciliation. It is not the creation of human power and will, but the birthright of the Christian as child of God, reborn in Christ and vivified by the spirit. It is therefore a much more fundamental thing than what we commonly understand by religious freedom. In modern times Christian freedom has usually been considered in reference either to the freedom of the individual conscience against external compulsion or to the freedom of the Christian community—the Church—against the state. But the first freedom from which these are derivative and dependent is the freedom of the Spirit—the new creation which changes man’s nature and liberates him from the state of psychological and moral bondage to the world and the forces that rule the world.
Now this essential spiritual freedom can be expressed in two ways—intellectually as the result of the enlightenment of divine truth—“you shall hear the truth and the truth shall make you free”—or vitally as the communication of divine life—a new birth which transforms human nature by the infusion of the Spirit.
This twofold relation is especially clearly marked in the Johannine writings. Both the Gospel and the First Epistle of St. John equally insist that the communication of Divine Life is made at once by the hearing of a Word and by the society of a Person, and Word and Person were substantially one.
That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon and our hands have handled of the Word of life….
That which we have seen and have heard we declare unto you that you also may have fellowship with us, and our fellowship may be with the Father and with His Son Jesus Christ.
The true freedom of the world—the only freedom that can free man in the depths of his personality—depends on keeping open the channel of revelation, preserving the Word of Truth and communicating the Spirit of Life. These are the essential Christian freedoms, and it for this that the Christian Church as a visible institution exists. If the channel becomes choked or the bridge broken, the world falls back into darkness and chaos and humanity once more becomes bound in that state of slavery which the ancient world saw as an impersonal chain of necessity but which Christian tradition conceived in terms of active personal evil as the Kingdom of Satan.
It is this wholesale loss of spiritual freedom that is the real danger that faces the world today. The plain fact which we see displayed before our eyes is that the power of man has grown so great that it has denied and shut out the power of the Spirit and that consequently it is destroying the world. We have seen how the new totalitarian orders all tend to become closed orders—spiritual as well as economic autarchies which leave no room for true Christian freedom. And we have no reason to suppose that a new democratic order which bases itself on the ideals of technocracy and economic planning would be fundamentally different in this respect, even though it avoids the grosser evils of the existing totalitarian systems. In so far as this is so, all these new orders are orders of death.
In face of this great danger Christianity still stands as the hope of the world. It is true that Christendom is weakened and divided. At first sight it seems like a valley of dry bones, the dry bones of dead controversies and moribund traditions, since Christians are more tied to the dead past, more dependent on antiquated modes of thought, more wedded to the old social and political order than the rest of the world. There is hardly a social abuse or an intellectual fallacy that has not found its stoutest defenders in the ranks of Christian orthodoxy. Nevertheless, in spite of all this, Christianity is still a living force in the modern world. It has still the promise of new life and spiritual freedom as at the beginning. It may be difficult to see how this promise is to be realized under modern conditions. In fact if we could foresee the future of Christendom and plan out exactly what was to be done, we should be missing the essential nature of Christian freedom. What we can say, however, is that the nature of the new forces that threaten to enslave humanity will inevitably tend to make both Christians and non-Christians conscious of the essential truths of faith and spiritual reality on which the Church stands. The rise of the new totalitarian systems and ideologies is a religious as well as a political revolution. It destroys the traditional division of life into separate secular and religious spheres. It attempts to unify human life and to organize the total psychic and material energies of the community for common ends. And consequently it marks the end of the four centuries of religious development which followed the Reformation—a period that was characterized by the progressive individualization of consciousness, by religious separation and division and by the identification of spiritual freedom with religious individualism. The totalitarian revolution reverses this tendency and leaves no room for any kind of individualism, either secular or religious.
But it goes further than that and attacks spiritual freedom itself. It is therefore vital that Christians should not allow themselves to become confused and divided on this fundamental issue. Christians are agreed that the spiritual anarchy of unbridled individualism is contrary to the whole Christian tradition of faith and order, however much they may differ in their definitions. But on the other hand they must be still more united in defending the vital principles of Christian freedom which is the fundamental law of spiritual action. For what we are defending are not only man’s rights but the rights of God. If the channels are closed by which the word of Christ and the power of the Spirit are communicated to man corporately and individually, the world must fall back into the state of darkness and slavery which Christ came to destroy. It is, of course, true that the opposition and conflict between the Two Cities runs through the whole of human history, but hitherto a limit has been set to it by the limitation of human power and knowledge. But today the scientific development of the techniques of social control have created a new situation in which for the first time in history it has become possible to make the human soul itself a cog in the mechanism of planned organization. This is the challenge that Christians have to face today, and they can do so only by returning to the foundations—the organic principles of spiritual life and spiritual freedom which are the laws of the Church’s life.
1 Broadcast of Pius XII on 12 May 1942.
This item 12800 digitally provided courtesy of CatholicCulture.org
