PAST EDITORIAL .... Freedom
(from the AFP June Issue 2000)
Freedom
by The Rev'd Gavin Dunbar
What follows is the text, only slightly altered, of an address I gave at a "bacalaureate" service (it was actually just a high school). It is, I think, of general interest.
Our work this evening, and tomorrow, is to acknowledge formally and publicly, an academic achievement. It is a time to pause, and look back, and rejoice. On such occasions as this, it is said that great dollops of good advice are expected, and I trust not to disappoint such hopes. But I suspect those graduating today really want nothing of the sort. They want to be free—free—and what use am I? Clergymen are notorious spoilsports when it comes to freedom. David Hume, the great Scottish philosopher, wrote, "in all ages of the world, priests have been the enemies of liberty"¹. Just look at Moses: first he demands of Pharaoh, "Let my people go!"—but turn the page and he is imposing the yoke of the Law on the children of Israel with all its comminations and threatenings of disobedience. To be sure, the more up-to-date clergy like to champion various liberationist causes, but the pose is never quite convincing. We sense that something does not quite fit. For the clergy's proper job is to claim our allegiance for God, to require our obedience to his laws. In words of a seventeenth century divine (George Herbert), "a pastor is the deputy of Christ for the reducing of Man to the Obedience of God" [The Country Pastor].I have been asked the impossible, that a clergyman speak about freedom. I will do what I can. I begin with a wonderful image of freedom, the ancient Greek myth of Prometheus. Prometheus, having made man from clay, "plundered the privileges of the gods" when he stole fire from heaven for men, lighting a torch at the chariot wheels of the Sun, and by his gift of divine fire, taught men all the arts and sciences of culture and civilization. Enraged by his defiance, a vengeful Zeus had him bound in chains to the rock of Mount Caucasus, and sent an eagle to rip out and devour his liver—a punishment designed to fit the crime, for the liver, an organ that produces gall, was anciently considered the seat of violent passion and spiteful designs. This torment had to be repeated each day, for Prometheus' liver grew back each night, he too being immortal. Though cruelly punished, he remains heroically determined to resist the cruel tyranny of Zeus to the end; and indeed foresees his liberation in the distant future.
This was the image that caught the imagination of the 18th and 19th centuries, that age of enlightenment from old superstitions and revolution against old tyrannies. In Prometheus they saw an image of man's struggle for liberty against oppression. In this account of freedom, the gods—the powers that rule this world—care little about men. They hoard their privileges jealously, indifferent or even hostile to man's welfare, binding in chains all who dare challenge their rule, seeking to eviscerate from them all will to resist. But in man's mortal clay burns the fire of divine freedom, and through heroic struggle and terrible suffering, he breaks the chains that bind him, and overcomes the tyranny of the gods. One hears an echo of this myth in Marx's Communist Manifesto of 1848, which as commonly rendered runs: "Workers of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains". ²
Now I don't suppose that the Headmaster has put any of the graduates in chains. Nonetheless, that is an account of freedom I trust they recognize, and at times, when the disciplines and routines of school and family chafe, will admit to finding rather appealing. Tonight, perhaps, they are relishing a certain liberation and are looking forward to more. And perhaps also, through the work of such groups as Amnesty International, they are aware of how many peoples of the world groan under cruel regimes, and their sympathies are with them in their Promethean struggles to attain freedom and justice. Or perhaps their sympathies lie with those who suffer from discrimination, who aspire to take their legitimate place in society, as free self-determining persons.
In all this we participate in what has been, since the eighteenth century, the great project of human society, first in the west, and now globally, the quest for liberation. The philosophers of the eighteenth century Enlightenment sought to emancipate human reason and conscience from the authority of tradition and custom, both religious, and political. In turn, the romantics of the nineteenth century sought the freedom to be guided simply by feeling and emotion, free of the dictates of reason and convention. The existentialists defined freedom in radically subjective terms, the freedom to be guided by one's immediate experience of reality, the freedom to express oneself. Everyone is to be his own Prometheus, creating himself and his own world by sheer will. And at the end of the twentieth century, we are heirs of all these variations on the Promethean idea, in all their potency for good and evil. The autonomy of the self-determining individual is taken for granted. Society is to be organized that this autonomy to do what you will is unaffected by all but voluntary restraints. Freedom of choice is all. And we celebrate the power of the collective will for good, which it is said, nothing can resist.
Such ideas are regarded as almost unquestionable. I myself find them rather thin gruel. We are always thinking about the moment when we break our chains; what follows after is rather vaguely sketched in, and seems to have no real content. We know ourselves to be free only when we transgress the boundaries. No wonder the principle is sometimes taken to its absurd and terrifying extreme, by those nihilists who hold we are only free in acts of "creative destruction," when we act contrary to the dictates of the good known in any way, through tradition, through reason, or through feeling. And among those of more moderate outlook, what form does freedom of self-expression take? After all the talk about breaking out in daringly unconventional, non-conformist ways, what we get are entirely predictable rituals of liberation, and marketing ploys for bobos, the bohemian bourgeoisie. Freedom, individuality, nonconformism, "think different": it is just another way to sell you a personal computer.
But what happens after the chains are broken? What is this freedom for which we are set free? Consider, for instance, those peoples and societies who have been engaged in a struggle for freedom over the past century and a half. The history of their struggles does not suggest that such freedom is easy to attain. The dreadful irony is that for the sake of the Promethean struggle for human freedom, Stalin, Mao, and Kim Jong II have killed many millions more of their own peoples, than did the Nazi regime in Germany, whose explicit aim was the extermination of inferior races. And now at the end of the twentieth century, when many communist and reactionary regimes have collapsed, what do we find? Whether it is Bulgaria, or Russia, Indonesia, Zimbabwe, South Africa, or Haiti, the popular overthrow of oppressive regimes proves only a beginning, and the road forward is neither easy nor obvious. Freedom has challenges which servitude does not.
As my Old Testament students will recall, this is an experience as old as Exodus: the slaves Moses leads out into the desert prove inadequate to the demands of this new freedom, they retreat into a slavish mentality, and long to return to Egypt again. In Exodus we find a profound insight into the nature of freedom. Freedom is not simply a matter of overthrowing the statues. Freedom is not simply a matter of the popular will rising against tyrants. To be free outwardly, one must be free inwardly, free in mind and will, free from delusions, free from distractions, free to act in accord with the good, clearly perceived, regardless of all competing pressures from without and from within. But if man is enslaved to delusions mid distractions, how can he be the one to set himself free? The gods who oppress us, the corrupt powers of the world, prove in the end to be the passions of our own hearts writ large. As Pogo said, "we have met the enemy, and he is us". It seems that we need in a sense to be liberated from ourselves first of all.
To restrain those destructive passions, and to direct them in accord with the good, western societies do what Moses did, they impose the rule of law, and seek to build institutions that enforce and sustain our freedom in that rule of law—the institutions of the family, the church, and public life, as well as the school and university. There is no innate superiority to western peoples: we are not naturally free; we must learn the habits of freedom, and be formed in its contours by our institutions. In the West we are fortunate: as a result of centuries of development we have such institutions. Our great struggle is to maintain and strengthen them, at a time when they all appear to be in a state of decline. The great struggle of nations emerging from Communist or reactionary regimes is to build such institutions. And it is not easy for anyone.
But this thought in turn leads on to another: if man's freedom consists in acting in accordance with the good, then that means that for man to be free, there must really be a good that is truly and absolutely good, always and everywhere good, a good that knows no limits save those imposed by its own nature. The great idea that appeared in ancient Israel was that such a good did exist, "whose service is perfect freedom." This idea was taken over completely by the Christian Church, and spread throughout the West, and now indeed belongs to the world.
Tertullian, a Christian writer of the 2nd century who lived in North Africa, explained Israel's great idea this way: "that he alone is God, who made the universe, who fashioned man frorn mud, for he is your true Prometheus, who ordained the course of the world..." ³. Beyond the tyranny of false gods, the corruptible, fallible, or uncaring powers that rule over this world; and beyond the bondage of our own hearts' corrupt passions, there is a true good that creates and governs all things in absolute freedom: nothing can frustrate his good will, not even those things least promising to our eyes, the terrible griefs and pains of this world. Invisible to all but the most discerning, his power runs through all things, and weaves them all into his good purpose; which is nothing else than to impart a share in his own divine freedom to the whole creation, to give man what one Jewish writer of the first century called "the glorious liberty of the children of God".
This "true Prometheus" is a free spirit, a wind from heaven that blows where he wills, beyond the power of all machinations and manipulations, even those of piety. Although he creates faith, and gives the law, and human institutions, and the free individual, he cannot be reduced to any of these. We can do all the right things, and still miss the good; freedom is a divine gift before it is our human achievement. For man to be free, God must act. What the Christian Church added to Israel's great idea was simply this: the claim that God had acted. What Israel had hoped for had actually happened, in Jesus Christ. Like Prometheus before him, he had suffered terribly at the hands of the powers of this world, to give men fire from heaven, the flame of divine Spirit, the flame of spiritual freedom. But unlike the Greek god, his sufferings were the act of the most complete freedom and the most complete obedience. He did exactly what he wanted to do, acting in perfect knowledge of the good, undeterred by the threatenings of tyrants or the weakness of the flesh; and he did exactly what God wanted him to do, precisely because he acted in perfect knowledge of the good, and according to its promptings. Through union with him, it was possible for all men to be free. This is the idea that shaped western culture at its very roots, long centuries ago, and still shapes our culture even today, even when it forgets or dismisses it.
You asked a clergyman to speak on freedom tonight, and you got what you asked for, and perhaps rather more: a big chunk of theology and very few jokes. Indeed I have said things that were perhaps at odds with the optimism, the boosterism, the rhetoric of success, that is so often to be taken to be appropriate on these occasions. But I do not suggest that you embrace a general pessimism either. The optimism of Western society that finds expression tonight is not without foundation. But it is not to be found in the Promethean fantasy of the indomitable human spirit. I began my address with an apparent contradiction: Promethean freedom, or slavish obedience. I end with an apparent paradox: that freedom is found in obedience, obedience to the motions of the true Prometheus, whose fingers fashioned our mortal flesh from clay, and who kindles in us the fire of divine spirit. This is our freedom; may it be yours.
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Footnotes:
1. Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary (1875) "Of the parties of Great Britain" (1741-2), and Daniel Defoe, speaking from bitter experience, wrote, "of all plagues which mankind are curst, / ecclesiastic tyranny's the worst" [The True Born Englishman (1701)].
2. Actually: "The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Working men of all countries unite!"
3. "...quo praedicarent deum unicum esse, qui universa condiderit, qui hominem de humo struxerit, hic enim est vers Prometheus, qui saeculum certis temporum dispositionibus et exitibus ordinavit,..." Tertullian Apologeticus XVIII. 2,3.
A note on our Editor:
The Rev'd Gavin Dunbar was Rector of the Parish of Ecum Secum, Nova Scotia, and now serves as an associate priest in the parish of St. John's, Savannah, Georgia.
He is the editor of the Anglican Free Press, and past Vice-President of the Nova Scotia / PEI branch of the Prayer Book Society of Canada, and a former instructor at the Atlantic St. Michael's Youth Conference. He has written and lectured extensively on a range of topics, and has many god-children.