Retrieving Freedom

D. C. Schindler

Description

Retrieving Freedom is a provocative, big-picture book, taking a long view of the “rise and fall” of the classical understanding of freedom.

In response to the evident shortcomings of the notion of freedom that dominates contemporary discourse, Retrieving Freedom seeks to return to the sources of the Western tradition to recover a more adequate understanding. This book begins by setting forth the ancient Greek conception—summarized from the conclusion of D. C. Schindler’s previous tour de force of political and moral reasoning, Freedom from Reality—and the ancient Hebrew conception, arguing that at the heart of the Christian vision of humanity is a novel synthesis of the apparently opposed views of the Greeks and Jews. This synthesis is then taken as a measure that guides an in-depth exploration of landmark figures framing the history of the Christian appropriation of the classical tradition. Schindler conducts his investigation through five different historical periods, focusing in each case on a polarity, a pair of figures who represent the spectrum of views from that time: Plotinus and Augustine from late antiquity, Dionysius the Areopagite and Maximus the Confessor from the patristic period, Anselm and Bernard from the early middle ages, Bonaventure and Aquinas from the high middle ages, and, finally, Godfrey of Fontaines and John Duns Scotus from the late middle ages. In the end, we rediscover dimensions of freedom that have gone missing in contemporary discourse, and thereby identify tasks that remain to be accomplished. Schindler’s masterful study will interest philosophers, political theorists, and students and scholars of intellectual history, especially those who seek an alternative to contemporary philosophical understandings of freedom.

Freedom has an origin. We have come to take freedom for granted as an evident fact, one of the obviously given realities of the world, or else we dispute that reality, just as we might dispute other ostensibly obvious things, such as the existence of nature or the existence of God. If the question of freedom has become in the past century one of the classics of philosophical controversy—“free will” versus “determinism”—it is a sign that the ground of its evidence has become occluded, just as it has for the other questions just mentioned, namely, those of the existence of nature and of the existence of God. And indeed the ground, in the end, is the same in all three cases. At the core of the question of freedom ultimately lies the question of God, who is the source of both nature and freedom. To the extent that we allow the question of God to be eclipsed, which is to say that we block the intellect’s natural and essential access to God, whether we do so as individuals or as a culture, it is not simply that we begin to draw bad inferences regarding the existence or non existence of freedom; it is that we become incapable of raising proper questions to begin with, we become incapable of thinking fruitfully about freedom and inquiring into its reality in a genuinely productive way.

To say it again, freedom has an origin. There can be no freedom if there is no God at the origin of all things, no God who is at once Creator and Liberator of the world, who is free of his very being, whose nature it is to be both free and freeing. To be both free and freeing, this God must be able to give rise to a world that has its own reality in itself, its own principle of selforiginating self-motion, which exists in some fundamental way in itself and from itself. This God must not, then, stand in radical competition with this creaturely reality, but be able to share its reality himself, which is to say to enter into its history and to establish that history tout court, giving a liberating, theological sanction to what is in its essence a wholly natural reality. And this God must be able to do so because he is already in himself, in his own inner being, something like a reciprocity of wills, a reciprocity of freedom joined in love—a love that both generates and results from a non-reductive relation that can be perfectly, numerically one without being any less a reciprocity between abiding others.

If such a God is in fact the real origin of freedom, then the fate of freedom will be bound up with the fate of the self-revelation of this God in the actuality of created nature and of history. In this book, we have traced some of the key figures in the reception of this self-revelation, specifically in what concerns the nature and meaning of freedom. To be sure, there is no claim here to be exhaustive, even within the limits of this particular theme. God’s self-revelation has been received by an effectively infinite number of people, and it has been analogously different not only in every individual case, but more generally at different historical periods and geographical locations. Nevertheless, the figures we have chosen to study in some depth are paradigmatic, and collaborate together in their polarities, which span the extremes of the spectrum of possibility in a given period, to present an illuminating picture of the arc of freedom in the West, the rise and fall of the great classical Christian tradition. Plotinus represents a culminating point of the pre-Christian classical tradition, the point at which that tradition flourishes and allows its fruit to be taken up into the Christian form. It is not an accident that this bearing of fruit coincides with the first great insight into freedom, since freedom just is this fruitful generativity. As we saw, for Plotinus, the perfection of freedom is essentially a superabundant perfection, which has its own goodness always both in itself and out beyond itself. A key principle arose here, which proved to be crucial for the fate of Western freedom, as it has unfolded in the figures we have studied in this book: freedom requires a principle that simultaneously transcends the act-potency distinction and establishes that distinction in its properly asymmetrical order. This simultaneity is the meaning of generosity, the essence of gift, which creates things as good and as fruitful in their goodness. Plotinus, we might say, inaugurates the Western tradition of freedom by opening up an insight into this radically original generosity, even if he ultimately lacked the theoretical resources to sustain it.

Abbreviations

Preface

Part I: Prolegomena

1. Christian Freedom and Its Traditions

Part II: Late Antiquity

2. Plotinus on Freedom as Generative Perfection

3. Augustine and the Gift of the Power to Choose

Part III: The Patristic Period

4. Perfectly Natural Freedom in Dionysius the Areopagite

5. Maximus the Confessor: Redeeming Choice

Part IV: The Early Middle Ages

6. St. Anselm: Just Freedom

7. Bernard of Clairvaux: Liberating Love

Part V: The High Middle Ages

8. Bonaventure on the Trinitarian Origin of Freedom

9. Thomas Aquinas: A Fruitful Reception of the Whole

Part VI: The Late Middle Ages

10. Godfrey of Fontaines: The Absolute Priority of Act

11. John Duns Scotus and the Radicalizing of Potency

Part VII: General Conclusion

12. The Givenness of Freedom

Bibliography

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Philosophie politique
• Éthique et morale
• Political Ideologies
• Moral Philosophy
• Political
• POLITICAL SCIENCE
• PHILOSOPHY
• Philosophie et théologie
• Religión
• Juan Duns Scoto
• Thomas Aquinas
• Duns Scotus
• Godfrey of Fontaines
• Anselm
• Maximus the Confessor
• Plotinus
• Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite
• Politics
• Ethics
• Bernard of Clairvaux
• Augustine of Hippo
• Aristotle
• Plato
• Religion
• Augustine
• Bonaventure
• Jean Duns Scot
• John Locke
• Thomas d'Aquin

Informations

• Publié par: University of Notre Dame Press
• Date de parution: 15 octobre 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780268203696
• Langue: English

Extrait

Retrieving Freedom
CATHOLIC IDEAS FOR A SECULAR WORLD
O. Carter Snead, series editor

The purpose of this interdisciplinary series is to feature authors from around the world who will expand the influence of Catholic thought on the most important conversations in academia and the public square. The series is “Catholic” in the sense that the books will emphasize and engage the enduring themes of human dignity and flourishing, the common good, truth, beauty, justice, and freedom in ways that reflect and deepen principles affirmed by the Catholic Church for millennia. It is not limited to Catholic authors or even works that explicitly take Catholic principles as a point of departure. Its books are intended to demonstrate the diversity and enhance the relevance of these enduring themes and principles in numerous subjects, ranging from the arts and humanities to the sciences.
RETRIEVING FREEDOM

The Christian Appropriation of Classical Tradition
D. C. SCHINDLER
University of Notre Dame Press
Notre Dame, Indiana
Copyright © 2022 by the University of Notre Dame
University of Notre Dame Press
Notre Dame, Indiana 46556
undpress.nd.edu
All Rights Reserved
Published in the United States of America
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022935751
ISBN: 978-0-268-20370-2 (Hardback)
ISBN: 978-0-268-20372-6 (WebPDF)
ISBN: 978-0-268-20369-6 (Epub)
This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at [e-mail]
For my father
hanc ex diverso sedem veniemus in unam. tu, genitor, cape sacra manu patriosque penatis.
—Virgil, Aeneid , II.716–17
Alles Gute ist Erbschaft: was nicht ererbt ist, ist unvollkommen, ist Anfang . . .
—Nietzsche, Götzen-Dämmerung , §47
Τῇ ἐλευθερίᾳ ἡμᾶς Χριστὸς ἐλ ευθέρωσεν.
—Galatians 5:1
CONTENTS Preface Acknowledgments Part I. Prolegomena 1 Christian Freedom and Its Traditions Part II. Late Antiquity 2 Plotinus on Freedom as Generative Perfection 3 Augustine and the Gift of the Power to Choose Part III. The Patristic Period 4 Perfectly Natural Freedom in Dionysius the Areopagite 5 Maximus the Confessor: Redeeming Choice Part IV. The Early Middle Ages 6 St. Anselm: Just Freedom 7 Bernard of Clairvaux: Liberating Love Part V. The High Middle Ages 8 Bonaventure on the Trinitarian Origin of Freedom 9 Thomas Aquinas: A Fruitful Reception of the Whole Part VI. The Late Middle Ages 10 Godfrey of Fontaines: The Absolute Priority of Act 11 John Duns Scotus and the Radicalizing of Potency Part VII. General Conclusion 12 The Givenness of Freedom Abbreviations Notes Bibliography Index
PREFACE
The present book is the second part of a projected trilogy on the nature of freedom. Volume 1, Freedom from Reality: The Diabolical Character of Modern Liberty , was a diagnosis of the condition of the contemporary understanding of freedom and the deleterious cultural forms it generates. That book connected the inherently self-subverting character of modern liberty to a reduction of freedom to indeterminate potency, which has a definitive expression in John Locke’s interpretation of the will as the paradigm of power. This pars destruens will eventually be complemented by a third volume, the pars construens , in which a comprehensive and positive theory will be developed in the light of the failings of the contemporary notion, in part by drawing on the great sources of thought on freedom in the West. This final volume will seek to tie together the dimensions of the question that are typically treated separately—the anthropological, the social and political, and the theological—in relation to a metaphysical core, which rarely gets addressed at all in studies on freedom. The hope will be that the long exploration of freedom in its current state of disorder and in the history of its rise and fall will enable a perspective that allows a genuine contribution to our philosophical understanding of this central human reality.
The present volume, the second in the projected trilogy, is an effort to lay bare the deep sources of the notion of freedom as it developed in the principal current of Western thought, namely, in what is often called the classical tradition. The first volume began with the study of John Locke, taken as a paradigm of the modern interpretation, and ended by contrasting that dialectical vision with the original notion that emerged from the pair of figures that founded the classical tradition, Plato and Aristotle. The current book covers more or less the same ground in the opposite direction, from the period of the inheritance of Plato and Aristotle in late antiquity to the period that preceded, and in a certain respect prepared the space for, early modernity, namely, the late Middle Ages. But it needs to be said straightaway that this book does not intend to be a genealogy, which traces the lines of a particular problem’s growth and thus reads the past specifically in its direct relation to a contemporary concern; still less is this meant to be a work of intellectual history, which studies the complex development of an idea with an aspiration to be as thorough as possible in uncovering sources and influences. Instead, the methodology governing this book does not fit in any obvious way in the conventional categories dominant in the academy. It is meant to be a work of tradition . This implies, on the one hand, the assumption of a time-transcending truth that is nevertheless conveyed concretely in time, through the actuality of history. On the other hand, it implies that the truth thus conveyed, transcendent and so “perennial” by nature, is nevertheless radically affected by this actuality of its realization. The effect of history on truth goes, so to speak, in both directions: while our contemporary understanding must be recognized as, most basically, a fruit of the past, a recipient of the tradition that has preceded it, it is also the case that this tradition is not an abstractly fixed quantity but is itself transformed by the particularity of its reception. Inheriting a tradition, in other words, is not a mere repetition of the same but a genuinely “poetic” act. From the vantage of the contemporary age, one can bring out novel dimensions of the thought that preceded, and indeed one must do so if one’s own thinking is to be properly traditional. Gabriel Marcel once spoke insightfully of what he called “creative fidelity,” which in fact is the only kind of fidelity, properly understood. As we are going to argue over the course of this book, the “creative” realization of tradition, in the sense just indicated, is not simply one possible way to approach the question of freedom but is essential to the very core meaning of freedom. Tradition and freedom cannot be separated.
Such, in a nutshell, is the aim of the present book: to re-source the meaning of freedom by seeking to enter into the heart of the idea in a number of the landmark figures in the classical Christian tradition. Perhaps the best image for the methodology adopted in this book is the oil drill: rather than scouring wide swaths of the surface laboriously, accumulating little pockets of the sought material here and there amid the slag, the drill penetrates directly into the core at a particular location. If several drills are placed at representative spots, one can achieve a fairly accurate picture of the geological stratification of an area and project an approximation of the topography, the nature of the soil’s mineral content and of the various formations, and even perhaps a rough history of the geological shifts that brought them about. But these discoveries are incidental to the principal aim, which is to open access to the rich resource that lies beneath. Similarly, here, following in the spirit of our study of Plato and Aristotle that concluded volume 1, after an introduction that sketches the contours of the Greek and Jewish contribution to the notion, we will take a pair of figures as representative of the notion of freedom in five basic historical periods, which trace out what we might refer to as the rise and fall of the Christian appropriation of the classical tradition: late antiquity, the patristic period, the early Middle Ages, the High Middle Ages, and the late Middle Ages. The reason we treat two figures in each period is to set up a certain polarity in which those figures’ mostly irreducibly different stances on freedom are considered as the ends of a spectrum. The idea is that a “stereoscopic vision” of this sort allows a depth dimension to emerge that would not come forth as clearly inside of a merely monocular view. This is one of the things that marks the distinction of a philosophical work of tradition from a more customary intellectual history. Apart from the section on the High Middle Ages, where the order is in a certain sense reversed, we have generally found it was possible first to present a more intellectualist and ontological account of freedom and then to complement it with a somewhat more existentialist perspective, which highlights the personal drama of choice. It will become evident, nevertheless, that what these complementary poles mean is analogously different in each period.
A word about the specific figures chosen to illustrate each major period is appropriate. St. Augustine (354–430) is often, and with good reason, taken to be the founder of the Western notion of freedom. It would of course have been possible to present him as one of the primary inaugurating figures of the long Middle Ages, in which the anthropological dimension of the notion was elaborated with such detail and logical sophistication. This more typical approach is legitimate and yields many insights into the later medieval thinkers. But we have chosen instead to interpret Augustine retrospectively, as it were: to pair him with Plotinus (204/5–270) and thus to take him as an essentia