To consider persons and events and situations only in the light o their effect upon
myself is to live on the doorstep of hell. Selfishness is doomed to frustration, centered as it is upon a lie. To live exclusively for myself, I must make all things bend themselves to my will as if I were a god. But this is impossible. Is there any more cogent indication of my creaturehood than the insufficiency of my own will? For I cannot make the universe obey me. I cannot make other people conform to my own whims and fancies. I cannot make even my own body obey me. When I give it pleasure, it deceives my expectation and makes me suffer pain. When I give myself what I conceive to be freedom, I deceive myself and find that I am the prisoner of my own blindness and selfishness and insufficiency.
It is true, the freedom of my will is a great thing. But this freedom is not absolute
self-sufficiency. If the essence of freedom were merely the act of choice, then the mere
fact of making choices would perfect our freedom. But there are two difficulties here.
First of all, our choices must really be free—that is to say, they must perfect us in our
own being. They must perfect us in our relation to other free beings. We must make
the choices that enable us to fulfill the deepest capacities of our real selves. From this
flows the second difficulty: we too easily assume that we are our real selves, and that
our choices are really the ones we want to make when, in fact, our acts of free choice are (though morally imputable, no doubt) largely dictated by psychological compulsions,
flowing from our inordinate ideas of our own importance. Our choices are too often
dictated by our false selves.
Hence I do not find in myself the power to be happy merely by doing what I like.
On the contrary, if I do nothing except what pleases my own fancy I will be miserable
almost all the time. This would never be so if my will had not been created to use its
own freedom in the love of others.
My free will consolidates and perfects its own autonomy by freely co-ordinating its
action with the will of another. There is something in the very nature of my freedom
that inclines me to love, to do good, to dedicate myself to others. I have an instinct that
tells me that I am less free when I am living for myself alone. The reason for this is that
I cannot be completely independent. Since I am not self-sufficient I depend on someone
else for my fulfillment. My freedom is not fully free when left to itself. It becomes so
when it is brought into the right relation with the freedom of another.
At the same time, my instinct to be independent is by no means evil. My freedom is
not perfected by subjection to a tyrant. Subjection is not an end in itself. It is right that
my nature should rebel against subjection. Why should my will have been created free,
if I were never to use my freedom?
If my will is meant to perfect its freedom in serving another will, that does not mean
it will find its perfection in serving every other will. In fact, there is only one will in
whose service I can find perfection and freedom. To give my freedom blindly to a being
equal to or inferior to myself is to degrade myself and throw away my freedom. I can
only become perfectly free by serving the will of God. If I do, in fact, obey other men
and serve them it is not for their sake alone that I will do so, but because their will is the
sacrament of the will of God. Obedience to man has no meaning unless it is primarily
obedience to God. From this flow many consequences. Where there is no faith in God
there can be no real order; therefore, where there is no faith obedience is without any
sense. It can only be imposed on others as a matter of expediency. If there is no God,
no government is logical except tyranny. And in actual fact, states that reject the idea of
God tend either to tyranny or to moral chaos. In either case, the end is disorder, because tyranny is itself a disorder. The immature conscience is not its own master. It is merely the delegate of the conscience of another person, or of a group, or of a party, or of a social class, or of a nation, or of a race. Therefore, it does not make real moral decisions of its own, it simply parrots the decisions of others. It does not make judgments of its own, it merely “conforms” to the party line. It does not really have motives or intentions of its own. Or if it does, it wrecks them by twisting and rationalizing them to fit the intentions of another. That is not moral freedom. It makes true love impossible. For if I am to love truly and freely, I must be able to give something that is truly my own to another. If my heart does not first belong to me, how can I give it to another? It is not mine to give!
Free will is not given to us merely as a firework to be shot off into the air. There
are some men who seem to think their acts are freer in proportion as they are without
purpose, as if a rational purpose imposed some kind of limitation upon our liberty. That
is like saying that one is richer if he throws money out the window than if he spends it.
Since money is what it is, I do not deny that you may be worthy of all praise if you
light your cigarettes with it. That would show you had a deep, pure sense of the ontological value of the dollar. Nevertheless, if that is all you can think of doing with money you will not long enjoy the advantages that it can still obtain.
It may be true that a rich man can better afford to throw money out the window
than a poor man, but neither the spending nor the waste of money is what makes a man
rich. He is rich by virtue of what he has, and his riches are valuable to him for what he
can do with them.
As for freedom, according to this analogy, it grows no greater by being wasted, or
spent, but it is given to us as a talent to be traded with until the coming of Christ. In
this trading we part with what is ours only to recover it with interest. We do not destroy
it or throw it away. We dedicate it to some purpose, and this dedication makes us freer
than we were before.
-Thomas Merton No Man Is an Island (Shambhala Library)
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