As we prepare for the upcoming festivities commemorating America’s semiquincentennial, the 250th anniversary of the drafting, signing, and promulgation of our Declaration of Independence by our founding fathers, questions naturally arise about who we are as Americans, what precisely we have to celebrate. “What makes this night different from any other night?” our children might ask, to borrow words from the traditional Passover seder. One word which will likely be bandied about with abandon is “freedom,” but without knowing what our faith teaches us about that reality, we will fall prey to one of the dangers along the narrow path: either the whirlpool that is determinism or the sea-serpent of radical autonomy. If we see how these alternative proposals are suggested by writers and artists—not only from the nineteenth century to our own time, but also by one writing in the “fullness of time” in which God chose to send his only-begotten son—we can come to realize the true distinctiveness of the Christian understanding and practice of freedom and how that freedom is what the United States needs if she is to endure in the decades and centuries to come.
As Americans, we love freedom. While historically the Greeks valued moderation and the Romans valued order—although they may have fallen short of these pursuits on a number of occasions—our mythos is different. “Give me liberty, or give me death!” we remember Patrick Henry saying, even if we do not remember the content or context of the rest of that speech. This love we inherited primarily from our English past, from London, one of what historian Susan Hanssen calls our “heritage cities,” drawing from Russell Kirk’s magisterial work The Roots of American Order.
As an example of this freedom rightly ordered, we should remember St. Thomas More. More thought of himself as a Londoner, and owing a debt of loyalty to his city. This was true not only in his final perseverance in the truth about marriage and the reality of the Church that led to his martyrdom—which he saw as not contrary to the good of his king and country, but rather essential to it—but also and especially in his 1523 petition to Henry VIII, made as Speaker of the House of Commons. In that petition, More asked for the freedom for members of the Commons to freely speak their own minds, according to their conscience, a freedom truly important for deliberation concerning “the common affairs.” This would be especially necessary for the Commons, as while such a body would include some of tact and careful eloquence, will also include “so many, boisterous and rude in language,” who, nonetheless, “see deep indeed, and give right substantial counsel.” Such was English ordered liberty, aimed at the common good, taking account of the genuine differences among men and securing freedom for their deliberation so that right reason might be proposed and prevail in the governance of the realm.
The English tradition also, in later centuries, would come to include a different sense of freedom, one for a kind of self-master as an antidote to a poisonous sense of futility brought about by suffering, but which especially in our time comes to be exaggerated into a false libertinism, where while we proclaim autonomy, we are in fact mastered by our heeding the siren call of sensual pleasure. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, the young poet William Ernest Henley wrote a short bit of verse, only twelve lines, later titled “Invictus” (meaning “unconquered”), emphasizing his self-mastery in the face of the extreme suffering of his battle with tuberculosis, which at the time of his writing had already claimed one of his legs and was threatening the other. One might at first glance think the poet a good example of facing squarely up to his illness and enduring, much as Theodore Roosevelt worked hard to become physically fit despite real childhood health challenges, as Wilfred McClay recounts in his survey of American history, Land of Hope. But while one might read as exhortatory hyperbole the poem’s final lines that have long echoes in our subsequent history—“I am the master of my fate, / I am the captain of my soul”—Henley attributes his “unconquerable soul” to “whatever gods may be,” and the weakness of his body to “the fell clutch of circumstance” and “the bludgeonings of chance” to which his head remains “unbowed.” No sense of a loving, Christian providence, that, but something darker and more pagan.
While not all quotations of the poem endorse its pagan metaphysics of an uncaring fate—Winston Churchill memorably used its last two lines to end a speech to Parliament during 1941, before the turning point of World War II when the United States joined the Allied Powers—two subsequent quotations, one shocking and one more sonically pleasant, present to us the full ramifications of lionizing radical autonomy, namely, being carried away by one’s passions to violence and lust. Consider the final written statement of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh. His 1995 bombing of a federal building killed 168 people and injured many others and was called in a news report published June 12, 2001, four months before the September 11 attacks, “the worst terrorist act ever on American soil.” What did McVeigh issue as his final words before his execution? The text of “Invictus.” McVeigh’s last words in his life were not an appeal to justify the horrific violence he perpetrated on the basis of the Declaration of Independence—though he had made a similar appeal previously—but simply a claim to be his own master, his own captain, in effect, his own judge, usurping God’s judicial authority in a final non serviam, “I will not serve.”
While news reports of that event would have made Generation X and their parents familiar with Henley’s poem, millennials and some in Generation Z have more likely become familiar with its final lines through their use as part of a refrain in the verses of the title track of singer-songwriter Lana del Rey’s fifth studio album “Lust for Life,” in which it is sung, almost antiphonally by Lana and The Weeknd’s Abel Tesfaye, in each case immediately preceding the pre-chorus. What is the impetus which the song dramatizes, the action which in 2017 is taken to be the logical implication of being “the masters of our own fate” and “the captains of our own soul”? Not martyrial witness, not heroic self-sacrifice for others, not love, but autonomy is now the mask for a descent into lust, as Lana and Abel sing, three times in a three-fold repetition, “Take off, take off, take off all your clothes,” subsequently proclaiming that it is “a lust for life” that “keeps us alive.”
Our understanding of freedom roots itself in freedom’s purpose, namely, the self-sacrificial, active love for others, which conforms us to the God who made us and loves us more than we love ourselves.
Such “freedom” revealed in McVeigh’s last statement and dramatized in Lana’s song is no more than being ruled by one’s passions. It is not simply speaking a modern or contemporary danger, but one which haunted the pagan imagination all the way back to the Roman poet Virgil and beyond. When Virgil, shortly before the Incarnation, wrote his epic poem the Aeneid, he placed an articulation of the dilemma of freedom in relation to the passions in the mouth of one of his Trojan warriors. As the two men Nisus and Euryalus prepare to ask Aeneas’ son Ascanius, then captain of the army, to go on a night-raid on the Latin camp, the older man, Nisus, considering his own feelings, asks his companion, “this urge to action, do the gods instill it, / or is each man’s desire a god to him?”
Nisus wonders whether desire comes from the gods above, or if in fact each person has desires inside which are effectively his own goods. Presupposed in either option, however, is a rejection of the idea that man’s reason could reign over his desire, itself ruled and measured by a vision of the good, rather than being simply a “slave to the passions,” as the eighteenth century Scottish philosopher David Hume put it. The consequences of living out such evil thoughts are devastating; Euryalus follows his desire for plunder, rather than remembering his love for his mother, and he and Nisus are killed as a result.
If autonomy is, then, a mask for the rule of the passions over reason, a rule which can come to seem deterministic and in fact uses the ideology of determinism to justify itself, then one of the tasks that belongs to Christians in the contemporary world is stripping off that mask to show this state of affairs as unnecessary, and thus, something which we can reject in order to live differently. This is just what the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky did on a number of occasions, from his early novella Notes from Underground, through his more well-known novel Crime and Punishment, and to his final masterpiece, The Brothers Karamazov, recently acclaimed by Catholic philosopher Peter Kreeft as one of the two greatest novels ever written. To take but one example from these brilliant works of fiction, it is worth remembering that towards the end of The Brothers Karamazov, the oldest brother, Dmitri, is being tempted by a wayward seminarian to follow an atheistic, materialist doctrine, and to think that his thoughts are only produced because of the “tails [of the nerves in his brain], not at all because I’ve got a soul, and that I am some sort of image and likeness,” namely the image and likeness of God, in line with Christian anthropology.
Dostoevsky doesn’t give us an argumentative refutation of this claim, but rather presents us with an image that counters it in his portrayal of the brothers, similar in genetic material, but very different in the choices that they make and the characters that are formed on account of those choices. While the middle brother Ivan laments the suffering of children, and on that account supposedly refuses to accept God’s world in which he is enjoined to love his neighbor, the youngest brother, Alyosha, ends the novel by showing us his own active love, as he gathers a community of schoolboys, both to mourn the death of their classmate, but also to celebrate the hope that they and we have as Christians for his eternal life with God. Our understanding of freedom roots itself in freedom’s purpose, namely, the self-sacrificial, active love for others, which conforms us to the God who made us and loves us more than we love ourselves.
It is in pursuit of this love, which is happiness, that we will become again the “moral and religious people” for whom John Adams warned our Constitution was made and for that kind of people only. That kind of love secures the possibility of freedom from the idolatrous slavery of autonomy and determinism, both of which would lead our ship of state to founder on the rocks we will encounter along the way. As Americans, we must proceed in that trust which Patrick Henry proclaimed so many years ago, that “there is a just God who presides over the destiny of nations,” that “we shall not fight our battles alone;” as Catholics, we must encourage our countrymen to dwell with that God, so that knowing him and his only-begotten son and his Holy Spirit and participating in the divine life through charity, we might find our freedom’s goal, “arriv[ing] at truth, and fulfill[ing] the great responsibility which we hold to God and our country.”