Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-mlc7c Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-05T10:39:12.337Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Obedience and Freedom

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2024

Gerald Vann O.P.
Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Core share and HTML view are not available for this content. However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

Our Blessed Lord said to His disciples: Now I call you not servants ... but I have called you friends. And to the Jews He said: You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.

St. Paul wrote to the Galatians of the freedom wherewith Christ hath made us free; and told them: Stand, and be not holden in again with the yoke of servitude.

The cry of freedom is one to which men have always, throughout their history, rallied. That cry of freedom, in particular, which is in the New Testament has been sounded again and again by the Church throughout its history; so that, as Pope Leo XIII declared, whenever men ‘have attacked the liberty of man, the Church has defended it and protected this noble possession from destruction.’ ‘The powerful influence of the Church,’ he said again, ‘has ever been manifested in the custody and protection of the civil and political liberty of the people.’

Type
Research Article
Information
Blackfriars , Volume 21 , Issue 247 , October 1940 , pp. 580 - 592
Copyright
Copyright © 1940 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

References

1 Cf. Libertas Praestantissimum.

2 It is important, in these days of State absolutism especially, to distinguish clearly between State and society. Political society is the union of many, collaborating together for the attainment of a common end; this collaboration, as St. Thomas, for example :bows in the beginning of the De Regimine Principum, implies authority, sovereignty ; the State is the subject of that authority. ‘The limits of State action, therefore, are rigidly defined by ‘the nature and purpose of its authority. For St. Thomas, who, as Roland-Gosselin notes, synthetizes the empiricism of Aristotle with the mysticism of Augustine, the end of the State is to procure the imperfect beatitude possible in this life, as a condition of attaining the perfect beatitude of the next life. Far from being itself absolute therefore, the State must be governed in its action, ultimately by the eternal law of God and the needs of ‘the eternal destiny of man; and proximately, by the necessity of procuring the temporal happiness of the commonwealth as a commonwealth of persons. The State is for society and not vice versa, And a society is only a society of persons if Its members collaborate as free men, responsible, creators, fulfilling each his own proper vocation in the making of things of whatever sort it may be (art), and in the making of life through the discovery of the new unity of two-in-one (family). State action, then, is limited, first, by the moral law; secondly, by the rights of t h e person as such : the rights of self-preservation, of marriage, procreation, education; the rights of freedom of thought, of personal vocation, of property; thirdly, by the demands of the society as determined by the end of society : the preservation of peace, order, unity ; the assurance of the necessities of life to all ; the restraint of wickedness and the fostering of virtue. The State is for the person.

But that terrestrial beatitude which it is the purpose of the State to procure is, itself, a social beatitude. And the ultimate aim of all human life, eternal beatitude, is also a social beatitude. If ‘We who are many are one in that One,’ it follows that me cannot think of our personal happiness apart from the happiness of this greater unity. The Church is wholly distinct from the State: their aims are different, their power is different, their competence is different. But the persons who make up political society are also the persons who (actually or potentially) make up the mystical Body of Christ; the unity of charity must in-form political life also; and in that sense the perfection of person and of society of persons is one.

3 Leo XIII, op, Cit.

4 Cf. E. Hounier : A Personalist Manifesto, pp. 36, 37.

5 Divini Redemptoris, par. 29

6 Compare the bragging brutality of fascist technique, the nazi scorn of mercy and all the gentle vintues, with Pope Leo's affirmation that gantleness ‘speedily takes the place of cruelty’ in any land where the Church, with her Gospel of freedom, has once set foot.