A Free Man?

At our Red Mass this weekend, Bishop Conlon stated that he believed our current culture is "individualistic," meaning that people largely insist on taking their own path on moral issues, uninfluenced by a sense of "what God wants." An ethic of "anything goes" pervades, which many people think of as freedom. Freedom is the inviting smorgasboard of choices surveyed by a person with a hearty appetite!

Was Thomas More free? I would make a case that he was, infinitely more so than the vast majority of the English who marched in lockstep with Henry VIII in his quixotic journey to again marry church and state. Robert Bolt, in his play Man For All Seasons, has Thomas More say that there was something inside of him that made him unable to go along, not free to accept Henry's edict.

What was that quality? According to Philip Rieff (Crisis of the Officer Class, p.8), "More's self takes its identity -- he is himself -- from the one fixed fact of his life. 'Only God is loved right throughout and that's my-self.' The credal self can neither erase nor cross certain boundaries. More, too, has an appetite for evading a boundary issue. But his self is identified in a way that restricts his room for legal maneuver. 'I will not give in [to the Henrisian state political will] because I oppose it, not my pride, not my spleen nor any other of my appetites oppose it, but I do -- I, I.' For what it delivers, this passage should be read aloud."

Free or unfree? Gabriel Marcel said, in Man Against Mass Society, p. 23, that "a man cannot be free or remain free, except in the degree to which he remains linked with that which transcends him. . ." What transcended More was his relationship to God, with an absolute that rendered him free of the powers that be. Only in the truth is freedom found.

Without true freedom man is merely "busy", as Czeslaw Milosz said in a poem:

Man has been given to understand
that he lives only by the grace of those in power.
Let him therefore busy himself sipping coffee, catching butterflies.
Who cares for the Republic will have his right hand cut off.

Quoted by Guissani in The Religious Sense at p. 90.

We must bind ourselves to an absolute in order not to be "moved" by the powers that be. To be so moved is slavery, but to be bound by something infinitely greater than ourselves is the mark of a free man!