Running Towards Virtue | Freedom for Excellence

Freedom is always oriented towards the good.

Welcome back to another edition of Lumen Ecclesiae, folks. Recently, we’ve had a number of posts concerned with vocation and discernment in different ways, but one thing which is essential and more basic to discerning our vocation, whatever it might be, is the idea of freedom.

A common phrase these days is that “I want to keep my options open” or “I don’t want to make a choice yet, I’m still discerning” or even “I don’t want to miss out” and the like. But if we are always keeping our options open, if we are always on the outskirts considering and calculating best moves, we will never get beyond the shallows of life. We’re called out into the deep, into challenge and risk and excellence.

And so we have to ask: what does it mean to be free?

Is freedom only about having options? Or is freedom oriented towards making a choice and acting with excellence? Do we have a freedom of indifference or a freedom for excellence?

One of the best Dominican moral theologians, Servais Pinckaers, was a firm Thomist and a believer in that as humans, if we are to be more than slaves, we have to have a freedom for excellence not simply an indifferent freedom.

Freedom for excellence basically means that we are actually freer when we choose to do good and virtuous actions and that rules and habits and the moral order are structured in such a way to enhance our freedom.

We have a natural longing for goodness, beauty, truth and a freedom for excellence is about improving ourselves and choosing actions which bring us closer to all those things as they exist in God. Our freedom is not indifferent, but is always ordered towards the Good.

Choosing an evil action, in this conception of freedom, actually indicates a lack of freedom and impairs our ability to choose the good, the excellent, and the perfect.

Take for example, someone who is learning to play the piano. To play the piano well, one has to practice, and drill, learning the scales and the notes and everything that comes with it.

Rules and practice which limit us in some ways, are the only way we actually grow and become a great pianist. We can of course simply bash our fingers against the keys of the piano and notes will be played, but we will never be a master pianist this way.

The same goes for someone who is learning to play soccer, or football, or any other sport. It’s the rules and the training, the challenge of it all, which gives the sport it’s shape. If we didn’t have rules and if we hadn’t trained for it, we couldn’t a play a beautiful game.

Our parents provide us with rules and regulations for a reason: that we might grow into our full stature as adults. If they never challenged us and never restricted us, we would be bratty children forever.

One more image to help you imagine this new type of freedom for excellence. Picture a river channel, the banks of the river are what make a river a river. If the river wasn’t channeled and directed along its course by these banks it would lose force and energy, just as we so often do when we lack structure.

If the banks of this river were to be suddenly flattened, if there was nothing keeping the river restrained, the flow of the river would stop, and we’d be sitting in a small pond not going anywhere.

Only by channeling the flow of water within certain bounds can we maintain the speed and energy of the current to it’s final destination: the Sea. That final destination for us is of course happiness or Beatitude as found in union with God.

Our life is meant to be one of virtue, goodness, excellence, and which is directed towards God who is the embodiment of all these things. In all of this is real freedom.

But we’re so afraid. We’re afraid to make choices which might “limit us” in some way. But excellence and virtue don’t limit us, they enhance and improve us, making it possible to live a good life.

The Catechism makes this point clear:

 Freedom is the power, rooted in reason and will, to act or not to act, to do this or that, and so to perform deliberate actions on one’s own responsibility. By free will one shapes one’s own life. Human freedom is a force for growth and maturity in truth and goodness; it attains its perfection when directed toward God, our beatitude. (CCC 1731)

Freedom is not freedom for its own sake, but for excellence and to become better:

The more one does what is good, the freer one becomes. There is no true freedom except in the service of what is good and just. The choice to disobey and do evil is an abuse of freedom and leads to “the slavery of sin.” (CCC 1733)

There are many men and women who are afraid to enter religious life or a committed relationship and marriage simply because they want to keep their options open, they don’t want to miss out on something good that might come around the corner. But if we’re always looking for the good thing around the corner, we won’t see the good that God has already placed in our hands.

As a challenge for you all, consider a choice or a discernment question that you have in front of you, something you’ve been wrestling with for a while.

Don’t consider the question in terms of limits, but rather in terms of improvement and excellence. How will this choice or this discernment if answered in one way improve me and make me a better man or woman? What virtues will I develop and work on by making this choice?

Life is full of regulations, rules, and laws. If our freedom was opposed to these things, we would never be free, not really. And in that kind of world, God will always be a tyrant and not a loving parent. We would be slaves.

But God does not believe in slaves, but in children who grow into their full stature and beauty over time and with the help of the virtues and through rules and laws. He is a loving Father and one who desires us to grow and to become like Him: Good, Beautiful, and Perfect.

We’ll talk more about what the helpful virtues and habits which can help us become more like our Heavenly Father moving forward. God bless!