The Discovery of Freedom

       Back when I was in the eighth grade, I had the wonderful privilege of being in a Miss Barkley’s honors class in a small-town public school in Alabama.  This remarkable woman accomplished in many of us what is hardly a goal of education anymore:  she opened our minds to the richness of the Western Tradition.  (Now, I realize that this is taboo nowadays – we’re supposed to denigrate this Tradition, ceaselessly pointing out all the failures of traditional Western culture, even as we turn a blind eye to the failures of other cultures.)  But Miss Barkley was not a prisoner to this ideology, and she helped to make sure that her students too would be free of such close-mindedness.  Besides introducing us to the glories of the Greek and Latin languages and to the literary and philosophical wealth of these peoples, she also walked us through an in-depth study of the history of Western antiquity.  This involved my introduction to yet another remarkable woman, the great American scholar of the Greeks, Edith Hamilton, whose most famous study, The Greek Way, I’ve read many times. 

      My eighth grade teacher’s influence came to bear upon me again just the other day when I was in Asheville, waiting for my car to be serviced, and was rummaging through a local bookstore.  My eye came across a book that immediately occasioned a rush of memories (and an aching realization that I had probably never thanked Miss Barkley for her role in my life); I picked up a slim volume entitled The Echo of Greece, another one of Edith Hamilton’s works.  For just $9.00 I bought this little treasure and proceeded to inflict the whole of the Introduction and Chapter One on Fr. Kauth, as I read them aloud as we traveled back to our parishes. 

      The end of the Introduction I quote now: 
 

   To [such thinkers as Plato, Plutarch, and Socrates] as to all Greeks freedom was first in importance.  Fundamental to everything the Greeks achieved was their conviction that good for humanity was possible only if men were free, body, mind, and spirit, and if each man limited his own freedom.  A good state or work of art or piece of thinking was possible only through the self-mastery of the free individual, self-government.¹ 
 

Hamilton expounded on this theme in the first chapter, appropriately titled “Freedom,” where she contrasted the great discovery of the Greeks with Oriental “grandeur”: 
 

   The ancient civilizations [in the Orient] were alike in one respect, in a refusal to recognize limits.  Exaggeration was stamped upon them, a rejection of the limits of reality.  It is plain to see in their art, in the monstrous Assyrian bird-and-beast statues, in the pyramids and the colossal images and the tremendous temples of Egypt, in the hanging gardens of Babylon.  It is apparent, too, in the showers of barbaric pearl and gold, the heaped-up treasures on one hand and the wretched, helpless multitudes on the other, incredible magnificence side by side with incredible squalor.  Eastern life was lived at the extremes…. Freedom was born in Greece because there men limited their own freedom….

   Fundamental in the Greeks was their conviction that limits were good.  Exaggeration was foreign to them.  They detested extremes and the idea of the limitless repelled them….  They wanted the truth and they never thought it could be found by escaping from the real.  Greek art at its best and most characteristic is kept within the limits of the real world….  The Greek artist instinctively turned away from the strange.  He would have nothing to do with the eccentric or even the accidental.  He was searching for what has permanent meaning.  He was trying to express something fundamental and universal in everything he made whether it was a temple or a statue or a vase.  The Assyrian artist produced what he pleased without a thought of fundamentals and universals.  He swept limits aside in his portentous images.  His imagination was free to wander where it would.  But the Greek artist had no wish for that kind of freedom.  He knew a law which he was constrained to obey.  Montesquieu said, “Laws are necessary relations springing from the nature of things.”  It is a statement essentially Greek.  The ruling characteristic of the Greeks was that they were driven to find out the necessary relations, the clues that lead from confusion to order….

   What the artist did in his field the statesman did in his.  He found the necessary relation between law and freedom.  Thucydides makes Pericles say, “We are a free democracy, but we obey the laws, more especially those which protect the oppressed and the unwritten laws whose transgression brings shame….”  Obedience to what Professor Whitehead has called the unenforceable, that to which no force can compel, the Athenian accepted as the basic condition of freedom for men living together, obedience to kindness and compassion and unselfishness and all the long list of qualities without which life would be intolerable except to a hermit in a desert.  The limits to action established by law were a mere nothing compared to the limits established by a man’s free choice.

   This conception of what freedom means dawned upon the Greeks.  The quality they valued most – the Greek word is sophrosuné – cannot be expressed by any single English word.  It is oftenest translated by self-control, but it meant more than that.  It was the spirit behind the two great Delphic sayings, “Know thyself” and “Nothing in excess.”  Arrogance, insolent self-assertion, was of all qualities most detested by the Greeks.  Sophrosuné was the exact opposite.  It had its nature, as Aristotle would say, in the excellent and it meant accepting the bounds excellence laid down for human nature, restraining impulses to unrestricted freedom, shunning excess, obeying the inner laws of harmony and proportion.  This was the virtue the Greeks esteemed beyond all others not because they were moderate lovers of the golden mean, but because their spontaneity and ever-changing variety and ardent energy of life had to have the strong control of a disciplined spirit or end in senseless violence.

   That was the Greek ideal, and the result was their freedom.  The idea that only the man who holds himself within self-chosen limits can be free is one of their great legacies to us. 
 

      I have quoted at length from Hamilton for a number of reasons.  First, in order to try to do honor to her research, and to pay my respects to my eighth grade teacher whose chief mentor was Hamilton; for they both helped lay the foundation for my own conversion to the Catholic Faith, whose moral teaching is in sync with this discovery of the Greeks.   And secondly, I have made this lengthy quotation to remind us moderns of what we have lost.  For we have strayed from this true pathway to freedom.  Something old and decrepit, something as ancient as that choice in the Garden of Eden, that succumbing to the Tempter’s Siren song of false freedom, was reborn in the West on the fringes of the Renaissance, becoming the moving force behind Luther’s rebellion, and was dogmatized during the Enlightenment:  that human liberty is defined by “freedom” from constraint, from self-restraint, from any self-denial and from all authority. 

      To turn again to the Greeks, Aristotle said that the truly free and happy man is the virtuous man; and if we know anything of virtue – the learning of the habitual practice, a practice that transforms us, of prudence, justice, temperance and fortitude – we know that this involves serious self-restraint.  And the humane fruit of this is real freedom, both individual and social.  Such a virtuous life grants the human being an inner freedom that the practice of arrogant self-will only denies him; it shapes and forms one into a man or woman then capable of living peacefully in a society marked by such virtue. 

      How far we have come!  But such a view of human life, uncovered by the Greeks, is tenacious because it is natural; and so it has taken a long time to more or less eradicate it.  It was still alive in 19^th century America, when many a scholar and educator commented on it.  A good illustration of its one-time prominence is the story of the young mother who brought her small son to visit Robert E. Lee after the war was over and asked him for advice for raising her son to be a good man, and Lee responded, “Teach him to deny himself.”  Such harsh words to the contemporary ear!

      Another example.  Just the other evening I traveled to Asheville to speak to a group of Catholic teenagers on this very topic.  During the question-and-answer time, one of the youths asked me how they could, as Catholics, show their non-Catholic friends that something like the Ten Commandments were not really constraints on their lives, and I responded by saying that we indeed cannot to do so, for they are constraints, not only upon our exterior behavior, but also upon our interior, thought life, constraints we need if we are going to be free.  Those who bow down and worship created things, ignore their obligations to their Creator, who speak vainly and stupidly of divine and elevated things, who show no respect to their forebears (and to all that history too could teach them), who lie and steal and commit infidelity to those to whom they’ve sworn to be faithful, who hanker after the possessions and accomplishments of others, etc., are, quite simply, slaves – pathetic, indentured servants of their own impulses and urges and of a culture that has come to enshrine such deviance as the way to freedom. 

      In late modernity, our world has suffered the reincarnation of the ancient despots, so willful in their exertion of themselves, tyrants such as Hitler and Stalin, who made no bones about the primacy of their own willfulness.  Even with such warnings, we have still turned to the model of “freedom” described by Hamilton as that which marked the ancient Orient:  the limitless, whimsical, eccentric and extreme, now exaggerated all the more by modern ideas of radical individualism and a conception of “democracy” at which the Greeks, not to mention our nation’s founders, would only sadly shake their heads; for now nearly everyone – and not just the ruling despots – can get into the game of self-promotion at the expense of others.  Self-constraint has been exchanged for litigation and the power of the police for the maintenance of some kind of order, so that when the pursuit of our “limitless” freedom of self-will breaks the boundaries of the rights of others, there is an exterior strength there to slap people back in line.  And, as the game progresses – and many really do see this nightmare as “progress” – strange “rights” of individual indulgence multiply, and atomic individuals find themselves colliding against each other all the more often and forcefully.

      The beauty of the Greek discovery, expounded upon by the Church in the even more beautiful light of the Gospel, is that the virtuous life – entailing as it does self-restraint – is completely in line with human nature.  The unwritten laws of the Greeks, the breaking of which brought such shame, are actually written in every human heart and mind and divinely revealed on Moses’ stone tablets and perfectly illustrated in the life of Christ, who, as today’s second reading reminds us, our Savior Himself, the divine Son of God, experienced the constraints of human life, “Son though he was, he learned obedience from what he suffered.”  In the mystery of the Incarnation, we discover the discovery of the Greeks once again:  this time, though, lived fully, not only for our needed edification, but also for our redemption:  the Son of God, we know from our Faith, “who though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men.  And being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross” (Philippians 2:6-8).  The fruit of His self-denial is the liberty promised by the Gospel to all those who follow Him:  “If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me” (Matthew 16:24).