The Cudgel Called Conscience

There is a crisis of freedom in our world that is best summed up by Father Zosima in The Brothers Karamazov:

"The world has proclaimed the reign of freedom, especially of late, but what do we see in this freedom of theirs? Nothing but slavery and self-destruction!"[1] 

Perhaps for simplicity's sake it was better for Fr. Zosima to identify the “freedom” proclaimed in his age as one type of freedom that leads to both slavery and self-destruction, but, for our purposes, it might be helpful to distinguish two types of distorted freedoms in the holy priest’s reflection: one that leads to slavery and another that leads to self-destruction. The former we could call ‘forfeited freedom’ insofar as an individual hands over his freedom to another/others/something and is thereby enslaved to him/them/it. The latter we could call ‘usurped power,’ that is, when an individual appropriates to himself an over-extended sense of power, thereby destroying himself in the process.[2] 

In this critique of freedom's dual distortion in our present moment, comparisons can be made to ideas expressed by such minds as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Cardinal Robert Sarah. For Solzhenitsyn, his double criticism, on the one hand of Marxist totalitarianism in Soviet Russia (i.e. forfeited freedom) and, on the other of the pleasure-seeking, materialistic society of the West (i.e. usurped power), fits neatly within the aforementioned paradigm. Likewise, Cardinal Sarah's anxiety over the two apocalyptical beasts of Islamic fundamentalism as represented through ISIS (i.e. forfeited freedom), and the West's idolatry of a freedom with no bounds, as represented through gender ideology (i.e. usurped power) is also a noteworthy warning of freedom's dilapidated state that fits into this bi-partite prism.[3] 

The hostile reality before us is that on one side the raging monster Charybdis threatens us with enslavement to tyranny and, on the other, the whirlpool Scylla looms to bring about our destruction by sucking us in her vortex of radicalized liberty. Let us then look at each of these terrors in turn.

Freedom forfeited 

We get a glimpse of our Charybdis and what this idea of forfeited freedom means in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov with the Grand Inquisitor's words to Christ where he blames Him for giving man too much freedom to handle. Men have, says the decrepit cardinal: "the great anxiety and terrible agony they endure at present in making a free decision for themselves."[4] Hence, this responsibility drives these poor unfortunates to cry out: "Save us from ourselves!"[5] for a simple creature cannot be expected to know truth from falsehood or right from wrong. Yet, the bitter reality is, they still must choose nonetheless.

It is this freedom of choice that Jean-Paul Sartre somberly lectured will drive a man into a sense of anguish over his situation. Not only is man free, Sartre tragically writes, but:

"Man is freedom... man is condemned to be free. Condemned, because he did not create himself, yet is nevertheless at liberty, and from the moment that he is thrown into this world he is responsible for everything he does."[6] 

And so, with such anguish, Dostoevsky’s Inquisitor goes on to say that although "people are more convinced than ever that they have perfect freedom," still, to unburden themselves of such responsibility "they have brought their freedom to us and laid it humbly at our feet."[7] Thus, man forfeits his right and duty to freedom by handing it over to another in exchange for such things as peace of mind, the unburdening of responsibility, and the appeasement of his conscience. He hands it over for the promise of salvation, security, safety- even bread.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was a man who experienced this reality with his own eyes and ears in mid-20^th century Russia. He relates in his writings of how a prisoner in a worker convoy of a labor camp in Siberia once wrestled and killed two convoy keepers in charge of a group of political prisoners. Having taken their guns and stepping over their corpses, the newly freed man then turned to his fellow comrades who simply stood by and watched the action of their liberation in passive astonishment. The man cried out to them: "You are free! Go!" However, every last one of the prisoners, horrified at what the brave man had done, sat on the ground and waited for another convoy to come by and pick them up. Solzhenitsyn goes on to reflect concerning this experience:

"The Goodthinkers didn't need 'freedom in general'. They didn't need the ordinary common freedom of humans and birds. Every truth is concrete! And the only freedom they needed was freedom given them by the state, handed freedom, duly signed and sealed...Without that what use was freedom?"[8] 

What we see from this then is one's ability to choose for oneself what to think and how to live is stunted by the reality of a responsibility which does not want to be assumed because it is not explicitly handed on by a person or state who has taken over one’s welfare and demanded his submission as a result.

We have seen in the past century how individuals have forfeited the freedom that is rightly theirs and handed it over to those in power. They traded in their unique rights as rational, moral agents to a fascist dictator or a communist state in exchange for the comfort of knowing he (or it) will assume responsibility for them. But what might this responsibility entail when the dictator or state acquires this submission on such a grand scale? Nothing less than the determination of what is right, just, true, and good for individuals in mass by the dictator himself, or the gang in charge as a whole.

"This is surely the main problem of the twentieth century: is it permissible merely to carry out orders and commit one's conscience to someone else's keeping? Can a man do without ideas of his own about good and evil, and merely derive them from the printed instructions and verbal orders of his superiors?"[9]

As the figure of Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor makes clear, this indeed can happen in the religious realm but, just as easily it happens in the political and cultural realms as well.

"I tell Thee that man is tormented by no greater anxiety than to find someone quickly to whom he can hand over that gift of freedom with which the ill-fated creature is born."[10] 

Perhaps Sartre had these opinions of the Inquisitor in mind when lecturing!

It seems to me that too frequently men are willing to hand over their responsibility to think and reason for themselves to a government agency, a media outlet, or a ruling group that offers them ideological propaganda disguised as truth. The Covid-event could certainly be counted as an instance of this: with its stipulations of how spatially proximate individuals are permitted to be near each other, when and where people should cover their face with a mask, the universal administration of a shot that brings with it, in the very least, many unanswered questions of its safety, efficacy, and necessity and- at a more drastic level- the shunning of society if one simply refuses it (or even speaks critically of it!).

Similarly, in a slightly different setting, there are also those individuals in the Islamic parts of the world who are forced to submit themselves under the yoke of a militant religious/political terror group like ISIS or the Taliban. Such groups demand a person’s surrender to the Koran and Sharia Law in spite of one’s own personal conviction. If the said man decides to run counter to Muslim thought and law in these parts with his own thinking and behavior, he will do so only at the cost of his life.  

These two examples are just continuations of the strategy of propagating ideology based on the power of groupthink and on wielding the sword by the strength of those in charge. Ultimately however, they are targeted at those they feel will forfeit their freedom because they do not want the responsibility that comes with possessing it. These entities, whether they be the governments and media of the West or the vying caliphates and Islamism of the East, shape the thinking and influence the actions of their newly acquired subjects who have either forgotten how to think critically, or become too lazy in handling the burden of their own responsibility, or been broken to the point of submission. Therefore, like a tidal wave the manufactured truths of the dominating entity sweep away objective reason and the sound thinking of individuals who wish to retain their own freedom independent of the ruling party.

"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" asked Patrick Henry to the members of the Virginia Convention as the United States was at the brink of war for their freedom.[11] The cost is indeed nothing less than slavery for those who surrender their rational and free selves to someone else who can dictate what it is they are to believe and what it is they are to do. No longer recognizing the rational ground upon which moral imperatives are made nor objective truth which undergirds sound thinking, one finds himself entering into a gullible state when he utterly disposes of his freedom and gives it to those who lord over him. Thus, when these overlords greedily accept his forfeited freedom and take control of his moral, spiritual, physical, and intellectual welfare, he can be rest assured he has become their slave.

But this does not happen to anyone passively because the haunt of Sartre persistently troubles us with that fatalistic problem of having to choose. And so the question that will always remain in front of us is this: Will I forfeit my God-given right to freedom or will I fight to keep it?

"Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!"[12] 

Patrick Henry certainly chose to fight. What will we choose to do?

Usurped Power 

Now to our Scylla. This second type of distorted freedom falls off the opposite side of the saddle from which forfeited freedom will cause its victim to hit the ground. Usurped power leans to the side of self-destruction for it takes solely upon itself, a mere creature, the freedom to create such absolutes as right and wrong, truth and error. This radicalized liberty is (similar to those who choose the converse abuse of forfeited freedom mentioned above) indeed too much for an individual to handle. In fact, we could say that if the slave falls off the right side of this horse we call freedom, the suicide tragically falls off the left.

Ivan Karamazov is the harbinger of this freedom in the Karamazov story. It is expressed in a simple line that sums up his thought: "Without God everything is permissible."[13] In other words, the design of the moral realm and the order of the natural world can be usurped from its proper place (i.e. from the mind of God) by the subjective mind of the individual. When this happens, whatever a person wants to be true, whether it be in morality, religion, language or even in the empirical facts of the sciences, it is true because now it is one's own mind that determines truth, rather than truth being rooted in the perfection of God as manifested in the observable world of objective reality. The classicist Edith Hamilton warned us what will be the result of such self-destructive subjectivism:

"When the mind withdraws into itself and dispenses with facts it makes only chaos."[14]

This sort of unnecessary intellectual chaos is an all-too-common usurpation in our day that seems to make the phenomena of suicide and dependence on various addictions more frequent than had been in the past. For when one takes upon himself the freedom to create what is right or wrong, what is true or false, what is factual or not, this responsibility becomes too great for him to cope with. By ignoring the design of the world around him- by ignoring the facts of the world- an individual simply gets lost in his own mind. His subjectivism breeds isolation because it permits him to create judgments unanchored in objectivity, thus cutting him off from the same access to truth that he formerly shared with others. More tragically however, it isolates him from God Himself who has ordered things to act in accordance with their nature. After rejecting this order and choosing for oneself how one will live, the intoxication of a freedom that has overextended itself will eventually become stale- leading to dissatisfaction, confusion, and ultimately self-destruction. It has usurped an authority only meant to be found in God. The mere satisfaction of one's desires, even if done in accordance with one's fabricated moral code, is simply not enough to keep a man sane in this type of unfettered freedom. Fr. Zosima warned:

"Interpreting freedom as the multiplication and rapid satisfaction of desires, men distort their own nature, for they thus engender in themselves many senseless and foolish desires and habits and most absurd fancies."[15]

Cardinal Robert Sarah's concern over the West's adoption of a mentality that denigrates the reality of the binary nature of sex is certainly expressed under this sort of usurped power that has utterly ruined true freedom. For gender ideology inevitably causes human beings to unbind themselves from not only their God-given vocations of who they are as men and women, but even from the physical, material world as manifested in the anatomy of their own bodies. This unfettering of oneself from all things physically and spiritually objective, leaves the individual who falls victim to such an ideology afloat in a realm that becomes more distorted the longer one stays in it. The destruction of gender brings with it the destruction of what it means to be human (i.e. male and female) and with that the impossibility of achieving the genuine union that man is called to with others- what Cardinal Sarah refers to as "communion in the distinction." And, just as freedom forfeited as represented by Islamism brings with it slavery through subordination (poly-gamy), the usurped power of gender ideology brings with it self-destruction through confusion (homo-gamy).[16] 

But this confusion does not free man from the limits the physical world does impose on him. And, even if it was able to do so and man was thus able to ignore these limits by his dismissal of what his own senses show him, still another law stands in his way that demands his recognition as well: the Natural Law. Stepping beyond the boundaries of this law, which has been planted around him as a hedge:

"the individualist universe comes to be centered solely on the person, who no longer tolerates any constraint. Hence God is considered someone who creates obstacles to confine our will by imposing laws; God becomes the enemy of autonomy and liberty. Wishing to be totally free, man refuses to accept what he considers to be constraints and even goes so far as to reject any form of dependence on God. He rejects the authority of God."[17] 

Thus, if a man is not to be found a slave to others by the forfeiture of his freedom, he very well might self-destruct by usurping the place of God whom he no longer sees as the Friend of autonomy and liberty- but its very enemy. But where else can a man turn to if not to Him who made him free in the first place. Does he really think he can satisfyingly turn to himself to discover his own lasting liberation?

Freedom Found 

It seems to me then there is no solution to the predicament of man's freedom apart from God. For if an individual harnesses his independence by entrusting himself to the will of others, he will end up their slave; if, on the other hand, he tampers his dependence on others by proclaiming his own right to determine reality, he will end up a suicide. How to escape the chains of others on the one side without being nudged to the noose of oneself on the other?

C.S. Lewis seems to hit the nail on the head:

"A dogmatic belief in objective value is necessary to the very idea of a rule which is not tyranny or an obedience which is not slavery."[18] 

Objective value- or what the Greeks called the “Logos” and the evangelist John posited as a divine Person (c.f. Jn 1:1)- is the key to unlocking freedom's promises for it/He is the hinge upon which all things can be reasoned and the anchor that prevents anything from drifting away into irrationality. If one does not believe things are objectively good and bad or that truth, falsity, right and wrong are real terms that can be applied to real things, he cannot expect to live freely in a world governed by order. It is only by affirming that truth, or the Truth, does not primarily reside in the subjective mind but is instead first in a world outside waiting to be apprehended by the individual, that one has the justification to say "No!" to the arbitrary commands of a dictator and “No!” to the capricious innovations of the subjective self.

But how does an individual come to perceive objective value? How does he come to know and live according to truth? By no other means than through his conscience. It is necessary for contemporary man to not only reacquire a conscience, but he must also more clearly understand what is meant by its reality.

Conscience is not a malleable urge in us that is to be shaped by the multitude, nor a whimsical voice that is conditioned by our subjective mind. It is that inner justification that reconciles the way one believes, thinks, and acts with the greater reality of the objective world God designed and shaped for man's happiness. All things come from God and the duty of the conscience is to articulate for an individual how he is to live in accordance with the world the Creator created. Conscience presupposes the idea of an objective world whose inner meaning can be discovered by the rational mind. Aided by grace- and the insight of wise men- every individual has it within his power and responsibility to successfully govern himself in the freedom of living in accord with the objective order. This is precisely what holiness for an individual is in Christian tradition:

"Sanctity consists of fidelity to the established order of God."[19] 

Sanctity is none other than fidelity to virtue, to right reason, to the truth of how the world works. Personal holiness begins with a simple acknowledgement of the way things are and is further fortified by a continued commitment to that order.

This means a person must curb impulses to vice and go out of his way to stimulate habits of virtue. One could even go so far as Aristotle and Aquinas and say that one ought to be conditioned to be drawn toward goodness in his tastes, desires, and urgings, for it is praiseworthy for the free person to be fettered to goodness as he is by his own inclinations. This does not mean his freedom is infringed upon any more than a husband’s freedom is by the love he has for his wife. Indeed, in choosing to love one woman exclusively, he has cut off the possibility of loving all women inclusively- yet, the discriminate love he has for his beloved lies more deeper than the superficial fancies he might have entertained for others.

Even a skilled musician is evidently shackled by the rules of beautiful-sounding music. For it is precisely in ceasing to play an instrument incorrectly or reading the notes improperly that new avenues to auditory beauty are opened up to the musician who now has greater freedom to improvise and be original.

So it is with the conscience-driven individual who seeks to exercise his freedom in a proper balance of autonomy and openness to others. For it is as Tocqueville once wrote: “Providence has created a human being neither wholly independent nor totally slavish.”[20] Thus, recognizing "the rules of living" which have been preordained by God (i.e. through the Natural Law and the Ten Commandments), the truly free individual submits himself to an order justly laid out above as an ideal and strives to follow it- and he does this lest he be enslaved by something else inferior to it. Freedom can only be properly recognized when yoked to this responsibility to the greater law that is demanded of each and every human being.

Consequently, this responsibility can only be understood through the lens of a virtue-driven life created by God, for this is in accord with the very design of man's vocation. Cardinal Sarah teaches:

"[God] created us free so that, by the reasonable exercise of our freedom, we might go beyond our wild impulses and tame all our instincts by taking full responsibility for our life and growth."[21]

St. Peter similarly exhorts us:

"Live as free men, yet without using your freedom as a pretext for evil" (1 Pt 2:16).

Who better had taken responsibility for his life and growth by being a truly free man than the Lord Chancellor of England in the 16^th century, St. Thomas More. Indeed, Sir Thomas proved that this sort of freedom was achievable by the grace of God and the conditioning of the soul even in King Henry VIII's England, a kingdom that threatened lesser men to throw their freedom away by the stroke of a pen.

For Henry VIII wanted to divorce his wife and the Church would not allow it. By making himself the head of the church in England, the king could then do as he pleased. But in his arrogance, Henry demanded all England's bishops, barons, academicians, and royal advisors to also acknowledge his supremacy within the Church and this was something Thomas More could not in good conscience do. Threatened and punished with the removal of his property, separation from family, imprisonment in the Tower, and finally the executioner's axe, Thomas could have been “freed” at any moment if he would do one seemingly small thing- sign the paper that contained the king's oath of supremacy. But Thomas More could not bring himself to do this because this would go against the understandings of his intellect and the beliefs of his heart. Following St. John Fisher, the bishop of Rochester, and several Carthusians from the Charterhouse in London, St. Thomas More became numbered among the martyrs of the Church by having his head cut off.

In the preface to his play on Sir Thomas More, A Man for all Seasons, Robert Bolt perhaps writes the most concise and insightful description of this sainted lawyer as it pertains to this discussion on true freedom:

"[Thomas was] a man with an adamantine sense of his own self. He knew where he began and left off."[22] 

Is this not another way of saying Thomas More knew where he “began,” that is, where the pressures and influence of others ended; and where he “left off,” that is, where he surrendered himself to the greater authority of God above? Let us put it like this: Thomas More would not forfeit his freedom to those whose tightening grip had sought to influence his choice, nor would he usurp the power for himself to break from the greater law of God- though both choices could have quite easily restored his life. Rather, leaving that deepest part of himself untouched by others but only touched by God and his own rational mind, Thomas remained free even while imprisoned- even while being executed! St. Thomas More, pray for us in these unfree times!

We must get back to virtue if we are to get back to freedom. For freedom cannot be had in handing it over to another's responsibility nor in usurping its power to oneself. To return to Solzhenitsyn:

"After the Western ideal of unlimited freedom, after the Marxist concept of freedom as acceptance of the yoke of necessity- here is the true Christian definition of freedom. Freedom is self-restriction! Restriction of the self for the sake of others!"[23] 

For true freedom is not found in being bullied by the thoughts and actions of others nor is it found in taking license to think and do what one wants. No, to stay on the saddle of freedom's horse one must form and sharpen one's will and intellect to withstand pressures from without and one's own weakness and pride from within. The balance demanded of such a truly free person is strenuously achieved because:

"to shove it a yard or two along to tyranny, a frown, a little cough, is enough. But to drag it an inch along the road to freedom you must harness a hundred oxen and keep after each of them with a cudgel: 'Watch where you're pulling! Watch where you're going!'"[24]

Indeed, Fr. Zosima would say genuine freedom can only be achieved and maintained by such effort.

[1] Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Constance Garnett (Norwalk, CT: Easton Press, 1979), 239.

[2] Fear of freedom's abuse is not a new idea. In the early 19^th century, Alexis de Tocqueville's monumental work Democracy in America sought to articulate the dangers that sprung from an abrupt rise of freedom and equality in the West following the American Revolutionary War. If not held in check, Tocqueville contended absolute freedom and universal equality is a dangerous combination that might lead to enslavement or anarchy: "Among our contemporaries I can see two ideas which are as incompatible as they are disastrous. Some people can see in equality only the anarchical tendencies which it engenders. They are frightened by their freedom of choice and are frightened of themselves. Others, fewer in number but more enlightened, maintain a different viewpoint. Alongside the road which starts with equality and leads to anarchy, they have at last discovered the path which seems to lead men to inevitable enslavement. They incline their souls in advance to this unavoidable slavery and, abandoning any hope of remaining free, they are already prepared to worship in their hearts the master who is bound to make an imminent appearance. The former give up freedom because they regard it as dangerous; the latter because they judge it impossible." Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America and Two Essays in America, trans. Gerald E. Bevan (New York, NY: Penguin Book, 2003), 817.

[3] c.f. Cardinal Sarah’s opening remarks at the Synod of the Family in 2015.

[4] Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, 197.

[5] Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, 196.

[6] Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism, trans. Carol Macomber (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 29, [emphasis added].

[7] Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, 190.

[8] Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation III-IV, volume 2, trans. Thomas P. Whitney (New York, NY: Harper & Row, 1974), 349.

[9] Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation V-VII, volume 3, trans. Harry Willetts (New York, NY: Harper & Row, 1974), 224.

[10] Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, 193.

[11] Patrick Henry, “Give Me Liberty, or Give Me Death!” in The U.S. Constitution and Other Writings (San Diego, CA: Canterbury Classics, 2017), 48.

[12] ibid.

[13] c.f. Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, 50.

[14] Edith Hamilton, The Greek Way (New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1958), 35.

[15] Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, 240.

[16] c.f. Sarah’s opening remarks at the Synod of the Family in 2015.

[17] Robert Sarah, God or Nothing: A Conversation on Faith with Nicolas Diat, trans. Michael J. Miller (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 2015), 168.

[18] C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man in The Complete C.S. Lewis Signature Classics (San Francisco, CA: Harper Collins, 2002), 727.

[19] Jean-Pierre de Caussade, Abandonment to Divine Providence, trans. E.J. Strickland (St. Louis, MO: B. Herder Book Company, 1921), 1.

[20] Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 822.

[21] Sarah, God or Nothing: A Conversation on Faith with Nicolas Diat, 168.

[22] Robert Bolt, A Man for All Seasons (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1990), xii.

[23] Alexander Solzhenitsyn et al., From under the Rubble (Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Co., 1975), 136.

[24] Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, volume 3, 451.