"But I shot a man in Reno..." or did I?
Have I mentioned how much I love the book I’m reading? The Sources of Christian Ethics by Servais Pinckaers. And it’s not just because the author’s last name sounds just like “pink hairs,” either!
A history lesson
The middle section of the book gives a quick history of major ideas in morality from Plato to the present. The very short version is that in the fourteenth century (that’s AD 1301-1400) an English Franciscan named William of Ockham (famous for “Ockham’s razor”) began pushing the theory that the will was more important than the intellect, and that freedom was the greatest of all goods – greater even than truth.
Ockham’s ideas caught on, and in the next couple hundred years transformed the way people thought about ethics and morality.
Instead of being about the pursuit of goodness, happiness, and excellence, morality became a struggle between freedom and law, between choice and obligation.
Don’t impose your morality on me!
There’s a lot packed into that history, but something that struck me very personally was that law is something imposed on me from outside, whereas virtue is something I develop from within myself.
Now, being a basically lazy man, I’ve spent vast portions of my life waiting for somebody else to make me do things. I’d put off homework till the teacher sat me down and watched me do it. At work, I would only get things done if the boss was around to make me look busy. Heck, even at home, I only bother to pick the place up if there’s company coming over.
In other words, I’ve been defining my freedom as avoiding the imposition of law – and I associated doing anything at all with the obligation of law. Even things I know are good for me, I need someone to “make” me do them.
The approach of virtue is altogether different. It recognizes that freedom is at the service of a person’s ability to act, to do stuff. And it is a person’s mind that figures out what’s good to do. The will follows the mind and moves us into action.
Right, totally abstract. Let me see if I can give an example.
An example
So I’m sitting on my bed looking at the mess that is my bedroom. Papers piling up on the desk. Clothes strewn all over the chairs and the corner of the bed – not yet on the floor, but that’ll come soon if I don’t do anything about it. A bowl and a glass from when I ate lunch in my room a week and a half ago.
But something in me says, I don’t have to clean my room. Nobody’s going to make me. You’re not the mom of me!
So, instead of cleaning my room, I read a book. Yep, The Sources of Christian Ethics. And it occured to me that I could choose to clean my room – not because someone was forcing me to, but because it was good to. I could clean my room simply because I enjoy having a clean room.
So I stood up and started clearing off my desk.
Those who cling to freedom will lose it
It’s ironic that, by clinging to a false freedom – refusing to let anybody “make” me clean my room – I actually lost a true freedom: the ability to clean my room and to enjoy it. But that’s what happens when a good thing gets put in the wrong place.
Freedom is not the highest good, and is not something to be grasped with both hands. If we hold it lightly, and use it to grow in virtue, then it blossoms itself and makes everything we do truly free.
