NOTION OF FREEDOM AND LAW IN ST. THOMAS AQUINAS

NOTION OF FREEDOM AND LAW IN
ST. THOMAS AQUINAS

CHAPTER ONE

1.0           
THE GENERAL NOTION OF FREEDOM

The concept of freedom is
an analogous one, predicated in different ways to beings of very different
types. The various forms of attribution depend, to a certain extent, not by
defining the same specific content, but by indicating formal relation, which
remains the same. This relation can be put negatively or positively.

Negatively, freedom means
being free from the relation of not being bound to a given being or law, of
being independent from something and of not being determined by a given
principle of determination. This negative concept is also a relative one
because every finite being belongs to a world and is related to the other being
in the world. It may be free from this direct relationship to this or that, but
only because their place are taken by others.

A being fully free in the negative sense
could not be a being in the world, without relationship fully isolated, it
would be based on nothing and be nothing.1

Thus in
contrast to the negative, relative concept, there is a positive absolute
concept of freedom. A being is positively free in so far as it is in possession
of itself and possesses in this relationship the sufficient condition for all
its being and relations. Here, freedom means self-possession being completely
present to oneself, completely self-sufficient.

According to
Maslaw

Freedom is the basic
acknowledgment

that the individual is more
important

than his society.2 

However, human
freedom is clearly neither merely negative and relative nor fully positive and
absolute. Man has dominion over himself and so also over parts of the world.
But he is non-the-less inserted into the world and dependent on the beings he
finds himself. The basic mode of human freedom may be called transcendental
freedom, which is the fundamental propriety of man by which he alone can say he
is.

It follows
that man can never be deprived of this transcendental freedom, which is part
and parcel of his existence. But its emptiness and importance point on to
another mode of freedom. Man is not simply there, he does not simply grow, he
has to be, he is a task absolutely imposed on himself he has to decide to be
himself or what he will be and there is no way in which he can evade this
decision.

This mode is
called the freedom of decision or existential freedom. This directly implies
freedom of choice since an arbitrary freedom would be no freedom, a man free in
this sense, will leave his actions at the mercy of mood whim or chance.

                   Freedom
in general may be defined as

                   the
absence of obstacles to the realization

of desires.3

1.1     THE MEANING OF FREEDOM  

Freedom!
Everybody wants it, it makes a man a human being, poets praise it, and
politicians promise or proclaim it. Some people have given their lives to win
it for themselves or for others, but what actually is it? St Thomas Aquinas
sees it as absence of coercion. Coercion or compulsion bears on the external
action and corresponds to the absence of external coercion. This is variously
named according to the kind of activity involved.

Thus we have
physical freedom, civil freedom, political freedom, freedom of
self-realization, freedom of choice, and freedom for self-perfection.
Psychological freedom or freedom of choice corresponds to absence of internal
coercion, that is the power of the will to will something or not. External is
contingent on internal freedom, since the former has no meaning without the
latter, but the converse is not necessarily true.                                      

A Survey of
Yves R. Simons book ‘Freedom of Choice,’ contrasts to some extent the St Thomas
Aquinas notion of freedom. For example he investigated on freedom and
voluntariness, and said that  “there is
unqualified voluntariness without freedom”4

1.2       KINDS OF FREEDOM

Man is full of dynamism, and his activities are equally the same. Hence
his conception of freedom differs according to their different activities.
Man’s activities are not just determined by external factors like a piece of
stone that is moved or a computer game that is moved by the pads. It sometimes
comes from his awareness of his own freedom and ability to decide for himself.
Among all these, freedom still remain verse to comprehend at each moment, but
for better apprehension, I will examine briefly the kinds of freedom in the
following sequence.

Human Freedom

This is simply a matter of accepting the Universe because you understand
its mathematical necessity. This done, you will gain peace of mind, be free
from passions and be able to return good for evil. This human freedom implies
that man has the natural ability to act at length without being injurious to
others.

Freedom Of Religion

Freedom of
religion could be identified as the right of a person to have free exercise of
religion without compulsion or coercion. He is allowed to worship anything,
anywhere, anytime according to the dictates of his conscience. Murray said on
his own part that religious freedom is ‘…an immunity from Coercion in what
concerns personal relation with God’5   

For the authenticity of religion to be realized, many
societies adopt freedom of religion.

Freedom Of Choice

 This is the principle of action by which man
judges freely. Apart from this, Aquinas maintained that freedom of choice is
not a habit but a power since it proceeds from man. He called it an election.
He compared ‘man’ and ‘animal’ and stated that man acts out of comparism in the
reason, while animals acts from natural instinct. Since man acts out of
comparism, he acts by free Judgment and equally retains the power of being
inclined to many things. Thus man has free choice.

Freedom of choice refers either to the act of the will, or to
the object of the will. In the first instance, there is freedom of exercise, in
the second, freedom of specification. Freedom of exercise means that the will
is at liberty to choose or not to choose, to operate or not to operate. The
point to emphasize here is that one is not compelled to act.

Freedom Of Self-Perfection

Here St.
Thomas believed and taught that man ought to tamper and train his Soul, and the
dignity of man lies in self-mastery. Now, man’s nature is constituted in such a
way that reason and will must always guide and direct his actions. In so doing
man has self-control, since that makes him a person. Any man who allows
passion, money, power etc to overtake him, is not free, since he feels free
outwardly, but inwardly remain enslaved to vice, greed, power, pride, and
ambition.

Fulton Sheen
in his book ‘On Being Human’ maintained that freedom is not gained at once, but
a gradual process, which continues until one reaches the peak. Man is not
expected to become an angel, but man, which is his ontological vocation, man
cannot be perfect in an imperfect world.

Freedom of
Self Realization

Each man is a microcosm,
in other words, said to be represented in a small scale. He occupies an
important and irreplaceable position in the entire universe. He is a being who
has a mission in the world. And the achievement of this mission is the
realization of himself. Each man is a bundle of potentialities. These
potentialities when realized or actualized become the individual’s contribution
to development of the entire human family.

Self-realization,
according to Anthony Storr is said to be:

The fullest possible
expression in

life
of the innate potentialities of

the individual, the
realization of

this uniqueness as a
personality.6

It consists in
productiveness, spontaneous activity as opposed to compulsion, love and active
solidarity with human beings. It consists in accepting oneself as the bearer of
human potentialities and being ready to grow through creative activity. It is
the man who uses his powers that answers the fundamental question of his
individual existence. Freedom of self-realization is only possible in and
through the facticity, which surround each person, it cannot be more than this.
They include, height, colour, strength, intelligence, sex, race etc.

Karl Rahner
held that:

                   Freedom
is only freedom in the

                   concrete
sense, when all those

                   freedoms
are combined.7

Aquinas on his
own part noted that,

Freedom is seen not as
independence

from an absolute but as
independence

From the relatives.8

In the history
of philosophy and social thought, freedom has a specific use as a moral and
social concept to refer either to circumstance which arise in the relations of
man to man to specific conditions of social life. Philosophical argument about
the meaning or the nature of freedom is concerned with the legitimacy or
convenience of particular application of the term. Bertrand Russels often held
that freedom in general is that absence of obstacles to the realization of
one’s desires.

1.3     AQUINAS NOTION OF FREEDOM

 
This
medieval theologian understood freedom to be the harmony of the will and the
act. And the consideration is the divine influence and the will. Implicitly,
the relation of harmony, the divine influence and the will is freedom. Hence, a
free act is constituted by the assent of the will rather than by the decision
of the will. It implies then that this cannot be freedom as self-determination.

The term in Aquinas closest in meaning and
usage to the contemporary term freedom, is perhaps liberty9

But for John
Locke;

It is to be free from constraint and
violence from others, which cannot be, where there are no law10

Freedom may
mean absence of constraint and this is what is proper to man. There is no right
minded individual who would applaud constraints. Being free from constraint
means being free from choice imprisonment.

1.4     LIMITS OF FREEDOM

While we reject the view that man
is not free, or that freedom is an illusion, we must not accept the Sartrean
exaggerated notion of freedom. According to Sartre in his book ‘Being and
Nothingness’, man is absolutely free. Man he said, is condemned to be free
and man’s authentic existence is realized to the extent that he makes use of
his freedom.

 Man is free, yes, but his freedom has to be
limited by certain things such as his body, will, environment, desires and
passion, pressures from heredity, society etc.

Walter Farrel
in his book ‘A Companion to Summa’ vol.iii supported this when
he used the analogy of a wild bird beating out its life against the windows of
a desolate house into which it has wondered, to awaken pity on us. Also in man,
who is confined to a space and who is imperfect and limited, struggling day in
and out to be unlimited and free. We find such a situation in the incessant discoveries
by science to know if it can give meaning to human life, but what happens, we
still experience some sort of imperfection in all these.

Also as a
social being, man is limited by his very nature of being forced to be social by
nature, he is compulsorily limited to stay where his body permits him to be.
The existentialists emphasized this when they said that man as a social being
in the world is subjected to the laws of nature.

We should not
say that limitation is the essence of human freedom because man’s insatiable
tension towards the absolute and good is limitless, rather as an incarnate
being, a being in the world, his body which situates him in the world limits
his freedom. It then follows that man is not absolutely free, since there are
some limitations.

1.5           
SOCIAL
STRUCTURE OF FREEDOM.

Since freedom
is transcendental distance and transcendental spontaneity, it is essentially
part of man. But this primordial freedom is still only the basis for
existential freedom, the realization of man as person, it is not yet this
personal being in actual reality, transcendental and transcendental freedom are
actuated only in the decision of the existential freedom for its own essence –
as basic form. But R.S. Peters held that:

                   Freedom
means not doing what one wills

without restraints but
accepting

the law or the real will of
the community.11

It follows
that human freedom can never be a simple state of man or a specialized
propriety, but neither is it simply the actuation of selfhood, nor pure act
without the history like the divine freedom. But on the contrary, human freedom
is history by its very nature. Man is wholly claimed by the works to be done
and the states to be achieved. He becomes truly a person by going freely out of
himself- to throw himself into the work to be done.

Thus human
freedom is not a state, as it is in things, freedom from this or that
compulsion nor is it as in God a pure act of self-consciousness. Freedom is the
history of a person’s coming to himself, which culminates in fully conscious
self-possession. In the strict sense, only the individual is with himself,
self-possession can be predicted only analogously of a community or a people.

All these
principles recur in the principle which regulates the mode of realization of
freedom, the freedom of subsidiary. Freedom in act is identical with the
personality of the person. It is the person’s mode of being. This mode of being
is at once individual and supra individual condition and uncondition. Conscious
selfhood, as an act  feasible only to the
self, makes the individual unique as a person.

These common
works are modes of self-realization, of the reality of freedom and the person.
But as such modes, there are forms taken by freedom and they retain their
meaning and purpose only by being referred back to the person and its reality.