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Book Review
D. C. Schindler
Retrieving Freedom: The Christian Appropriation of Classical Tradition
University of Notre Dame Press, 2022
In Acedia and Its Discontents: Metaphysical Boredom in an Empire of Desire, R. J. Snell critiques the philosophy and actions of Judge Holden, a character in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, a novel that explores the violence endemic to nihilism. Snell argues that Judge Holden, by his violence, enacts the modern view of freedom. Holden considers that essence of any kind entails restraint and imposes, therefore, an unacceptable limitation upon his will. Because he demands, in principle and in fact, absolute power to determine essence and meaning, he must destroy any being with an integrity he cannot manipulate or control, embodying, thereby, one aspect of “the diabolical character of modern liberty,” as described by D. C. Schindler in his first volume on modern freedom.1 Because Holden equates liberty with power, he enacts what Schindler, describing Goethe’s Faust, calls a “necessary contempt for limits and the rejection of order, the refusal to participate in a whole greater than oneself[;] the possessor of power [in this case Holden]…is at odds, not only with himself, but with all other things….Such a person is turned in opposition…to anything and everything real.”2 So he judges — condemns to destruction — everything that eludes his control. Enacting nihilistic violence wherever he goes, Holden “demands the violation of things as an act of final emancipation.”3 Reflecting upon this demand, Snell observes, “Freedom is for us, now, an idol, and our conception of freedom is so absolute that we increasingly perceive limits as illicit and impermissible….So total are the demands of our new god that even our own human nature is thought a trap.”4 Judge Holden demonstrates how intolerant of limits modern liberty can become, so intolerant that even material laws, even our own bodies, may come to seem prisons which we must remake or escape.
Of course, reality always reasserts itself, thwarting — eventually — our attempts to denude created beings of their integrity. However much we may resent the givenness of things, however loudly or violently we may pass judgment upon it, condemning it to the tyranny of our opposing wills or to the fantasy of a resentful imagination, what is is — and is what it is. Though we are powerful enough to wreak havoc on our world with, for example, our nuclear weapons (as McCarthy imagines us having done in his novel The Road) or to maim our bodies in pursuit of identities we will never achieve, we cannot, finally, create and sustain an alternate reality. Nihilism will fail; but on its way to failure, it may destroy much that is good.
Schindler’s Argument. Thankfully, we need not couple our car to this runaway train. In Retrieving Freedom: The Christian Appropriation of Classical Tradition, Schindler reminds us of a different possibility. Tracing the genealogy of freedom in the West, Schindler exposes the intellectual roots of fanatical modern liberty and recalls a vision of freedom in which what is given can be received with gratitude, as the context within which both our selves and our world are, by our free choice, brought to fullness of being. If hate, which demands conformity of the hated to hater, both feeds and flowers from the roots of modern liberty, love, says Schindler, which is “a conformity of the lover to the beloved….[lies] at the root of [the Christian conception] of freedom.”5
With special attention to Thomas Aquinas and John Duns Scotus, Schindler anatomizes these two possibilities. Via Aquinas, we can acknowledge the priority of actuality to potency and lovingly bring to fruition the world that shall be from the world that is. In this way, argues Schindler, “Free human action on things is simultaneously a ‘coaxing’ out of things a possibility that is not yet expressed.”6 Or, via Scotus, we can submit actuality to potency, implying thereby that each existing thing is but a dim, dusty, unsatisfying instance of a greater, more desirable, always-changeable possibility. In this view, concludes Schindler, “Freedom represents a wealth of possibility in relation to which every actuality is a kind of restriction, a relative poverty.”7 It is, of course, this latter vision — stretched well beyond anything Scotus intended — which contributes to the diabolical character of modern liberty.
Fortunately, Schindler promises a third volume, in which the diagnosis of his first and the genealogy of his second will culminate in a robust vision of liberty that recognizes the priority of act to potency while preserving the spontaneity of genuinely new and undetermined acts of choice — acts which originate in the individual soul but which are, nonetheless, responsive to the deep goodness of reality as it is given to us. “A fully adequate philosophy of freedom,” observes Schindler, “would…deepen the paradoxical unity of nature and person, actuality and potency, spontaneity and receptivity, and goodness and power. But this possibility remains a task to be carried out.”8 If successful, Schindler will give us a philosophy rooted in love.
For, at the heart of the Christian vision is an affirmation of the absolute compatibility of person and nature, spirit and substance: the reciprocity of Persons in the Trinity, each of which is definitively and absolutely itself and not the others, coincides with the absolute simplicity of the divine being; the unoriginate fontality of the Father is not a hierarchical priority but is relational from the very origin.9
A fully Christian philosophy of freedom will imply and enable a different kind of judgment upon the world than that pronounced by Judge Holden. It will, like Thomist philosopher Josef Pieper, enable us to say of the world and of all its particular beings, “It’s good that you exist; it’s good that you are in this world!”10 It will enable us to love small, particular things; small, particular places; even small, particular people. In short, it will justify such love as that spoken by the Reverend John Ames to his own son, in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead: “it’s your existence I love you for, mainly,” a love which he extends to the town of Gilead and even to the humble prairie.11 I await this third volume with hope.
My Questions. In the meantime, I wish to reflect upon some practical questions arising from my encounter with Schindler’s work, questions that should concern anyone — parent, pastor, educator — who is responsible to form the minds and hearts of young humans. First, how do we, reconfiguring our own understanding of freedom, help our students to understand, embrace, and embody a freedom rooted in the love of what is given? Each year, for example, in my literature and philosophy class, we study the idea of freedom. I begin this study by asking my students what is meant by the word itself. Invariably, they articulate some popularized reduction of Lockean–Scotistic freedom, the idea that freedom means doing what one wants, when one wants, with nothing and nobody to interfere or tell one “No.” Because the school in which I teach is grounded in the Christian tradition, we quickly come up against the conundrum this definition poses. For if freedom means simply doing as one pleases without regard for what is or what ought to be, if this rendering of the definition exhausts the meaning of freedom, then the Christian faith impedes liberty; it does not nurture, cultivate, or enable it. Pretty quickly, we realize that if we are going to be both Christian and free, we will have to develop a truer understanding of this idea. Precisely here the trouble arises, as my students cast about for an alternative only to realize they do not have one.
This problem raises, for me, another question: Why are the implications of Scotus’s philosophy of freedom — in their popular, pedestrian form — readily available to my students, while the vision of Aquinas’ philosophy of freedom, though it addresses a problem they feel deeply, remains practically unavailable to them in either philosophical or popular form, until I offer it specifically to them? What has made one triumph over the other in the popular imagination — a triumph which matters, as it is from popular levels of understanding that the world is, mostly, run? Although Scotus comes later in history than Aquinas, the Thomistic tradition has never died out; so mere chronology cannot account for the ascendance in culture of potency over act.
Which ascendance raises another question. Given that popular culture enacts its own powerful catechism which tends to subvert any catechism employed by Christians, how might we make a Christian vision compelling and powerful enough to shape human living, so to speak, all the way down? It surprises no one to hear on our music platforms a pop song that articulates a fanatically libertarian version of freedom in which potency (especially as regards sexual desire) takes priority over actuality. We might consider, as an example, the song “We Can’t Stop” by that ever-so-profound philosopher of modern freedom, Miley Cyrus. In this song, Cyrus celebrates the right to do whatever she wants — to love, kiss, or have intercourse with whomever shares with her a mutual sexual interest, promiscuous copulation emerging as the expected, celebrated endpoint of the party.12 Such a song embracing such a view of freedom is nearly ubiquitous; for it expresses the modern understanding of the self as a thing free because it is undefined in pursuit of its own pleasure. Although any song which celebrates even a particle of real love has, thereby, grounds from which we can reach a more robust vision of it, Cyrus’ song articulates, proudly and primarily, the pleasure-obsessed point toward which the high-minded philosophy of Scotus and Locke — when absorbed by the popular consciousness — seems, inevitably, to bend. What matters in this song is not who in the dense givenness of their being actually stands before another in the dense givenness of their being, but what sort of sexual experiences might arise out of a party.
Conversely, it is difficult (though not impossible) for me to imagine a chart-topping pop song which articulates a robustly Thomistic alternative, something in the spirit of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s joyful, creation-affirming poem, “As Kingfishers Catch Fire.”
As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came.
I say móre: the just man justices;
Keeps gráce: thát keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is —
Chríst — for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men’s faces.13
Here is a deeply Christic view of the self relating, in its freedom, to all others, each thing dealing out — in surprising ways — that which it is — “selving” itself by that which it does, becoming what it is by enacting its own being. The just man who justices becomes, thereby, the just man that he is. He enacts a justice which opens space for all things and all people, a space wherein “Christ plays… / Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his / To the father through the features of men’s faces.”14
Hopkins’ vision is alluring, warm — even festive — while Cyrus’s vision, despite her attempt to celebrate freedom, is fundamentally cold, resistant — a fist raised in defiance of anything that would limit human will. Her song ends, in fact, by implying that nothing is a divine gift (not even her own being) and thus that no one (not even God) merits her deference,15 a sentiment whose implications McCarthy’s Judge Holden unfolds in all its bloody horror.16 Yet, however willing my students are to accredit Hopkins over Cyrus, at least at the personal level, they seem incapable of imagining a society in which Aquinas rather than Locke, or Hopkins rather than Cyrus, forms our communal conception of liberty, from which we might shape our common life.
The Implication. So if, by and large, we accept Schindler’s argument, we implicate ourselves in a difficult but significant task — that of forming within ourselves and others a richly Christian vision of freedom, in contrast with the vision that seems everywhere else ascendant. Without the work of scholars such as Schindler, we lack the necessary intellectual foundation for this work. Both his exposition of the act/potency reversal as it appears in Locke and his elaboration of its genealogy from Plotinus to Scotus provide invaluable conceptual and historical foundations from which to act and think. Yet, if love is the root of this vision, love, finally, must seed and cultivate it. Thus, those responsible for the moral, spiritual, and intellectual formation of human beings, who are themselves learning how and what to love, must set this vision forth in a way that is alluring and attractive. Through our own rhetoric, through the music, literature, and art that we lay before them, we must convey the beauty — the loveliness — of what is given, nurturing in them a receptive gratitude that will incline them to grant priority to what is over what could be, to see in the structure of the world, even in its resistance to their wills, an integrity that arouses their respect. “This is love:” says educator and theologian Luigi Giussani, “when one’s own fulfillment, one’s self-realization, coincides with affirming others.”17 And we must help them extend that respect to their own bodies as a divine gift of themselves to themselves, to the gift of human sexuality as a profound source of life, to the gift of other beings — human and non-human — as things that, when loved, help them to realize their own liberty, which depends upon a proper relationship with all that is. For as Hopkins reminds us in another of his poems, “The world is charged with the grandeur of God.”18 Seeing, loving, and affirming that grandeur must become the understood root of fruitful liberty. —Stephen Mitchell
Stephen Mitchell, PhD, teaches literature at Covenant Day School in North Carolina and Covenant College in Georgia. He is a contributing writer to the Christian Research Journal.
NOTES
- D. C. Schindler, Freedom from Reality: The Diabolical Character of Modern Liberty (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2017).
- Schindler, Freedom from Reality, 269.
- R. J. Snell, Acedia and Its Discontents: Metaphysical Boredom in an Empire of Desire (Brooklyn, NY: Angelico Press, 2015), 12.
- Snell, Acedia and Its Discontents, 61.
- D. C. Schindler, Retrieving Freedom: The Christian Appropriation of Classical Tradition (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2022), 262.
- Schindler, Retrieving Freedom, 265.
- Schindler, Retrieving Freedom, 315.
- Schindler, Retrieving Freedom, 336.
- Schindler, Retrieving Freedom, 340.
- Josef Pieper, Faith, Hope, Love, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1991), 164.
- Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2004), 52, 72, 237, 245–47.
- Miley Cyrus, et al., “We Can’t Stop,” Bangrz, Kobalt Music Publishing, Ltd., 2013. The ticklish legalities of fair use laws regarding music prevent my quoting Cyrus’s song. But the official music video can be found here: “Miley Cyrus — We Can’t Stop (Official Video),” Miley Cyrus, YouTube, June 19, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrUvu1mlWco.
- Gerard Manley Hopkins, “As Kingfishers Catch Fire,” in Poems and Prose of Gerard Manley Hopkins (London: Penguin Books, 1985), 51, accessible online at Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44389/as-kingfishers-catch-fire.
- Ironically, Hopkins (1844–1889) owes the notion of “inscape,” expressed in his poem, to Scotus, whom he deeply admired. But the implication of Schindler’s critique is that by raising potentiality over actuality, Scotus subverts the very “thisness” that he otherwise celebrates. See Peter Kreeft, A Summa of the Summa: The Essential Philosophical Passages of St. Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica Edited and Explained for Beginners (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1990), 143n124.
- See Cyrus et al., “We Can’t Stop.”
- Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian (New York: Vintage International, 1985), 198.
- Luigi Giussani, The Risk of Education: Discovering Our Ultimate Destiny, trans. Mariangela Sullivan (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019), 14.
- Gerard Manley Hopkins, “God’s Grandeur,” in Poems and Prose of Gerard Manley Hopkins (London: Penguin Books, 1985), 27, accessible online at Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44395/gods-grandeur.
