The Orthodox Imperative: Selected Essays of Avery Cardinal Dulles, S.J. by Dulles Avery

The Orthodox Imperative: Selected Essays of Avery Cardinal Dulles, S.J. by Dulles Avery

Author:Dulles, Avery [Dulles, Avery]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: First Things Press
Published: 2012-07-15T00:00:00+00:00


John Paul II and the Truth about Freedom

(August/September 1995)

The rootedness of freedom in the truth has been a constant and central theme in the writings of John Paul II. Already in 1964, as a young bishop at Vatican II, Karol Wojtyla criticized the draft of the declaration on religious freedom because it did not sufficiently emphasize the connection between freedom and truth. “For freedom on the one hand is for the sake of truth and on the other hand it cannot be perfected except by means of truth. Hence the words of our Lord, which speak so clearly to everyone: ‘The truth will make you free’ (John 8:32). There is no freedom without truth.”

Again in his first encyclical Redemptor Hominis (1979) John Paul II quoted the words of Christ, “You will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.” He added: “These words contain both a fundamental requirement and a warning: the requirement of an honest relationship with regard to truth as a condition for authentic freedom, and the warning to avoid every kind of illusory freedom, every superficial unilateral freedom, every freedom that fails to enter into the whole truth about man and the world.”

In his 1993 encyclical, Veritatis Splendor, the Pope rejects a series of ethical systems that propose novel criteria for the moral evaluation of human action. Despite their variety, he declares, these systems are at one in minimizing or even denying the dependence of freedom upon truth. This dependence, he says, finds its clearest and most authoritative expression in the words of Christ, “You will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.” In Evangelium Vitae (1995) the Pope reaffirms the unbreakable link between freedom and truth.

The Pope’s philosophy of freedom runs counter to the value-free concept so prevalent in contemporary culture, perhaps especially in the United States. Many people today would say that freedom and truth are wholly separable, since anyone is free to affirm the truth and abide by it, to ignore the truth, or even to deny it and act against it. If freedom were bound by the truth, they ask, how could it be freedom? In the course of his discussion of freedom and law in Veritatis Splendor, the Pope proposes his answer to questions such as these.

I

Before undertaking to answer these difficulties, we would do well, I believe, to take a close look at the meaning of the term “freedom,” which has different implications at the natural and the personal levels.

At the lower level, that of nature, freedom means the absence of physical constraint. A balloon rises freely when nothing obstructs it; a stone falls freely when nothing impedes it. A dog is free if it is let off the leash so that it can follow its impulses. To be free, in this sense, is to act according to an inner inclination. To be unfree is to have that inclination frustrated.

At the higher level, distinctive to persons, freedom demands, in addition, the absence of psychological compulsion. My



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