…the implication that Jesus is making [in Matthew 11] by calling his yoke “easy” and burden “light” is that we are, all of us, apart from him, striving under a cruel yoke and a crushing burden. And maybe one way to say that, and to see it, is to say ”“ as Jesus elsewhere did ”“ that knowing the truth will set us free, and that lies, falsehoods, not only deceive, they enslave.
But to make any sense of that, we have to understand what freedom is. Our modern, evolved notion of freedom is largely, I think almost exclusively, negative. It is always freedom from something: freedom from moral or legal restraint, freedom from limit, from being told what to do. So, it’s “Keep your laws off my body,” or, “The government can’t make me buy health insurance,” to choose left and right examples.
But there is another and older idea of freedom. It conceives of freedom as a positive capability. It is freedom for. It has to do with understanding what sort of a creature I am, and then the pursuit of those good things to which my being, my nature, is ordered.
In other words, a fish is not more free if it decides to forsake the limits of water and flop up on the dock and go for a stroll; it is decidedly less so.
This is good classic thinking. Power to Fr Allen; and thank you!
For any Pol Sci 101 course should deliver on both Positive and Negative Liberty. Thereafter, any Philosophy 101 should deliver on Freedom always being accompanied by Form; the two are inseparable – unless one is an existentialist of the atheistic kind.
Tragically, our western mass culture only knows of sheer autonomy (a pseudo neo-Kantianism?), and then this only of the consumer kind: so walk/drive into any large supermarket and embrace the choice of coffees on offer etc. etc. That’s my freedom, surely?!