Pints With Aquinas - The Gift of Freewill | Fr. Gregory Pine, O.P.

Episode Date: September 30, 2023

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Hello, my name is Fr. Gregory Pine and I'm a Dominican friar in the province of St. Joseph and this is Pines of the Quinas. This past weekend I was in Nashville, Tennessee. Why? Well, because I went to visit the Dominican Sisters of St. Cecilia because they were hosting a retreat for young women, a kind of come and see weekend, and so they had me in to preach some of the conferences, which was awesome. And the topic or the theme for the retreat was freedom,

which is an awesome theme, especially in this setting, because I think that often enough, we feel our freedom to be a burden, or we don't know how to make sense of our freedom, and then default on it, thinking that we have to, what, optimize or maximize in some kind of like crass robotic way. But it turns out our freedom is a great gift, a great responsibility sure, but a great gift which ultimately helps us to partake of God's own freedom, which is wild. So let's

talk a little bit about freedom. Here we go. Okay, so sometimes when people describe freedom, they describe human freedom as in conflict or competition with divine freedom. But I want to submit to you that this is not the case. So I would say it's more so true that our freedom is a sharing or participation in the divine freedom. St. John Paul II talks about this a little bit in the encyclical which goes by the name of Veritatis Splendor

and he says that because of certain philosophical developments of like the 17th, 18th, 19th centuries, people get it in their mind, right, that either I am autonomous, which is to say I am a rule to myself or a law to myself, or I suffer heteronomous imposition, right, or I suffer the effects of heteronomy, which just means like other law. And we think about it in terms of something that is violent or something that is oppressive or something that represents a curb to my freedom or a limitation on my freedom. But St. John Paul II proposes a kind of middle way, which he describes as participated theonomy. That is to say that when

we abide by God's law, we partake of His very freedom and we come to discover that it enriches and actually emboldens our own freedom. Why? Well, because God is the giver of our freedom, and the giver of our freedom on the pattern of His own. God works more interior to us than we work within ourselves, okay? So God is able to act more naturally in our own nature than we ourselves are. Because when you think about it, what it means for something to be free or for it to be voluntary is in part for it to issue from us, like to genuinely be from us. And when God acts in us, you know, prompting us, as it were, to consent to and cooperate with His movement, He makes it to be genuinely from us, not because He's the great puppeteer

in the sky, but because He's the giver of our nature and the giver of our agency. And He sustains our nature and our agency and being throughout the whole course of our life, seeking to heal and to grow it with the gift of grace and ultimately to stabilize it in glory. So this makes it such that we have to rethink our understanding of freedom just a little bit. So we're not thinking of freedom in terms of the capacity for license or the capacity to choose among various options without any condition or without any limitation thereupon

because that's not the point. That might be what we would call a kind of freedom of indifference, but we're looking for a freedom for excellence. We're looking to be, again, emboldened or empowered in our pursuit of the good. And so, in preaching to these women, I tried to identify a couple of notes of freedom,

which we can identify in the divine freedom, which then have application in our own human experience. And the things that I picked out were, one, fixity, and two, play. What do I mean by that? Well, to be free is to be fixed in the end, in the sense that nothing can distract us from it or deflect us from it or otherwise deter us from it. Because the truly free person knows what he or she is about and is you know dead set on that pursuit And in our case as Christians, that's that's God

I mean the goal is God you can think about it in terms of holiness or sanctity or consecration However, you want to describe it in this setting, right? but ultimately what we're seeking to be fixed in is God himself and We see this, you know in in God's dealings with creation. So God creates everything by His love, on the pattern of His love, and unto His love. So in all that God does with creation, He does it for love. He has fixed in Himself who is love. Alright? And then this other idea of like play, namely that when you are fixed in the end,

it doesn't matter too terribly much what you use as the means. Okay? Because again, it's not about optimizing or maximizing because we're not just trying to produce effects or consequences, we're trying to grow in love, right? We're trying to affirm the object of our love, in this case God. So like if you're truly fixed in the end, it doesn't matter if you go in for A or B or C, if these various options can all be a way by which to affirm that end itself. And so the example I used in preaching was like gelato.

You come to find this excellent gelataria when you're visiting a friend in Rome and you try the first flavor and it's like, oh my gosh, this is delicious. Pistachio absolutely lights out. And you decide to go there the next two or three days during your stay and it's like yeah they have 99 flavors you can choose any number of them it's gonna be great you know you don't have to lament the fact that you can't try them all at nor do you have to make an exhaustive study of the potential benefits or like drawbacks of each flavor it's just like no just enjoy because you're there to love your friend

and you have found a way to do it together, namely eating gelato because it's wonderful. And let's go, right? That's the idea. So we also see this play again in God's dealings with creation and we can think here specifically of the plan of redemption. So God created this world. He could have created another world, but He created this world because He thought that

this world might be a wonderful way in which for us to experience his love because he found it to be a wonderful way to manifest his glory and work towards our salvation. Obviously we defected from that purpose, we sinned, our original parents sinned, and we ourselves are downstream of that choice. But in the plan of redemption, God again could have done any number of things, but he chose what he chose, namely that his only begotten son take human flesh, suffer die, rise from the dead, and lead us with him up to life eternal. Because it's wonderful, because it's beautiful, right? So God could have

snapped his fingers and affected our salvation by a seemingly more immediate or direct means, but he chose our Lord Jesus Christ as the means which was most fitting or, yeah, again, most wonderfully or beautifully suited to communicate the depths of his love for us, yeah, in the horror of human sin, but then also like our dignity as human persons and then our destiny as partakers of his divine nature. So insofar as God is fixed in the end, which is himself, you know, the divine love, he is free to play with the means, both in creation and in redemption. And again, it's not for us to say like, well, maybe it could have been blah, blah, blah,

this and such. I suppose that might be a fruitful avenue of speculation. But it's for us to kind of unpack the divine wisdom and the divine affection which are told forth in the choice that he actually made. So then we're meant to participate or to share in this freedom, this divine freedom. So when you think about it, it's a matter of our being educated in a certain fixity and educated in a certain play. So fixity, we're seeking to affirm God in all that we do. We say that we realize this in learning to love, because love is the fulfillment of the law, and love of God and of neighbor abides by the same logic, which is the recognition

that it's a gift, right? That we are here as a gift, that they are here as a gift, that God has given it as a gift, and that we can respond joyfully at the recognition and reception of this gift and enter into the ambiance of the gift, of its gratuity and of its liberty, right? Of its wonder, of its beauty. And so we seek to be yet more and more perfectly throughout the course of our lives fixed in the good God, fixed in the divine love. And then we are free to choose among the means.

So in this particular retreat, I was talking about it with respect to vocational discernment because I think a lot of people just kind of get hooked on, all right, you know, religious life is objectively higher, which it is, because it espouses objectively higher means to salvation. But we have to ask ourselves, what is subjectively mine? Right? What is the Lord calling me to? Because he's not about a bland egalitarianism of promoting everyone towards the objectively highest state, because it's not a bland egalitarian project, it's a mystical body. So we're each called to be small, to be humble, to play our part, and come to discover by the Lord's kind of indication in our loves, which are gradually being healed through prayer,

sacraments, study, penance, friendship, service of the material poor, and other things besides, we're called to discover where we fit, right? Not so as to be ground under or passed over, but so as to abide in the place in which we are meant to flourish for God's glory and our salvation. And so with the recognition of that, we can kind of play with our loves, because if we're seeking to heal and to grow them, that is to say to educate and edify them, then they will lead us further up and further into the divine plan, that we can trust God because he has trusted us with our own life. He has placed our lives in our hands so as to see in a certain sense what we'll do of them. Again, not to optimize or maximize,

not to like make an Excel macro which will give indication as to the best possible way that we could produce wonderfully self-vific consequences for all those whom we meet. Okay, I don't mean to make light of that, but sometimes it's good perhaps to think along those lines. But I just mean to say, like, the Lord wants you to love, and he's excited to see how you will love. So insofar as we are fixed in the end of God and seeking to be ever more so throughout the course of our life, we are genuinely free to play with the means, right? You might end a religious life, you might not, you might get married, you might not, you might marry this individual or that individual or someone else entirely. You know, it's like any number of things could happen and in the midst of those different things the Lord is present, right? The Lord is welcoming you into a deep relationship

with Him so that you might encounter and experience that divine intimacy so as to make a certain sense of your life and to render it precious So yeah so I think that rather than envisioning our freedom as in conflict with the divine freedom we can see our freedom as a partaking or sharing in the divine freedom that we can have a foretaste or a fore experience of the divine fixity and of the divine play and that our freedom which may may be perhaps we formerly thought of as a kind of burden, becomes in turn an opportunity to express the divine joy, the divine levity, the divine excitement at the prospect of how his glory can be told forth in the orders of both creation and redemption with wonder. So it's like in that setting then that we talk about freedom in the

particular terms that we describe it in, and like, you know, it's like the metaphysical tradition will say that you can choose whether or not, right, or you can choose under this or that aspect, and that's all super helpful in making those distinctions. But I think that this fundamental point, this most basic point, that there's not conflict or competition, right, that there's a genuine share, that there's a real participation. So rather than going in for autonomy or heteronomy, we have this middle way, which is to say this higher way of participated theonomy. Alright, so we can receive our freedom as the gift that it is and learn to exercise

it with greater delight, right, to exercise our freedom with greater freedom. That sounds like we're just defining things by themselves, which gets out of control. But this is God's plan for you. This is His intention for you. This is His delight for you. All right, that's what I wanted to say. This is Pines of the Quinas. If you haven't yet, please do subscribe to the channel,

push the bell, get email updates when other things come out. Also, if you haven't yet, check out God's Planning, which is a podcast which I contribute with four other Dominican friars. Things are moving and grooving check out God's Planning, which is a podcast which I contribute with four other Dominican friars. Things are moving and grooving on the God's Planning front. We just recorded a handful of episodes, some of which are quite good. I'm pretty pumped about them.

But yeah, we hope to hear from you in that platform or on that platform. And then we have a God's Planning retreat coming up for young adults, age 21 through 33. Send an email if you're slightly older and we'll make an exception. But we've got like 70 people signed up, so we're pretty jazzed, getting on towards capacity. So that's November 3rd through 5th in Malvern, Pennsylvania, outside of Philadelphia.

And it's about as cheap as it gets, in so far as I think we're only charging like $225 for a shared room, $275 for a single. So find out details about that at godsplaining.org. All right, know of my prayers for you, please pray for me, and I'll look forward to chatting with you next time on Pons with Aquinas.