Chapter 5 - FILL IN HERE
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Beneficial Constraints
“Do not consider that you are constrained, but to what you are constrained, if it is to the good or to the evil.”
St. Augustine
Liberalism, as I have told you, makes of liberty of action, defined in the preceding chapter as exemption from all constraint, an absolute, an end in itself. I will leave to Cardinal Billot the care of analyzing and refuting this fundamental pretension of the Liberals. He writes:
The fundamental principle of Liberalism is the freedom from all coercion whatever it may be, not only from that which is carried out by violence and which aims only at external acts, but also from the coercion which proceeds from the fear of laws and penalties, from social dependencies and necessities, in a word, from the ties of every nature which prevent man from acting according to his natural inclination. For the Liberals, this individual liberty is the good par excellence, the fundamental, inviolable good, to which everything should yield, except perhaps what is required for the purely material order of the city. Liberty is the good to which all the rest is subordinated; it is the necessary foundation of all social construction.1
Now, Cardinal Billot always says, “This principle of Liberalism is absurd, against nature, and visionary.” There you have the critical analysis that he develops; you will permit me to outline it by commenting on it.
The Liberal Principle is Absurd
This principle is absurd: incipit ab absurdo, it begins in absurdity, by pretending that the principal good of man is the absence of every tie capable of hampering or restraining liberty. The principal good of man, indeed, should be considered as an end: that which is desired in itself. Now liberty, liberty of action, is only a means, is only a faculty that can permit man to acquire a good. It is therefore completely relative to the use that one makes of it: good if it is for the good, bad if it is for the evil. It is therefore not an end in itself, it is certainly not the principal good of man.
According to the Liberals, constraint would always be an evil (except to guarantee a certain public order). It is clear, on the contrary, that, to take an example, prison is a good for the evil-doer, not only to guarantee public order, but for the punishment and amendment of the culprit. Likewise the censorship of the press, which is practiced by the Liberals against their enemies, according to the (liberal?) adage “No liberty against the enemies of liberty,” is in itself a good, not only to secure the public peace, but to defend society against the expansion of the venom of error, which corrupts minds.
It must be affirmed therefore that constraint is not an evil in itself, and even that it is, from the moral point of view, quid indifferens in se, something indifferent in itself. Everything depends on the end to which it is employed. This is moreover the teaching of St. Augustine, Doctor of the Church, who writes to Vincent:
You see now, I think, that we should not consider the fact that one is constrained, but to what he is constrained: whether it is to the good or to the evil. It is not that anyone can become good despite himself, but the fear of what he does not want to suffer puts an end to the obstinacy which was posing an obstacle and urges him on to study the truth that he did not know. It makes him reject the falsehood that he was upholding, seek the truth that he did not know; and he reaches the point of wanting what he did not want.2
I intervened myself several times at Vatican II to protest against the liberal concept of liberty, which was being applied to religious freedom, an idea according to which liberty would be defined as exemption from all constraint. This is what I declared then:
Human liberty cannot be defined as a liberation from all restraint, without danger of destroying all authority. Constraint can be physical or moral. Moral constraint in the religious domain is very useful and is found over and over all throughout the Holy Scriptures: “The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom.“3
The declaration against constraint, in no. 28, is ambiguous and, in certain aspects, false. What would happen, indeed, to the paternal authority of the fathers of Christian families over their children? To the authority of the teachers in the Christian schools? To the authority of the Church over apostates, heretics and schismatics? To the authority of the heads of Catholic states over the false religions, which bring with them immorality, rationalism, etc?4
It seems to me that the first epithet of absurd that Cardinal Billot attributes to the principle of Liberalism cannot be better reaffirmed than by quoting Pope Leo XIII:
Nothing more absurd and more contrary to good sense could be said or imagined than this assertion: Man being free by nature should be exempted from all law.5
We might as well say, “I am free, therefore I must be left free!” The underlying sophism is obvious if this is explained: I am free by nature, endowed with free will, thus, I am also free from all law, from all constraint exerted by the threat of penalties! Unless it is claimed that the laws should be devoid of all sanction? That would be the death of the laws; man is not an angel, all men are not saints!
Modern Spirit and Liberalism
I would like to make a remark here. Liberalism is a very serious error of which I have related the historical origin above. There is a modern spirit which, without being candidly liberal, represents a tendency towards Liberalism. It is found from the sixteenth century on among the Catholic authors not suspected of sympathy with naturalism or Protestantism. Now there is no doubt that it is a mark of this modern spirit to ponder thus: “I am free to the extent that there is no law that comes along to limit me.“6 Beyond a doubt, every law comes along to limit freedom of action; but the spirit of the Middle Ages, that is to say, the spirit of the natural, Christian order of which we were speaking above, always envisaged the law and its restraints first as a help and a guarantee of true freedom, and not primarily as a limitation. A question of emphasis, you say? I say: No! An essential question that marks the beginning of a fundamental change of mentality: a world turned towards God seen as the ultimate end to attain, cost what it may; a world entirely oriented towards the Sovereign Good, gives place to a new world centered on man, preoccupied with man’s prerogatives, his rights, his liberty.
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1 Op.cit.,pp. 45-46.
2 Letter 93—ad Vincentium—N° 16, PL 33, 321-330.
3 Observation sent to the Secretariat of the Council, December 30, 1963.
4 Oral intervention in the conciliar hall, October, 1964.
5 Encyclical Libertas, PIN. 180.
6 François Suarez, S.J. (1548-1617), expresses this mind when he writes,
homo continet libertatem suam—“Man holds his own liberty” in the sense that liberty is previous to the law. (De bon. el mal. hum. act., disp. XII, sect V, p. 448, quoted by DTC XIII, 473.) A Thomist mind like that of Leo XIII would not admit this disassociation of two realities strictly correlative.