Transformation in Christ_ On the Christian Attitude - Dietrich Von Hildebrand [101]
Nor is this all. In an even more integral sense of freedom than the one implied in his single cognitive and emotional acts as such, man—by virtue of his personal center of consciousness—can posit free decisions and thus call into being an entirely new sequence of causes. The Yes and No he pronounces, his free assent and dissent, are no mere effect of forces and influences, impressions and impulsions canalized or arranged by his personal center in the fashion of an agency of exchange, as it were; they are properly and actually generated by man’s central personality.
Free will is a sublime gift
This freedom of man is a truly miraculous aspect of earthly existence, and at the same time, one of the most sublime gifts that God has conferred upon our race. Freedom is the presupposition of responsibility: it is by virtue of his freedom than man can acquire merit and fall into guilt. It is on the basis of his freedom that man can be morally good or evil; and above all, that he is capable of that response to God which glorifies him in an incomparably higher sense than any values that may also inhere in unfree beings. God wills us to serve Him in the mode of this free assent, which is one of the deepest expressions of man’s God-likeness.
Free will introduces the possibility of sin
However, in order to endow man with this greatest of gifts—which lends him his specific dignity, provides his life with its ultimate gravity and emphasis, and underlies the importance of his behavior—what did God, so to speak, take into the bargain? Nothing less than sin: the possibility that man might offend God. For without freedom there can be no sin. Unfree nature cannot offend God; but for freedom, no disharmony would exist in the universe. And yet, God has assigned to man the gift of freedom, because, were he not free, he could not give God the response that is due to Him.
The individual alone has power over his own will
No power on earth, no temptation or attraction however potent, can force our assent; no pressure or influence can forcibly—in the way of a force majeure—provoke our decision. Much can be imposed on man’s body by violence (and also on his psychic state, so far as it is linked to the physical one); he can be made to perform certain actions repugnant to him, and particularly, can be prevented from doing anything he wishes to do; but no matter what limitations are placed upon his outward sphere of action, nothing, except himself, has any power over his inward decision, over his ultimate, and irrevocably free, Yes or No.
Freedom’s first dimension: sanction or disavowal
We must next distinguish two dimensions in which the freedom of man extends. The first dimension denotes man’s basic capacity of assent and dissent itself—the fact that he can confirm and reject things, recognize and repudiate values and non-values, by taking up an inward position in regard to them and engaging his person in defense of that position; that he is able to stamp the spontaneous responses of his nature, as elicited by a variety of values, with the ultimate sanction of his central personality, or inversely, to invalidate these natural reactions by a disavowal issuing from this supreme center; that he has the power to decide his attitude to things out of himself as it were. This basic, inward fact of personality has been described earlier as a constitutive element of what we have called true consciousness.
Freedom’s second dimension: the initiation of action
By the second dimension of freedom, we mean man’s capacity to enact, to decree, to command certain movements or actions. He is endowed with a certain range of effectiveness; his will has power over certain outward things and can cause or prevent their happening. We may effectively decide whether to do something or to forego it; to tell something or to keep it secret, according to our will.
Limits to the second dimension of freedom
In contradistinction to the first dimension