Transformation in Christ_ On the Christian Attitude - Dietrich Von Hildebrand [103]
On the other hand, the converse type undeniably also exists: persons who do make use of their deeper freedom and respond adequately to values, whose inward decisions are not dictated by pride or concupiscence; but who labor under various inhibitions and in many cases, owing to their weakness, fail to translate their good intentions into actions.
Self-discipline is not the same as moral freedom
Certainly, to acquire a healthy will that is able to wield the power of command normally due to it is by no means immaterial for our inner development. Still, the place of that purpose in our striving for perfection is only a secondary one. The central object of our striving for perfection bears on the more essential capacity of using our freedom (in the first sense) adequately, in conformity with the will of God. In other words, the prime task of the education of personality is not to teach man how to make his innate freedom practically valid—though that may be next in importance—but to heighten his innate freedom into moral freedom proper. A mere preservation and exercise of our physical freedom—in the broadest sense of the term, including even the freedom of our inward response—does not by itself amount to the acquisition of that moral freedom which our freedom of will is really meant to prepare and support.
In contrast to persons who, drifting along as though unconscious, allow their freedom to droop to a point nearing extinction, those habituated to exercise their will power may be described as free; yet, as we have seen, they may at the same time lack the freedom of inner response and choice, being slaves to pride or concupiscence. They cannot be credited with moral freedom; nor even can those who, though enjoying a degree of inner freedom insofar as they are not simply dominated by their sensuous appetites or their instinct of self-assertion, have not used that inner freedom for an integral response to values and a subordination of self to the demands they utter, nor turned it into a basis for a free assent to God and His holy will.
He alone can be said to possess moral freedom who makes the right use of his inner freedom, in whom the central attitude of value-response has achieved a definitive victory over pride and concupiscence, and whose behavior in general and in its significant details is actually adapted to the logos of values as it appears in the various situations and aspects of life.
Moral freedom implies, not only the capacity to obey the demand of the values accidentally, but a permanent and intimate conformity to their suasion, sealed with the express sanction of the central personality. Moral freedom in this sense—which obviously belongs to what we have labelled as the first sphere of freedom is equivalent to freedom proper, freedom in its perfection; above all, it goes incomparably deeper than the merely formal or technical freedom embodied in the controlling position of the will.
Hence, the means that conduce to this moral freedom cannot be the same as those destined merely to impose a discipline on nature, that is, to ensure a formal preponderance of the conscious will. In certain schools of ascetical training, this fact has sometimes failed to receive due appreciation. There has been a certain tendency to expect too much from the development of man’s capacity to subordinate his entire nature to his will.
Yet, the mere fact that a person has achieved self-control—that whatever he decides to do he executes without inhibitions; that everything in him promptly obeys the command of his will—does not by itself indicate, let alone guarantee, that he has achieved moral freedom.