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Again, this failure to distinguish between the two dimensions of freedom has worked out in a sense apt to discredit the very idea of freedom. The somewhat excessive stress laid on the education of will power—in keeping with the view that considers a formal ascendancy of the will over all spontaneous emotions as the mainstay of man’s progress towards perfection—has provoked a reaction, not unjustified in itself, against the all too artificial and inorganic character of such a conception of life.

Let us trust (some have argued) organic evolution rather than a highly-strung effort of the will; let our remolding be a work of God, who alone is able to transform souls, not a specious result of our own conscious planning. It mostly happens in such cases that this reaction, though healthy to a degree, has certainly overshot the mark. The sublime central meaning of freedom proper—in the sense of the first dimension of freedom—which constitutes the deepest expression of our God-likeness, has been overlooked.

It was because they failed to distinguish clearly enough between the two dimensions of freedom that certain votaries of the liturgical movement went too far (in a direction suggestive of magic automatism and moral passivity, as it were) in their emphasis on an organic inner life informed by the spirit of the liturgy. True, a unilateral education of will power as a means to achieve freedom, stressing the second dimension of freedom well-nigh exclusively, does deserve the reproach that it involves a mechanistic outlook on psychic life; yet such a criticism hardly applies to a conception of freedom centered on its first dimension. For the freedom of assenting to values and of stamping this assent with a personal sanction has nothing to do with mere technique or discipline; it definitely represents an inward and organic function of the will.

Without a doubt, the mechanism of the innervations subject to the command of the will may be regarded as a comparatively artificial structure in man’s moral life; without a doubt, it is characteristic of the deepest manifestations of our personality that they cannot be promptly and infallibly evoked by pressing, as it were, a button in the apparatus of our emotional dispositions.

But no grosser misconception could be thought of than to attribute this aspect of mechanical artificiality to our free and conscious assent to values, for the reason only that freedom in this sense, too, means a decisive step from out of the penumbra of a subconscious, primarily biological, mode of existence to the higher region of clear, distinct, express, and responsible acts.

Far more than any biological display of spontaneity, our free spiritual motion towards a union with values is, on the contrary, a true prototype of things generated (of whatever is genitum: that is, a manifestation in which our very being is somehow expressed and coined out) as contrasted to the mere artifact (to all things manufactured or made: factum). Instead of giving ear to the minimizers of freedom who would conceive of man’s progress towards perfection as modeled after the growth of an apple, as it were, we must understand that we cannot esteem the human capacity for a free and voluntary assent highly enough; for it constitutes the central condition of all adequate tribute to God from our part, so much so that for its sake (as has been pointed out above) God has even permitted sin to be possible.

We are called freely to assent to our transformation

And this, also, contains the answer—in its most important part, at least—to the question we are next faced with: What can, and should, be our own contribution to the process of our transformation in Christ? What is meant by the cooperation on our part to which St. Augustine refers in saying: “He who created thee without thee, shall not justify thee without thee” (Sermo 169.13)?

First, it is the free word of assent we are to speak to God and to our own transformation in Christ. In the free gift of ourselves that is implied in our decisive turn towards God (which finds its most tangible