78. Reason and freedom
78. REASON AND FREEDOM
Aren’t these two things contraries? Doesn’t reason restrict our will and our freedom?
It is exactly the opposite: reason creates our freedom:
Man does not choose of necessity. . . . The reason for this is seated in the very power of the reason. For the will can tend to whatever the reason can apprehend as good. . . . And in all particular goods the reason can consider an aspect of some good and the lack of some good, which has the aspect of evil, and in this respect it can apprehend any single one of such goods as to be chosen or to be avoided. The perfect good alone, which is Happiness, cannot be apprehended by the reason as an evil or as lacking in any way. Consequently man wills Happiness of necessity, nor can he will not to be happy, or to be unhappy. Now since choice is not of the end but of the means, it is not of the perfect good, which is Happiness, but of other particular goods. Therefore man chooses not of necessity but freely (I-II,13,6).
Senses and sense appetites perceive only particular goods, like this particular piece of delicious food. Reason perceives good in general, and therefore—because of our reason—we can freely choose between different concrete particular goods, as animals cannot. They always act according to the strongest instinct that is driving them at the time: if they are more tired than hungry, they will sleep; if more hungry than tired, they will eat. They always see and respond to whatever particular good looms largest in their view, like train travelers passing telephone poles. They always play the piano keys that are closest to their hand rather than reading the sheet music. But we can follow the sheet music and choose which keys to play. Their life is only noise, while ours can be music, precisely because we have reason, which can understand universals.
God loves to hear the music His children play.
Our music can be ordered—when it is played in obedience to reason’s sheet music—or disordered—as when an infant in a rage pounds on the keys. This is not freedom. The infant is not free to make beautiful music. Freedom requires the discipline, or discipleship, of reason, not just to regulate it from without, but to create it in the first place. We are not free unless we are good, and we are not good unless we listen to reason.
Hilary says: It is an unruly will that persists in its desires in opposition to reason. But the goodness of the will consists in not being unruly. Therefore the goodness of the will depends on its being subject to reason.
As stated above, the goodness of the will depends properly on the object (what is willed). Now the will’s object is proposed to it by the reason. . . . Therefore the goodness of the will depends on reason, in the same way as it depends on the object (I-II,19,3).