When Freedom and Love Were One:
The Annunciation
by Bishop Fulton J. Sheen
1952
TAKEN FROM THE WORLD'S FIRST LOVE
The modern age,
which gives primacy to sex, justifies promiscuity and divorce on the grounds
that love is by its nature free -— which, indeed, it is. All love is free love, in
a certain sense. To be devoid of love is of the essence of Hell. Scripture tells
us: "Where the spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty" (2 Cor. 3:17). The ideal
life is fulfilled -— not in subjection to an absolute law but in the discriminating
response of an educated affection.
The formula
that love is free is right. The interpretation of this can often be wrong. Those
husbands who leave one wife for another may justify their infidelity on the
grounds that "one must be free to live his own life." No one is
ever selfish or voluptuous without covering up his demands with a similar parade
of ideals. Behind many contemporary affirmations of the freedom of love is a
false rationalization, for although love involves freedom, not all freedom
involves love. I cannot love unless I am free, but, because I am free, still I
may not love as I please. A man can have freedom without love -— for example, he
who violates another is free in his action when there is no one around to
restrain him -— yet he certainly has no love. A robber is free to ransack a house
when the owners are away, but it is absurd to say that he loves the owners
because he is free to steal. The purest liberty is that which is given, not that
which is taken.
What many
moderns mean by freedom in love is freedom from something without being
free for anything. True love wants to be free from something
for something. A young man wants to be free from the parental yoke -— that
he may love someone besides his parents and thus prolong his life. Freedom of
love is, therefore, inseparable from service, from altruism and goodness. The
press wants freedom from restraint in order to be free to express truth; a man
wants to be free from political tyranny in order to work out his own prosperity
for him here below and for his destiny in the life hereafter. Love demands
freedom from one thing in order to place itself freely at the service of
another. When a man falls in love, he seeks the sweet servitude of affection and
devotion to another. When a man falls in love with God, he immediately goes out
in search of a neighbor. But to be utterly free from all restraint, a man would
have to be alone; but then he would have no one to love. This is precisely the
ideal of Sartre, who says: "Others are hell." The basis of his philosophy is
that anything restraining the ego is nothing. But every other man, and every
other thing, restrains the ego -— therefore, they are nothing. Truly, indeed, if a
man sets out to be free in the sense of living life only on his own terms, he
finds himself in the nihilism of hell. Sartre forgets that to fall in love means
to fall into something, and that something is responsibility. Thus, the same
love that demands freedom to exercise itself also seeks the curbs to limit it.
The liberty of love, therefore, is not license. Freedom implies not just a mere
choice but also responsibility for choice.
There are three
definitions of freedom: two of them are false, and one is true. The first false
definition is "Freedom is the right to do whatever I please." This
is the liberal doctrine of freedom, which reduces freedom to a physical, rather
than to a moral, power. Of course we are free to do whatever we please: for
example, we can turn a machine gun on our neighbor's chickens, or drive an
automobile on the sidewalk, or stuff a neighbor's mattress with used razor
blades -— but ought we to do these things? This kind of freedom, in which
everyone is allowed to seek his own benefit, produces confusion. There is no
liberalism of this particular kind without a world of conflicting egotisms,
where no one is willing to submerge himself for the common good. In order to
overcome this confusion of everyone's doing whatever he pleases, there arose the
second false definition of freedom, namely, "Freedom is the right to do whatever
you must." This is totalitarian freedom, which was developed in order to
destroy individual freedom for the sake of society. Engels, who with Marx wrote
the Philosophy of Communism, said: "A stone is free to fall because it
must obey the law of gravitation." So man is free in Communist society
because he must obey the law of the dictator.
The true
concept of freedom is "Freedom is the right to do whatever we ought," and
ought implies goal, purpose, morality, and the law of God. True freedom
is within the law, not outside it. I am free to draw a triangle, if I give it
three sides, but not, in a stroke of broad-mindedness, fifty-seven sides. I am
free to fly on condition that I obey the law of aeronautics. In the spiritual
realm, I am also most free when I obey the law of God.
In order to
escape the implications of freedom (namely, its involvement in responsibility),
there are those who would deny individual freedom either communally (as do the
Communists) or biologically (as do some Freudians). Any civilization that denies
free will is, generally, a civilization that is already disgusted with the
choices of its freedom, because it has brought unhappiness upon itself. Those
who make the theoretical denial of free will are those who, in practice, confuse
freedom by identifying it with license. One will never find a professor who
denies freedom of the will who does not also have something in his life for
which he wishes to shake off responsibility. He disowns the evil by disowning
that which made evil possible, namely, free will. On the golf course, such
deniers of freedom blame the golf clubs but never themselves. The excuse is like
the perennial one of the little boy who broke the vase: "Someone pushed me."
That is, he was forced. When he grows up, he becomes a professor, but instead of
saying: "I was pushed," he says: "The concatenation of social, economic, and
environmental factors, so weighted down with the collective psychic heritage of
our animal and evolutionary origin, produced in me what psychologists called a
compulsive Id." These same professors who deny freedom of the will are the ones
who sign their names to petitions to free Communists in the name of freedom,
after they have already abused the privilege of American freedom.
The beauty of
this universe is that practically all gifts are conditioned by freedom. There is
no law that a young man should give the gift of a ring to the young lady to whom
he is engaged. The one word in the English language that proves the close
connection between gifts and freedom is "thanks." As Chesterton said: "If man
were not free, he could never say, 'Thank you for the mustard'."
Freedom is ours
really to give away because of something we love. Everyone in the world who is
free wants freedom first of all as a means: he wants freedom in order to give it
away. Almost everyone actually gives freedom away. Some give their freedom of
thinking away to public opinion, to moods, to fashions, and to the anonymity of
"they say" and thus become the willing slaves of the passing hour. Others give
their freedom to alcohol and to sex and thus experience in their lives the words
of Scripture: "He who commits sin is the slave of sin." Others give up their
freedom in love to another person. This is a higher form of surrender and is the
sweet slavery of love of which Our Savior spoke: "My yoke is sweet and my burden
light." The young man who courts a young woman is practically saying to her: "I
want to be your slave all the days of my life, and that will be my highest and
greatest freedom." The young woman courted might say to the young man: "You say
you love me, but how do I know? Have you courted the other 458,623 young
eligible ladies in this city?" If the young man knew his metaphysics and
philosophy well, he would answer: "In a certain sense, yes, for by the mere fact
that I love you, I reject them. The very love that makes me choose you also
makes me spurn them -- and that will be for life."
Love therefore
is not only an affirmation; it is also a rejection. The mere fact that John
loves Mary with his whole heart means that he does not love Ruth with any part
of it. Every protestation of love is a limitation of a wrong kind of free love.
Love, here, is the curbing of the freedom understood as license, and yet it is
the enjoyment of perfect freedom -— for all that one wants in life is to love that
person. True love always imposes restrictions on itself -— for the sake of
others -— whether it be the Saint who detaches himself from the world in order more
readily to adhere to Christ or the husband who detaches himself from former
acquaintances to belong more readily to the spouse of his choice. True love, by
its nature, is uncompromising; it is the freeing of self from selfishness and
egotism. Real love uses freedom to attach itself unchangeably to another. St.
Augustine has said: "Love God, and then do whatever you please." By this he
meant that if you love God, you will never do anything to wound Him. In married
love, likewise, there is perfect freedom, and yet one limitation that
preserves that love, and that is the refusal to hurt the beloved. There is no
moment more sacred in freedom than that when the ability to love others is
suspended and checked by the interest one has in the pledged one of his heart;
there then arises a moment when one abandons the seizure and the capture for the
pleasure of contemplating it and when the need to possess and devour disappears
in the joy of seeing another live.
And an
interesting insight into love is this -— that, to just the extent that we reject
love, we lose our gifts. No refugee from Russia sends a gift back to a dictator;
God's gifts, too, are dependent on our love. Adam and Eve could have passed on
to posterity extraordinary gifts of body and soul had they but loved. They were
not forced to love; they were not asked to say, "I love," because words
can be empty; they were merely asked to make an act of choice between what is
God's and what is not God's, between the choices symbolized in the alternatives
of the garden and the tree. If they had had no freedom, they would have turned
to God as the sunflower does to the sun; but, being free, they could reject the
whole for the part, the garden for the tree, the future joy for the immediate
pleasure. The result was that mankind lost those gifts that God would have
passed on to it, had it only been true in love.
What concerns
us now is the restoration of these gifts through another act of freedom. God
could have restored man to himself by simply forgiving man's sin, but then there
would have been mercy without justice. The problem confronting man was something
like that which confronts an orchestra leader. The score is written and given to
an excellent director. The musicians, well skilled in their art, are free to
follow the director or to rebel against him. Suppose that one of the musicians
decides to hit a wrong note. The director might do either of two things: either
he might ignore the mistake, or he might strike his baton and order the measure
to be replayed. It would make little difference, for that note has already gone
winging into space, and since time cannot be reversed, the discord goes on and
on through the universe, even to the end of time. Is there any possible way by
which this voluntary disharmony can be stopped? Certainly not by anyone in time.
It could be corrected on condition that someone would reach out from eternity,
would seize that note in time and arrest it in its mad flight. But would it
still not be a discord? No, it could be made the first note in a new symphony
and thus be made harmonious!
When our first
parents were created, God gave them a conscience, a moral law, and an original
justice. They were not compelled to follow Him as the director of the symphony
of creation. Yet they chose to rebel, and that sour note of original revolution
was passed on to humanity, through human generation. How could that original
disorder be stopped? It could be arrested in the same way as the sour note, by
having eternity come into time and lay hold of a man by force, compelling him to
enter into a new order where the original gifts would be restored and harmony
would be the law. But this would not be God's way, for it would mean the
destruction of human freedom. God could lay hold of a note, but He could not lay
hold of a man by force without abusing the greatest gift that He gave to
man -— namely, freedom, which alone makes love possible.
Now we come to
the greatest act of freedom the world has ever known -— the reversal of that free
act which the Head of humanity performed in Paradise when he chose non-God
against God. It was the moment in which that unfortunate choice was reversed,
when God in His Mercy willed to remake man and to give him a fresh start in a
new birth of freedom under God. God could have made a perfect man
to start humanity out of dust as He had done in the beginning. He could have
made the new man start the new humanity from nothing as He had done in making
the world. And He could have done it without consulting humanity, but this would
have been the invasion of human privilege. God would not take a man out of the
world of freedom without the free act of a free being. God's way with man is not
dictatorship, but cooperation. If He would redeem humanity, it would be with
human consent and not against it. God could destroy evil, but only at
the cost of human freedom, and that would be too high a price to pay for the
destruction of dictatorship on earth -— to
have a dictator in Heaven. Before remaking humanity, God willed to
consult with humanity, so that there would be no destruction of human
dignity; the particular person whom He consulted was a woman. In the
beginning, it was man who was asked to ratify the gift; this time it is
a woman. The mystery of the Incarnation is very simply that of God's
asking a woman freely to give Him a human nature. In so many words,
through the Angel, He was saying: "Will you make Me a man?" As from the
first Adam came the first Eve, so now, in the rebirth of man's dignity,
the new Adam will come from the new Eve. And in Mary's free consent we
have the only human nature that was ever born in perfect liberty.
The story of
this rebirth of freedom is told in the Gospel of St. Luke (1:26—35):
When the sixth
month came, God sent the Angel Gabriel to a city of Galilee called Nazareth,
where a virgin dwelt betrothed to a man of David's lineage; His name was Joseph,
and the virgin's name was Mary. Into her presence the Angel came, and said,
"Hail, thou who art full of grace; the Lord is with thee; Blessed art thou among
women." She was much perplexed at hearing him speak so, And cast about in her
mind, what she was to make of such a greeting. Then the Angel said to her,
"Mary, do not be afraid; Thou hast found favor in the sight of God. And behold,
thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and shalt bear a son and shalt call him Jesus.
He shall be
great, and men will know him for the Son of the most High;
The Lord will
give him the throne of his father, David,
And He shall
reign over the house of Jacob eternally;
His Kingdom
shall never have an end."
But Mary said
to the Angel, "How can that be, since I have no knowledge of man?"
And the Angel
answered her,
"The Holy
Spirit will come upon thee and the Power of the most High will overshadow
thee.
Thus the holy
thing which is to be born of thee shall be known for the Son of
God."
The Angel
Gabriel, as God's spokesman, here asks Mary if she will freely give the Son of
God a human nature, that He may also be the Son of man. A creature was asked by
the Creator if she would freely cooperate with God's plan to take humanity out
of the mire and to let him be ravished totally by God. Mary at first is troubled
as to how she can give God a manhood, since she is still a virgin. The Angel
settles the problem by telling her that God Himself, through His Spirit, will
work that miracle within her.
But from our
point of view there seems to be another difficulty. Mary was chosen by God to be
His Mother and was even prepared for that honor by being preserved free from the
primal sin that had infected all humanity. If she were so prepared, would she be
free to accept or to reject, and would her answer be the full fruit of her free
will? The answer is that her redemption was already completed but that she had
not yet accepted or ratified it. It was, in a way, something like our dilemma.
We are baptized as infants, and our bodies become temples of God, as our souls
have been filled with infused virtues. We become not just creatures made by God
but partakers in Divine nature. All this is done in Baptism before our freedom
blossoms, the Church standing responsible for our spiritual birth as our parents
did for our physical birth. Later on, however, we ratify that original endowment
by the free acts of our moral lives -— by receiving the Sacraments, by prayers, and
by sacrifices. So, too, Mary's redemption was completed -— as our Baptism was
completed -— but she had not yet accepted, ratified, or confirmed it before she
gave her consent to the Angel. She was planned for a role in the drama of
redemption by God, as a child is planned for a musical career by his physical
parents, but it was not fulfilled until this moment. The Holy Trinity never
possesses a creature without the consent of his will. When, therefore, Mary had
heard how this was to take place, she uttered words that are the greatest pledge
of liberty and the greatest charter of freedom the world has ever heard: "Be it
done unto me according to thy word." As in Eden there took place the first
espousals of man and woman, so, in her, there took place the first espousals of
God and man, eternity and time, omnipotence and bonds. In answer to the question
"Will you give me a man?" the marriage ceremony of love becomes bathed with new
depths of freedom: "I will." And the Word was conceived in her.
Here,
then, is freedom of religion; God respects human freedom by
refusing to invade humanity and to establish a beachhead in time without the
free consent of one of His creatures. Freedom of conscience is also
involved: before Mary could claim as her own the great gifts of God, she had to
ratify those gifts by an act of will in the Annunciation. And there is the
freedom of a total abandonment to God: our free will is the only thing that
is really our own. Our health, our wealth, our power -— all these God can take from
us. But our freedom he leaves to us, even in hell. Because freedom is our own,
it is the only perfect gift that we can make to God. And yet here a creature
totally, yet freely, surrendered her will, so that one might say that it was not
a matter of Mary's will doing the will of her Son but of Mary's will being lost
in that of her Son. Later on in His life he would say: "If the Son of Man makes
you free, you will be free indeed." If this be so, then no one has ever been
more free than this belle of Liberty, the lady who sang the
Magnificat.
But there is
another freedom revealed through Mary. In human marriage there is something
personal and also something impersonal or racial. What is personal and free is
love, because love is always for a unique person; thus, jealousy is the guardian
of monogamy. What is impersonal and automatic is sex, since its operation is to
some extent outside human control. Love belongs to man; sex belongs to God, for
the effects of it are beyond our determination. Whenever a mother gives birth to
a babe, she freely wills the act of love that made her and her husband two in
one flesh. But there is also the unknown, the free element in their love,
namely, the decision whether a child will be born of the union -— whether it will
be a boy or a girl and the exact time of birth and even the moment of its
conception are lost in some unknown night of love. We are thus accepted by our
parents rather than willed by them -— except indirectly.
But with Mary
there was perfect freedom. Her Divine Son was not accepted in any unforeseen or
unpredictable way. He was willed. There was no element of chance; nothing
was impersonal, for He was fully willed in mind and in body. How is this true?
He was willed in mind, because, when the Angel explained the miracle,
Mary said: "Be it done unto me according to thy word." Then he was willed in
Body for now, not in some past obscure night; conception took place as in
the full effulgence of the brightness of the morn does the Divine Spirit of Love
begin weaving the garment of flesh for the Eternal Word. The time was
deliberately chosen; the consent was voluntary; the physical cooperation was
free. It was the only birth in all the world that was truly willed and,
therefore, truly free.
Every birth
partakes of the nature of the plant kingdom, in that the flower has its roots on
the earth, although its blossoms open to the heavens. In generation, the body
comes from parents who are of the earth; the soul comes from God, Who is in
Heaven. In Mary, there was hardly any earth at all except herself; all was
Heaven. The other love that conceived within her was the Holy Spirit; the Person
born of her was the Eternal Word -— the union of the Godhead and manhood was
through the mysterious alchemy of the Trinity. She alone was of earth, and yet
she, too, seemed more of Heaven.
Other mothers
know that a new life beats within them, through the pulsations within the body.
Mary knew that Divine Life beat within her, through her soul in communion with
an Angel. Other mothers become conscious of motherhood through physical changes;
Mary knew through the message of an Angel and the overshadowing of the Holy
Spirit. Nothing that comes from the body is as free as that which comes from the
mind: there are mothers who yearn for children, but they have to wait upon
processes subject to nature. In Mary alone a Child waited not on nature
but on her acceptance of the Divine will. All she had to say was Fiat,
and she conceived. This is what all birth would have been without sin -— a matter
of human wills uniting themselves with the Divine will and, through the union of
bodies, sharing in the creation of new life through the usual processes of human
generation. The Virgin Birth is, therefore, synonymous with Birth in
Freedom.
Mary! -— we poor
creatures of earth are stumbling over our freedoms, fumbling over our choices.
Millions of us are seeking to give up their freedom -— some by repudiating it,
because of the burden of their guilt -— some, by surrendering it to the moods and
fashions of the time -— others, by absorption into Communism, where there is only
one will, which is the dictator's, and where the only love is hate and
revolution!
We speak much
of freedom today, Mary, because we are losing it -— just as we speak most of health
when we are sick. Thou art the Mistress of Freedom because thou didst undo the
false freedom that makes men slaves to their passions by pronouncing the word
God Himself said when He made light and again when thy Son redeemed the
world -— Fiat! Or, be it done unto me according to God's will. As the "no"
of Eve proves that the creature was made by love and is therefore free, so thy
Fiat proves that the Creature was made for love as well. Teach us,
then, that there is no freedom except in doing, out of love, what thou didst do
in the Annunciation, namely, saying Yes to what Jesus asks.
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