Abstract
The fact that the question of freedom has again become an item of philosophical controversy during the past century—as has happened before, to be sure, over the course of western philosophy—is a sign that the ground of freedom’s evidence has become occluded. Yet, freedom lies at the center of the Christian vision of the human person and the person’s relation to the divine order. Indeed, proposes D. C. Schindler in Retrieving Freedom: The Christian Appropriation of Classical Tradition, freedom “is the very essence of Christianity” (3). Thus, at the base of our contemporary debates about freedom are really questions about God and his self-revelation, and about the Christian claim to know God: At the core of the question of freedom ultimately lies the question of God, who is the source of both nature and freedom. To the extent that we allow the question of God to be eclipsed, which is to say that we block the intellect’s natural and essential access to God, whether we do so as individuals or as a culture, we do not simply begin to draw bad inferences regarding the existence or nonexistence of freedom; we become incapable of raising proper questions to begin with, incapable of thinking fruitfully about freedom and inquiring into its reality in a genuinely productive way. (331)
S.’s impressive Retrieving Freedom—the middle volume in a projected trilogy on the meaning of freedom—professes to be neither a genealogy nor an intellectual history, but rather “a work of tradition,” aimed to “re-source the meaning of freedom by seeking to enter into the heart of the idea in a number of landmark figures in the classical Christian tradition” (x). Taking Plotinus as synthesizing and bringing the preceding classical tradition to a fruitful culmination, S. then offers chapter-length readings of Augustine, Dionysios, Maximus, Anselm, Bernard of Clairvaux, Bonaventure, Thomas Aquinas, Godfrey of Fontaines, and John Duns Scotus. Ultimately, S. urges the claim that “freedom has an origin”—so that There can be no freedom if there is no God at the origin of all things, no God who is at once Creator and Liberator of the world, who is free of his very being, whose nature it is to be both free and freeing. To be both free and freeing, this God must be able to give rise to a world that has its own reality in itself, its own principle of self-originating self-motion, which exists in some fundamental way in itself and from itself. This God must not, then, stand in radical competition with this creaturely reality but must be able to share its reality himself, which is to say to enter into its history and to establish that history tout court, giving a liberating, theological sanction to what is in its essence a wholly natural reality. And this God must be able to do so because he is already in himself, in his own inner being, something like a reciprocity of wills, a reciprocity of freedom joined in love—a love that both generates and results from a nonreductive relation that can be perfectly, numerically one without being any less a reciprocity between abiding others. (331–32, emphasis original)
S.’s “work of tradition” serves then to ground and elucidate these insights as they surface and come to maturing expression—yet also come to be maintained only with difficulty by the end of the narrative—in the authors named above.
The depth of S.’s engagement with the primary authors and the secondary scholarship on each is really quite extraordinary. Moreover, his own creative interpretations struck this reviewer as both faithful to the sources expounded and genuinely insightful: I learned something new from every chapter—though I found the chapters on Plotinus, Maximus the Confessor, Thomas Aquinas, and Duns Scotus particularly stimulating. Admittedly, the depth and minutiae of the expositions sometimes felt a bit extravagant. I think here particularly of the chapter on Aquinas. This being said, S.’s chapter summations always lead the reader back from the detailed exegesis to a sense of the larger picture that is unfolding, and render the payoff in new insight worth the sometimes heavy going of the preceding exposition.
A fully adequate philosophy of freedom, says S., would, among other tasks, continue to “deepen the paradoxical unity of nature and person, actuality and potency, spontaneity and receptivity, and goodness and power” already being developed within the tradition (336). That project S. promises to carry forward in the third, more constructive installment of his trilogy. I look forward to reading that volume as well.