Ecclesiological Aesthetics (Part One): Misplaced Freedom and The Un-Aesthetic Faith

It is such a commonplace axiom of our current cultural situation that humans are meant to be free as to verge on an unremarkable platitude. But what does it mean to be free? As moderns our idea of freedom, notes David Bentley Hart (without approving of this view, I should say), correlates with the idea that

"We believe in nothing...that is not to say we have no beliefs, the truly modern person may believe in almost anything, or perhaps even everything...so long as all these beliefs rest securely upon a more fundamental and radical faith in the nothing--or better, in nothingness as such. Modernity's highest ideal--its special understanding of personal autonomy--requires us to place our trust in an original absence underlying all of reality, a fertile void in which all things are possible, from which arises no impediment to our wills, and before which we may consequently choose to make of ourselves what we choose. We trust, that is to say, that there is no substantial criterion by which to judge our choices that stands higher than the unquestioned good of free choice itself, and that therefore all judgment, divine no less than human, is in some sense an infringement upon our freedom...the ethos of modernity is--to be perfectly precise--nihilism." (The Atheist Delusion p.20-21; c.f. also Hart's essay Christ and Nothing at firsthings.com)

The inviolable liberty of personal volition, a will that is sovereign, and whose spontaneous exertions are constrained by nothing other than itself, is often seen as the highest good. The only good. Of course no one lives in such an extreme, and many of us explicitly or implicitly accept the boundaries of stability against the "storm of infinite possibility" (Hart, p.23) nonetheless as this type of non-determinist freedom reflects upon itself it realizes that even a God, or a stable definition of what humankind is limits its pure volition through pre-conceived channels. "The human," wrote Nietzsche as Zarathustra "is that which is to be overcome." (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, p.33) This is the true meaning of Nietzche's cryptic remark: the definition of man is to be undone for the unlimited potentiality of man to be unleashed from the necessity of a delineated existence. "How can a man be considered free," remarks John Zizioulas, "when he cannot do other than accept [the givenness] of his existence?" (Being as Communion p.42) We see this overcoming of man's own entrapment to himself illustrated with a haunting profundity in Dostoyevsky's The Possessed where the character Kirilov says "Every man who desires to attain total freedom must must be bold enough to put an end to his life...this is the ultimate limit of freedom; this is all; Whoever dares to commit suicide becomes God" (p.126) That is to say, the only freedom in the face of the fact that we exist is to choose to deny our own existence, and so to exalt the will over the givenness of our being. The existentialist Heidegger describes our being-in-the-world as a "thrownness," which gives our Being-there (our "dasein") the character of a pre-absorption into necessary perspectival limitations (Being and Time p.174-183) and notes that authenticity (read: freedom) is to overcome the "They," in life, that is to become unshackled by prior limitations of the faceless masses of the public, of society, and of communion, and become an authentic individual open to the future possibilities of existence (e.g. p.213) Though extreme, this type of freedom shows well the modern day mindset: I am free because I choose. I am choice choosing.

But with this concept of freedom, a freedom which is ultimately unrepresentable because every attempt to "represent," it by, say, a tendency or a concept, limits the ability of choice choosing, we destroy the good, the beautiful, and any sense of communion. It is literally at root, nothing. And in this sense it retracts from the world all the world's beauty; it defatigates the beautiful faces of friends, family, and community, because any representable beauty in this schema of freedom can only be represented as an assault upon freedom because it limits. If freedom of choice is true freedom, then I can only approach others as I will to. In one sense beauty becomes (as in Kant) an ornamental addition to reality as I perceive it, and not something inherent in the goodness of creation itself. We see this in our churches as evangelicals, where the predominant understanding of our gathering is that, while it is good for fellowship, it is ultimately a matter "between us and Jesus," (to cite the popular phrase) instead of seeing the beauty of our salvation as the Table Fellowship, the foretaste and anticipation of the glory of the kingdom of God. The church becomes evacuated of life because it is merely a collection of so many individuals. But the church is not merely a voluntary association of will, it is, as Zizioulas remarks, an ontology, a mode of existence that constitutes our very being as those who have been born again into the anticipation of God's kingdom. It is not merely a platform for individual spiritual formation, but is the very tangible, gathered, missional existence of the Kingdom, which is not some invisible spiritual reality but is an incredible form (that is, a specifiable thing) and so can be beautiful in how it represents itself, rather than some intangible phantom of mystical "spiritual" inwardness in the unceasing willing of the will. The gathering of the church cannot be based simply on our will to gather (even in the name of Christ) because as such it would simply be based upon the nothingness of this type of "Freedom."

But this is not the only concept of freedom. In the early Christian church, for example, Augustine distinguished free choice (liberum arbitrium) from freedom as such (libertas). The freedom to choose all humankind, fallen or redeemed, had to various extents given their lot in life. But only those who are redeemed have true libertas and so to say freedom in the true sense, that is , ontological freedom. In the future, says Augustine, true freedom will be the impossibility to sin (non posse peccare). This comes about because through continual formation to the Good the more we are emancipated from illusion and caprice, and hence the more perfect our vision becomes and the less there really is to choose (that is, not the end of choice per se, but the end of the ability to stray from the Good). We become, to use Gregory of Nyssa's phrase "mirrors of the infinite," who, in imitation of the form and beauty of Christ's self-giving and commitment to the flock, to His gathering of the People of God through the power of the Spirit, living representations of Christ, icons that radiate with the form of Christ as servant. But this form of Christ as servant is the very form of God (the scandal of the Gospel!) , that is to say, Christ is the very radiance of God's essence (Heb 1:3); so in imitation of Christ as servants we are the very images of God, shining forth His glory as a praise to Him. But as the form of Christ, we are to imitate as Christ the Servant, this means that our existence as Christians must be communal and missional: we exist as the form of Christ, as the Imago Dei by service to others in the Church and outside the Church. Service cannot be reified as the simple occupation of an individual, but is based upon the very lattice and interconnections of a communal form of existence in Love. This is the very existence of redemption. We are bound to one another through being bound to God. We reflect God in being bound to one another in service and living life. In fact, we see here, the concept of choice and of true freedom are so distinct that in some sense we have to say "to the extent that [the will] can choose differently face to face with the given norm of the good, it is already sinful because it is emancipated from commitment to the good." (Pannenberg, Systematic Theology vol 2 p.258). Indeed "the free deed knows itself in the end as the deed of God; the decision knows itself as guidance; the free venture knows itself as divine necessity." (Bonhoeffer, Ethics, p.246)

Hence when Gregory of Nazianzus writes "Let us be made lights in the world, holding forth the Word of Life; that is, let us be made a quickening power to others. Let us lay hold of the Godhead; let us lay hold of the First and Brightest light. Let us walk towards Him shining." (Orations 40.37) we can understand our shining (that is, our reflections of Christ) our walking together, and our quickening power to others as inseparable things. The beauty of the Christian life is its community, within itself, and in service to those outside of it. This is the aesthetic of the Church as the Body of Christ (who was a servant), and its true freedom to which we now reflect only imperfectly, but which we shall radiate fully at the end of the age.