Freedom For—
By T. Renee Kozinski
Alex Murdaugh just got put in prison for life for killing his family, yet he comes across as a nice, middle-aged Southern man in videos from happier times and even on the stand in his own trial, a trial revealing a trash-pit of theft, lies, the works...rotting fruit with a wax overlay that has, like Lenin’s fake preserved face, fooled many with its apparent peace, control, and "freedom" to act, to manipulate. I’ve been a bit obsessed by the Murdaugh case (The rhetoric alone! And such Southern Gothic, complete with defense attorneys pointing guns at prosecutors!), and I began, today, to wonder why. I thought, as I got deeper into the redwoods behind my house, about myself, and that, perhaps, Alex’s Oedipal–circus, namely, the revelation of family horror, had done what the Greek tragedies were meant to do for the individuals in a polity: strike a tragic human chord, break through our wax visions of ourselves, cut tumors from us through katharsis.
I thought about Alex and his tragic flaws, his conflicted self, and myself, my own “struggle with two wills” that St. Augustine explains with such raw power in The Confessions. Alex did not seem free to me even when seeming the most just, a lawyer from a respected family in position, power, and wealth; he was, in reality, Socrates’ “perfectly unjust man,” an addict to more than opioids; the best explanation I heard about how a man could do something like this to his own flesh and blood, like Oedipus but perhaps with forethought, had to do with an extreme version of these two wills inside, perhaps, every person on the journey to eternity. The only people alive who do not have this are already, in their central being, in eternity with God: we call them, when we know about it, saints. What do these all have in common that Alex and, to varying degrees, all of us in various types of prisons do not?
If those with two wills are those struggling for personal “freedom from” and yet, as human beings, wanting “freedom for” love and genuine community, the ones among these acting more from fear generated by obsessing about “freedom from” all constraint will suffer, at the least, with deep, destructive conflict; at the most, they will commit various forms of crime, mostly hidden even from themselves. We all struggle with these two wills: we all live at times in our lives in the dark wood with Dante, faced with our wild appetites and the inability to go forward into genuine, generous self-gift. However, if we try to free ourselves by simply doing what we think others, even God, want of us, we may become a craven, misshapen copy of the truly free, because we are not doing it from genuine generosity. God does not want, I don’t believe, a grudging, fake, wax gift of the self, one that we think looks good to Him and to others. Thus, and this was the poet Dante’s genius to describe, God takes us through the inferno of our heart, with its penchant for prison walls, and then along the purgatorial path, with a new drive to travel the seven-story mountain, drawn up a hard path through gates upward to a garden where we can choose, finally, in some freedom, to submerge ourselves in the Lethe, that stream of self-forgetting...and finally, finally, expanding beyond the boundaries of our physical existence, to a place where no walls are needed, no gates, where human wills, original creations, order themselves to the will of God: self-gift. Freedom for. Freedom—
The insight I had today was that God wants us to give this true gift of self as a magnanimous gift; He loves us enough to want us to give ourselves from a place of true freedom, not even from what we think He wants. He wants us to be real, to face ourselves; He wants the real thing. What is that in this life? Who of us can be truly free when we are sinful creatures, creatures often misshapen by our modern culture, often educated in a factory model to be good, productive cogs in the economic and political machine, as perhaps Alex Murdaugh was? If we freely, truly, express ourselves as we truly are, shouldn’t we all be in some form of prison or other? Or at least due some punishment?
God made us as originals with a common nature, an angel-beast, a rational bridge between the physical creation and the deeper, more real, formative sources of reality (of which God is the ultimate Source to which we are meant to return–ah! Return! Paradise). We must steward, we must name, because we humans are alone those who are both able to see the Whole from the Parts and yet also live embodied within the creation. The body is not a prison, therefore, but a vocation. We have an identity, an original one, and we must, to be free, first be that person, express that person, know that person, in both the glorious and the grasping parts, in the parts of deep love and shallow, mis-fired desires. To be free, we must know ourselves as we are, as God sees us within our own wreckages. This is a kind of freedom, because we are in a relation to reality, and this is truth, and the truth sets us free—because only from that place can we hope to love with our whole being, in reality, connecting fully with all that exists connected to us.
So, to be free, I must see myself as I am, but I can only do that if I am both rational and honest: my mind must be in the right relation with reality, and this of course includes God, the Source of reality. This is humility, humus, “on the ground.” Only then, in the fullness of truth, seeing the beauty, acknowledging the rot, asking for healing, can I truly give myself with generosity and magnanimity. Prior to this is an imperfect gift muddied by unreality–about myself, others, the world. “Love God with your whole heart”—a heart whole though scarred and wounded—”and your neighbor as yourself.” How do we get here? We aren’t angels who can see ends intuitively. We must, as Dr. Kreeft says, crawl forward step-by-step, learning, moving through different acts of the mind, being formed by those wiser than ourselves, by experience—which can only happen through humility, the “foundation for even the making of every small leaf,” and love. How?
Education is one means...and this has to do directly, for young people, with the three liberal arts; I have always been inspired by the St. John's College motto, "Facio liberos ex liberis libris libraque" ("I make free adults from children by means of books and a balance"). I know that St. John's only goes so far, as does this motto; in fact, it is really stupid (talk about dilettantism!) without the proper telos, which is Duc in altum with Christ. However, in the proper context, this "making free adults from children" is one essential element of the foundation needed "to go deep" at the behest of Christ. The other is love, which also needs to be the foundation for education: what is best for the student, the individual in my class?
To be free, to become mature, we must know how our own minds actually work, and the connection between this mind and reality. Thus, the liberal arts are part of our Christian patrimony; it is no mistake that these arts were nascent in the means of Christian education, from Irish monasteries deep in the first millennium (Alcuin) to the full-fledged resurgence of Greco-Roman arts in the early Renaissance. We must connect through speech (grammar); we order our minds to reality, come to arete of thought through logic, and make the heart sing as “only the lover sings” (Augustine) through rhetoric and its subset, poetics.
However, this is not the only, nor perhaps the most important, part of coming to freedom, which must come through the habits that purge the self of dross and dispose one to see God. Socrates muses about this in the Meno when he tries to define virtue; the best answer I’ve come to on the unanswered questions he raises about how to teach virtue (which is the habit, ultimately, resulting in the freedom to then give oneself freely and magnanimously to God and to others) is the following: when Socrates stands there, in front of the young men at the end of the dialogue, asked yet again, “Can virtue be taught?” there is no verbal answer possible.
One can be educated to think clearly through logic and one can be persuaded toward the good by various forms of rhetoric and poetry, but ultimately, one must know it and desire it with the whole heart, and I mean in the Biblical sense of knowing: to be in the throes of becoming, loving, the good. I thought of Socrates, perhaps an almost perfectly just man who remained just even though he had to face a slew of attacks and slander (read his Apology), a man in love with Beauty (see the Symposium). If one was able to see, to love, Socrates even in his shame and ignominy, would one be on the way to virtue? Is it a sight, perhaps made possible in part (through informing, disposing) by the liberal arts? After all, Socrates taught, too, the fundamental art of dialectic.
What about the One for whom Socrates begs the question, literally and figuratively? What about the One who was truly just but was thought the most unjust as He hung like a criminal, thought of by his own people as we think of Alex Murdaugh, and so was the most perfectly just because gaining nothing from it, thirsting for souls in absolute poverty: Eloi, Eloi lama sabachthani? Is the freeing of ourselves, the ultimate teaching of virtue, only truly possible if we unveil ourselves freely to God from the ground at the Crucifixion? Christ knew to go beyond dialectic, as Socrates sometimes did: Christ was the master of rhetoric, the art that dialectic prepares for, the crowning art of the liberal arts; He was a living persuasion, a poem, the most powerful, skilled dramatist, producing the katharsis to end all katharses; He went straight to the heart like a rhetorical missile, knowing that the scandal of the Cross would separate those who could, would see Him from those who refused. All education falls short here...perhaps, though, it can pave the way, like St. John the Baptist, even though it itself, to be a good education, must know it is not fit to tie the sandals of His shoes.
This is beautiful.
I am always excited to read what appears here, either written by Thaddeus or others. I also like to hear from the family of a writer, to flesh out the picture. Clearly Renee has insight to share.
I have not followed or even heard of the Murdaugh case. Further, I had to look up some of the references, particularly Augustine's two wills, so perhaps I am not the intended audience. I have visited the Annapolis St. Johns campus with a son who decided not to to attend, however my great books exposure is, ahem, limited.
I want to know what your insight is. I carefully read, but I'm not sure. Do you have an ELI5 (explain it like I'm 5) version? I'd like to think that grace and heaven are possible even for the intellectually lazy or challenged.
You wrote:
To be free, to become mature, we must know how our own minds actually work, and the connection between this mind and reality.
Is it that we need to complete a process of self-discovery, as well as intend to be righteous, before our actions can be pleasing to God? I'd like to think there was an experiential or intuitive path too.