Autor: Little, Joyce

Buch: The Church and the Culture War

Titel: The Church and the Culture War

Stichwort: Freiheit und Selbstbeherrschung; self-mastery (um der Wahl des Guten willen)- emotivistisches Selbst (Kontrolle gleichsam von außen)

Kurzinhalt: Freedom from sin is a form of self-mastery. That a man does not sin is important, but even more important is that he refrain from sin specifically because he is master of himself, ruling his desires rather than being ruled by them.

Textausschnitt: Freedom and Self-Mastery

118c The only sort of freedom which is capable of freely choosing the good is that freedom which has mastered its own desires, its own inclinations to do its own thing rather than to do the good thing. When the Pope speaks of man and woman at the beginning as "free with the very freedom of the gift", he says that the freedom of the gift itself requires a very particular kind of freedom which he specifies as "mastery of oneself (self-control)".1 Freedom from sin is a form of self-mastery. That a man does not sin is important, but even more important is that he refrain from sin specifically because he is master of himself, ruling his desires rather than being ruled by them. The new universal catechism speaks of that "royal freedom" which is Christ's gift to his followers, citing St. Ambrose's description of what that freedom entails:

That man is rightly called a king who makes his own body an obedient subject and, by governing himself with suitable rigor, refuses to let his passions breed rebellion in his soul, for he exercises a kind of royal power over himself. And because he knows how to rule his own person as king, so too does he sit as its judge. He will not let himself be imprisoned by sin, or thrown headlong into wickedness (908). (Fs)

119a Freedom as self-mastery is a foreign notion to the imperial, emotivist self. Such a self desires self-esteem, self-actualization, self-fulfillment, but rarely self-discipline. (If you doubt this, just watch the talk shows where the emotivist self holds forth and count the number of times the words "self-mastery" and "self-discipline" are used.) This is not to say, however, that the emotivist self is totally unaware of the need to control the bad consequences which all too obviously and often result from unrestrained freedom of choice. It is just that such a self seeks control not from within but from without, more often than not from science and technology. When this self seeks to have sex without babies, it has recourse to pills, condoms, abortionists, etc., which it calls "taking control of one's reproductive organs". When this self seeks to avoid suffering, it has recourse to the Dr. Kevorkians and the "death machines" of this world, and calls it "taking control of one's death". Far from taking control of oneself, however, these are all mechanisms by which many people today hand over the control in their lives to the things of this world, the things their technological societies have produced. This is precisely the sort of thing Pope John Paul II has in mind when he speaks of people becoming enslaved or conformed to the things of this world, rather than being conformed to the truth of their own being. (Fs)

120a It is interesting to note that William Bennett, in his popular Book of Virtues, places self-discipline at the head of his list of virtues. Perhaps this is because, without self-discipline, no other virtue is possible. How, for example, is a man to practice the virtue of, say, honesty without exercising mastery over his own inclinations to lie when it serves his own purposes? Or how is he to exercise the virtue of courage without first mastering his own fear? In a sense, self-mastery is the only way to "liberate" that goodness which resides within us even after the Fall. (Fs)

120b Self-mastery is not for its own sake (for then it would be little more than an exercise in pride) but for the sake of allowing us to "choose the good", a good which resides not only outside but also inside us. Indeed, the Pope insists that a certain "spontaneity" of action (a kind of "going with the flow") is possible to us, but only on condition that we have first mastered that concupiscence which tempts us away from the good. Self-mastery is the means by which we are able to release that goodness within us which concupiscence seeks to dominate. Thus, the Pope is able to speak of "a mature spontaneity of the human 'heart', which does not suffocate its noble desires and aspirations, but, on the contrary, frees them and, in a way, facilitates them."2 Such a mature spontaneity, however, is acquired "precisely at the price of self-control" and in no other way.3

120c Self-mastery exists for the sake of that "mature spontaneity" which frees man's "noble desires and aspirations". The highest level of freedom lies in the realization of those desires and aspirations. This level of freedom the Pope calls "the freedom of the gift", and it is entirely in service to this "freedom of the gift" that freedom of choice and the freedom of self-mastery acquire their significance. (Fs)