Whose Service is Perfect Freedom

We are free.

The season of Eastertide begins on the night of the Easter Vigil, with a liturgy that poetically links the story of the Exodus with the story of salvation. Just as God delivered the Israelites from slavery in Egypt through the waters of the Red Sea, He delivers us from slavery to sin through the water of baptism. This parallel is brought out beautifully by the hymn we sing as we pass out of the sadness of Lent and into the joy of Easter:

Come ye faithful, raise the strain of triumphant gladness

God hath brought His Israel into joy from sadness

Loosed from Pharaoh’s bitter yoke Jacob’s sons and daughters

Led them with unmoisten’d foot through the Red Sea waters

In what way does Easter set us free, though?

In his first epistle, St. Peter writes, “[T]his is the will of God, that by doing good you may put to silence the ignorance of foolish men – as free, yet not using liberty as a cloak for vice, but as bondservants of God.” Evidently, then, our freedom as Christians has certain conditions. Along similar lines, the Collect for Peace, which we pray every morning as part of the Daily Office, begins, “O God, who art the author of peace and lover of concord, in knowledge of whom standeth our eternal life, whose service is perfect freedom…” To the modern ear, this prayer has a paradoxical ring to it. It might even sound like an unpleasant contradiction. Shouldn’t “freedom” mean that I can do whatever I want? Have we really been set free from slavery just to become “bondservants”?

To resolve this quandary, we need to understand why Christians have historically conceived of sin as slavery – and to understand this, we should begin by examining the claim that true freedom means the ability to do whatever we want. The definition of freedom cannot be quite so straightforward, for the simple reason that our wants are not so straightforward. We want all manner of things, and our wants often contradict each other. For instance, in a given moment, I may want both a healthy body and the food that will make my body unhealthy. Does freedom simply mean I am able to gratify my desire for momentary pleasure while frustrating my desire for a more long-lasting good? Or is true freedom – the “perfect freedom” of the Collect – something more specific?

In The Consolation of Philosophy, the medieval Christian philosopher Boethius argues that all men have a fundamental desire for true happiness. Sin purports to make us happy, but never can, because it separates us from God, the only source of true happiness. If power is the ability to attain what one wants, then, sin is not power but weakness. In a sense, we could say that the wicked are free to do whatever they want – and yet, according to Boethius, what they really want always eludes them so long as they pursue it by wicked means. 

The same logic is at play in the Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri’s epic poetic account of the life of faith. The entire Comedy is built around pictures of vice as slavery and virtue as freedom. Nowhere is the self-defeating, self-oppressing character of sin more strikingly evident than at the bottom of the Inferno. In the deepest level of hell, at the lowest point of all existence, Dante envisions Satan as a being of terrifying size, threatening appearance, and utter impotence. Trapped in ice from the waist down, Dante’s Satan weeps and gnashes his teeth while he flaps his enormous wings, forever trying to free himself – and yet the very flapping of his wings sweeps the pit of hell with bitterly cold winds, eternally hardening the ice that imprisons him. In the Boethian sense, Satan may be the most powerless being in the entire cosmos. The more he tries to “free” himself from God’s design, the more he makes himself a slave, trapped in the prison of his own self-centered willfulness.

By keeping this context in mind, we might begin to make sense of the paradox of Dante’s Purgatory. Dante envisions Mount Purgatory as the place where human souls are freed, and much like the claim that God’s “service is perfect freedom,” this claim is liable to strike us as strange. After all, isn’t the whole point of Purgatory that the souls there are compelled to endure unpleasant things for literal centuries?

Nonetheless, Dante is explicit: he “seeks his freedom,” and this freedom is, paradoxically, gained through the “custody” by which the souls on the mountain purge their sins. On each of Mount Purgatory’s seven terraces, the souls of Christians are freed from one of the seven deadly sins by which they were enslaved in their lives on earth. Those who proudly held themselves upright are bent down under heavy stones; those who looked on others with envy weep through eyes sewn shut. How do these sufferings free the souls from their sins? The deprivations of Dante’s Purgatory are analogous to the deprivations of our Lenten fast: they heal the souls’ ability to freely enjoy the things they were once enslaved to. At the top of the mountain, just as the fast of Lent gives way to the feast of Easter, the arduous work of Purgatory gives way to the joyous play of the Edenic Earthly Paradise. The souls who were lustful are now free to love chastely. The souls who were gluttonous are now free to enjoy the goodness of food. The souls who were prideful are now free to revel humbly in the immense worth they have in God’s sight. It is here, in Earthly Paradise, that Virgil, Dante’s guide and teacher, declares him truly free:

I’ve led you here by strength of mind, and art;

take your own pleasure for your leader now…

No longer wait for what I do or say.

Your judgment now is free and whole and true;

to fail to follow its will would be to stray.

Lord of yourself I crown and miter you.

In direct contrast to the lowest point of Dante’s world, where Satan is a prisoner of his own willfulness, this freedom is the high point of earthly existence. Why does Virgil declare Dante “lord of himself”? What makes this different from the hubristic presumption that led to Satan’s fall? At the top of Purgatory, Dante is truly free because, through a combination of divine grace and human effort, his will has been healed. He is free to do whatever he wants, because all he wants is to do good. He is restored to man’s original vocation as king and priest (“I crown and miter you”), free to enjoy the good creation which he both rules and continually offers to God. By the “holy waters” of Earthly Paradise, he is “remade as a new young plant appears / renewed in every newly springing frond, / Pure, and in trim for mounting to the stars.”

Perhaps we taste a hint of this heavenly freedom on Easter, but for now, we are still here on Earth. The Israelites passed through the Red Sea and discovered the desert on the other side. For us, too, there is a wilderness on the other side of Easter. We have been freed from sin in a real way; nonetheless, four weeks into Eastertide, we probably have plenty of proof that this deliverance was not a total, instantaneous transformation. For Dante, Earthly Paradise is only a foretaste of the incomprehensible joy that awaits in the blazing celestial spheres of heaven. For us, Resurrection Sunday is only a foretaste of the Resurrection that is yet to come on the last day. Until then, Eastertide is a call to recommit ourselves to the hard work of pursuing true freedom. Let us not, as the Israelites did, turn back to slavery in our hearts. Instead, as we press on into Easter, let us seek new ways to serve the One who set us free. Let us freely give up our freedom so that we may enjoy true and perfect freedom.