The Dignity of the Human Free Will and Its Transcendent Nature

As I was out driving early this morning, say at around 1 AM, I thought that I would take a drive to see the house that I spent some of my earliest years, a house that is located about 12 miles from where I currently live. As I was driving toward this former residence, for which I have very fond childhood memories, I begin to think about just how significant human free will is and the existential and ontological dignity associated with human free will.

I began to formulate some thoughts in a mentally articulated manner that I have never really thought before regarding the dignity, and transcendent nature and power of the human free will.

First, I reflected on the power of human free will to operate independently of the causes of the choices it produces. This freedom does not simply mean that we are not forced by others to do what we do and that we merely can do what we feel and/or think is appropriate. according to Catholic Theology, it is the ability of the human free will to transcend deterministic behavior, to act in an non-deterministic manner in which the human will can produce acts that are independent, and not determined by the actions causes.

Although I have long held a belief in the ability of human free will to act independently of the causes of its actions, another idea occurred to me. Essentially, this idea arose out of the idea that the human free will can do what it was not meant to do by God, in other words, it can simply act in ways it was not meant to do.

We can all agree that human free will choices such as murder, terrorist acts, reckless driving, rape, embezzlement of Church funds and the like are human choices that were not meant by God to occur. Some may say that God’s will is always accomplished but I retort in response, not so fast. It is never God’s will that human beings sin. God would never have willed that murder of millions of Jews, his chosen people, at the hands of the NAZI Gestapo, nor the 25 million Russian military troops and brave civilians who died fighting NAZI troops who invaded Russia. God never intended a situation that would arise by which dozens of nuclear submarines from the U.S. and Russia, and several from the U.K., France, and China would ply the depths of Earth’s oceans in a cold calculating manner wherein some of these subs have on an individual basis, perhaps enough nuclear warheads to end the human race if not all life on the surface of the Earth from the combined primary and secondary effects of targeting hundreds of large cities. God never intended Fundamentalists Islamic terrorists to start using woman as suicide bombers to kill dozens of innocent civilians, many of them young children who as young children, their angels go before the Lord on the children’s behalf, to paraphrase Sacred Scripture. The list of examples is huge.

What can we make of this human free will wherein even God’s will for us can be thwarted or disobeyed. I am not glorifying evil, but instead suggest that just as we humans have the ability for profoundly evil and un meant to be acts, perhaps with God’s grace we have the ability to go beyond the call of duty as we carry our life’s crosses and pray that ,our loved ones, and even our enemies grow all the more in the state of grace. There just may be some cases, wherein an individual human being desiring to do good to the extent that he or she was not called to do such good by God, or originally not meant to do such good, actually guided somehow in a mysterious way by God’s own grace, goes the extra mile and goes beyond the call of duty. Some folks might say that such cannot happen, at least in any normal sense or times, but we live in extraordinary times and I say, because God has chosen to let us humans make free choices on our behalf and on the behalf of others,  all bets are off on this one.

Another concept that occurred to me is the concept of violating the purpose of one’s life by his or her free choices and then coming back with flying colors to do good in the process of conversion. We all know of many instances of individuals who have sinned profoundly but who have come back to the life of grace with flying colors. A good example is that of Saint Paul of the early Church who personally was involved in the death sentences of perhaps hundreds of thousands of early Christians who were persecuted by the authorities for professing and practicing their faith.

I believe that God can provide a means for salvific atonement in cases where one takes his own life in a mortally sinful manner by ways known only to God. This notion seems to be clearly implied in the New Catechism of the Catholic Church. Note that the Catholic Catechism says that in many cases of suicide, culpability is reduced and that the chief hindrances to full culpability are mental disorders, fear, torture, etc. For cases where the culpability is reduced and the person who takes their own life is not in the state of mortal sin when he dies, then no means for salvific atonement known only to God is required since a stay in purgatory will then be the means of purification, a means which is known by every practicing Catholic. I personally believe that in some cases, persons who take their own lives go straight to heaven especially those as such who were the unfortunate victims of alleged CIA mind control experiments involving massive doses of LSD and perhaps even brain implants because such persons were martyred in the most horrible way, by the grave attacks on what we in modern civilization view as are inner sanctum, our very psyches. I just cannot see God punishing a poor bedraggled elderly street bag lady that commits suicide in a stupor of depression who has been rejected by her husband, raped, and abandoned by her children as insane who nonetheless stops by a Catholic Church some days and puts a quarter in the poor basket. Only a hypocritical, pretentious,  and self-righteous aristocratic snob could envision God punishing such a woman, and much worse, have a desire that God should punish such a woman.

One form of going beyond the call of duty is to make a so-called Heroic Act of Charity daily by which one offers any time up he will spend in Purgatory for the salvation of others and even for others to become Saints, even Canonized Saints, especially for family members and enemies. God will surely not let such Heroic Acts go unrewarded. I cannot think of a more selfless act than to essentially volunteer to spend time in purgatory, even while aiming at a state of sanctity in this life, for ones enemies to become Saints.

Even when we use our free will to transcend cause and effect or simply causality, and to in an ironic sense, transcend the purpose for which we were created, and perform acts that were not meant by God for us to do, we can make the initial choice to come back to God, and then come back into the fullness of Gods grace with the help of God’s grace.

Just as we have all inherited a state of original sin, we will be Resurrected at the end of time by the power of God. I believe we will actually be of an incredibly more exalted state because of original sin than we would have had we never sinned thru Adam and Eve. Just as Christ’s Human Nature was exalted and glorified in His Resurrection from the Dead after His Life’s suffering and Passion and death on the Cross, so will all of us as we struggle to overcome sin, sickness, persecution, the hassles of daily life in the life of a working family (a life in modern America which can be among the biggest of crosses due to the anti-life, anti-family culture that has spread through our civilization), the hassles of dealing with other motorists on our highways who treat us rudely, and the list goes on and on.

This wonderful thing, we call the human free will, is perhaps far more profound than even our intellects. Let us use our free will to harness our intellects and our hearts for the good of humanity. Only then, guided by Gods grace, will we build a civilization of love.

May the Good Lord bring you into the fullness of His Glory.

Regards;

Jim