According to the philosopher and mystic Simone Weil, instead of freedom being simply the absence of necessity, it should be conceptualized as a unity of thought and action, or a right balance between the two. To be able to perform actions thoughtlessly is not true freedom. To be able to think, without being able to act upon the fruits of such thinking, is also a lack of freedom. Freedom, in other words, is theory with praxis, with both elements present and active. By this conception, a wealthy but unemployed person who spends all their time in pursuit of mindless leisure is less free than the middle-class worker who finds satisfaction in their work and has their talents purposefully employed in pursuit of a social good.
The novelist Jonathan Franzen studied in Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, where an inscription on one of the buildings says, “Use well thy freedom.” Such an inscription is also described to be present in the university attended by one of the characters in his 2010 novel, simply entitled Freedom; the simplicity of the title telegraphs the ambitions of the work to be a Great American Novel. And America is nothing without freedom, there is nothing that Americans value as much as their freedom, as the popular characterization goes. But the commandment implies that freedom is a means, not an end. The founding fathers and the revolutionary armies have won the nation its freedom; now the citizens are free—for what, to do what? Perhaps the true glory and nobility of freedom depends not on the mere state of freedom itself, but on what such state leads to and allows to take place.
One of the vows usually taken by those entering Catholic religious orders, in addition to poverty and chastity, is that of obedience. Obedience to their superiors, to the Church, to divine law. Indeed, the entirety of the Church’s teachings often feels like a list of restriction after restriction, an outdated set of obstacles to happiness. Certainly, this is what feels like to many children studying in Catholic schools, who are taught what cannot be and what should not be, but are often not made to understand why not. It is also what it feels like to adults, both the non-believers as well as the believers who have not yet studied the faith well enough. But just like how happiness is not necessarily the same thing as joy or pleasure (the ancient Greek philosophers teach that true happiness, eudaimonia, consists of human flourishing), what the Church would like the faithful to focus on is the positive conception of freedom, as the freedom to obey or act or believe. Those who take the vows of obedience do so freely, willingly, lovingly; in fact, they are given all the opportunities to refuse to continue with their vows if they are unable to, during their formation. It is said that the greatest trick the devil has ever played is to convince us that he does not exist; in a similar vein, God loves us so much that he gave us so much freedom, that we are free even to not believe in, obey, or love him. What a terrible waste of freedom that would be.