By Frederick Woodward
For anyone who has contemplated what it means to truly exist in a state of freedom, a state of self-sufficiency often appears as the sine qua non, or the essential element for such a condition. Respected figures throughout the Western tradition have long grappled with the practical implications of such an ideal. Henry David Thoreau’s glorification of life “alone… in a house which I had built myself… earning my living by the labor of my hands only,” comes to mind here. Even more so does St. Augustine’s longing to “live at ease and separate from the turmoil of men” with a few friends, undisturbed by the cares of civil life and able to “contemplate serenely” philosophy and theology. The pursuit of freedom and independence from an incredibly incessant society is nothing if not a recurring theme throughout the reflections and desires of men past and present.
This ideal of a self-sufficient community is indeed a natural good in itself.The monastics bore St. Augustine’s idea to fruition, as did those medieval states which practiced a largely self-reliant or locally-sufficient form of subsidiarity. But in doing so, they also skirted a pitfall which many moderns seem unable to avoid: pursuing this end for its own sake.
Unlike certain contemporary figures, the Church Fathers and medieval monastics recognized that any community desiring to survive longer than a generation’s time must organize around a transcendent animating principle. As they knew keenly, this alleviated a secondary, more hidden problem latent in the nature of any polis, self-sufficient or otherwise: the threat that a lack of ‘meaning’ poses to even the most well-established community.
Writing at the close of the 20th century, then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger clarified the implications of just such an exigency. As Paul Sullins summarizes, “in the absence of a common understanding of the good that is not subject to political alteration, individual freedom becomes meaningless in practice, descending into material comfort or anarchic violence.” Without a spiritual dimension, therefore, mere external autonomy is worse than worthless.
But what is the proper role of the metaphysical in the melodrama of individual freedom? Is not the idea of a spiritual-religious framework a coercive mental burden which hinders rather than helps men achieve freedom, as many current philosophers propose? Unsurprisingly, the moderns get it wrong here again. In doing so, however, they illustrate a crucial detail: true freedom is not merely physical separation from a corrupted society. It consists not solely in the “absence of coercion” for which libertarian philosopher and economist Friedrich Hayek argued. Rather as the fathers and monks had learned, this true freedom, this purest conception of self-sufficiency must contain by necessity an ordered spiritual component for its proper existence and preservation.
The function of this spiritual factor then, properly conceived, is to order the interior of the individual to freedom, just as self-sufficiency orders the exterior to this end. Here, however, a paradox unique to self-sufficiency is revealed. For, unlike the exterior aspects of the self-sufficient community which seek freedom by not being reliant upon the world and other non-community or non-family members for the essential components of physical life, the interior aspect is quite the opposite. Here, only by virtue of an individual placing himself into relation with an immutable being can this truest freedom result.
The philosophical explanation for this is simple. Within the self-sufficient mind, a type of Epicureanism often emerges—in fact, Epicurus himself might properly be termed the father of self-sufficiency. As the noted Catholic intellectual and convert T. S. Gregory observed in his 1935 magnum opus, “The Unfinished Universe,” Epicurus sought to create “a philosophical refuge for himself and his fellows.” Epicurus explains the implications of his ideal well. “Self-sufficiency is the greatest of riches,” he writes. “I have anticipated thee, Fortune, and I have entrenched myself against thy secret attacks,” he continues. “We will not give ourselves up as captives to thee or to any other circumstance.” Within the traditional Epicurean psychology of avoiding pain and pursuing pleasure, therefore, the avoidance of pain and misfortune takes precedence in the self-sufficient mind over the pursuit of pleasure, becoming the fundamental motivator.
The fault in this natural philosophy is that it deals primarily in externals and neglects man’s internal state. While it is relatively straightforward to establish an externally self-sufficient and therefore free existence, internally this task becomes far more difficult. This is because, presupposing the truth of Aristotle’s eternal observation, companionship is “one of the most indispensable requirements of life.” Accordingly, even the self-sufficient man, “without friends would not choose to live, though he had all other goods.” Even during his self-sufficient era, Thoreau dearly anticipated and enjoyed his weekly dinners with friend and fellow poet Ralph Waldo Emmerson. Yet, like all purely natural joys, the existence of such attachments remains transitory.
Accordingly, when this inevitable cessation occurs, what was once an occasion of joy inevitably becomes a source of overpowering natural sorrow to the remaining being who was ‘keeper and gifter’ of the love between the two, to paraphrase Pope St. John Paul II. This sorrow is an inescapable impingement upon the freedom so desired by the self-sufficient individual, and to make matters graver, the occasion of these attachments is not limited to the realms of eros or philia. The numerous friendships and familial loves one develops, when they reach their earthly expiration, become but further causes of grief and misery. The account of Achilles, perhaps one of the most stirring icons of a self-reliant warrior king, testifies poignantly to this. Early in the Iliad’s narrative, Achilles is portrayed with a “heart of iron,” needing nothing, and powerful because of it. By mid-story, however, the situation changes drastically. Achilles’ dearest friend Patroclus, fighting on Achilles’ behalf, is surrounded on the battlefield and cut down. Grief overwhelms Achilles, overcoming his internal mental battlements, and his sanity slips away as he takes to the battlefield “like an inhuman fire raging on through mountain gorges splinter-dry,” only to eventually recover his human sanity many days and atrocities later.
Similarly, to return to St. Augustine, whose pre-conversion philosophy has been described as “largely agreeing” with that of Epicureanism, as he relates in his Confessions, the death of a beloved leaves the human person broken. He recounts his own experience of grief as like having “a gouged and gory soul, which… I couldn’t find a place to put it down or rest.” The implication of the saint’s vivid depiction is brutally clear. It does the human being no good to provide freely for all of his external needs—food, clothing, shelter, defense, and even leisure—if his will to live freely and enjoy existence has become agony for him due to the pain which loss brings.
The Epicurean, no doubt, will recoil strongly at such a notion, much as Augustine himself did at this stage in his conversion. Yet, it is this precise circumstance which allows the paradox of self-sufficiency to play out. In desiring to end this agony of existence, which Augustine describes as tormenting him incessantly for months, he at last throws himself at the feet of the Divine, praying to find solace from his pain. In response, he receives an illuminating insight which becomes the basis for the hierarchy of good that he will later establish. Recognizing the genuine good that love, friendship, and human association have to offer, Augustine reconceptualizes the purely mortal nature of the attachments that formerly bound him. In the place of the transitory material, Augustine discovers the peace and assurance which the divine brings to natural goods. As he testifies,
“It is a happy person who loves Thee, O God, and in Thee loves his friend, and loves his enemy because of Thee. The only one who never loses anyone dear to him is the one to whom everyone is dear through Him who can’t be lost.”
By transforming his natural loves through consciously relating them to the divine, Augustine discovers he no longer fears the passing of his friends and family. Subsequently in his Confessions, the saint tells of his dear friends Nebridius and Verecundus falling ill and dying. Unlike the previous death of his friend, cause of such grievous agony, Augustine is at peace as he describes the death of his comrades. A short while later, Augustine’s own mother, the sainted Monica similarly succumbs to a tragic sickness and departs her son and his remaining companions. Yet throughout the entire ordeal, Augustine remains at peace, even as his heart and his body still mourn. His head and his soul both know what his emotions will learn—death, separation, and loss no longer need be feared.
Augustine’s transformation brings the type of freedom which the self-sufficient man desires most. By consciously ordering his loves and placing them in relation to the Divine, Augustine ensures that what was once passing no longer maintains its purely transitory nature. As the Thomistic metaphor of grafting a fallen branch onto the tree of its origin depicts, earthly relationships no longer remain purely natural sources of grief when their earthly interruption occurs. Instead, they become an occasion for the remaining being to rest within an eternal outlook, finding true peace. This framework becomes a sure path to the proper ordering of goods and according telos of human action which the monks and Fathers recognized as essential, and without which modern efforts at self-sufficiency are doomed to fail.
Finally, this conception holds the truest fulfillment of both the Epicurean notion of self-sufficiency and the Aristotelian conception of happiness. For, as Aristotle posits in his Nicomachean Ethics, “The self-sufficient we now define as that which on its own makes life desirable and lacking in nothing, and in such we think happiness to be.” No conception save the eternal outlook of St. Augustine can truly fulfill Aristotle’s criteria. This is the truest crystallization of what the moderns have forgotten; what the Fathers and the monastics knew so well, and what enabled the fruition of the monastery as a foundational form of polis throughout the West.
This is what the Christian life consists in.
Frederick Woodward is a Senior studying Political Economy, Journalism, and Finance.
