Wings in the Wind of the Spirit: Freedom for the Sake of Love

Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being changed into his likeness from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit.¹

Freedom, an attribute proper to persons, is a mystery which, like personhood itself, eludes circumscription by even the deftest positive philosophical analysis. Therefore, instead of approaching the subject of freedom from a philosophical perspective—which, to be sure, is not an unhelpful endeavor so far as it goes—I will instead consider it within the context of man’s relation to God, who is the source of all freedom. In this way, I hope to shed some light on the nature of freedom, its purpose, and provide something of a basic starting point for further reflection.

God, as Trinity, is the super-existent archetype and source of all created being in all its aspects and characteristics. As the ineffably transcendent fount of reality, He is beyond all limit and thus all definition. The movement of God, vis-à-vis creation, by His wings in the wind of the Spirit, cannot be understood within any framework of freedom conceived by man; the freedom in which He moves lays out before His face the path of His unconstrained love, which falls from the heavens like rain upon both the just and the unjust, and constitutes a call to all men to work together with Him in this love, in accordance with His Spirit and thereby, as His images, become truly free in the likeness of His freedom.

Since our freedom as humans is a gift of God, a part of the divine image in which He created us—and realized through our participation in His very freedom—we must not seek to understand it by way of philosophical analysis in terms of concepts formed through our fallen cogitation, distorted and fraught with the bent of our passions, but rather seek to purify ourselves in heart and mind in order to see God and to know His freedom. To know God is to love God; to understand His freedom is to walk in the Spiritual liberty of Christ. By experience, we know that we can spurn the will of God by choosing evil, and, through our personal will, use our freedom in a manner which leads directly to its own negation: self-willed slavery to the passions. In so doing, we give ourselves over as slaves to depersonalizing masters—whether they be our very bodies, other persons, evil spirits, the goods of this world, or anything else which might exert control over us by the reins of our passions—who, through our repeated submission to them, further contort the image of God in us and render us to varying degrees subhuman. But God, who gave us freedom in the beginning, does not desire our enslavement in this way. Quite to the contrary, and as St. Dumitru Stăniloae says:

The working of the Spirit as Person within us requires our free cooperation; this shows the importance that God gives us as persons. The Spirit asks us to assume His working and to make it our own through our will and work. The Spirit does not force; that is, He does not nullify the will that God has given us through creation. He does not nullify this will because He Himself is free of all passions and therefore of the passion to dominate as well. Freedom is the most proper characteristic of the Spirit, of the authentically supreme Spirit: “Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty” (2 Cor 3:17). The Spirit is not dominated by any will to dominate; He does not want to dominate any person but rather wants to liberate him of everything that limits and dominates him so that he may be able to activate all his powers, thus advancing into the infinity of the divine life and in its eternal newness. He wants to liberate the human person from the passions that enslave him and keep him enclosed in a monotonous repetition. He wants to make him free for the love of God, the infinite source of all gifts.²

As fallen men, we are faced with deliberating over and choosing between good and evil in our course of action: either fighting against our inclination to satisfy the passions which are in dissonance with God’s will or folding to the pressure they impose upon us and so acting against the grain of our very nature, which is the good creation of God. In this condition, we must use our fallen gnomic will to choose the good repeatedly while sidestepping the wiles of the devil by fixing our hearts and minds on Christ and so disdaining evil, even to the point of ignoring it. St. Porphyrios proclaims that “[l]ove for Christ…is the best and sole remedy for the passions”³ and describes in the following what he terms “the easy way” to defeat evil:

You won’t become saints by hounding after evil. Ignore evil. Look towards Christ and He will save you. Instead of standing outside the door shooing the evil one away, treat him with disdain. If evil approaches from one direction, then calmly turn in the opposite direction. If evil comes to assault you, turn all your inner strength to good, to Christ. Pray, ‘Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.’ He knows how and in what way to have mercy on you. And when you have filled yourself with good, don’t turn any more towards evil. In this way you become good on your own, with the grace of God. Where can evil find a foothold? It disappears!⁴

Through steadfastness in this effort, the seed of our human freedom which exists in potential form as an aspect of the image of God in us—contorted though it may be in this age—sprouts forth progressively into the reality of God’s freedom manifest in and through us. This divine freedom, true freedom, uninhibited by evil or even the thought of the actual possibility thereof, is freedom to empty oneself in love toward God and others, to find ineffable joy in choosing always and in every instance that which is in perfect accord with the will of God to the point of complete identification with Christ, His Son, who as man did precisely this since the moment he was born. St. Dumitru says:

[F]reedom is not a whim; it is not freedom to sin (which in fact means slavery) or a narrowness due to egoism and to repeating the same passions that take over our freedom. It does mean liberation from the slavery that has the appearance of liberty, from the slavery that cunningly hides under the mask of freedom.⁵

The liberty to which God calls us is both the basis for and the fruit of developing within ourselves the image of God into perfect likeness; divine freedom both supports the development of all other aspects of His image in us into a state of likeness, and is itself aided in its own development through the development of these other aspects of the image into likeness. By the grace of God through the Spirit’s working in us, we are able, more and more, freely to choose the good, deepening and solidifying the inclination of our hearts toward the good and weakening our proclivity toward evil; through our spiritual growth along these lines, we are able to spend less of our energy resisting evil by brute force and instead collaborating humbly with God in love, which expands the breadth and depth of our freedom. I suspect that this is at least part of why the devil and his fallen host seem to work proportionally harder to thwart the spiritual efforts of those who are to a greater degree developed in holiness—namely, because it takes much more cunning to devise schemes which might steal their attention and thus require their energy to expose and nullify. The passions are levers of control for the demons, but if one makes no effort to sanctify oneself in the Spirit, the demons have no need to pull them, for in this case we succumb to them as slaves without any overt manipulation; in holy persons, on the other hand, the tendency to dance to the siren songs of the passions has been to a much greater degree rooted out of their hearts, and thus what we, as those who are less spiritually developed, would consider genuine temptations do not exert on them the same gravitational pull toward sin as they do on us. In comparison to ourselves, the response to temptation of those who are more like Christ is closer to His when He was tempted by the devil in the desert, having come up out of the waters of the Jordan and the Spirit having descended and lighted upon Him.⁶

It is by the grace of God that we are made holy, set apart for liberty in Christ—and not by our own effort only; it is God alone who is in Himself truly and perfectly free—no less, and in fact moreso, because He cannot sin. And, paradoxically, we come to share in this freedom only through submission to Him. “True freedom is the freely accepted submission to the good, to the love of the other, to the voluntary obligation toward the good of one’s neighbor and toward God, who asks us to serve the good of others as well as our own true good”.⁷ Trace the footsteps of Christ through the Gospels, and you will find in them, pervasively, precisely this kind of submission to the Father manifest as perfect self-emptying love toward others, devoid of any trace of egoism. Christ, being Truth incarnate, who along with the Father and the Spirit cannot lie, says of Himself: “Most assuredly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of Himself, but what He sees the Father do; for whatever He does, the Son also does in like manner”.⁸ But this same Christ, in complete submission to God, is the freest man who has ever or will ever live. He said to us, “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free”⁹; and far beyond knowing the truth, the Truth is who He is. How much more, then, is He free!

All three Persons of the Trinity are integrally involved in bestowing upon us the gift of freedom into which we come to live more fully as we become more like God. This freedom to which we are called is the very freedom in which the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit live together eternally; but the Spirit plays a peculiar role in activating the divine qualities we receive through our regeneration as new creatures, at first in potential and then actualized progressively, all of which contribute to the realization of divine liberty in us by grace. St. Dumitru explicates this—within the broader context of our receiving and being anointed by the Spirit in baptism and chrismation—in terms of our threefold vocation as prophets, priests, and kings in Christ, the archetypal Prophet, Priest, and King¹⁰:

With the help of the Spirit whom we have received, we begin immediately to activate the quality we now possess of being teachers and prophets of God’s Kingdom, priests who bring the offering of ourselves and of nature as a sacrifice to God, and kings reigning over our own nature and the nature of the world, so that we may never be mastered by the world or led to use our natural powers in a way that pursues only our own passions and denies our freedom . . . Accordingly, through the descent of the Spirit upon us, we too have the heavens opened for us, that is, the mysteries of the endless life to come that transcend the laws of nature. This occurs within a process of discovery that is actualized for us in stages and in which we will share fully in the life to come, and within this process we can give prophetic testimony to the coming of that life in its fullness . . . With the coming of Christ and the reception of His Spirit, it has been revealed to men that a life limited within the boundaries of nature and the present age—a life that ends in death—is not all there is. The light and the power of the eternal life to come in the Spirit have burst forth from within it, and the revelation of the end of this age has begun.¹¹

In the most basic terms, God, who is love, in His freedom created us; to us He gave freedom so that we might love Him and one another with the same love with which He loves us. To love with His love, we must purify ourselves of all sin, nullifying the passions, becoming holy as He is holy, perfect as He is perfect, and free as He is free. Though we live in an age pervaded by sin and death, Christ has performed definitively the work of salvation necessary to bring us out of the devil’s yoke of bondage, to become holy, perfect, free, and so to love with His love. Because God is absolutely and infinitely transcendent, our transformation as His image into divine likeness is an eternal becoming, starting in this age when, in Christ, freely we die and are raised to new life in His Spirit, and finishing as an endless opening into the ever-moving rest of eternal newness in the bosom of the Father, which contains for those whose freedom has given birth to love things prepared by Him which eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor have entered into the heart of man—the deep things of God searchable only by the Spirit and those in whom He dwells, who spread their wings in His wind.

1. 2 Corinthians 3:17-18

2. St. Dumitru Stăniloae, The Experience of God, Vol. 4, p. 107.

3. St. Porphyrios, Wonderworker of Kavsokaliva, Wounded by Love, p. 135.

4. Ibid.

5. St. Dumitru Stăniloae, The Experience of God, Vol. 4, p. 107.

6. See Luke 4.

7. St. Dumitru Stăniloae, The Experience of God, Vol. 4, p. 108.

8. John 5:19

9. John 8:32

10. St. Dumitru lays out extensively these three vocations of Christ with respect to His work of salvation in chapters 5, 6, and 7 of The Experience of God, Volume 3: The Person of Jesus Christ as God and Savior. Through our participation in Christ, especially as His Body in the Church, these by extension become the fulfillment of our own vocation as humans, and are deeply embedded in the narrative of Scripture from the very beginning of Genesis.

11. St. Dumitru Stăniloae, The Experience of God, Vol. 5, pp. 62-63.