How Choosing Evil is a Lack of Freedom

Archangel Gabriel, La Madeleine, Paris

Free will is perfect when it is ordered towards its proper end, which is the good. As long as the person with free will chooses the good he becomes more free. It is union with the good which makes him free. "If you abide in my word, you shall be my disciples indeed, and you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." (John 8:31-32). Freedom comes from knowledge of the truth and knowledge of the truth comes from living in the word of Jesus Christ, living in relationship, in a personal relationship, with the truth, living in discipleship with Him. The Truth is a Person. "I am the Way, the Truth and the Life." (John 14:16). Communion of Persons is the source of freedom. Love is the source of freedom. Divine union, in the Person of Christ, is the source of freedom.

When man uses his freedom to do what is wrong he harms his own freedom. He makes himself less free with every sin which he commits. There are three ways that freedom is harmed by evil: by willing it, by being capable of it, and by actually doing it. (Cf. Boethius, de consolatione, IV, 4a, 15, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Loeb Classical Library Harvard University Press, 1978, 340). That is why God, Jesus Christ, the Immaculate Conception, and all the Angels and the Saints in heaven, incapable as they are of doing evil, enjoy the greatest freedom. (Cf. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theol. Ia, q. 62, a. 8, ad. 3). Their freedom is commensurate with the fullness of being of each in his perfect exercise of union with his proper end which is God, union in the Most Blessed Trinity. Each person lives and moves and has his being in perfect harmony with the love of his life, which is God, in union with God. And that is why those who are wicked are said to be dead.

All men, endowed as they are with free will, are ordered toward the good by nature. Therefore, the good man achieves his natural end and the wicked man does not, which means that the good man is powerful and the evil man is weak. The evil man, knowing what is good, is led by inordinate desire to do what is evil, being weak to will and to do the good. He is thus less a man than the good man. The more evil he wills, can do, and actually does, the less of a man he is, the less he truly lives and the less he shares in his own existence, because he thereby abandons his proper destiny, his proper nature, which is directed toward the good: "for those who leave aside the common end of all things that are, at the same time also leave off being." (de consolatione, IV, 2a, 100-101, Ibid., 325-326).

Cf. María Esther Gómez de Pedro, Libertad en Ratzinger: riesgo y tarea, Madrid: Encuentro, 2014, 101-102. Also James 1:14-15 on how concupiscence kills man.

P.S. "Amen, amen I say to you, everyone who commits sin is a slave of sin. But the slave does not abide in the house forever; the son abides there forever. If therefore the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed." John 8:34-36