FREEDOM AND LOVE
Hi Friends,
The meaning of freedom appears with great clarity in relation to love. The supreme act of freedom is love, and love cannot be said to be authentic if it is not free. In fact there is no love without freedom. Man cannot fulfill himself completely except in self-giving and communion.
Love, then, is the fundamental meaning of freedom. Freedom and love are not successive stage of a process; they are inseparable. Freedom begins where love begins, and love begins where freedom does. We should not think that a free man must choose between love and egoism, for the man who has not chosen love is not free, nor is he who has chosen egoism is free. He who has decided to do only what he likes is in reality doing only what is decided by forces inside or outside of him, but which are not his true self. Egoism represses man’s greatest and most beautiful possibilities. For this reason, egoistic and hedonist notions of love are repressive. Egoism is a form of alienating dependency, even when it is represented under the guise of freedom. It is a dependence one’s instincts, which are given free rein, and by which one is used and abused. It is also a dependency on others, paradoxically; the egoist who seeks to subjugate others is in reality a slave of himself. Those who always hope to receive, without ever giving, need others, and are ripe of disappointment. On the other hand, he who loves adopts a posture of self-giving to others, and hence, in relation to them, he stands in a state of profound freedom. One cannot love without being oneself and without means promoting his freedom. Only those who love another’s freedom truly love.
To love means to will that the other be, and be fully. To affirm another and promote him in his existence is the true meaning of love. Traditional terminology speaks of amor benevolentae as opposed to amor concupiscentiae. For Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas, loving is velle alicui bonum (to will good to another). All authentic love is unconditional, disinterested, and faithfully. Unconditional means that it is directed towards another, not for what they have, but for what they are. Love is disinterested, that is it does not seek its own advantage to the detriment of others. Love is, moreover, faithful to a concrete person, not an empty and abstract fidelity.
Love is the most complete fulfillment of man’s possibilities. In love man finds the greatest fullness of his own being. Wojtyla observes: “The person finds in love the greatest possible fullness of being, of objective existence). However, love must be authentic. Current usage of the term, often reducing love to simply affective or sexual contact, undervalues the forms of true love.