When ancient peoples defended what they called their liberty, the word
stood for a plain and urgent interest of theirs: that their cities
should not be destroyed, their territory pillaged, and they themselves
sold into slavery. For the Greeks in particular liberty meant even
more than this. Perhaps the deepest assumption of classic philosophy
is that nature and the gods on the one hand and man on the other, both
have a fixed character; that there is consequently a necessary piety,
a true philosophy, a standard happiness, a normal art. The Greeks
believed, not without reason, that they had grasped these permanent
principles better than other peoples. They had largely dispelled
superstition, experimented in government, and turned life into a
rational art. Therefore when they defended their liberty what they
defended was not merely freedom to live. It was freedom to live well,
to live as other nations did not, in the public experimental study of
the world and of human nature. This liberty to discover and pursue a
natural happiness, this liberty to grow wise and to live in friendship
with the gods and with one another, was the liberty vindicated at
Thermopylae by martyrdom and at Salamis by victory.
As Greek cities stood for liberty in the world, so philosophers stood
for liberty in the Greek cities. In both cases it was the same kind
of liberty, not freedom to wander at hazard or to let things slip,
but on the contrary freedom to legislate more precisely, at least for
oneself, and to discover and codify the means to true happiness. Many
of these pioneers in wisdom were audacious radicals and recoiled from
no paradox. Some condemned what was most Greek: mythology, athletics,
even multiplicity and physical motion. In the heart of those thriving,
loquacious, festive little ant-hills, they preached impassibility and
abstraction, the unanswerable scepticism of silence. Others practised
a musical and priestly refinement of life, filled with metaphysical
mysteries, and formed secret societies, not without a tendency to
political domination. The cynics railed at the conventions, making
themselves as comfortable as possible in the rôle of beggars and
mocking parasites. The conservatives themselves were radical, so
intelligent were they, and Plato wrote the charter of the most extreme
militarism and communism, for the sake of preserving the free state. It
was the swan-song of liberty, a prescription to a diseased old man to
become young again and try a second life of superhuman virtue. The old
man preferred simply to die.
Many laughed then, as we may be tempted to do, at all those absolute
physicians of the soul, each with his panacea. Yet beneath their
quarrels the wranglers had a common faith. They all believed there was
a single solid natural wisdom to be found, that reason could find it,
and that mankind, sobered by reason, could put it in practice. Mankind
has continued to run wild and like barbarians to place freedom in their
very wildness, till we can hardly conceive the classic assumption of
Greek philosophers and cities, that true liberty is bound up with an
institution, a corporate scientific discipline, necessary to set free
the perfect man, or the god, within us.
Upon the dissolution of paganism the Christian church adopted the
classic conception of liberty. Of course, the field in which the higher
politics had to operate was now conceived differently, and there was
a new experience of the sort of happiness appropriate and possible
to man; but the assumption remained unchallenged that Providence, as
well as the human soul, had a fixed discoverable scope, and that the
business of education, law, and religion was to bring them to operate
in harmony. The aim of life, salvation, was involved in the nature of
the soul itself, and the means of salvation had been ascertained by a
positive science which the church was possessed of, partly revealed
and partly experimental. Salvation was simply what, on a broad view,
we should see to be health, and religion was nothing but a sort of
universal hygiene.
The church, therefore, little as it tolerated heretical liberty, the
liberty of moral and intellectual dispersion, felt that it had come
into the world to set men free, and constantly demanded liberty for
itself, that it might fulfil this mission. It was divinely commissioned
to teach, guide, and console all nations and all ages by the self-same
means, and to promote at all costs what it conceived to be human
perfection. There should be saints and as many saints as possible.
The church never admitted, any more than did any sect of ancient
philosophers, that its teaching might represent only an eccentric view
of the world, or that its guidance and consolations might be suitable
only at one stage of human development. To waver in the pursuit of the
orthodox ideal could only betray frivolity and want of self-knowledge.
The truth of things and the happiness of each man could not lie
elsewhere than where the church, summing up all human experience and
all divine revelation, had placed it once for all and for everybody.
The liberty of the church to fulfil its mission was accordingly hostile
to any liberty of dispersion, to any radical consecutive independence,
in the life of individuals or of nations.
When it came to full fruition this orthodox freedom was far from gay;
it was called sanctity. The freedom of pagan philosophers too had
turned out to be rather a stiff and severe pose; but in the Christian
dispensation this austerity of true happiness was less to be wondered
at, since life on earth was reputed to be abnormal from the beginning,
and infected with hereditary disease. The full beauty and joy of
restored liberty could hardly become evident in this life. Nevertheless
a certain beauty and joy did radiate visibly from the saints; and
while we may well think their renunciations and penances misguided or
excessive, it is certain that, like the Spartans and the philosophers,
they got something for their pains. Their bodies and souls were
transfigured, as none now found upon earth. If we admire without
imitating them we shall perhaps have done their philosophy exact
justice. Classic liberty was a sort of forced and artificial liberty, a
poor perfection reserved for an ascetic aristocracy in whom heroism and
refinement were touched with perversity and slowly starved themselves
to death.
Since those days we have discovered how much larger the universe is,
and we have lost our way in it. Any day it may come over us again
that our modern liberty to drift in the dark is the most terrible
negation of freedom. Nothing happens to us as we would. We want peace
and make war. We need science and obey the will to believe, we love
art and flounder among whimsicalities, we believe in general comfort
and equality and we strain every nerve to become millionaires. After
all, antiquity must have been right in thinking that reasonable
self-direction must rest on having a determinate character and knowing
what it is, and that only the truth about God and happiness, if we
somehow found it, could make us free. But the truth is not to be
found by guessing at it, as religious prophets and men of genius have
done, and then damning every one who does not agree. Human nature,
for all its substantial fixity, is a living thing with many varieties
and variations. All diversity of opinion is therefore not founded on
ignorance; it may express a legitimate change of habit or interest. The
classic and Christian synthesis from which we have broken loose was
certainly premature, even if the only issue of our liberal experiments
should be to lead us back to some such equilibrium. Let us hope at
least that the new morality, when it comes, may be more broadly based
than the old on knowledge of the world, not so absolute, not so
meticulous, and not chanted so much in the monotone of an abstracted
sage.
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