Freedom, Free Will
See also: Choice, to choose, Slaves, oppressed, prisoners.
Freedom is a characteristic of spiritual beings, who can choose to perform good or bad acts. Free choice is rewarded by God if it is good, and punished if it is bad.
In "The Gospel as It Was Revealed to Me"
- How man frees himself from the grip of the flesh (of the world).[1]
- If God provided for everything, He would commit a theft against His friends. He would deprive them of the power to be merciful and thus to obey the commandment of love.[2]
- The Master and the freedom of His students.[3]
- Man is a free being. I have come to free him more and more from sin concerning the spirit and from the chains of a religion deviated.[4]
- Everything is spontaneous in Me and around Me.[5]
- Man has free will, which means that concerning the freedom of human thought and feeling, Satan cannot exercise his violence. God does not either.[6]
- Man does not know how to be perfect and he misuses the gifts of God who gave man the freedom to act, while commanding him the good things, advising him the perfect so that man cannot say: "I did not know".[7]
- The two coins given to all sons before their sending into the world are time and free will that God gives every man so that he uses it as he believes good after being instructed and trained by the Law and the examples of the righteous.[8]
- God is Father, He loves us and He weeps if we are bad, but He does not force us to obey. Yet he who is bad will be chastised one day by horrible torments...[9]
- Indeed, the freedom to conduct oneself, left by God to man His child, is like a servant capable given by God to man, His child, to help him make the vineyard fruitful, that is to say the soul.[10]
- God rarely forces human freedom.[11]
- The spiritual man is the true superman because he is not a slave to the senses, whereas the material man is a non-value, compared to the true dignity of man, because he has too many appetites that he shares with the brute and he is even inferior to it while surpassing it, making the natural instinct of the animal a degrading vice.[12]
- Satan helps to finish enslaving. God lets him do it, because from this struggle between the High and the Low, between Good and Evil, the value of the creature emerges. The value and the will. He will always let him do it, even after I have risen. But then Satan will have a great enemy against him and man will have a very powerful friend. - Who? Who? - Grace.[13]
- God has granted creatures free will, so that through it the creature perfects itself in virtues and thus becomes more like God his Father." And I tell you again, O scoffer and cunning seeker of sin in my words, that from Evil, which was voluntarily formed, God still draws a good end: that of serving to make men possessors of a deserved glory.[14]
- Oh! Truly I tell you that he who makes good use of his intelligence and his free will and who will invoke the Lord to see the truth of things, will not be ruined by temptation, for the Father of Heavens will help him to do good despite all the pitfalls of the world and Satan.[15]
In the other works of Maria Valtorta
In the Notebooks
- Catechesis of February 18, 1947: "The free will of no one, not even Christ, was compelled to yield or not to temptations. Temptation repelled, merit acquired. It is for this reason that God left man his splendid freedom of will, so that he may reach, thanks to it and by his personal merit, a deserved glory".[16]
In other sources
Simone Weil (1909 – 1943)
The proper function of intelligence demands total freedom, implying the right to deny everything and no domination. Wherever it usurps command, there is an excess of individualism. Wherever it is uncomfortable, there is an oppressive community, or several.
The Church and the State must punish it, each in their own way, when it advises acts they disapprove of. When it remains in the realm of purely theoretical speculation, they still have the duty, if necessary, to warn the public by all effective means against the danger of practical influence of certain speculations in the conduct of life. But whatever these theoretical speculations are, the Church and the State have no right to try to suppress them or inflict any material or moral harm upon their authors. Above all, they must not deprive them of the sacraments if they desire them. Because whatever they have said, even if they had publicly denied the existence of God, they may have committed no sin. In such a case, the Church must declare that they are in error, but must not demand from them anything resembling a disavowal of what they have said, nor deprive them of the Bread of life.
A community is the guardian of dogma; and dogma is an object of contemplation for love, faith, and intelligence, three strictly individual faculties. Hence, an unease of the individual in Christianity, almost from the beginning, and notably an unease of intelligence. This cannot be denied.
"The Waiting for God" – La Colombe / Livre de Poche editions – Paris 1963 - pp. 56-57