I want to look at the phrase in this collect "whose service is perfect freedom". It interests me (as the italics I inserted probably should've tipped you off to). It seems counter-intuitive, how is service freedom? James says something along same lines in his epistle speaking of the "law that gives freedom" or "the law of liberty" depending on what translation you're looking at. This is what I want to discuss, and to do that I want to go back to Genesis and the Garden.
After creating man, God gives him three commands: to be fruitful and multiply, to subdue the earth and have
dominion over its creatures (both Gen. 1:28) and not to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Now this last command stands out from the rest for several reasons, not least of which is that it is the one Adam and Eve fail to do. It is the only prohibitive command, the other two are positive in that they tell man what he should do. But more than that, and here is where I begin to steal from C.S. Lewis' wonderful novel Perelandra that reimagines the Fall in a different setting, the command not to eat is the only one not immediately recommended to them by their own nature; man naturally desires to be fruitful and multiply and subdue the earth and thrive upon it (and we still don't seem to struggle too much with these two). This prohibitive command is actually the source of their freedom however, because in it they have the freedom to choose obedience, to love. If God had simply made obedience completely congruent with their natural desires, love for Him could not be shown through obedience as it would merely be acting in self-interest. It is what seems at first to be the arbitrariness of the command, because after all, the fruit is "good for food and a delight to the eyes and the tree was to be desired to make one wise," it is this arbitrariness of asking obedience outside of one's appetites that makes true obedience out of love possible. Which of course brings up a big problem- is the command, in fact, arbitrary?
Well the short answer is no, but it is important to see how and why we get there. You could perhaps argue that the choice of that particular tree was arbitrary, that the act of disobedience rather than some special property of the tree is what imparted the knowledge of evil to those who had previously only known the goodness of God and of His Creation, but that is not the core of the issue (no apple-related pun intended). We can see that obedience is not arbitrary by the effects of the Fall if nothing else. Man as "priesthood of all creation", to use Maximus the Confessor's term, affects the whole of Creation when he falls. N.B.- I realize that the sin-related account for natural evil raises alot of problems, for example, didn't hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, ect. all exist before the Fall since that is a function of how our planet regulates itself (as this clip from the Muppet Babies explains around the 6 min mark), but that is the subject of another post, one which I probably won't ever get around to writing. Obedience and the love of God is anything but arbitrary just as sin, it's inverse, is not arbitrary. Dante says something very interesting in the third canto of his Inferno, on the Gates of Hell is an inscription which reads in part,
"Justice moved my Great Maker; God EternalCharles Williams gives the following explanation in The Figure of Beatrice, "If there is God, if there is freewill, then man is able to choose the opposite of God. Power, Wisdom, Love, gave man freewill; therefore Power, Wisdom, Love, created the gate of hell and the possibility of hell." So then God in allowing us to truly love, also allows for the possibility of disobedience, of sin.
Wrought me: the Power, and the Unsearchably
High Wisdom, and the Primal Love supernal"
So, all that to say that obedience allows for us to love. I could've probably just told you to go read 1 John, but then the link to the Muppet Babies wouldn't have made much sense, would it?
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