Several times in the prophets, the relationship between Israel with God is described analogously as that of a piece of clay being shaped and molded by a potter. Often, such as in Jeremiah, this is used almost as a theodicy. “The word that came to Jeremiah from the LORD: ‘Arise, and go down to the potter’s house, and there I will let you hear my words.’ So I went down to the potter’s house, and there he was working at his wheel. And the vessel he was making of clay was spoiled in the potter’s hand, and he reworked it into another vessel, as it seemed good to the potter to do. Then the word of the LORD came to me: ‘O house of Israel, can I not do with you as this potter has done? says the LORD. Behold, like the clay in the potter’s hand, so are you in my hand, O house of Israel. If at any time I declare concerning a nation or a kingdom, that I will pluck up and break down and destroy it, and if that nation, concerning which I have spoken, turns from its evil, I will repent of the evil that I intended to do to it. And if at any time I declare concerning a nation or a kingdom that I will build and plant it, and if it does evil in my sight, not listening to my voice, then I will repent of the good which I had intended to do to it,'” (Jer 18:1 – 10). In Isaiah, this analogy is used as a way to respond back to God – if we are as God has made us, then should not God take pride in his work and find a way to preserve it? “We have all become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a polluted garment. We all fade like a leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away. There is no one that calls upon thy name, that bestirs himself to take hold of thee; for thou hast hid thy face from us, and hast delivered us into the hand of our iniquities. Yet, O LORD, thou art our Father; we are the clay, and thou art our potter; we are all the work of thy hand. Be not exceedingly angry, O LORD, and remember not iniquity for ever. Behold, consider, we are all thy people,” (Isa 64:6-9). While the point of these texts is that Israel is a special creation of God, what is said about Israel certainly holds true to all men and women. Indeed, St Paul explicitly picks this up and uses it in the book of Romans. “You will say to me then, ‘Why does he still find fault? For who can resist his will?’ But who are you, a man, to answer back to God? Will what is molded say to its molder, ‘Why have you made me thus?’ Has the potter no right over the clay, to make out of the same lump one vessel for beauty and another for menial use? What if God, desiring to show his wrath and to make known his power, has endured with much patience the vessels of wrath made for destruction, in order to make known the riches of his glory for the vessels of mercy, which he has prepared beforehand for glory, even us whom he has called, not from the Jews only but also from the Gentiles?” (Rom 9:19-24).
Verses such as these emphasize the authority of God; they can make it seem that a human person is a completely passive object for God to use. Certainly we are not equal with God. However, there is another side to our relationship with God. Yes, he is our creator and he has given us our special form. What, however, is that form? In what fashion has he made us? “Then God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth,’“(Gen 1:26). We have been made like God, and have been given the task become his stewards over the rest of the earth. If we are to act in his place, we must be given the freedom to act. And we can explain this because humanity finds made in a form which is analogous to the divinity.
What is this divinity? There are many ways we can go about answering this question. But the foundation for all such answer should be with what the Apostle John tells us, that is, “God is love,” (1 John 4:8). It is because God is tri-personal that God can be love; and indeed, God is not just love but absolute love. For within the Trinity, all three persons love one another, and give themselves completely over, one to another – both singularly as well as communally. If God were merely uni-personal, God would be without any other to love in eternity as an eternal love, and so would not be not absolute love. If God merely existed as two persons without a third, the two could love one another, but they could not experience the joys of a love shared, and would not know all basic forms of love, as Richard of St. Victor explains: “For when two persons who mutually love and embrace each other with supreme longing and take supreme delight in each other’s love, then the supreme joy of the first is in intimate love of the second, and conversely the excellent joy of the second is in love of the first. As long as only the first is loved by the second, he alone seems to possess the delights of his excellent sweetness. Similarly as long as the second does not have someone who shares in love for a third, he lacks the sharing of excellent joy. In order that both may be able to share delights of that kind, it is necessary for them to have someone who shares in love for a third,” Richard of St Victor, “Book Three Of the Trinity” pages 373 – 397 in Richard of St. Victor. Trans. Grover A Zinn (New York: Paulist Press, 1979), ch. 15. It is with a completely selfless and self-giving love that the persons of the Trinity (in their unique personal fashion) commune with one another and are One God. Since we have been made in the image and likeness of God, in the image and likeness of persons who give themselves completely over one to another in love, we find our human existence was made for the same: to be persons who commune one with another in love, and share together the joy of God’s love for us and our love for God.
God’s actions are actions done in and through love. His creation of the world was a free will gift made by love. In this way, creation must not be seen as a necessity such as an emanation from God, yet it cannot be said that there was no purpose behind creation. Indeed, in a fashion, one can even talk about a necessity for creation while keeping in mind the absolute freedom behind God’s act of creation. “It is necessary for God; however, it is not necessary for God with a natural necessity, the necessity of His self-completion, nor is it necessary with a necessity imposed from outside, for there is no ‘outside’ for God. Rather, it is with the necessity of love, which cannot not love, and which manifests and realizes in itself the identity and indistinguishability of freedom and necessity. For love is free by nature, but it is not arbitrary in its freedom,” Sergius Bulgakov, The Lamb of God. Trans. Boris Jakim (Grand Rapids, MI: William B Eerdman’s Publishing Company, 2008), 120.
Just as it is by love we are created, in our end we are meant to experience the fullness of the divine life by that same love. It is the means by which we can dwell in God and God in us. “God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him,” (1 John 4:16). Thus it is in that love, in the vastness of God, we find everything needed for our salvation and deification. “Love supplies all that is wanting for our salvation; it contains abundantly every good thing, and lacks not even the presence of the supreme object of our desires,” St. Albert the Great, On Union with God. Ed. PJ Berthier (New York: Continuum, 2000), 70. And in this deification, our will is freed from the bondage of sin.
We experience freedom by our unity with the absolute freedom of God. For God shows us that true freedom is the freedom of love. By being made in the image of God, we are made in the image of love; of course, because we are in the image of God and therefore we are not God, this means we are made to be free, but our freedom is relative compared to the absolute freedom of God. As much as we embrace this love, it is that much we find our freedom. How do we embrace it? By taking it as a thing for ourselves? No, by following the example of the persons of the Trinity, who give themselves to each other; they know no ego which blocks their self-giving to each other. The ego traps us with its slavery; when we overcome the individualistic self do we find liberty. And it is only the work of God, which draws us back to him, which makes this possible. “The power of this act of drawing in is the exproportion of our privacy, i.e., in concrete terms, of our sealed-up egoism, of our addiction to the desires (‘επιθuμίαι) that seek to draw everything to ourselves; it is the liberation that brings us into freedom (Gal 5:1), for ‘where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom’ (2 Cor 3:17). This freedom is the opposite of addiction; it is the possibility for those who have been set free ‘to love, no longer for themselves, but for him who died and rose for them’ (2 Cor 5:15), and therefore, as an act of handing over, it is essentially service – service first of the self-expropriating love of God, and, coming directly from this, service for all those for whose sake God has expropriated himself,” Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord VII: The New Covenant. Trans, Brian McNeil (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989), 403.
Since true love is self-giving and productive, God, who possesses absolute love and needs no other, creates the world. If in any act of love there will be an act of self-renunciation for the sake of the other, then in God’s creation of the world we should expect such self-renunciation. And it is exactly what we find. God has created subjects with free will, and so has willingly limited his authority over them to vouchsafe that free will. “The creation of heaven and earth, as an act of God’s love flowing beyond the limits of the proper divine life into the world, is, in relation to Divinity itself, a voluntary self-diminution, a metaphysical kenosis: Alongside His absolute being, God establishes a relative being with which He enters into an interrelation, being God and Creator for this being,” Sergius Bulgakov. The Lamb of God, 128. Of course, despite God’s self-renunciation, God’s free will is in itself absolute and infinite while ours is relative and finite. But even that relative freedom is important because it points out that God made us in such a way that he doesn’t coerce us like a puppet to do his bidding. Rather, he comes to us, pleads for us to follow him, and opens up to us the paths needed for us to do so.
Providence should not be seen as a force which limits free will. It is, rather, where God interacts with the world and the people in it, opening up to each and everyone where they are at options and paths they can take to develop their own unique person. Providence is able to guide to these options, but it does not force us to follow them; it should never be seen as fatalistic. Rather it is what gives us greater freedom. It grants us the ability to free our will from the prison of the self and to grow in our relationship with God; and this, in turn, means we grow in our personal existence, in our role in God’s plan for creation. “The trinitarian God, and he alone, never changes into mere ‘fate’ but accompanies his creature in such a vital manner that, in doing so, he can attract and call him to a more intimate fellowship, encouraging him to bolder action, entice him to play a unique role,” Hans Urs Von Balthasar, Theo-Drama II: Man in God. Trans. Graham Harrison (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1990), 296.
Now, we must understand, being given relative freedom, this means that there are restrictions upon our freedom. For example, as actors in the world, we experience natural necessity (we need to eat, we need to sleep, we need to breathe, and if we do not follow through and do these things, our body will perish). Providence can open us up in such a way that natural necessities will be overcome through deification. But the reverse is also true. We can reject providence. We can close ourselves from its suggestions. God allows us to harden our heart (bringing ourselves into bondage). The more one closes oneself from God’s providence, the more one hardens one’s heart, the more the ego will develop. The more the ego develops, the more natural necessity and the passions of the flesh will rule. There will be consequences for our actions when they go against the will of God, but they are the consequences of un-freedom, of the fate which we make for ourselves (and God allows us to have). But other aspects of our relative freedom are not as dire as natural necessity; for example, our relationship with others who also possess some freedom of will demonstrates another way our freedom is restricted. This restriction can be understood either by the hermeneutics of egoism (where the ego will see these restrictions as an unfair burden upon the self and a source of misery), or it can be understood and seen in the hermeneutics of love (where we see the other, not as a rival to the self, but as a joy). Sadly, we live in a fallen world where people are pitted against one another. Their relations and ways of dealing with eachother can differ; a hostile force can and will employ natural law to coerce us to action; but our response, even here, can be either that of egoism or of love. And we must remember what love is capable of. “Love is patient and kind; love is not jealous or boastful; it is not arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrong, but rejoices in the right. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends,” (1 Cor 13:4-8a). Love, if it must, will endure even death for the sake of the other. “Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends,” (John 15:13). Jesus, of course, is the example which we must follow: he who is God, is love incarnate; and as love, he allowed human egoism to find its fulfillment, to strike out against himself, against God. Yet in the resurrection we have been shown how much greater love is; hate has a limit, love does not. This shows us that if we follow his example, we too shall know there will be an end to hate. Even if we die at the hands of hate, we know its final say cannot overrule love. For in our resurrection we will experience love without end.
It is in this fashion we come to realize the paradoxical reality of freedom. There are two ways freedom can present itself to us: the freedom to follow one’s passions to wherever they should lead, or the freedom to deny oneself to find out where that should lead. The first is the way the world generally understands freedom: freedom is perceived in the act of an individual, an act which follows from the desires of the self and leads to attainment of those desires, or at least the attempt for their attainment. But this freedom is an illusion, because the attainment the self and all of its desires is the attainment of the ego and one of its manifold prisons. Passion leads to action, action leads to habit, habit leads to the addiction whereby freedom is lost. “A freedom that consisted solely in the possibility of satisfying one’s needs would not be human freedom, since it would remain in the animal realm. An individual freedom without substance dissolves into meaninglessness, since the individual’s freedom can exist only in an order of freedoms,” Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Values in a Time of Upheaval. Trans. Brian McNeil (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2006), 48. It is because freedom can only exist in an order of freedoms, and can only exist in a community which experiences its real freedom in God, that one must divest oneself from egoistic interpretations of freedom. Real freedom follows the laws of love, the law of self-surrender, for it is only in that surrendering of the self do we find our personal existence. By dying to the self, we get the greater, unlimited realm of God’s love. “Now the herald’s cry that proclaims the gospel call to decision, is clear: it demands that a choice be made between two freedoms – a freedom which may take a personal or a collective form, of innerworldly self-determination (αΰτάρκεια), and a freedom of self-giving in faith’s obedience to the free love of God. The one who chooses self-determination will remain in the ‘servitude’ of the world and will be alienated from God, while the one who chooses self-giving has his home with God and is a ‘pilgrim and stranger’ (1Pet 1:1; 2:11; Heb 11:13) and a ‘resident alien’ (1Pet 11:17; cf. Heb 11:9) in this world,” Hans Urs Von Balthasar, Glory of the Lord VII, 501.
Now we need to take all of this back to our initial Scriptural image, that of the potter and the piece of clay. A piece of clay, by its own inclinations, will have no special form, no special meaning, and will exist in the prison of formlessness. It is only when it gives itself over to the potter to be formed will its meaning be made clear, and it will then be free to follow through with that meaning to find its real, and unlimited, possibilities. Giving ourselves over to God must not be seen as giving ourselves to a ruler who forms us without our consent; rather, it is through being molded by God, in cooperation with that molding, do we find our true, integral identify as a true personal subject, and it is only once that personal subject has been established can it ever have any real sense of freedom.
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