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The Dance of Two Freedoms
The Eternal in the Everyday
A conversation with Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, Archbishop of Vienna

edited by Riccardo Piol and Andrea D’Auria

In your talk at the Meeting [for Friendship Among Peoples], you said that man’s vocation is marked by a continual call to a “little,” daily happiness which leads to a “big,” eternal happiness, without which the little happiness would be impossible and illusory. Could we say that this statement of yours echoes what Fr Giussani wrote in his “Letter to the Fraternity’ of CL: “God destines you for eternity. He makes you eternal, because He destines you to understand who you are”?
The human heart is often not satisfied with earthly things. We live by doing daily things, in our work as in our free time, but in reality many people feel that this–in Paris they call it “boulot, métro, dodo,” i.e., office, subway commute, sleep–cannot be everything. The Christian proposal says: it is true that this is not everything, but you can find in the everyday the presence of what is greater, of what the heart aspires to; it is the eternal present in the everyday. For a person who is living in this, which is not only an ideal horizon but the real presence of the eternal in the instant, even the tiresome things in life can take on a new flavor, and are no longer distinguished by the feeling of a race with no end and no goal, like a hamster running around the wheel in its little cage. To indicate this experience, we have the great Biblical word love–that which causes the everyday to be traversed by the sense of the eternal. But there is another problem: we aspire to happiness and we think this means doing what we like, evading the limitations of the obligations of daily life, putting reality aside, as it were.

Is this the “drama the ‘I’ must live” that Fr Giussani talks about, i.e., the “adherence to the fact that the ‘I’ must be continually exalted by reality’s rebirth”? Is this the problem you are talking about?
I think that the crucial, existential point is this fear that if I do the will of God, I deprive myself of my own freedom. It is almost inevitable to think like this because our reasoning is tied to a heart wounded by original sin. But the Christian journey is a journey to learning that freedom is not the choice between good and evil: this is a form of fallen freedom, of man marked by original sin. St Thomas shows us that true freedom is reached when there is a chosen, aware, and–I would add–joyous adherence to good. Here, experience fulfills and corroborates this theory. Think about Mother Teresa, who will soon be beatified: was she a free person or a slave? I have rarely met a person as free and happy as she. The mystery of freedom is made real in the joyous adherence to good, to the will of God, to the being of which Fr Giussani speaks…

… and he also writes in his letter: “The fundamental principle of Christianity is freedom, the only translation of man’s infiniteness.”
Fr Giussani insists a great deal on freedom in this letter, but we have to understand wherein lies the freedom of Our Lady of which he speaks. Where is the freedom of the person who submits totally to the will of God? To reach an understanding of this, I would like to take an example from the Meeting. I was struck by the willingness of the volunteers who come for their vacation, therefore to enjoy the freedom, the “little happiness” of their vacation. And what do they do? They put themselves at the service of others and spend their vacation like this. How is it possible to be happy being so dependent? I think that here we see an essential anthropological fact that is at the heart of Christian life; I think we see what John Paul II has said so many times: the gift of self is the surest path to fulfillment of the person. Gift of self is freedom. It is right here that freedom shows itself, the sovereignty of freedom to overcome the immediacy of desire–above all for a very simple fact, which is the happiness of others, making others happy. My freedom is able to be invested in this overcoming of immediate desire directed toward sharing with others the happiness I find in the joy I see in the life of others. This is the method for arriving at the mystery itself of God. The joy of God the Father is the gift of Himself to the Son. “This is my beloved Son,” says God to the Incarnate Son; God’s joy is to be the gift of Himself, and in this He is infinitely free.

Fr Giussani writes that Our Lady “totally respected God’s freedom,” whereas we are usually accustomed to hearing that it is God who respects man’s freedom. In your opinion, what does this statement mean?
This phrase struck me; it is a bit provocative. Fr Giussani speaks of Mary as the fulfillment of freedom and reveals something that may be hard to think, but is very real in life. Mary is fully free in her adherence to the One who is freedom. Adherence to God is not adherence to a despot–perhaps this is the sense in which Fr Giussani says that Mary “totally respected God’s freedom”–but it is like entering a space of boundless freedom, not a freedom to do this or that, to do good or evil, to do whatever I want and whatever enters my head, but to be in total respect of God’s freedom. I think this is Fr Giussani’s insight: an adherence that makes us free and that sets in motion–we see it in all the lives of the saints–a dance of two freedoms.
St Paul always insists on the fact that God makes us free, that Christ has freed us for freedom. But this freedom means entering into the relationship of freedom which is that of the Holy Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, a mystery of boundless freedom. And Fr Giussani speaks of Mary as God’s method for leading us to this freedom. Therefore, looking at Mary, her motherhood, her presence in the life of men, is looking at a supremely free figure, because it is the dance of two freedoms, created and uncreated, human and divine.

Lastly, I ask you to comment on the passage in the letter where we read, “The essence of being is love, this is the great revelation. Thus, the whole moral law is totally defined by the word charity.” For today’s man, this too is a provocation. Don’t you think so?
As a child of St Dominic and thus of St Thomas, I say that this is a classic statement; it is not a surprise. St Thomas teaches us that love, charity, is the form omnium virtutum: that which makes a virtue be what it is. And this is a crucial point of St Thomas’ morality because justice without love cannot be justice; prudence without love cannot be prudence, cannot be itself; the act proper to justice needs to be intimately shaped by charity. And this is an ingenious view of charity. All these virtues exist–fortitude, temperance, justice, prudence–but each act of virtue, which means every truly human act, if it is not shaped by, if it is not impregnated with charity, is not itself; it cannot succeed in being true virtue. Just see when justice does not have charity as its measure, its driving force; it is not itself. This is why I say that Giussani’s statement is totally classic. But it also expresses a real everyday experience, not a theory.