The Syro-Malabar church has entered a period of discord. Unfortunately, the church authority has been unable to arrive at an concord. Where does the root of the issue reside? Has the freedom of conscience become a problem? The Catholic Church has tolerated a wide range of freedom of religious thought. The great advantage of the Church is found in precisely its lack of too much external guarantees. The Church affirms that freedom of conscience is not nonsense, but is actually the greatest treasure of Christianity. But we are living at a time of fear and timidity in the face of freedom of conscience, refusing to take upon ourselves the burden of freedom, the burden of responsibility. Freedom of conscience does not mean Protestant individualism. Freedom is not isolation of the soul, opposing it to all other souls and to the whole world. In the realm of freedom, of Christian freedom, there is a mystical union of that which is uniquely individual with that which is universally common. I can never accept anything against my free conscience, since God cannot countenance violence perpetrated against me. My humility before the highest authority can only be an enlightenment and a transfiguration of my free conscience within, as my mystical communion with a higher reality. The authenticity and spirituality of an ecumenical council is discerned and affirmed by the free conscience of the people of the Church. The Holy Spirit acts within the Church’s people, and makes a distinction between truth and falsehood. Everything is resolved through spiritual life, through spiritual experience. The Holy Spirit does not act like natural forces and social forces. Only the spiritual life and what develops within it are primary. The Holy Spirit is the ultimate authority within an interiority.
The crux of the issue is the inability to reconcile the dialectics within the Church. The dialectics of it is within every one. Are we capable of resolving the dialectics within? Or are we letting the conflict overflow into the community and society as a sort of Hegelian conflict? Only if man is a free spiritual being can he rise above nature and give witness to his greatness, of his divine image within. The grammar of synthesis is within, not only the grammar but also the grammarian also is the foundation of my interiority. “To be free is to have entered upon another order of being which is spiritual in character,” says Berdyaev when talking about the dynamicity of the spirit. He thus understands freedom of the spirit as a self-determination of one’s being, a free self-determination of ever coming closer to the origin of one’s being, which is spirit, because the conception of being which is not spirit, and is without and not within, results in the tyranny of naturalism of war and retribution. We cannot follow the Hegelian and Marxian way. Nicholai Berdyaev wrote: “This is the demoniacal element of Marxism and it is called dialectic. Dialectically, evil passes over into good, darkness into light. Lenin proclaimed that everything was moral, which served the proletarian revolution.” Unfortunately, we see diabolic Manichaean conflicts enter into the church with evil passing over as good.
Kierkegaard was critical of Hegel, but he himself introduced dialectical theology, whose positions Romano Guardini always rejected. Although Guardini often turns to Kierkegaard as a dialectical thinker who emphasizes the infinite qualitative difference between the finite and infinite, he does not uncritically endorse Kierkegaard’s dialectical performance. Instead, Guardini recasts Kierkegaard’s dialectical emphasis on opposition into analogical terms of difference-in-relation. The conflict of liturgy can easily be reconciled as difference-in-relation. We are ‘boundary dwellers’ between time and eternity, and the tension that we feel in this present moment is instructive and potentially edifying. For example, Guardini writes that the mission of the Church is to arouse in us that tension which constitutes the very foundation of nature: the tension between being and the desire to be, between actuality and the task to be accomplished and to resolve this tension by reminding us that we are God’s image and therefore capable of apprehending and possessing God.
One can rise above this dialectical tension by his creativity where the dialectics is resolved by one’s ethics and spirituality. To be free is to have entered upon another order of being, which is spiritual in character. Freedom of the spirit as a self-determination of one’s being, a free self-determination of ever coming closer to the origin of one’s being, which is spirit, because the conception of being which is not spirit, and is without and not within, results in the tyranny of naturalism. One must resolve the coincidentia oppositorum within one’s interiority with an ethical optics where one’s soul is the other. Freedom is the rising of initiative above the blind happenings of the world. As such, this is a value, it lifts man out of the connections of nature in which he is rooted, and it allows him to tear himself away, to rise into a different realm. Lack of freedom is total determination from outside, the serfdom of man under the universal course of events. The profound struggle of human thought to attain a metaphysical proof of freedom of the will is a witness to its worth.