I have always struggled to accept the way traditional theology defines and explains freedom within Creation (note: freedom does not exist outwith Creation except in the case of God) and could never get over the hump of created freedom being false and somehow unfree.
My intuition informed me that authentic freedom could not be created by God or anyone. Nor could it simply be an inherent part of God creating “actual” beings. Real freedom had to be, well, free.
It does not originate from some external source and exists entirely independent of contingency or necessity.
In a nutshell, I concluded that freedom must be uncreated to be true. An unorthodox position if there ever was one.
Fortunately, I eventually encountered the works of Nicholas Berdyaev and, to my surprise and relief, discovered that I was not the only person in the history of the world to hold to the unorthodox assumption of uncreated freedom.
Berdyaev argued for the ultimacy of freedom -- to the point that his vision of reality places freedom before being. Berdyaev’s views on uncreated freedom stemmed primarily from the mystic Jacob Boehme, who envisioned the existence of something called the Ungrund, unground or ground without ground, a primordial void of consciousness and spirit from which God creates all being.
Berdyaev took Boehme’s Ungrund, a step further and placed it outside of God. Now the Ungrund was not merely something from which God created but also something from which God emerged, pulling all of Creation with him.
Berdyaev’s rationalization of placing the Ungrund outside of God is triple-pronged—to explain the presence of an uncreated attribute man and God share, to define and protect freedom as authentic freedom against the limited doctrine of free will, and to absolve God from the existence of evil within Creation.
Berdyaev outlines his thinking succinctly in The Destiny of Man:
Out of the Divine Nothing, or of the UNGRUND, the Holy Trinity, God the Creator is born.
From this point of view, it may be said that freedom is not created by God: it is rooted in the Nothing, in the UNGRUND from all eternity. The opposition between God the Creator and freedom is secondary: in the primeval mystery of the Divine Nothing this opposition is transcended, for both God and freedom are manifested out of the UNGRUND.
God the Creator cannot be responsible for freedom which gave rise to evil. Man is the child of God and the child of freedom - of nothing, of non- being, (greek equivalent). Meonic freedom consented to God's act of creation; non-being freely accepted being.
God the Creator is all-powerful over being, over the created world, but He has no power over non- being, over the uncreated freedom.
The myth of the Fall tells of this powerlessness of the Creator to avert the evil resulting from freedom which He has not created.
For the sake of clarity, it is worth noting that creation from the Ungrund, as Berdyaev conceptualizes it, is not merely a reinterpretation of creatio ex nihilo because the meonic freedom inherent in the Ungrund is not no-thing.
It contains something God did not create—freedom—and that freedom unavoidably seeps into Creation via God’s act of creating; hence, Berdyaev’s declaration that God is master over all being but not the uncreated freedom that is innately within the beings he creates.
Uncreated freedom is also an attribute God shares with all other beings, dispelling the strict insistence on classifying and regarding God as a different category of being altogether.
As far as theodicy goes, I find Berdyaev’s explanation of evil far more convincing than traditional theodicean justifications; more convincing because it places the existence of evil beyond God’s powers of creating, absolving God of the presence of evil and protecting traditional tenets of God’s omnibenevolence.
At the same time, by placing the Ungrund outside of God, Berdyaev tramples ever so lightly on other traditional assertions of God as omniscient and omnipotent.
In any case, glad to no longer be adrift alone upon what seemed like an endless ocean, I adopted Berdyaev’s views on uncreated freedom for a few years. Nevertheless, I could not shake the intuition that his conceptualization of uncreated freedom contained many loose ends and gaps.
For starters, I could not wrap my head around the idea of freedom preceding being, at least not in the fundamental sense as implied by God’s self-emergence and simultaneous act of creation.
Yes, the will to be must precede the being, but the will to be had to be rooted in something, otherwise it remains a case of mere potential actualizing into being.
I also struggled to understand how the Trinitarian godhead emerged from the Ungrund, already distinct yet unified in eternal purpose, ready to create from the get-go.
As of now, I have settled on Berdyaev’s conceptualization of freedom as uncreated as true but within the framework of already existing beings in the form of consciousness and spirit.
In this sense, Boehme’s Ungrund is more than a bubbling cauldron of mere potential and becomes a place of chaotic, unrealized potential.
In my mind, God’s forming and organizing of this unrealized potential from chaos into Creation offers far more penetrating and coherent explanations for the motives of why God created in the first place while still maintaining the uncreated-ness of freedom already inherent within beings (pre-existing, temporally-eternal consciousness and spirit). It also underscores the virtually indescribably significance of freedom within Creation--specifically, the honing of uncreated freedom toward love.
RSS Feed
