Fourth Meditation: What Is Freedom? 173
quires a belief not only in the reality of created natures, which
must flourish to be free, but also in the transcendent Good
toward which rational natures are necessarily oriented. To be
fully free is to be joined to that end for which our natures were
originally framed, and for which, in the deepest reaches of our
souls, we ceaselessly yearn. Whatever separates us from that
end, even if it be our own power of choice, is a form of bond-
age to the irrational. We are free not because we can choose,
but only when we have chosen well. And to choose well we
must ever more clearly see the "sun of the Good" ( to employ
the lovely Platonic metaphor), and to see more clearly we must
continue to choose well; and the more we are emancipated
from illusion and caprice, and the more our will is informed
by and responds to the Good, the more perfect our vision be-
comes, and the less there is really to choose. Thus it is that
Augustine could say that the consummation of freedom for a
rational creature would be to achieve not the liberty attributed
by tradition to Adam and Eve, who were merely "able not to
sin" (posse non peccare), but rather the truest liberty of all, that
of being entirely "unable to sin" (non posse peccare). To this
state one can attain only when one's nature has been so eman-
cipated from error that nothing can prevent it from reaching
and enjoying the only end that can fulfill it: God. Only then is
a rational being not a slave to ignorance and delusion.
At the same time, rationality must by definition be in -
tentionality: the mind's awareness, that is, of a purpose it seeks
or an end it wishes to achieve or a meaning it wishes to affirm.
Rational freedom, in its every action, must be teleological in
structure: one must know the end one is choosing, and why.
Any act of the mind or will done without a reason, conversely,
would be by definition irrational and therefore a symptom of
bondage to something outside of or lower than the rational