Description
Book SynopsisTrade Review“Retrieving Freedom is an impressive volume that locates the nature of free will in the very depth of both history and metaphysics. This is a much-needed contribution that will situate the questions of free will in the only horizon that can make them intelligible: a horizon in which we can get into view the very meaning and purpose of our freedom.” —Anselm Ramelow, OP, editor of God: Reason and Reality
"Lucid, capacious, and forceful as all of Schindler’s work, Retrieving Freedom reexamines the problem of human freedom within a philosophical and theological tradition spanning from Plotinus to Duns Scotus. The book’s provocative decision to retrace the question of freedom within Christianity’s inherently normative and metaphysical framework helpfully counteracts modernity’s habit of conceiving freedom through its ostensible contrary: determinism. Instead, Schindler’s brilliantly executed, contrastive approach allows us to see that the true source and origin of human freedom is found in Christianity’s Triune God as revealed in the twin orders of nature and history." —Thomas Pfau, author of Incomprehensible Certainty
"Through a close analysis of ten key figures beginning with (the not-quite-Christian) Plotinus and ending with John Duns Scotus, Schindler walks us through a historical tour de force of major—and not so major—Christian thinkers grinding out an ever clearer understanding of freedom through a process of clashing ideas that result in syntheses." —The Heythrop Journal
"This book is part of an ambitious project, and specialists may quibble with Schindler—for instance, with his unitarian rather than developmental approach to Augustine and with his admitted advances beyond the explicit words of Thomas Aquinas—but Schindler's lucid and often elegant discussions cannot fail to illumine. ...Recommended." —Choice
"D.C. Schindler’s work in Retrieving Freedom can show those who wish to truly restore Western civilization the true significance of freedom. Without a framework such as his, the idea of freedom as the chief political principle of a regime is surely doomed to become little more than a libertarian cliché." —The University Bookman
"Schindler has provided a tremendous scholarly labor in uncovering and explaining the Christian roots to the concept of Western freedom. His work deserves a wide reading among philosophers, political theorists, and historians of freedom." —Catholic Social Science Review
"This is a great work in the Augustinian tradition. Schindler rightly emphasizes that freedom should not be understood in the context of sin but as a gift of nature, with a divine origin and orientation. He repeatedly lifts the reader to higher levels, and his breadth of vision is also welcome; he writes about the complete development of a major idea and its relation to the most fundamental realities and eschews mind-numbing minutiae." —The Review of Metaphysics
Table of ContentsAbbreviations
Preface
Part I: Prolegomena
1. Christian Freedom and Its Traditions
Part II: Late Antiquity
2. Plotinus on Freedom as Generative Perfection
3. Augustine and the Gift of the Power to Choose
Part III: The Patristic Period
4. Perfectly Natural Freedom in Dionysius the Areopagite
5. Maximus the Confessor: Redeeming Choice
Part IV: The Early Middle Ages
6. St. Anselm: Just Freedom
7. Bernard of Clairvaux: Liberating Love
Part V: The High Middle Ages
8. Bonaventure on the Trinitarian Origin of Freedom
9. Thomas Aquinas: A Fruitful Reception of the Whole
Part VI: The Late Middle Ages
10. Godfrey of Fontaines: The Absolute Priority of Act
11. John Duns Scotus and the Radicalizing of Potency
Part VII: General Conclusion
12. The Givenness of Freedom
Bibliography
