We are made for excellence. Developed through the four cardinal virtues prudence (practical wisdom), justice, courage, and temperance (perhaps better styled today, â??self-commandâ??) freedom is the method by which we become the kind of people our noblest instincts incline us to be: the kind of people who can, among other possibilities, build free and virtuous societies in which the rights of all are acknowledged, respected, and protected in law. Law is thus intertwined with freedom. Law can educate us in freedom. Law is not a work of heteronomous (external) imposition but a work of wisdom, and good law facilitates our achievement of the human goods that we instinctively seek because of who we are and what we are meant to be as human beings.
Virtue and the virtues are crucial elements of freedom rightly understood, and the journey of a life lived in freedom is a journey of growth in virtue, growth in the ability to choose wisely and well the things that truly make for our happiness and for the common good. Itâ??s a bit like learning to play a musical instrument. Anyone can bang away on a piano; but that is to make noise, not music, and itâ??s a barbaric, not humanistic, expression of freedom. At first, learning to play the piano is a matter of some drudgery as we master exercises that seem like a constraint, a burden. But as our mastery grows, we discover a new, richer dimension of freedom: we can play the music we like, we can even create new music on our own. Freedom, in other words, is a matter of gradually acquiring the capacity to choose the good and to do what we choose with perfection.
George Weigel A better concept of freedom
