DP 73 [1, 2, 3, 5, 6-7]
A human being has reason and
freedom,
or rationality and liberty,
and these two faculties are present
in a person
from the Lord.
First, however, it must be known
that freedom is wholly a
matter of love,
so that love and freedom are united.
Moreover, because
love is a person's life,
freedom is also a matter of his life.
Natural freedom everyone has
from heredity.
From his heredity
a person loves only himself and the
world.
His initial life is nothing else.
Rational freedom results from
a love of one's reputation
for the sake of honor or material gain.
The delight of this love is to
appear
in outward demeanor like a moral person.
Spiritual freedom results from a love of eternal life.
No one else comes into that love and its delight
but one who thinks that
evils are sins
and for that reason does not will them,
and who at the
same time looks to the Lord.
As soon as a person does this,
he is in
that state of freedom.
For no one can resist
willing evils because they
are sins
and for that reason not do them
except by the exercise
of an
interior or higher freedom
which results from
an interior or higher love
that he has.
This kind of freedom does not at first
appear to be
freedom, even though it is.
But afterward it does appear to be so,
and a
person then acts in real freedom
in accordance with real reason,
thinking, willing, speaking and doing
what is good and true.
This
state of freedom grows
as the exercise of natural freedom decreases
and
becomes its servant,
and as it unites itself with rational freedom
and
purifies it.
Anyone can come into this freedom
provided he is willing
to believe that life is eternal,
and that any delight and blessedness
of life in time, for a time,
is but as a fleeting shadow compared to
the
delight and blessedness of life
in eternity, to eternity.
Moreover, a
person can believe this,
if he is willing to,
because he has rationality
and freedom,
and because the Lord
from whom he has these two faculties
continually gives him the ability.
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