Intellectual Freedom - It Isn't Free

Intellectual Freedom - It Isn't Free

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea

By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown

Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

Very few of us are unfamiliar with the Genesis account of creation, where it is written that "God said, 'Let there be light,' and there was light." [1] The obvious point is that God creates the world; but later writings have chosen to focus on the idea that the divine being both creates and destroys by the power of His word alone. God spoke, and "it came to be." [2] By the time of the Gospel of John was put to paper, we are informed that the word is not merely an expression of God: it is, in fact, no less than God himself. [3] The word is divine.

Especially after Augustine, who articulated Christian doctrine as the road to God passing directly within self, the inner word has been seen not only as the source of innermost self, but of conscience as well. [4] In terms of Augustinian inwardness, "God is to be found in the intimacy of self-presence." [5] The inner triangulation of self involves what the Athanasian Creed referred to as the "reasonable soul and the flesh" as two elements, with God the third in between. [6]

In fact, it is clear that the original construction of the First Amendment was devoted to protecting precisely this Augustinian notion of inner light, this inner word and presence of God. [7] This is what Tom Paine, chaplain to the American Revolutionary soldiers (and author of Common Sense) referred to when he wrote his well-known dictum that "my own mind is my church." [8] As early as the 1740s, for example, it was the New Light Congregationalists (ironically similar in theological outlook to the ill-fated Anne Hutchinson [9] ), who posed what became the central axiom of the American revolution: the idea that "liberty of conscience" is the "inalienable right of every rational creature." [10] Note how similar Paine's notion of his own mind being his inner sanctum is to the Quaker notion of the "inner light," which Staughton Lynd described as "the preamble to the political faith of the Dissenter, as of the subsequent Declaration of Independence.