Transcript
Emily: In the movie The Matrix, the lead character, Neo, is faced with a decision. Will he take the red pill or the blue pill? The “red pill” represents the choice to find out the harsh truth about reality, while the “blue pill” represents staying in blissful ignorance within a simulated world, essentially choosing to remain unaware of the truth. But did you notice there’s an even more complicated question at the heart of this movie?
Later, Neo meets with the Oracle in her kitchen as she’s baking cookies. “Don’t worry about the vase.” She says. Neo turns to look for the vase she mentioned, knocking it on the floor in the process. The Oracle then quips, “I said don’t worry about it. What’s really going to bake your noodle later on is, would you still have broken it if I hadn’t said anything?” Throughout the movie you are left wondering which characters are free if their choices are predetermined or “programmed” into them.
If someone knows the choices you’ll make in the future, does that mean you don’t really have a choice? And if that future-seeing someone is also interacting with you today, does that mean they are somehow the only one making a free choice about your life?
These philosophical questions and themes of obedience, reality, and free will are at the core of the entire Matrix franchise. But these questions have deep roots spanning throughout history—even in ancient Greece, where people were wrestling with similar concepts.
As far back as the 8th century B.C., we can read works like Homer’s Odyssey and find this concept of Moira [MOO-yah], often translated as “fate” or “destiny,” which represents a force that dictates inevitable outcomes in the world. But Homer’s characters are still responsible for their choices and actions, even though the weight of their fate is ultimately inescapable.
Socrates argued that knowledge leads to virtuous choices. For Socrates, there is a level of free will we all have, but our choices might be limited by ignorance. But 750 years after Socrates—in the late 4th and early 5th centuries—St. Augustine of Hippo was also thinking and writing extensively about free will. For St. Augustine, humans possess free will, but their freedom is limited by sin and cannot fully choose the ultimate good on their own without God’s grace. Grace allows us to turn toward God and cooperate with His purposes.
Later, during the Enlightenment and the 17th and 18th centuries, philosophers like Descartes and Kant would further explore free will as central to human existence. Descartes wrestled with the idea that the human body was governed by predetermined mechanical laws, but the immaterial soul meant it remained free and capable of choice.
Throughout history, we see these essential questions: does submitting our free will and following a higher power—or a higher moral order—make us less free? What does it really mean to make free choices? If freedom is simply the absence of restraint, then perhaps any form of obedience might appear as a limitation. But as thinkers from Socrates to Kant have suggested, freedom isn’t just about acting on impulse or evading control; it’s about aligning ourselves with what is good, true, and meaningful.
This is where St. Thomas Aquinas’ bow and arrow might be helpful. According to Aquinas, we do have free will, and we are actually free to make our own decisions. But St. Thomas Aquinas makes an important distinction between freedom of choice and true freedom. He argues that true freedom is not about unrestricted choice and being free to choose whatever we want without someone or something imposing on us. True freedom is about our ability to make a decision fully in line with reason and virtue.
It’s true, you’re free to choose whatever you want. But choosing to not follow reason and virtue actually makes us less free. For example, you could choose to drink alcohol every day and develop an addiction and ultimately become less free to choose not to drink. In this way, choosing against virtue and goodness shackles our free will over time
St. Thomas Aquinas gives us an analogy by describing a person who shoots an arrow. The person freely chooses the target, but the arrow must follow the laws of physics and the proper trajectory to hit the bullseye. In the same way, human freedom is real, but it must follow the moral order to reach true happiness. Surely, you’re free to use a bow and arrow however you want. But if the goal is to find happiness, we have to use our reason and intellect to figure out what is right and good.
So while it might at first feel limiting to submit to a higher law—or to God’s will—the question we really have to ask ourselves is: do we believe there are right and wrong choices we can make? And will we choose the right thing even when it’s hard?
