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I have noticed with some concern that determinism currently dominates online discussion of free will. Can you explain your basic position on the subject of humanity’s free will or lack thereof or the positions of the Church Fathers? It would be most helpful if you could explain how this will transcends the material world if you believe it does. Thank you. So St. Maximus especially and the Church Fathers in general I would say, they don’t have the same vision of free will that that most people have today. The idea that free will is somehow the capacity to choose between things. That isn’t the free will. For example, the idea that in the garden that Adam and Eve could exercise their free will by eating the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, that is just not the way that the Church Fathers understand freedom. To be free is to choose God. That’s freedom. That’s free will. To not choose God is to be a slave of something outside of you, is to become dependent on your passions, on the externals, on the outside world. And so the only freedom we have is when we align ourselves with the will of God. And that’s so, I know that that’s so counterintuitive for people. And that’s why if you read in St. Paul you can understand St. Paul a little more because the idea that you’re free to sin and you’re a slave to God and that is to be a slave to God is to be free because you get your, you’re attached to the thing that causes you. You’re attached to the thing that causes you and by being attached to the thing that causes you, you are free from the things that are around you, the thing that aren’t you, let’s say, that are pulling on your attention, that are pulling you in all the idiosyncrasies. You’re free from slavery to idiosyncrasies and so you rise up beyond the idiosyncrasies and then you master them. So you then can engage with the world. There’s nothing wrong with engaging with the world. You can engage with the world in freedom as being kind of above things and engaging with them rather than being under them and being a slave of your desires and your passions and all this other stuff. So hopefully that answers that question in terms of freedom. So freedom just doesn’t look, so a lot of the questions about free will, do you just read completely empty for me? You just read completely empty because freedom actually looks like submitting yourself to something higher and that’s what freedom ends up looking like. And so it doesn’t look like what you think. This idea of this absolute freedom where you can choose God or not choose God or you can choose between two kinds of toothpaste, all that stuff is arbitrary. It’s arbitrary and it’s not important and it’s not interesting. you