We human beings earnestly desire a life without limits. If you doubt this, do a quick search on Amazon for books with the title Life Without Limits. There are at least fifty (!) different books with some variation of that title (and that’s not counting a stunning number of additional books that have some version of “life/living without limits” as a subtitle). Apparently, there is no limit to the writing of books about living without limits.

Why have books on this topic been so popular in recent years? In part, their popularity stems from their emphasis on personal freedom, which is one of the paramount values in secular society today. The problem is, many people today suffer from a misconception of the nature of genuine freedom. They misconceive freedom as consisting in total autonomy, the completely unfettered ability to do whatever they want, and so they are drawn to books that they think will tell them how to break free of any and all constraints on their personal “freedom.”

But genuine freedom is something more profound than the ability to do whatever one wants. Genuine freedom consists in our God-given ability to choose the good. In some ways, people who conceive of freedom as consisting in complete autonomy are, perhaps unwittingly, operating from this deeper definition of freedom, in that they are choosing to value the ability to do whatever they want as a great good, maybe even the greatest good, but they are mistaken in that choice, as Avery Cardinal Dulles pointed out:  

In current popular thinking, freedom is understood to mean the capacity to do whatever one pleases, without moral or physical restraints. This arbitrary view of freedom points the way to uninhibited individualism, social chaos, and defiance of moral standards. Many people imagine that entering into firm commitments, such as a vocation or a family relationship, will impair their freedom. They therefore go through life unattached, guided by passing whims rather than firm convictions. Such lives quickly become empty and meaningless, moving toward suicidal despair.

Deep down, we want more than just the freedom to do whatever we want. We want more than being able to break free from the limits that constrain us. We want to break out of our finitude entirely; we want to find our way into the fullest possible life. We do indeed want “life without limits,” but what this desire really involves is our desire for the one who is, by definition, “life without limits”: God.

Hans Urs von Balthasar eloquently described this deepest desire of the human heart:

The deepest longing of man is to ascend to God, to become like God, indeed to become equal to God. Whereas daily life chains and constricts him, confining him to the little world of his everyday life on this earth, a pressure ignites within him to tear away the chains of this slavery and to break through to the mysterious depths that lurk behind this world, to a place where he can be free, whole, wise and immortal—free of the limitations of his narrow ego, holding dominion over the total context of events, superior to fate and to death.

We desire a life without limits because God made us for such a life; the desire for such a life is hardwired into us. God created human beings so that we might share forever in his divine life (Catechism of the Catholic Church 1). As St. Thomas Aquinas expressed it, we are finite beings who are open to the infinity of being; we were meant to share in the infinite Being of God.

But we cannot make ourselves into gods. This has been a temptation for us human beings since the earliest of times. That’s why the first book of the Bible describes humanity’s fall as involving a form of pride that rejected our creatureliness and sought divinity via our own efforts (Genesis 3:1–24). The divine life is not a fortress that can be stormed by force, nor can it be attained by any other methods that we might devise, including meditative techniques, ascetic practices, or attempts to assert that humanity is identical with divinity.

Such efforts to “self-divinize” persist to this day. Perhaps the most striking contemporary example of this desire is the movement known as transhumanism, which, as the name implies, seeks to find ways to take us above and beyond our existence as mere finite human beings via such methods as the implantation of computer chips in our brains, the search for medical treatments or regimens that might bring “immortality,” and attempts to develop technology that would enable us to “upload” the contents of our brains to the computer cloud, so that when our bodies die, we might continue to “live” as disembodied entities stored on a computer server somewhere.

“Life without limits,” or at least the fullest possible life available to us humans, is, in fact, attainable for us, but only as a gift that is offered to us out of the divine love, and not as an achievement attained via our own power and efforts. Finite, mortal beings cannot “become” God, who is, by definition, infinite and eternal. But God has graciously offered us the opportunity to share in his divine life forever (2 Peter 1:4), and our participation in that life starts by saying yes to that divine offer, and then striving to learn to love as God loves. The essence of the divine life does not consist primarily in complete autonomy or absolute power, but rather in self-giving love.

This earthly life of ours is intended to be a “school of love,” a preparation for sharing in the divine life and love. And God’s commandments and the other moral “limits” on our freedom to do as we might wish in this life are all intended as guardrails to keep us on the path toward an ever-increasing love of God and neighbor and eventual union with God.

It should be noted that even when we enter into the divine life after death, we will still retain some of the “limits” of our creaturely status. Balthasar characterizes our life in God after our earthly death as involving “a transformation that will partake of the limitlessness of God without suspending our creatureliness and our own limits.” We will, in other words, share in the divine life and love forever, but we will still retain our status as individual persons; we will not be “absorbed” into God. This “distance” between us and God is necessary for the exchange of love to be able to take place between us. And rather than being experienced as a frustrating “limit,” our finitude will then afford us the ineffable pleasure and joy of exploring the infinity of God’s beauty, goodness, and truth for all eternity, as was described by St. Francis de Sales:

The Godhead . . . is to us what the air is to the birds and the sea to the fish. One day we will fly through this divine element and swim in this sea and rejoice that our powers are not sufficient to embrace the whole space. It will be an ever-new delight for us to see that God—even if giving himself to us without restraint or limitation—still remains an abyss we are not capable of plumbing: we cannot enjoy him in a manner that does justice to the infinity of his perfections, for these shall always transcend our power of comprehension. Incomprehensibility is the essential mark of the beauty we will behold in paradise. This beauty would not be infinite, it would not be God, if we could comprehend it.

And that will be the true “life without limits” that we all so deeply desire, the life that will bring us ultimate happiness.