The Psychological Possibility of Mortal Sin: A Reply to Hart
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Angelika Kaufmann: “Thou art the man!”
By WILLIAM MATTHEW DIEM, S.T.D.
DAVID Bentley Hart has recently defended one of the more controversial theses from his recent book, That All Shall Be Saved: although he admits we can reject God, he insists that “we cannot do so with perfect knowledge and perfect freedom.” Why does he think such rejection is impossible? Because, in short, “Freely, sanely, deliberatively to elect misery forever rather than bliss is a form of madness.”
Of course I agree that no sane person is able to choose eternal misery as such. But that is not relevant to the question: one need not choose misery to merit misery. I do not merit punishment because I choose to make myself miserable. Rather, one merits punishment by violating law; law is concerned with justice--since the law regards what is due (as Aquinas shows, for example, in ST I-II, q. 99, a. 5, ad1); and justice is by nature concerned with the good of another, not of the agent himself. There is no injustice with respect to things that are one’s own. (Aristotle, Nic. Eth. V.6.3) This insistence that law regards another is not just Thomistic or Aristotelian, it is Scriptural: “Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore love is the fulfilling of the law.” (Rom. 13:10)
Conversely, as Aquinas notes, punishment is merited in view of some harm done by one to another: No one merits punishment by reason of harming or frustrating himself alone. (ST I-II q. 21, a. 3) One merits punishment because one chooses to act unjustly, not because one chooses to be miserable.
The root of sin is--the whole Christian tradition insists--pride: unduly exulting ourselves over others. In every sin the sinner slights another. In every sin the sinner acts selfishly by unreasonably placing his own desires over the legitimate desires of another and violating the Golden Rule.
All this amounts to is the distinction between the imprudent and the immoral, between the irrational and the unreasonable. We pity the man who acts in a way that harms himself alone and frustrates his own desires. We blame, we punish, the man who unreasonably harms and frustrates others. The former is imprudent, the latter is unjust; one is a fool, the other is evil. (Ultimately, of course, imprudence always ends up also being unjust: we are not our own; we belong to another such that self-harm is never just self-harm but also harm to another; see 1 Cor. 6:15-20. I have developed this line of thought at considerably greater length elsewhere, see for example here.)
Thus, whether I am psychologically able to choose to be miserable is totally irrelevant to whether I deserve to be punished for my sin. I merit punishment not because I foolishly chose misery, but because I selfishly chose injustice.
Hart’s initial confusion leads to a further confusion: as he put it in That All Shall Be Saved, “the question of whether a soul could freely and eternally reject God--whether a rational nature could in unhindered freedom of intellect and will elect endless misery rather than eternal bliss--is not even worth the trouble of asking.” (p181)
Knowing God’s goodness (goodness for me) is, he thinks, a condition of freedom because Hart seems to think my act is not perfectly free unless I understand the consequences my act will have on my happiness. Therefore, in order to reject God truly and feely, I must fully understand how good (for me) God is so that I can understand the misery that I will suffer in separating myself from Him.
This is nonsense. Folklore is replete with stories of powerful and wealthy benefactors--kings, princesses, even pagan gods--appearing in humble disguise to potential beneficiaries, in order to test their character. Will the villagers treat the king with kindness if they mistake him for an itinerant pauper, or will they ignore his modest requests with callous indifference? The justice of the king’s conduct in such stories is patent even to children. But on Hart’s account of freedom, this is a cruel trick, an unfair and meaningless test. The villagers would be incapable of performing a truly free act unless they realized that the one begging from them is actually a potential benefactor able to reward them handsomely for their “kindness”--if one can call self-interested pandering kindness. One must, on Hart’s theory of freedom, fully understand what good for oneself is at stake if one’s choice is to be truly free. Such is the ethics of dissemblers and flatterers.
This inverts ethics and makes selfishness the ultimate virtue. Whoever is condemned to hell is condemned to hell, not because he chose misery, but ultimately because he failed to fulfill the two great commandments of love (Mt. 22:37-40, cf. Jn 14:15; 15:12); we might say with Augustine (De Civitate Dei 14, 28) that the one condemned is condemned because he loved himself above all others, even to the contempt of God. But one does not need any particular knowledge of the consequences that one’s acts will have on one’s own happiness in order to place oneself freely as one’s own ultimate end. Similarly, it makes no difference to one who actually loves God even to contempt of self what he will suffer as a consequence of his acts of love--his love is a self-sacrificing love.
(There is, of course, a paradox of charity and selflessness: how is it psychologically possible for a human who, by nature, wills to be happy ever to love another more than himself and to act in a genuinely sacrificial way? But this problem is well known and well studied. It is also baked into Christianity.)
Put otherwise, one is not truly just or truly charitable if one avoids sinful acts purely for the sake of avoiding one’s own misery and securing one’s own happiness. A shrewd and informed self-interest may help us along path to virtue--particularly insofar as it serves as an occasion for us to notice the turpitude of sin and the justice of punishment--but it is not, by itself, virtue. As the prophets constantly remind us, God demands more than a mere slavish external conformity to His law.
To illustrate the point, let us imagine, for the moment, that Lucifer had sinned while holding the presumptuous belief that God, being all loving and merciful, would--despite his blustering threats--never actually condemn him to eternal punishment (though we will also suppose that God is prepared to punish deliberate insubordination with eternal punishment). Let us further suppose that after sinning and realizing his gross miscalculation, Lucifer quite naturally regretted his decision which bore him such dire consequences. Would that species of regret lessen his selfishness and pride? Would his regretting his defiance simply on the grounds that it has resulted in his eternal suffering do anything at all to mitigate the malice of his contumacious rejection of God? Would it constitute the pure and selfless love that God justly demands of His creatures? Would this revelation of God’s justice make any difference at all to the only issue that matters: whether Lucifer loved himself to the contempt of all else? Lucifer may eternally regret his choice, yet even his regret is--like the regret of the townsfolk for mistreating their regem absconditum--only a manifestation of his inordinate self-love; it would not constitute the contrition that is motivated by selfless love. This is simply to illustrate the classic distinction between filial fear and servile fear; or the distinction between charity and, what Aquinas calls, mercenary love (cf. ST, II-II, q. 13, a. 4). God will not be used by His creatures as a mere means to their own satisfaction.
Or consider this: Do we need to take into account David’s understanding or ignorance of the punishment he would suffer if we wish to assess the grievousness, the injustice, the capricious selfishness of his arranging the death of Uriah? Would the fact of such ignorance do anything whatever to lessen the malice of his sin? Would anyone consider it a reasonable excuse if David pleaded that he would not have ordered an innocent man’s death had he realized it would cost him his child’s life? Certainly not; his own judgement bore clear testimony against him, proving his rank hypocrisy (2 Sam 12:5-7). Offering such an excuse would be more a confession than an exculpation. It is absurd to suggest that his selfish injustice is less selfish and less unjust because he wasn’t cognizant of the suffering his selfishness would cause himself.
In short: Not knowing the consequences we will suffer for our sins does nothing to lessen the deliberateness of our injustice and selfishness. Greater knowledge of God’s punishment, greater knowledge of the divine good we forfeit in sinning, these may engender a servile fear and a mercenary love, but of itself neither of them is necessary or sufficient to elicit filial fear and charity.
I would (with the Catholic tradition--e.g, D-H 2291) go a step further: Not only is it not necessary to understand fully the divine goodness that one loses in sinning, one need have no explicit knowledge of God whatever to reject Him. I insist (and I have argued elsewhere at some length) that one pursues God implicitly by doing moral good. By the same token, one implicitly rejects Him by deliberately doing moral evil. It is in this sense that we call conscience the “voice of God”: God has endowed us with “a share of the Eternal Reason,” “a share of providence”, “an imprint on us of the Divine light,” “whereby we discern what is good and what is evil” (ST I-II, q. 91, a. 2) He has made us in His image (Gen. 1:26-28, 9:6), and written His law on our hearts (Rom 2:15). Defiance of the dictates of reason, defiance of the judgments of conscience, is defiance of God Himself. We need not either explicitly know or advert to God in order to reject Him.
Formal sin is a deliberate and willful violation of conscience--it is precisely the will's nolo to reason's debeo. Thus sin presupposes two things. First--on the part of reason--it presupposes that reason has already apprehended some act (here and now with all things considered) as simply unjust, and therefore as simply unreasonable and so also, in the judgment of reason, as simply evil. Again, law is not counsel, sin is not imprudence.
Second, sin presupposes, on the part of the will, that it remains psychologically possible for the will to choose an act freely despite its having been judged simply, morally evil by reason. This second condition can be satisfied because the will is, by nature, ordered not just to the good secundum rationem but to the good in general. Everything the will wills is willed sub specie boni. But reason is not the only apprehensive power; even things judged evil by reason may yet retain a speciem boni--they can still be apprehended as goods, if only in a qualified and particular respect. Witness the universal experience of moral struggle, in which we continue to find something desirable even though reason has judged it evil here and now. In sinning the will favors these merely apparent goods, while rejecting the true good as known by reason.
Deliberate defiance of conscience is thus a deliberate rejection of the good as known by reason. But more than this, it is by nature selfish, by nature it constitutes contempt for the other: Reason only binds us on pain of sin when injustice is involved, when something is judged to be due to another. Thus in deliberate sin, I defy the order of justice itself; I voluntarily despise not just this individual, but my neighbor in general, and pari ratione, I despise God Himself. Justice takes no account of the person; the just man is equally just to all; he gives each his due as a matter of principle, simply because it is his due. He who is only just to his friends and benefactors, he who is only just when it is convenient or advantageous, is not just at all. Thus in sinning, I turn myself against the other in general, and against the other as other. He who is deliberately unjust to one is implicitly unjust to all. Sin thus amounts to a deliberate rejection of reason, of true good, of the other in general, and of the common good of all creation.
It is important to note that there is no middle between justice and injustice, between self-love and love of other. No one can serve two masters (Mt. 6:24); when I deliberately choose to do injustice, when I violate my conscience, by that very fact I love myself above all others, even to the contempt of God.
It is true that, by nature, we long for the good. But our fundamental choice, our basic freedom is not whether to pursue good or not pursue good. It is whether to pursue good for its own sake or for our sake. By that very fact that I deliberately choose injustice, I pursue the good in a way that subjects the good to me--I set myself up as the ultimate end and good placing everything else below me as a means. The fact that, for the person with perfect knowledge, what is good for me is identically good in itself does not change the choice that each of us faces between loving the good for itself and loving the good for us.
One might respond to this by insisting that deliberate sin--as I have described it--is impossible. I admit that, like sacrifice, indeed like the freedom of the will itself, sin is paradoxical. But denying the possibility of sin is hard to reconcile to either Scripture or human experience, and in any case, it is explicitly not what Hart argues.
Moreover, it is true that the sinner always makes some sort of prudential error; we might even say with Hart that he is "deluded," to the extent he believes he can be happy without God. But, as I already pointed out, that prudential error is not an error about what is reasonable and just, and so it does not affect the selfishness or deliberateness of the sin. I may, for example, mistakenly believe that an affair will bring me happiness, but that error would do nothing to lessen the selfishness, the hypocrisy, the injustice of violating my wedding vow. There is an error, but it is not an error that affects the selfishness that motivated my choice.
One might instead argue that--although all who have the use of reason have sufficient knowledge to reject God--our wills are, in the present state, too weak for us to be fully responsible for our choices. One might hold that the voluntariness of our acts is always compromised, not by ignorance, but by some moral weakness--such that we can never be held fully responsible for our choices. Certainly, there are many possible mitigating factors which might reduce our responsibility for particular choices; I make no claim about how common mortal sin is in reality. I only contend that it remains psychologically possible. At any rate, if that is the argument I do not see where it has been made. Hart’s arguments are consistently arguments about our knowledge and understanding. He tells us, of a man facing a decision of life and death, “The more he knows, the freer he becomes.” He informs us, “to the degree that a rational nature attempts to reject God it is simply deluded.” Indeed, he goes so far as to gloss “freedom” as “liberty from delusion.”
The only further retort I can anticipate from Hart is that this rejection of God, while deliberate and imputable, can never be “final.” To that I can only respond by asking what specifically “final” adds beyond “deliberate and imputable.”
That we can culpably reject and contemn God without realizing we are rejecting Him is the clear moral of the Judgement of the Nations in Matthew (Mt. 25:31-46); after the Lord condemns those on his left for neglecting him in his need, they demand, “Lord, when did we see thee hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not minister to thee?” and the Lord answers, “Truly, I say to you, as you did it not to one of the least of these, you did it not to me.” Whether they ever considered the effect their action would have on their relation to God is not relevant; whether they understood the consequences they would suffer for their selfishness makes no difference. Whether they thought of God or even had any explicit knowledge of Him is irrelevant.