Knowing is Not Enough; and the Doing is Hard

Last updated on: August 11, 2015 at 6:00 am by willduquette

Knowing is Not Enough; and the Doing is Hard 2015-08-09T13:58:23-05:00 willduquette

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Continuing through Cam’s comment on my post about suffering in Heaven, he asks,

Your first argument seems to revolve around knowledge, yes? You’re saying we won’t have suffering in heaven because we will have perfect knowledge. This knowledge is somehow caused by something God is or does, and the exact mechanics of that probably won’t matter for my comment….

Secondly, your first argument seems to rest on an assumption often used by Christians in the service of theological issues (such as divine hiddenness) which is: knowledge is coercive. I don’t accept this assumption and I say it’s counterintuitive. Giving someone information is persuasive, not coercive. When my parents told me ‘it is wrong to steal’, they were not infringing on my free will to steal. If anything, knowledge *increases* free will! The free exercise of will requires knowledge (see e.g age of consent, legal capacity to sign contracts, etc).

I had suggested that free will allows us to choose badly; but that in Heaven we will see the Good more perfectly and so will not choose badly. Cam reasonably casts this as a question about knowledge, and that means I probably misspoke, or at best misled him.

Some philosophers speak as though teaching someone to live a moral life is simply a matter of education: if a person knows what is right, they will do what is right. Aristotle defined morality as the behavior that will truly lead to a happy life, taking that life as a whole, and seems to have assumed that the philosopher, having figured how what that behavior is, will naturally be able to do it and so will achieve his goal.

And yet, it’s clear that choosing to do the right thing isn’t simply a matter of knowing the right thing. Anyone who has ever tried to break a bad habit knows how hard it can be to do that. I might know, intellectually, that if I personally indulge in behavior X it will cause health problem Y, ultimately causing death Z; I might sincerely want to avoid both Y and Z; and yet somehow I still find myself doing X. Catholic theology calls this tendency concupiscence, relating it to the Fall of Man, and it’s what Chesterton had in mind when he said that Original Sin is the only doctrine of the Church that’s experimentally verifiable.

According to Aquinas, we always choose something that seems good to us, but we don’t always choose what seems best to us. If we were truly free from the effects of sin, we’d be truly free to choose the best thing. Thus, there are two reasons why we might choose to do or to be something harmful to us: first, because we often don’t see things clearly, and second because even when we do we suffer from concupiscence.

Thus, there are two things that Christ helps us with in this life: improving our understanding of what is truly good, so that we might see more clearly, and helping us to grow in virtue, to increase the number of things we do well by habit.

Those in Heaven, having accepted this help, are the ones who can benefit most by having God, Goodness itself, always before them. They will see the Good clearly; and by God’s grace they will have trained their wills to counteract the effects of concupiscence.

So it isn’t knowledge, simply; it’s knowledge plus virtue.

I still haven’t completely addressed the notion that “knowledge is coercive”; I’ll have more to say about that next week.

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