Lesson 13: Conscience and Truth

AGENDA

• Review of Aquinas on Virtue and Law
• Law and Conscience

REVIEW OF AQUINAS ON VIRTUE AND LAW

1. Now for Aquinas, virtue and law are the internal and external sides (or standards) in the same pursuit of goodness. For Aquinas and those who follow him in the tradition of Catholic moral thought, there can be no ultimate conflict between what the law requires and what virtue trains us to do. In other words, people who are truly virtuous abide by the law of God; and adherence to just laws (those human laws that accord with the natural law) helps to form persons in virtuous character.

1. Law he calls an external principle of act (a standard the guides us from the outside, just as the habit of virtue guides us from the inside)

2. Law he also calls “an ordinance of reason for the common good, promulgated by one who has care of the community.” (Q90, a1-4)
3. All the world is governed by the eternal law of God (that is, the rational ordering of the world). “Now it is evident, granted that the world is ruled by divine providence...that the whole community of the universe is governed by divine reason. Therefore the very notion of the government of things in God, the ruler of the universe, has the nature of a law.” (Q91, a1)
4. It is from the rational nature of eternal law that human beings are able to discern and order their communities by other kinds of law:
1. Natural Law: “is nothing else than the rational creature’s participation of the eternal law.” (Q91, a3)
2. Human Law: attempts by human agents to govern by reason; only those laws which cohere with natural law are worthy of the name and when the state tries to compel us to do otherwise, we are justified in disobeying.
3. Divine Law: the law of God as it is expressed through revelation (roughly divided into the Old Law (as communicated in the Hebrew Scriptures) and the New Law (as communicated in the Christian New Testament)

LAW AND CONSCIENCE

1. It is through this idea of the natural law--the rational creature's participation in the eternal law--that the tradition of Christian theology has made sense of basic ideas about conscience.
1. People frequently speak about conscience, and sometimes even appeal to conscience, in an attempt to behave in ways that violate the norms of their community (whether this be the Catholic Church or another community)
2. Claims about conscience tend to arise when people confront situations that can be understood as moral dilemmas or conflicts of goods. Sometimes this happens within families, or among friends, or in professional contexts.
3. To help us gain some clarity about what conscience is and what it does, let us examine two accounts of conscience: the first by Richard Gula and the second by by Pope John Paul II.
2. According to Richard Gula [cited from “Conscience” in Christian Ethics: An Introduction, Bernard Hoose, ed. (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1998), p. 110-122]
1. Definition: “Conscience is the whole person’s commitment to value and the judgment one makes in light of that commitment of who one ought to be and what one ought to do or not do.” (p. 114)
2. As capacity: as a fundamental ability to discern good and evil; every person, regardless of past experience, or their culture or religion, has the ability to discern the values and standards that guide human life.
3. As process: for discovering what is involved in becoming a good person, and in how one discovers right and wrong in a particular situation.
4. As judgment: of what one ought to do in a particular situation, based on one’s knowledge of objective moral norms.
3. According to John Paul II (cited from Veritatis Splendor)
1. Basis for human dignity, the place where God and the human being meet in the most intimate way, where the human being takes on God’s law and makes it her or his own.
2. As law [rule and measure/standard] (par. 54) the relationship between man's freedom and God's law is most deeply lived out in the "heart" of the person, in his moral conscience. As the Second Vatican Council observed: "In the depths of his conscience man detects a law which he does not impose on himself, but which holds him to obedience. Always summoning him to love good and avoid evil, the voice of conscience can when necessary speak to his heart more specifically: 'do this, shun that'. For man has in his heart a law written by God. To obey it is the very dignity of man; according to it he will be judged (cf. Rom 2:14-16)".
3. (From Romans 2:14-16) “For when the Gentiles who do not have the law by nature observe the prescriptions of the law, they are a law for themselves even though they do not have the law. They show that the demands of the law are written in their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness and their conflicting thoughts accuse or even defend them on the day when, according to my gospel, God will judge people's hidden works through Christ Jesus.”
4. As the first principle of practical reason: “Do Good and Avoid Evil.”
5. As witness, some personal inner voice that testifies to us about ourselves (par. 57) “confronts man with the law, and thus becomes a "witness" for man: a witness of his own faithfulness or unfaithfulness with regard to the law, of his essential moral rectitude or iniquity. Conscience is the only witness, since what takes place in the heart of the person is hidden from the eyes of everyone outside. Conscience makes its witness known only to the person himself. And, in turn, only the person himself knows what his own response is to the voice of conscience.”
6. As inner dialog between the human person and God (par. 58) “The importance of this inner dialogue of man with himself can never be adequately appreciated. But it is also a dialog of man with God, the author of the law, the primordial image and final end of man. …In this, and not in anything else, lies the entire mystery and the dignity of the moral conscience: in being the place, the sacred place where God speaks to man.”
7. As capacity for practical judgments, determining whether or not the action being considered conforms to the moral law established by God (par. 59) “The term ‘conflicting thoughts’ clarifies the precise nature of conscience: it is amoral judgment about man and his actions. …The judgment of conscience is a practical judgment, a judgment which makes known what man must do or not do, or which assesses an act already performed by him….Conscience thus formulates moral obligation in the light of the natural law: it is the obligation to do what the individual, through the workings of his conscience, knows to be a good he is called to do here and now.”
4. According to Bernard Häring (cited in “Conscience: The Sanctuary of Creative Fidelity and Liberty” in Introduction to Christian Ethics: A Reader, Ronald P. Hamel and Kenneth R. Himes, eds. (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1989), p. 252-280.)
1. Not exclusively a matter of antecedent or following conscience, but rather thelocation of the integration of actions in free response to the love of God
2. Characterized by an “innermost yearning for wholeness and integrity”
3. A fundamental openness to the traces of God in all people
4. An approximation where freedom and fidelity to God’s law meet.
5. What Conscience is Not:
1. For Gula, not the super-ego (the standard code outside us that is internalized to tame the animal instincts.)—why?—because this is not a free self commitment to the good
2. For John Paul II, does not create standards of right and wrong—why?—because this standard resides in God alone (the conscience merely points to a standard that it did not create on its own)
6. According to all of these thinkers, there are ways that conscience can be in error.
1. One needs to cultivate an informed conscience (if one has not formed one’s conscience in serious dialogue with the tradition of the Church’s teaching, one cannot expect it to function rightly [as Benedict XVI noted, conscience is an "organ not an oracle"])
2. We can be guilty both for acting against the dictates of our conscience, but also for not taking the time to inform our consciences through the various sources of moral knowledge we talked about
3. A conscience can suffer from invincible ignorance which in turn can be the result of particular past traumatic experiences or habituation in past action that leads us to think that any action other than the one we are doing now seems impossible
7. This variety of views about conscience is rooted in a long history of reflection on the topic, which was expressed in medieval writings as the difference between synteresis and syneidesis.
1. Synteresis—human knowledge of the first principles of practical reason, to do good and avoid evil; never fully eliminated despite human sinfulness.
2. Syneidesis—for Paul, the content of the law of God, written on every human heart; later used to denote the capacity for specific moral judgments; can be lost or clouded by sin
8. The difficulty of thinking through conscience as the center of moral decision making has lead many theologians to consider two more basic topics: the meaning of freedom and the nature of moral acts. These two topics became the center of Pope John Paul II’s encyclical letter, Veritatis Splendor, which we will consider in more detail next time.