Thinking About Conscience in Moral Theology

In a recent post by Fr. Tim Finigan at The Hermeneutic of Continuity he takes on the recent article in the Times concerning Newman's road to beatification. This post got me thinking about the primacy of prudence for a virtuous choice. This becomes very practical when thinking about conscience. Some think that conscience is the final arbiter of a good moral choice but conscience is not infallible and according to the Church needs conversion and cannot go against what the Church teaches on moral issues. I think Romanus Cessario, O.P. helps us to think about the tension between subjective conscience and objective law. This is where the rub often meets for people who use their 'conscience' as a guide against the objective teaching of the Church. He writes,

The cardinal virtue of prudence provides, as it were, the locus, for concrete moral decision-making; its proper exercise ensures that our decisions lead to what alone can satisfy a human nature created in the imago Dei. By placing prudence at the centre of moral practice, realist moral theology avoids the anxieties that certain moral theologians cause both themselves and others by accepting a fundamental tension between subjective conscience and objective law. Aquinas, however, recognises the irreducibility of all forms of sheer moral knowledge which, even when elaborated in highly refined moral theories, remain incapable of moving into order of execution or real action. The view that conscience by itself provides the faculty for translating moral knowledge into actual practice also runs counter to the evidentiary fact that, sometimes even over a long period of time, people act against their deepest instincts of conscience.

This is why Aquinas would quote from Corinthians that 'The unspiritual man does not receive the gifts of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned.' This prudence is imparted to us helps us to take moral wisdom and move it to practical action. Aquinas said that 'prudence directs the moral virtues not only in the choice of the means, but also in appointing the end.' The objective law in a realist moral theology does not find it a burden. Conscience is formed and imputed with prudence and therefore the conscience is shaped by love and life in the Spirit. This is how JP II put it in his encyclical Veritatis Splendor.

Those who live "by the flesh" experience God's law as a burden, and indeed as a denial or at least a restriction of their own freedom. On the other hand, those who are impelled by love and "walk by the Spirit" (Gal 5:16), and who desire to serve others, find in God's Law the fundamental and necessary way in which to practise love as something freely chosen and freely lived out. Indeed, they feel an interior urge — a genuine "necessity" and no longer a form of coercion — not to stop at the minimum demands of the Law, but to live them in their "fullness". This is a still uncertain and fragile journey as long as we are on earth, but it is one made possible by grace, which enables us to possess the full freedom of the children of God (cf. Rom 8:21) and thus to live our moral life in a way worthy of our sublime vocation as "sons in the Son".