CONSCIENCE
The Final Arbiter
People’s Expressions
What do people mean when they say:
“If conscience is your friend, it doesn’t matter who is your enemy; if conscience is your enemy, it doesn’t matter who is your friend.”
“He is a conscientious teacher”?
“She is a prisoner of her conscience”?
“My conscience is clear?”
“You have a guilty conscience?
Popular Understanding of
Conscience
A sense of right and wrong
A kind of inner voice (tingog gikan sa kinahiladman) which guides us in our moral life
God’s voice inside us telling us what to do. It makes us feel bad when we’ve done something wrong.
Guilt Feelings?
The experience of conscience often is associated with guilt feelings: “Nakonsensya ko bay” (“My conscience is bothering me”). “Wala ko makatulog kay nahasol ko sa akong konsensya” (“I have sleepless nights because my conscience tells me what I did was wrong”).
In the moral development of a person, guilt feelings are important. However, we need to be careful because some guilt feelings are not healthy.
Psychological Conscience?
PC is related to feelings of moral approval or disapproval. Practically, all of us experience at times either the security of some inner approval of one’s decision/action, or the anxiety of a condemnation within the depths of our being.
Guilt feelings stirred up by the inner mechanism of psychological conscience are widely discussed by psychiatrists. For example, Sigmund Freud, the father of modern psychoanalysis, explained the reality of the “superego” in the person’s psyche.
The long period of childhood during which the growing human being lives in dependence on his parents leaves behind it a precipitate, which forms within his ego a special agency in which this parental influence is prolonged. It has received the name of superego…
…The parents’ influence naturally includes not only the personalities of the parents themselves but also the racial, national, and family traditions handed on through them, as well as the demands of the immediate social milieu which they represent”
-Sigmund Freud, An Outline of Psychoanalysis-
Freud identified conscience with the superego, as if conscience were merely an externally imposed set of moral rules which made us feel guilty when we disobeyed them. The superego, which is the result of a process of psychological conditioning, would serve as the policeman of the personal life, the agent of enforced socialization.
Psychological Conscience may be either realistic and healthy or illusory and pathological. It might happen that guilt feelings will call our attention to a situation or an action for which we are and ought to be truly guilty. And if so, they are helpful guides for moral human living.
But the exact opposite may also be the case. For whatever reason, the person might feel guilty about something that he should not repent. For example, a woman who had been trained from childhood to be submissive might feel that she is being immoral if she does not do just what her husband desires.
Therefore, guilt feelings do not make an accurate barometer of the personal moral life. In fact, some people would even participate in wide scale graft and corruption without feeling guilty.
Oftentimes, the commands and prohibitions of the superego do not arise from the perception of the intrinsic goodness or badness of a contemplated action. Rather, it comes from the need to maintain the approval of authority figures, like parents or teachers.
Psychological conscience is largely influenced by non-rational factors, and it is not unusual for a conscience like this to condemn what is not wrong or to approve what is not right.
Holy Scripture on Conscience
The word conscience, in Greek syneidesis, is of Hellenistic origin and has no Hebrew counterpart. Thus, we should not be surprise if the word conscience does not occur in the Old Testament, except for 1 Sam 25:31 and Wisdom 17:11. But the idea of conscience (if not the term) receives generous attention in the pages of the Hebrew Scripture.
• 1 Sam 25:31 “Then your conscience will not be bothered for having killed without cause or for having taken your own revenge.”
• Wisdom 17:11 “Wickedness is cowardly in itself and stands self-condemned. Someone with a guilty conscience will always imagine things to be worse than they really are.”
• The OT usually employs the word ‘heart’, but also occasionally ‘spirit’, to indicate the inner sanctum where man is alone with his Maker, where his desires and decisions flow:
“Create in me a clean heart, O Lord, and renew a right spirit within me” (Ps 50).
“O, that today you would hear his voice: harden not your hearts” (Ps 95:7f).
“God probes the heart” (Jer 11:20; Prov 21:2; Ps 26:2).
“I will put my law within them, I will write it on their hearts” (Jer 31:33).
The word “conscience” does not appear in the Gospels. Nevertheless, Jesus warns against the obscuring of conscience when he says: “If the light in you is darkness, how great is the darkness” (Mt. 6:23). Conversely, “If your whole body is full of light, having no part dark, it will be wholly bright, as when a lamp with its rays gives you light” (Lk. 11:36).
In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus condemns the righteous Pharisees by quoting Isaiah, “This people honor me with their lips, but their heart is far from me.”
And then there is the classic description of conscience (kardia) provided by the writer of John’s letter. He declares:
“This is our way of knowing we are committed to the truth and are at peace before him no matter what our consciences may charge us with; for God is greater than our hearts and all is known to him. Beloved, if our consciences have nothing to charge us with, we can be sure that God is with us” (1 John 3:19-21).
In his understanding of conscience (syneidesis), Paul insists that even the Gentiles are said to have this awareness of right and wrong, though they lack divine revelation:
“When Gentiles, who do not possess the law, do instinctively what the law requires, these, though not having the law, are a law to themselves. They show that what the law requires is written on their hearts, to which their own conscience also bears witness; and their conflicting thoughts will accuse or perhaps excuse them on the day when, according to my gospel, God, through Jesus Christ, will judge the secret thoughts of all” (Rom 2: 14-16).
Church Documents on Conscience
In the documents of the Church, there are different levels of awareness of moral truth to which conscience refers. John Macquarrie identifies and explains the various levels:
1st Level: Particular Moral Conscience
2nd Level: General Moral Conscience
3rd Level: Transcendental Conscience
1st Level
Particular Moral Conscience
PMC refers to a practical judgment terminating a process of moral deliberation. For Saint Thomas, conscience is a judgment of the practical reason, closely connected with the virtue of prudence. It applies the moral law to specific situations. As a practical judgment concerning concrete situations, conscience would tell us: “Do this, shun that” (GS 16).
Note here that conscience is not a matter of feelings of approval or disapproval, but of a reflective moral judgment reached after a process of moral deliberation.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church says: “Conscience is a judgment of reason whereby the human person recognizes the moral quality of a concrete act that he is going to perform, is in the process of performing, or has already completed” (1778).
Similarly in Veritatis Splendor, Pope John Paul II writes: “The judgment of conscience is a practical judgment which makes known what man must do or not do, or which assesses an act already performed by him. It is a judgment which applies to a concrete situation the conviction that one must love and do good and avoid evil” (59).
For example, a man comes to see me and beg for help. He does not seem to be incapable of working, and I choose to give him food and something to drink, but not money. This is a practical judgment. My intellect assesses the situation, my conscience tells me that it would be wrong to refuse him help, but unwise to give him money which he might spend on alcohol.
Here, conscience formulates a moral obligation in the light of the natural law of generosity to the needy. “Whereas the natural law discloses the objective and universal demands of the moral good, conscience is the application of the law to a particular case” (VS 59). It reveals what ought to be done in practice here and now. It is the proximate [subjective] norm of personal morality.
2nd Level
General Moral Conscience
GMC refers to a “broader, more generalized knowledge of right and wrong, of good and bad.” It is a personal awareness of basic moral principles or truths which assist a person in making moral decisions.
“Do good, avoid evil”
“Do to others what you want others do unto you”
“Love God and neighbor”
“Give another person his or her due”
This awareness may easily include the norms that immediately follow from the most basic principles or what we call “secondary norms” such as those of the Ten Commandments.
Vatican II refers to conscience of this level when it affirms that it is through the mediation of conscience that man comes to perceive ever increasingly the unchanging truth and comes to recognize the demands of God’s divine and eternal law (DH 3).
Moreover, it affirms that the voice of God’s law, made known through conscience, calls upon to “love and to do what is good and to avoid evil” (GS 16). It is in this sense of the term that one’s conscience can be said to be an awareness of the law of God written in the human heart.
It is very important to note that conscience does not decide good and evil; it discerns them, more or less accurately. It is not the source of moral law, but a detector. In analogy to radio, it is a receiving set, not the transmitting station.
John Paul II explained: “Conscience is not an independent and exclusive capacity to decide what is good and what is evil. Rather there is profoundly imprinted upon it a principle of obedience vis-à-vis the objective norm which establishes and conditions the correspondence of its decisions with the commands and prohibitions which are at the basis of human behavior” (Veritatis Splendor 60).
3rd Level
Transcendental Conscience
Conscience also is understood as a special and very fundamental mode of self-awareness whereby persons are conscious of themselves as moral beings, called to fulfill their dignity as intelligent and free beings.
“Conscience in this sense is the summons, deep within our being, to be fully the beings God wills us to be and to make ourselves to be, by our own choices and actions, lovers of the true and the good” (William May). This inner drive of the person to seek the truth is what theologians call Transcendental Conscience.
Vatican II refers to this level of conscience when it says:
“In the depths of his conscience, man detects a law which he does not impose upon himself, but which holds him to obedience. Always summoning him to love good and avoid evil, the voice of this law 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” (Gaudium et Spes 16).
In a nutshell, the three levels of conscience are:
PMC: Conscience as a practical judgment about the morality of given acts.
GMC: Conscience as an awareness of the basic principles of morality.
TC: Conscience as an interior summons to fulfill God’s design for the human person.
