I am free to follow my conscience.

I am sure that you’ve heard a lot about the freedom of conscience. These two words tend to go together in people’s minds. But is this a Catholic concept? Am I really free to follow my moral conscience? Well, Saint Thomas Aquinas would warn us that it all depends on how we define our terms.

What is Human Freedom?

When most people think of freedom, they think of the ability to do whatever they want. By its very nature, this is what free will is – the ability to choose. But we get into trouble if we stop there. Does everyone have the ability and the right to choose whatever they want to do? What if what someone wants to do interferes with what I want to do? Who has the right to exercise freedom? It doesn’t take long to recognize that a definition of free will as licentiousness is horribly insufficient for thriving human life.

When we consider why God would give us the gift of free will, what its purpose is, we realize that God gave us our freedom to empower us to choose what is good, and ultimately to choose Him. So the true definition of human freedom is the ability to choose the best possible good in each situation. 

The Moral Conscience

Likewise, an insufficient understanding of conscience leads us away from its true power. Some people think of the conscience as a little voice in our head that tells us we’re doing something wrong (think Jimminy Cricket in the story of Pinocchio). More often today, the conscience is assumed to be our personal ideas about what is right or wrong – often used synonymously with the term “values.” But the conscience is so much more than that.

The moral conscience is the power to use reason to apply the moral law to specific situations.  It is based on the objective truth about the moral law.  In fact, the word “con-science” has knowledge of objective truth at its etymological root. The word literally means “with knowledge.”

The conscience is constituted of all the human faculties, and is therefore considered the heart of the human person.  The intellect empowers us to know the moral law and to reason out how to apply it to specific situations.  The free will empowers us to choose according to our conscience rather than being led by our passions.  Thanks to our sense appetite, we experience emotional reactions in response to the movement of our conscience.  We experience guilt when we judge our actions as evil.  We experience peace or joy when we judge our actions as good.  The involvement of all of our faculties is one way to understand that the conscience is in the human heart.

Examination of conscience and self-determination

It is where the human person meets the Truth, Beauty and Goodness that is God.  Thanks to the moral conscience, we are able to shape our own character and our ultimate destiny.  However, we must be careful stewards of our conscience, for if it is poorly formed it can lead us away from the goodness that God intended our lives to be.

We also use this ability to reason about good and evil to examine our past actions and judge them.  This power of intellect and free will ultimately allows us to form our character and decide who we are to become.  When we identify an action as good or evil, we can decide if we want that action to become part of who we are (by repeating the act and making it a habit) or if we are going to conquer that evil by avoiding temptation to that act in the future or refusing to repeat the action.  Each moral choice we make shapes our heart toward Goodness or away from it so that, ultimately, our final destiny will be decided during our final judgment when we ultimately choose God, the source of Goodness, or choose against Him.

God speaks to the heart through the conscience

Of course, our ultimate destiny is not made without Divine help.  Without grace, a relationship with God would be impossible in the first place.  Additionally, all of our moral choices are made in the context of our relationship with God.  In addition to the spark of love God places in our hearts, He also gives His divine help through the Gift of Counsel.  Counsel is the help of the Holy Spirit in making moral decisions.  This very practical gift of grace nudges our thought process and is especially strong when we seek God’s wisdom in prayer.  However, the Holy Spirit may at times strengthen the inner voice of our conscience within a specific situation to help us choose what is good.  Our guardian angels also help us in this way.

Within the conscience – within our heart – God has hidden a “spark of divine love” (St. Basil).   This spark draws our hearts toward God and all that reflects Him in what is True, Good and Beautiful.  That is why the first principle of the natural moral law – to choose good and avoid evil – is literally written in our hearts.  This spark is why committing moral evil draws our hearts to guilt and sorrow and committing acts of goodness draws us to peace and joy.  This spark of God’s love is also the “inner voice” that speaks to us about our actions.  However, God’s presence in our hearts does not interfere with our free will.  God wants us to be rational beings with free choice.  So, the second level of the moral conscience is the rational level, where we analyze our actions using what we know of the moral law as the norm for good behavior.

The inviolability of the human conscience

Because our conscience is so intimately tied to human freedom and destiny, human beings must be free to follow the leading of their conscience.  While authorities have the responsibility to protect society against those who ignore the dictates of conscience and choose evil, they also have the responsibility to offer as much freedom of conscience as the protection of the common good will allow.  To force people to act in good ways (or in ways desired by those in power) robs them of the opportunity to choose goodness for themselves and to grow in virtue. The law can nudge people in the right direction, but it cannot make them good.  The conscience is inviolable, but that does not mean that it is infallible.  If we hope to become the people God created us to be, we must be careful to form our conscience correctly.

The social nature of conscience

It makes sense that the conscience would have a social dimension.  Human beings are social by their very nature.  We constantly traverse the two dimensions of private personhood and social solidarity.  The formation of our character and conscience is influenced by people in our lives, by the values expressed in our society, and by the shaping influence of authorities.  However, the truth that we know and apply through our conscience is not shaped and formed by social influences.  Moral truth exists outside of human social influence, but is known in the context of our relationships with others.

Misconceptions of conscience

If we are going to form our conscience correctly, we must first avoid some common misconceptions about what the conscience is.  First of all, the conscience simply a person’s personal wishes, tastes or opinions.  It is not simply consciousness or self-awareness, as the “little voice” is sometimes described.  Nor can conscience be reduced to the Freudian concept of the “Superego,” formed by family and social expectations or unconscious pressures for perfection.  Nor is conscience group consensus about what is acceptable or not acceptable.  Conscience also cannot be a conformation to political or social power so that the few dictate for the masses what is good or evil. If we see the moral conscience in these ways, we will not be equipped to form our conscience properly.

Conscience formation

The first step to forming our conscience is to gain knowledge of the moral law by studying Sacred Scripture, the teachings of the Church, and the teachings of theologians within the Catholic intellectual tradition who can help us work out the tenants of the natural moral law. We need to also strengthen our moral reasoning ability by thinking through moral situations that present themselves to us. We have to strengthen our will by resisting temptation and making a conscious effort to combat vices and grow in virtue. Of course, we should enlist God’s help through prayer as we do all of this.
If we are not vigilant about the formation of our conscience, there are a number of ways that our conscience can become distorted.

• Misinformed or erroneous conscience (intellect): first, our conscience can become distorted due to a clouded intellect. Sometimes the distortion of our conscience leads us to ignorantly perform evil deeds, at other times we may neglect good acts that we should be doing because we don’t know about them. An erroneous conscience can also lead us to legalism and scrupulosity.
• Legalistic conscience: legalism means that we follow the moral law, but fail to grow beyond the law to the good that the law leads us to.  In other words, we follow the law for the sake of the law and miss the love of God that motivated the law in the first place.
• A scrupulous conscience sees sin where no sin exists.  The main sign of a scrupulous conscience is false guilt – guilt that does not accurately reflect something done wrong, guilt that is too intense for the level of evil done and guilt that does not lead to productive conversion.

• Our ignorance of good and evil can be either vincible or invincible.
  • Vincible ignorance: a vincibly distorted or erroneous conscience occurs because we failed to do what we could and should have done to be informed about the moral law, the principles derived from the moral law, or the moral choice we are facing.
  • Invincible ignorance: an invincibly erroneous conscience occurs when there is nothing we could have done to know what we needed to know to make the right decision.  When our conscience is invincibly ignorant, we incur no culpability for evil that we choose by following it.

• Lax Conscience: our conscience can also be malformed when we fail to strengthen our will against evil.  We know what is right or wrong in a given situation, but our conscience is too lax to resist temptation.  A lax conscience occurs when we give in to evil so that the desires of our sense appetite are strengthened (a basic rule about the sense appetite is that if you feed it, it wants more).  A lax conscience most often grows by small degrees, as we give in to the little temptations that are “no big deal” first.  Venial sins weaken our resolve against evil until we finally find ourselves feeling no compunction about mortal sins.

Certain conscience: if we are careful to form our conscience by strengthening our intellect and our will, we can confidently follow our conscience when it is certain.  A certain conscience excludes all reasonable fear that the opposite position may be correct.  If we harbor some doubt, we should never take serious action.  If our conscience is certain, we should always follow it.

The moral conscience is at the heart of human freedom.  By rightly forming and then honestly following his moral conscience, man has the power to cooperate with God’s creative power in his life.  Because it has to do with freedom of self-direction, the decision of conscience must be protected and respected, especially by those in authority.  While laws must exist to protect the common good, we cannot expect laws to dictate most matters of conscience.  Man must be free to seek the Good, the True and the Beautiful, not have it forced upon him.  Of course, every human person must realize the responsibility to form conscience and character with the help of others and the grace of God.

Learn How to Form Your Conscience

Would you like to learn how to form your conscience to be more in tune with God’s Truth, Beauty, and Goodness? From the Abbey‘s spirituality program teaches practical strategies for growth in five key areas of lay spirituality. One of those areas is the moral life, and building the virtues that lead to healthy conscience formation is one of the main strategies. I want to invite you to consider the offer below to get more involved in From the Abbey. 

Brought to you by Jeffrey S. Arrowood at From the Abbey, dedicated to helping you rediscover the JOY of learning and living your faith so you can grow in intimacy with God.