THE IMPORTANCE OF CONSCIENCE AND HOW IT RELATES TO LAW.

THE IMPORTANCE OF CONSCIENCE AND HOW IT RELATES TO LAW.

Conscience is a law deep within us that is put there by God. We discover the law of conscience (“do good, avoid evil,” the fundamental moral law), but we do not invent it. It is prior to ourselves. The origin of this law is God, not human beings. In other words, the moral law is not a human construct, but something decreed by God, that existed before humanity itself. In philosophical terms, it is a priori. It is not a law that is deduced from observation of phenomena.

The word for conscience (syneidesis in Greek) comes very late in the Old Testament. But we can note that the whole Old Testament talks of the human heart and the way God scrutinizes it. Gaudium et Spes 16, which is quoted by the Catechism of the Catholic Church in no. 1776, says: “Deep inside his conscience, man discovers a law which he has not laid upon himself but which he must obey. Its voice ever calling him to love and to do what is good and avoid evil, sounds in his heart at the right moment…For man has in his heart a law inscribed by God…His conscience is man’s most secret core and his sanctuary. There he is alone with God whose voice echoes in his depths.” It is hard to underestimate the importance of this definition or the richness of the theology contained therein. First of all, conscience is located “deep inside” a human being. That is to say, conscience and the call of conscience, to do good and avoid evil, is not something that is acquired, rather, it is something innate in man.

Conscience is called our innermost core and our sanctuary. By the use of the word “core”, it seem to suggest that it is conscience that is the irreducible part of us that makes us human. Animals after all are conscious and have feelings, but they are bereft of consciences, they cannot distinguish between right and wrong, good and evil. So conscience, our ability to hear the voice of God within us is at the root of our dignity as humans. Conscience is that inner place which is the seat of God (sedes Dei, as Augustine calls it) and in which we come to now his plan for us, and in which we come to grasp the meaning of his law. So, a belief in conscience presupposes that every human being has access to the highest truth within themselves. Within ourselves we can recognize something that was put there by God, and that we did not invent.Thomas Aquinas acknowledges that a mistaken conscience is binding, in other words, one is bound to obey the voice of God within him/her, even when that voice is misinterpreted. Conscience is always binding and it is the highest authority on earth.

Where does all these lead us? If we speak of the supreme authority of conscience, we must also acknowledge that God, the giver of conscience, is undoubtedly the giver of the law and the ultimate basis for the binding nature of the law he gives. But this does not annihilate human responsibility or our obligation and need to think morally. God certainly gives the law, but that law is mediated through conscience. Conscience is our way of hearing and understanding the law. Two things come together in the human conscience: an awareness of God’s law, and the awareness that we have to apply God’s law to our actual situation.