22. Conscience Is More to Be Obeyed Than Authority Imposed from the Outside.
22. Conscience is more to be obeyed than authority imposed from the outside.22
Conscience plays a central role in Aquinas’s teaching about morality. We are to develop a conscience and live by it. The passages in Aquinas about conscience always struck me deeply as I grew up in a very Protestant culture in the 1950s, as I heard time and again that it was Martin Luther who “invented” conscience as the bottom line in morality. “Here I stand,” Luther said, taking on the dark forces of the sixteenth-century Roman Catholic Church and peddling of indulgences . Movies, theater, and literature have praised Luther for his sense of conscience, and some commentators have spread the impression that he even invented the concept.
Without diluting Luther’s invocation of conscience, consider these teachings from Aquinas three hundred years earlier:
Conscience is more to be obeyed than authority imposed from the outside. By following a right conscience you not only do not incur sin but are also immune from sin, whatever superiors may say to the contrary. To act against one’s conscience and to disobey a superior can both be sinful. Of the two, the first is worse since the dictate of conscience is more binding than the decree of external authority.
He elaborates: “Every judgment of conscience, be it right or wrong, be it about things evil in themselves or morally indifferent, is obligatory in such a way that anyone who acts against their conscience always sins.”
To go against conscience—even a mistaken one—is to “contravene the law of God.”
What Aquinas teaches here is not an abstraction. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. invoked Thomas Aquinas’s teachings about conscience in his celebrated “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” which soon became the blueprint for the American civil rights movement. In addressing the question of civil disobedience, King first declares: “There are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.” He offers a strategy for distinguishing between the two: “A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law.” It is at this point that King invokes Aquinas: “To put it in the words of Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust.”31 Aquinas teaches that a “tyrannical law is not a law strictly speaking but rather a perversion of law. … Such laws do not bind in conscience” (480).
I know that Aquinas’s teachings on conscience informed my decisions when I was being ordered by my Dominican provincial and the Master General in Rome to abort my work with creation spirituality in California. Indeed, I wrote a letter to my Master General in which I cited the passages above apropos of conscience from Aquinas. He never responded to me however. Instead he formally dismissed me from the Order and sent me on my way to become an Episcopal priest and which in my autobiography Confessions I call a “Post-denominational priest.”
The prophet’s mind
is moved
not only to apprehend something,
but also to speak
or to do
something.