An Introduction To Moral Theology, 2nd Edition. William May
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have seen that in forming conscience one needs to be aware, first of all, of the basic principles of morality. Indeed, one of the levels of conscience examined in this chapter is the awareness of moral truth at the level of principles or starting points for moral deliberation. In the following chapter, devoted to the subject of natural law, we will be concerned with identifying these principles.
In this chapter, we have seen that a Catholic, in forming his or her conscience, can do so only by paying “careful attention to the sacred and certain teaching of the Church.” In the final chapter of this work, the role of the Church as moral teacher and the issue of dissent from authoritative teachings of the Church on moral questions will be taken up in detail. Here it suffices to note that for the Catholic the authority of those who teach in Christ’s name is a more-than-human authority, and the truths these teachers propose are to be taken to heart so that one’s life in Christ may be deepened and enriched. (On conscience and the moral life, see the Catechism of the Catholic Church, nos. 1776-1802.)
Notes for Chapter Two
1. St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, 1, 93, 4. In this article, St. Thomas distinguishes a threefold human dignity proper to human persons. The first is the dignity human beings have by virtue of being made in God’s image and likeness; the second is their dignity as beings who know and love God by conforming to his grace, but in an imperfect way as sojourners in this life; the third is their dignity as beings now living in complete union with God, and this is the dignity of the blessed.
2. On the “beatifying beginnings” of human existence, see the probing analyses of Pope John Paul II in The Original Unity of Man and Woman: Catechesis on Genesis (Boston: St. Paul Editions, 1981).
3. The Church has always taught that human life, precisely because it is a gift from God and is destined for life everlasting in union with him, is priceless and merits the most profound respect from its beginning. Perhaps the most profound and eloquent presentation of this great truth is given by Pope John Paul II in his 1995 encyclical Evangelium vitae (“The Gospel of Life”), in particular in Chapter II. A useful collection of earlier Church documents on the sanctity of human life extending from the time of the Didache in the early second century up to the 1976 pastoral letter of the U.S. bishops, To Live in Christ Jesus, is the anthology Yes to Life (Boston: St. Paul Publications, 1977). See also Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Instruction on Respect for Human Life in Its Origins and on the Dignity of Human Procreation (Donum vitae) (1987).
4. Karol Wojtyla, Love and Responsibility, trans. H. Willetts (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1981), p. 41.
5. On this matter, see my book Catholic Bioethics and the Gift of Human Life (Our Sunday Visitor: Huntington, IN, 2000), Chapter 3; see also Patrick Lee, Abortion and the Unborn Child (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1996), Chapter 1; Germain Grisez, “When Do People Begin?” in Proceedings of the Annual Convention of the American Catholic Philosophical Association (Washington, DC: The American Catholic Philosophical Association, 1986). See also Mortimer Adler, The Difference of Man and the Difference It Makes (Cleveland/New York: Meridian Books, 1968).
6. In the Abbott edition of The Documents of Vatican Council II (New York: America Press, 1965), this passage from Gaudium et spes (no. 16) is incorrectly translated as “the voice of conscience.” The Latin text is cuius vox, with the antecedent of cuius being lex (“law”), not conscientia (“conscience”).
7. St. Augustine devoted one of his earliest works after his baptism to the subject of free choice, namely, De Libero Arbitrio. The apostolic Fathers, such as Justin Martyr, stressed free choice in the face of pagan determinism. Early in Christianity, Justin developed a line of reasoning to be used over and over again by such writers as Augustine, John Damascene, and Aquinas. He wrote: “We have learned from the prophets and we hold it as true that punishments and chastisements and good rewards are distributed according to the merit of each man’s actions. Were this not the case, and were all things to happen according to the decree of fate, there would be nothing at all in our power. If fate decrees that this man is to be good, and that one wicked, then neither is the former to be praised nor the latter to be blamed. Furthermore, if the human race does not have the power of freely deliberated choice in fleeing evil and in choosing good, then men are not accountable for their actions” (The First Apology, 43; trans. W. A. Jurgen, The Faith of the Early Fathers [College-ville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1970], Vol. 1, no. 123).
8. St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, 1-2, Prologue.
9. The Council of Trent solemnly defined the truth that human persons, even after the Fall, are gifted with free choice. For the text, see Henricus Denzinger and Adolphus Schönmetzer, Enchiridion Symbolorum Definitionum et Declarationum de Rebus Fidei et Morum (35th ed., Rome: Herder, 1975), no. 1555. This source will henceforth be referred to as DS.
10. Joseph Boyle, Germain Grisez, and Olaf Tollefsen, Free Choice: A Self-Referential Argument (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1976).
11. Germain Grisez, The Way of the Lord Jesus, Vol. 1, Christian Moral Principles (Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1983), p. 41. On this, see also St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, 1, 83, 1; 1-2, 1, 1; 1-2, 6, 1; 1-2, 18, 1.
12. Grisez, Christian Moral Principles, p. 50.
13. On this, see the interesting account of human action as language in Herbert McCabe, O.P., What Is Ethics All About? (Washington, DC: Corpus Books, 1969), pp. 90-94.
14. Grisez, Christian Moral Principles, p. 59.
15. Ibid., pp. 60-61.
16. Ibid., p. 193.
17. Germain Grisez and Russell Shaw, Fulfillment in Christ: A Summary of Christian Moral Principles (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991), pp. 23-24.
18. Grisez, Christian Moral Principles, p. 58. Grisez provides a reference to St. Thomas, Summa theologiae, 1-2, 49, 1-3 and 55, 1-2, for the way in which Aquinas understood virtues and vices to be “habits” or, in Latin, habitus.
19. See St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, 1-2, 55, 4.
20. On the difference between intellectual virtues of this kind, which he calls virtues in a relative sense, and moral virtue, see St. Thomas, Summa theologiae, 1-2, 57-58.
21. On knowledge by connaturality, see my article, “Knowledge, Connatural,” in