Conscience, Freedom, Rights: Idols of the Enlightenment Religion

The Thomist 73 (2009): 169-239 CONSCIENCE, FREEDOM, RIGHTS: IDOLS OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT RELIGION JOHN R. T. LAMONT Catholic Institute of Sydney Strathfield, NSW, Australia THE UNDERLYING THEME of this article is the teaching of the Catholic Church on religious liberty. In order to address this much-contested subject one must first consider other subjects that are at least as important: the concepts of conscience, freedom, and rights. In this article, I will contrast St. Thomas's understanding of these concepts with the understandings of the Counter-Reformation and the Enlightenment, and will argue that St. Thomas's understanding is the one that should be adopted. In addition to providing a necessary preliminary to an examination of Catholic teaching on religious liberty, this discussion will put us in a position to understand the state of the Church as a whole, and the crisis she has been undergoing not simply since the Second Vatican Council, but since the Enlightenment. Examination of these concepts will have to be carried out at some length. This is because I will be arguing for theses in the line of the nouvelle theologie, claiming that the nominalist and Counter-Reformation understandings ofthese concepts are wrong and damaging, and that St. Thomas's understanding of them should be accepted instead. Because St. Thomas's views on these subjects are still often misunderstood, and the opposing views remain well entrenched, the arguments for St. Thomas's position need to be substantial. 169 170 JOHN R. T. LAMONT I. CONSCIENCE VS. PRUDENCE A) Conscience in St. Thomas Discussions of conscience usually proceed on the assumption that its basic features are known and not controverted, or at least not controverted by morally decent and sincere people. Frequent rhetorical appeals to the rights of conscience and the inviolability of conscience rest on this assumption. In fact, however, this assumption is mistaken. The understanding of conscience to which such rhetoric appeals is not an evident notion that arises from universal human experience, but is rather the product of a particular philosophical and theological development. This development, together with the notion of human freedom with which it is connected, began to be elaborated in the Middle Ages, and was brought to completion by the theologians of the CounterReformation . It is radically different from the notion of conscience held by St. Thomas, and the understanding of freedom that it involves is radically different from St. Thomas's understanding of freedom. To attain the degree of clarity that we require about St. Thomas's understanding and the CounterReformation understanding, it will be necessary to put them in the contexts of the accounts of human action of which they are parts. This is particularly necessary in St. Thomas's case, in order to remove the layers of misinterpretation that have been imposed on his views by commentators trying to force his thought into the mold of Counter-Reformation moral theology. Conscience, according to St. Thomas, is not a power or a habitus, but an act (STh I, q. 79, a. 13; De Verit., q. 17, a. 1}; it is the act of making a speculative judgment about the goodness or badness of a particular act of the will. The making of this speculative judgment need not occur in the course of deliberating about whether or not to do the act to which the judgment applies; it can be made about actions in the past. This understanding of conscience is at odds with the notions that conscience is an CONSCIENCE, FREEDOM, RIGHTS 171 authority, is "the most immediate giver of moral imperatives,"1 or is the proximate rule of human acts, with the divine law being the remote rule.2 The act of making a judgment of conscience does not as such give rise to moral permission or a moral imperative to act, nor does it contain the power to motivate an action. It is the reasons assented to in the judgment that perform these functions, rather than the act of making the judgment. As Herbert McCabe says, "it is not the strength and sincerity of my conviction that the use of nuclear weapons must always be evil, but rather the grounds for this conviction, that make...