Aug 30 Wed
Conscience is the judgment of the intellect on the goodness or evil of an act performed or about to be performed. We are free to choose what we are to do, but we are not free to make what we have chosen, good or evil, right or wrong. Our choices are good or bad insofar they conform to God’s divine and eternal law and its “imperatives,” which are made known to us through the mediation of the conscience. Through it, we participate in God’s divine and eternal law.
“No one can be relieved of the duty of forming his conscience,” said my interlocutor, who was a bit surprised when I said that no one can do that on his own; and no one should attempt it, since man’s capacity for self-deception is boundless.
“Other people and institutions can be deceived, too.” He seemed to be well-read, yet it is all too comfortable for men to remain in a perpetual underage, to have a spiritual advisor be their conscience, and governors to remind them, all the time, of the terrible dangers they run if they think for themselves.
The axiom, that “in moral matters you must decide for yourself what kinds of things are good and evil,” has been so deeply embedded in the modern Western mind, that few doubt it at all.
Ambition makes the world go round, and hypocrisy is its prophet. Thus, we have the contradiction, a free-thinking man who is obsessed with the desire to make the right impression on people he despises, in a world of malicious imaginations and scandal-spreading tongues. It is, I might say, a perpetual middle school gone very bad.
If, however, we trust the words of Jesus, and if we permit our minds and hearts to be directed by the teaching of the Church we believe He founded, we will be like those little children who find it easy to enter the kingdom of Heaven. But we will also be wise, as free as possible from the chances and changes of the stage-play all around us, with its time-bound obsessions. And this is something that I fear my interlocutor did not understand.
A man may aspire to be his own moral Napoleon, and he will end up imprisoned on the Saint Helena of public opinion and passing fads.
Thus, in our time, for example, the rainbow flag is a trumpet on the street corner, announcing to all how virtuous we are –actually, what slaves we are. But because I want to be free, I turn to Him who said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life,” the beating heart of the only real world there is and shall be.
Image: Christ Escapes the Pharisees by Johann Friedrich Overbeck, 1866 [Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp]
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