Holloway on… Conscience and the Natural Law

 

Pleasure and pain are simple judgements of animal organism concerning a good to be sought, or an evil to be fled from. What is physical in man concurs with the judgement of the soul concerning good and evil. So when conscience “gnaws” us, we sense a response jointly in body and in soul to evil done, to the lie lived. But, as earlier said, the body through its history and pedigree has had knowledge of the Natural Law. Of its own nature the flesh cooperates with the spirit in the judgement of conscience. The Natural Law as it applies to the body of man, teaches us that all organs must work together perfectly for the good of the whole. If there is excess or defect in any operation or secretion, there is disease. The same principle applies to the power of the spirit to judge the due proportion, the “organic” relationship so to speak, of pleasure to function, and to overall meaning in the right and wrong of life.

 

 

Thus by our very spiritual nature we can, and must, judge that eating for its own sake, alcohol in excess, the pleasures of sense, including the sexual, unrelated to meaning and ministry ... that these things are “wrong” because the whole point of Natural Law is that it is the Law of the wise, proportionate, and fulfilling in every order of being. What is true of the internal workings of the human body upon itself is true of the proportion, the “providence” which governs our seeking, or acceptance, of pleasures in relation to the meaning and ministry which Nature itself has placed upon them. In all aspects and relationships, the Natural Law is the recognition of that law of life and being by which our reality is constituted in its integrity, and in the governance of its fulfilment.

 

 

Sin, the power to rebel against a law of life upon which one is made, and over which one is not the master, destroys the harmony of man’s nature, both unto God, and unto the balance and due proportion of his own psyche or psychological make-up. The basis of sin is self-adoration. Thus every power of the spirit, especially of the intellect is bent to self-righteousness, self-assertion, self-opinion. Alas, we have no self-righteousness; the measure of our righteousness is the Eternal Word, the Logos, the mind of God. The root of sin as arrogance, self-adoration as our natural end and law, is indicated with precision in Genesis, in the temptation of Adam and Eve: “You will not die, the day you eat of it your eyes will be opened, you will be like gods, knowing good and evil” (Gen. 3:5). In other words, you are able to do as you like, accountable to yourselves alone. God is accountable to himself alone. God is self-adoration, because God is the ontological measure of all good, of all laws of natural fulfilment. God is the Law, by definition of his reality; we are not, nor any angel, nor anything created whatever.

 

 

The presence and power of the soul is godlike to the flesh within man’s being. The effect of the very first sin is to bring an imposed “law of disobedience” into the flesh and the psyche of man. We cannot now treat of it. St. Paul touches profoundly upon it in the Letter to the Romans, and St. Augustine treats magnificently of it especially in his works against the Pelagians. The Church, unlike a certain modern Jesuit, did not find in Augustine “a flawed genius” but one who expounded clearly, and in detail, what was her doctrine of Original Sin. Augustine expounded, and Aquinas accepted without demur, the effects of concupiscence which follow the loss of original gracious communion with God: addiction to passion for its own sake, the jangling disarray of all our pleasure principles, of which we are sadly aware. Original Sin itself is not concupiscence as disobedience to wisdom. Original Sin is the interior wound, the existence of a principle of intrinsic disobedience of nature to God, by which we lose the immanent justification of grace, and even when redeemed, are unable to ascend in holiness to God in a straight line.

 

 

Conscience is a judgement of conformity to God’s law, whether concerning the basic use and proportion of our being, and its pleasures of flesh and spirit, or whether it concerns the measure of the justice and charity we owe to God and our neighbour. The effect of sin is to confuse and coarsen the judgement of the spirit, but sin can never destroy its basic capability. Social pressure, social evil (and guilt in society is not Original Sin, either as fact, or as inheritance), passion and the example of others, all these can deeply wound the judgement of conscience. It is imperative for us fallen men that God should reveal, and in revealing underline the perspective of conscience. It is like putting correct lenses to very disordered eyes. St. Augustine is precise upon this: “so that men could not claim that the law was uncertain, God wrote on the Tablets of the Law what men would not read in the i r hear t s . As suredly these commandments were written there, but men did not want to read them there. So God thrust them under their very eyes, that they might be constrained to see them also in their consciences. At the voice of God moving in upon them from without, men as it were fled to their inner being, finding the same testimony”. (Ennarr. in. Ps. 57. n.1.)