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by Marissa Johannes

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Christ promised St. Peter in Matthew 16:18 that "the gates of Hell shall not prevail" against His Church. Our Divine Savior never promised, however, that She would not have conflicts, even conflicts from within Herself. One such problem afflicting the Church today is that of heteronomous groups who claim to be perfectly in harmony with the Church and the Pope while fundamentally misunderstanding key doctrines. There is a certain credibility to their teachings, for there are documents in the history of the Church that, taken out of context, would lend to an incorrect understanding of Catholic dogma. One such doctrine is the Church's teaching, Extra ecclesiam nulla salvus-"Outside the Church there is no salvation. "Taken literally, the Catholic Church would necessarily be required to exclude all non-Catholics-especially those who had never had any contact with the message of the Gospel and therefore never even had a chance-from the economy of salvation. One could argue that, after all, according to the Book of Revelation, the number of those saved is very few, but is such an exclusive view of salvation compatible with God's Divine Mercy? To be sure, God is infinitely Just but He is not a heteronomous and capricious monster. To correctly understand the Church's teaching on this matter, one must examine natural law and its relation to the individual conscience and for that there is no better authority than St. Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas' systematic examination of the natural law and conscience in the Summa Theologiae and the subsequent Church documents demonstrate that, while it is true that "outside the Church there is no salvation," it is also true that even one who has never heard of Jesus Christ may be saved.

Logically, one should begin with a basic comprehension of the natural law. Aquinas distinguishes various types of law, the eternal, divine, and the natural laws being most pertinent to the discussion at hand. The eternal law is "the divine reason's conception of things," eternal because it is the mind of God Himself and unchangeable as God Himself is unchangeable and perfect.¹ The eternal law serves as the basis for not only all the other laws but also all of creation, being that from which all things derive their correct order. Distinct from all of creation is the human being, a creature endowed with reason, the "divine image" of God mentioned in Genesis 1:27, and hand-in-hand with reason comes the free will to choose what the reason determines to be good. Sewn into the nature of reason, further, is a unique participation in the eternal law called the natural law that guides the human reason by helping it to discern what is good and what is evil.² Since the human reason is so far inferior to that of the Creator, the natural law cannot be a comprehensive sum of the eternal law (which can only be known by God) nor can it contradict the eternal law. The natural law allows men to know the eternal law to a certain extent due to its participation in the truth.³ Because the knowledge of the eternal law is limited in man, there is the divine law, which is essentially divine revelation (perhaps Aquinas did not live long enough to rename it in this way). The divine law serves as a check to, amongst other things, to take away all doubt as to the goodness or evil of a particular act.⁴

As mentioned before, reason is governed by the natural law. The rational question becomes thus: of what does the natural law consist so that the reason may know what to do? First and foremost, Aquinas says, the fundamental principle of practical reason is that good is what all men seek. This is not an "ought"; it is simply a statement of the existing condition of things, the "way things are," as it were. From this very general condition, man's reason is able to derive the fundamental general precept, the first "ought," namely that one ought to do good and avoid evil. It is a self-evident precept, one that comes naturally. It is not imposed by any lawgiver but is knitted into nature itself. That one ought to do good and avoid evil is the precept upon which all others are based, from which naturally follows that man seeks his own self-preservation, that he procreate and educate his offspring, that he lives in society, and that he seeks to know the truth about God.⁵ Also included in the natural law, promulgated in a definite revelation so that there may be no doubt about them, are the Ten Commandments, though some are more obvious than others.⁶ Among these various precepts is a hierarchy, which becomes imperative to be able to distinguish when it comes to determining whether a person may be at fault or not. The higher one moves up the ladder of hierarchy, the more particular a principle is. For example, the fundamental precept of the natural law-that is, to do good and avoid evil-belongs to a level of self-evident principles that cannot be mistaken by any man.⁷ The next level, that of concrete moral norms, like the Ten Commandments, is also known to all men but is somewhat more specific. The final level, conscience, is the level upon which the principles are applied to situations.

Now, from what has been outlined about the elements of a rational being and the laws governing it, one may proceed to conscience. St. Thomas defines conscience as "knowledge applied to a certain case," which is in and of itself an act.⁸ It is here, in the relation of knowledge to a particular situation, and the subsequent consent or refusal of the will where a man is to be judged. First, one must consider knowledge, for before the will may give or refuse its consent, it must know to what it is agreeing or disagreeing.

Conscience is the most specific of the levels because it is the level that is different in each individual. Each man knows the self-evident principles and the concrete moral norms but some men may interpret them differently. At this point, a heteronomous interlocutor would say that, because knowledge of the natural law is inherent in the nature of every man, no man has any excuse. By virtue of having that natural law within him, he can always refer back to it and know the difference between good and evil in any situation. To take a particular case, a man who was raised being told that killing his enemies is not evil and who does indeed kill is acting directly contrary to the Fifth Commandment, "Thou shalt not kill." Since the Commandments are part of the natural law, as discussed above, the man must surely know that it is wrong to kill, even if he were told otherwise. He is simply ignoring the natural law and therefore must be condemned.

The heteronomous argument is partially correct. It is true that "Thou shalt not kill an innocent human being" is a general precept of the natural law-but what has been the instruction of the man? What if the man had been told, since he was a child, that only people of a certain race or religion were innocent and all others were evil? What is his definition of "innocent man"? Is he to blame for killing the foreigners, believing that they are guilty?

Surprisingly enough, Thomas says (in some cases) no. In Prima Secundae, Question Six, Article Eight, he discusses the will's role in knowledge: all depends on the formation of knowledge, which, in turn, depends on whether or not the will chose or did not choose the knowledge. If the person is ignorant because the will chose to be so, the ignorance is vincible. Using Thomas' language, in such a case, ignorance is consequent of the will, since the will brought ignorance about as an actual consequence. The will could have done this in two ways: directly or indirectly voluntarily. Directly voluntary is simply that the person was freely able to access the truth and yet refused to believe it. Thus, such ignorance is also called by a more telling (and more terrifying) name: "ignorance of evil choice. "No better is the "affected ignorance"-indirect ignorance-whereby one chooses not to examine whether or not something may or may not be wrong in order that he need not be bound. This is more likely the case in which one would say, "Ignorance is bliss!" and act without attempting to learn the truth. Unfortunately for such a man, vincible ignorance is never bliss, and, even if he were excused on the basis of invincible ignorance, as discussed below, he would not be aware of his ignorance anyway to be able to recognize its bliss. Because he is aware of the truth and yet rejects it, a man with consequent ignorance commits a voluntary act of evil when he consents to an evil action.

As mentioned above, there is another type of ignorance: antecedent or invincible ignorance. Such ignorance is called antecedent because the ignorance precedes the will. Yet, if the ignorance precedes the will, then it is not possible for a man to know that he is in ignorance and from there, Aquinas says his actions are involuntary in so far as they are acted in ignorance. To use Thomas' own example (still in Prima Secundae, Question Six, Article Eight) a man may shoot at a deer, after having already ensured that his shot would not harm anybody, and accidentally hits a man who came up the road at the last minute. One simply could not call that a voluntary act but an involuntary one; there was not the full access to or knowledge of the truth present that could condemn the man.

To link vincible and invincible ignorance back to the discussion at hand, one takes up the previous example once again. A man has been raised from childhood being told that his enemies are evil and must be killed. He knows not to kill an innocent man from the natural law within, but his practical application of such has been warped-not by himself but by those who reared and taught him. He follows the natural law as he knows it: he does not harm innocent men, i.e., his countrymen. In fact, he may even believe that he is doing good by destroying his enemies. Thomas finds nothing wrong with such a view. He has to say thus:

As to general principles, the natural law, in the abstract, can nowise be blotted out from men's hearts. But it is blotted out in the case of a particular action insofar as reason is hindered from applying the general principles to a particular point of practice on account of concupiscence or some other passion.... But as to the other, i.e., the secondary precepts, the natural law can be blotted out from the human heart either by evil persuasions‚Ķor by vicious customs and corrupt habits, as among some men theft and even unnatural vices, as the Apostle states, were not esteemed sinful.⁹

It seems that this view denies that God's grace is present in the ignorant heart. For, if God's grace were truly there and man were cooperating with it, man would not commit an evil act, much less be excused for it. God's grace only helps a person to do good; if a person is not doing good, he is therefore acting against grace and sinning. Even so, Thomas replies, "Although grace is more efficacious than nature, yet nature is more essential to man and therefore more enduring."¹⁰ In other words, grace presupposes nature. It works under the presupposition that nature was correctly formed. In the case of an erroneous conscience, i.e., one that is making incorrect judgments in a particular situation because of invincible ignorance, a man must follow what his conscience dictates, even if it is a false conscience, if he truly believes that what his conscience dictates is true. The reason why is simple: "Although the erring reason is not derived from God, yet the erring reason puts forward its judgment as being true, and consequently derived from God, from Whom is all truth."¹¹ Grace can only work when man's free will cooperates freely with its positive stimulus¹² but the will acts on what the reason tells it to be good. If the reason is invincibly in error, the will must comply, for "every will at variance with reason, whether right or erring, is always evil."¹³ It is in this sense that St. Paul writes, in Romans 2:14-15, "For when the Gentiles who do not have the law by nature observe the prescriptions of the law, they are a law for themselves even though they do not have the law. They show that the demands of the law are written in their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness and their conflicting thoughts accuse or even defend them (emphasis added)."

To take a secular example for illustration of the principles guiding an erroneous conscience, one may look at Mark Twain's classic novel Huckleberry Finn. Young Huck is but a boy of twelve or thirteen, presented with a moral quandary by Chapter 31. Jim, the runaway slave, rightfully belongs to Miss Watson-or so Huck's upbringing has told him. Yet Huck has seen Jim's humanity manifested in so many different ways by this time. Jim even told him at one point that Huck was "the best friend old Jim had ever had in the world and the ONLY one he's got now. "Is Huck to follow his conscience, which has been (erroneously) formed by the moral heteronomy of Miss Watson, or is he to follow his experience? Huck is so upset by the dilemma that he first does what he should: writes a letter to Miss Watson telling her where Jim is. What happens next is a fascinating example of moral judgment. Huck says:

I took [the letter] up, and held it in my hand. I was a-trembling, because I'd got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself: "All right, then, I'll GO to hell" -- and tore it up.¹⁴

What is a reader to think about Huck's morality? On the one hand, his conscience is telling him to return Jim to his owner, but his experience is telling him otherwise; he is in the middle processes of informing his conscience. There is no doubt that he has a false conscience as his erroneous upbringing has instilled in him a teaching directly contrary to the fundamental dignity of a human being. The larger question is if his conscience is good or bad-was he really acting for or against it? On the surface, it might seem that this may be one of the rare cases of a false and bad conscience, where the conscience is erroneous but the person acts contrary to it anyway. Even if the act is, by nature, a good act (in this case, freeing a human being from unlawful slavery), the fact that Huck is acting against his conscience means that, even though he did a naturally good act, he did an accidental evil because he acted against what he believed was right.¹⁵ Yet, there is an alternative view of the situation. Because Huck, as a rational creature, does have the natural law and can see the fundamental dignity of a human being, it is possible to say that he was acting according to that deeper principle. He would therefore be acting in accord with what his conscience is telling him and blameless. Unfortunately, the two cases can only be speculation. One would have to ask his maker, and, sadly, Mr. Samuel Langhorne Clemens is unavailable for further comment.

At the very least, the illustration should serve as a warning to those who heteronomously wish to exclude who they will from the economy of salvation. "Judge not, lest ye be judged," Christ warns in Matthew 7:1, for only the Supreme Creator knows the innermost workings of his creations. Naturally, it is very important to avoid the mistake of falling into the opposite extreme of error-i.e., moral autonomy-and claiming that, because man is judged by his conscience, then there is no such thing as an absolute truth by which all are bound. Aquinas obviously did not deny truth; how could he have called the conscience "false" or "erroneous" if there were no standard by which to judge them? To find the mean between the two extremes, one should look at the infallible teachings of the Catholic Church's Magisterium in Vatican II's Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium:

Those also can attain to everlasting salvation who through no fault of their own do not know the gospel of Christ or His Church, yet sincerely seek God and, moved by grace, strive by their deeds to do His will as it is known to them through the dictates of conscience. Nor does divine Providence deny the help necessary for salvation to those who, without blame on their part, have not yet arrived at an explicit knowledge of God, but who strive to live a good life, thanks to His grace.¹⁶

Even though there are those who may be saved by virtue of their consciences without being a visible member of the Mystical Body of the Church, it is still best that they be brought into such a union. In the words of Veritatis Splendor, Pope John Paul II's encyclical on moral theology, "[F]reedom of conscience is never freedom 'from' truth but always and only freedom 'in' the truth.... The Church puts herself always and only at the service of conscience, helping it to avoid being tossed to and fro by every wind of doctrine proposed by human deceit."¹⁷ It is only nestled safe in the arms of Mother Church that the words of Christ can attain their fullest meaning: "You shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free."¹⁸

¹ St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I-II, q. 91, a. 1.
² Ibid. I-II, q. 91, a. 2.
³ Ibid. I-II, q. 93, a. .
⁴ Ibid. I-II, q. 91, a. 4.
⁵ Ibid. I-II, q. 94, a. 2.
⁶ Ibid. I-II, q. 100, a. 1.
⁷ Ibid. I-II, q. 94, a. 2.
⁸ Ibid. I-II, q. 79, a. 13.
⁹ Ibid. I-II, q. 94, a. 6 [emphasis added].
¹⁰ Ibid.
¹¹ Ibid. I-II, q. 19, a. 5 [emphasis added].
¹² Ibid. I-II, q. 109, a. 6.
¹³ Ibid. I-II, q. 19, a. 5.
¹⁴ Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
¹⁵ St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I-II, q. 19, a. 5.
¹⁶ Second Vatican Council, Dogmatic Constitution on the Church Lumen Gentium, 16.
¹⁷ Veratatis Splendor, 64.3.
¹⁸ John 8:32.