Freedom and Responsibility
When we begin talking about the process of sanctification and justification in the Christian life, we necessarily need to engage the reality of freedom and responsibility. Without freedom and responsibility we can never truly speak about love or morality or the process of working out our salvation.[1] The two go hand-in-hand: without freedom we cannot have responsibility, and without responsibility we can never have freedom.
Human freedom is more than just a capacity to choose between multiple options. It’s a power that God has given man so that he can choose what is good, and so to share in His Goodness, His Divine Life. The only way we can enter permanently into this Life with God is by continually choosing, here on earth, to love Him, and to love those whom He loves. Every choice that we make should be brought into full harmony with God’s plan for His creation.
Because of the connection between love and God’s plan, God’s law is objectively true; it is not arbitrary. It is given to us for our happiness, and when we give our full assent to God’s will, we take one step closer to eternal happiness. The law of God that we have to abide by in order to attain this eternal beatitude, this eternal happiness, is also called the moral law, because it informs our behavior.
Different Expressions of the Moral Law
The moral law by itself possesses multiple facets. The Catechism tells us “There are different sources or expressions of the moral law, all of them interrelated: eternal law – the source, in God, of all law; natural law; revealed law, comprising the Old Law and the New Law, or Law of the Gospel; finally, civil and ecclesiastical laws” (emphases added).[2]
To comment briefly on each of these:
- The eternal law is God’s eternal wisdom, which includes all moral law, and in fact, all law of any kind — including the laws that govern every aspect of creation, including physics, biology, psychology, mathematics, and so forth.
- The natural law is our human awareness, through reason, of how the eternal law calls us to act. It is the moral law as we know it by our natural ability of observing the world around us and applying our minds to the question, “How should we behave?”
- The revealed law is God’s eternal wisdom given to us by God through His prophets and in the sacred scriptures of Israel and the Church (there are two stages to the revealed law: the Old Law, and the New Law, or Law of the Gospel).
- Civil laws, and church/ecclesiastical laws are man-made laws which repeat, implement and enforce natural or revealed laws.
Moral Law as Family Rules
What really is the moral law? Is it just a set of rules that God imposes on us because He wants to be a dictator? No. The moral law, strictly speaking, are “family rules.” They are rules that God, as a good Father, has given us for the sake of helping us live good lives here on earth, so that we may be like Him, live in peaceful union with Him now, and journey with Him towards eternal happiness.
Since a moral law is a rule for the free conduct of a rational being, law presupposes a rational mind. In other words, a law can only exist in a mind, and, through communication, must be conferred from one mind into another mind. What we’re saying is that God, our loving and wise Father, has communicated to us, His children, “rules for the family”: through our human reason, and through divine revelation.
In all this, God knows that with His help, we, as his children, possess the capacity to live in accordance with His rules and to discern the rationale for them. This is what led the ancient church author Tertullian to write, ”Among all the animals, only man was worthy to receive a law from God to govern his conduct by using his freedom and will.”[3]
All moral law comes ultimately from the mind of God, from His eternal wisdom for His creation, but comes to us in two distinct streams: natural law, and divine or revealed law. These are otherwise known as nature and Divine Revelation. God speaks to us through our natural power of reason, and He also speaks to us through the words of people that He has chosen and sent to be His prophets, including those who He inspired to write the various parts of the bible.
Conscience
When talking about the moral law, it’s also important to say something about conscience. Conscience is where the law makes contact with our hearts. A well-formed conscience helps us navigate the moral law and make it our own possession. The conscience is a fundamental aspect of Christian moral teaching. The Catechism tells us that “Conscience is a judgment of reason by which the human person recognizes the moral quality of a concrete act.”[4] Even more, however, as the bishops of the Second Vatican Council wrote, “Man has in his heart a law inscribed by God…. conscience is man’s most secret core, and his sanctuary.”[5]
Conscience is more than just a kind of general ability that enables us to navigate between what’s right and what’s wrong. Conscience is our ability to make judgments that are aligned with what we sincerely believe to be the truth. God works within the conscience, helping us make those judgments, and leading us forward to growth in the understanding of the truth. We have a “good conscience,” then, when our judgments about right and wrong are based on our best attempts at sound reasoning and at discerning the wisdom of God as He reveals Himself. We have a “bad conscience” when we ignore the call of truth and of God, choosing instead to do what feels right or what we prefer to do, even if it conflicts with what we know is true.
Furthermore, when a person’s conscience is fully aligned, in reality, to God’s guidance in reason and revelation, then the conscience is “well-formed” and therefore is fulfilling its purpose. Because of all this, conscience requires lifelong formation. Every one of us, as baptized Christians, are called to listen to and follow Christ in continual formation of our conscience, and we do so by means of study, prayer, the reading of Scripture, meditation, receiving the Sacraments, and performing works of charity in obedience to God.
Listening to sound advice from the Saints, the Church, and wise people in positions of authority, further help to enlighten and direct our consciences. Even more, on a divine level, the Holy Spirit of God grants us interior gifts that will help us hone and perfect our consciences, that we may become morally sensitive; to be “men and women after God’s heart,” and live truly holy lives.
The Divine and Natural Laws
Having talked a little bit about what moral law is and the role of conscience, let’s talk some more about the two streams of the moral law that I mentioned earlier: nature and Divine Revelation. Nature entails the created world, including what is material and immaterial. What we know and understand of nature and the way it works is disclosed to us through experiencing the world around us through the use of reason. Divine Revelation is what God revealed to man about Himself and His will for us in history.[6]
Through both of these streams, God has communicated His law to us. Divine law has been revealed by God through His prophets and the Scriptures. It has two stages: the Old Law, and the New Law of the Gospel. First, let’s discuss the Old Law. We will discuss the New Law in the next segment.
Revealed law came first to Abraham and his family, and again to the people of Israel, his descendants, through Moses and the many prophets and anointed leaders that came after him. This is God’s revelation in the Old Testament, and so is called “the Old Law.”
Now let’s consider the natural law. Natural law is composed of statutes that can be naturally discerned by reason even without the help of Divine Revelation. Scripture tells us that sin has darkened the human intellect, and tarnished the soul’s capacity to be able to reason out the actions that are required of it. Because of this, natural law, and its principles and requirements, are not so easily known by all men.[7] That is one reason why God gives us revealed law.
Saint Augustine tells us that the statutes of the natural law, “are written in the book of that light which we call truth and are imprinted on the heart of man as a seal upon wax,”[8] St. Thomas Aquinas further asserts that “Natural law is the light of understanding placed in us by God through which we know what we must do and what we must avoid.”[9] Pope Leo XIII tells us that “foremost in [the office of laws] comes the natural law, which is written and engraved in the mind of every man; and this is nothing but our reason, commanding us to do right and forbidding sin. Nevertheless, all prescriptions of human reason can have force of law only inasmuch as they are the voice and the interpreters of some higher power on which our reason and liberty necessarily depend.”[10]
What these great teachers mean is that God has imprinted upon the soul of every man, regardless of their faith in Him, the basic statutes of natural law and that no man can deny possessing an inherent capacity to access this law.
Natural law is necessarily universal. Its authority applies to every human being. It is natural law that determines how every man, regardless of whether or not they have received the gift of the Gospel, should live. In fact, the pagan philosopher and orator Cicero writes of it: “This true law is diffused among all men, is immutable and eternal. To replace it with a contrary law is a sacrilege.”[11] This is a man who had never received the revelation of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Yet, clearly, it is crucial to him that all mankind should possess an overarching set of principles by which they live and that are universal, objective, immutable, and irrefutable.
It is upon this law, that man throughout history has established society. Natural law is without a doubt the fundamental basis upon which the civil law of every society in human history is founded. Because of human weakness and sin, natural law is always obscured to some degree or another in every society. But this is where divine or revealed law comes in: it strengthens, purifies, and restores what we already know, or should know, through natural law. For example, most of the 10 commandments, revealed by God to Moses, were already known, or able to be known, by natural reasoning.
Concluding Thoughts
The Christian life is much more than memorizing and following rules. It calls for a well-formed intellect and purified will that directs us, in varying circumstances, on how to live in ways that please God and truly express love for Him. Because of this, God, in his benevolence, has engraved natural law upon every human heart.
Having discussed the moral law in Old Testament times as well as the natural law, we now turn to discuss the perfection of this law, the Law of the Gospel.
[1] Cf. Philippians 2:12.
[3] Tertullian, Against Marcion, Book II, Ch. 4 (CCC 1951).
[5] Gaudium et Spes, 16.
[8] St. Augustine, De Trinitate. 14, 15, 21 (Monaci Ordinis S. Benedicti e Congregatione S. Mauri [edits.], Sancti Aurelii Augustini Opera Tomus Undecimus [Neapoli: 1854], 233). English translation as found in CCC 1955.
[9] St. Thomas Aquinas, In duo praecepta caritatis et in decem legis praecepta (Paris: Ludovicum Vivès, 1975), 144. English translation as found in CCC 1955.
[10] Pope Leo XIII, Encyclical Letter Libertas praestantissimum in Acta Leonis XIII pontificis maximi Acta, Vol. VIII (Romae, Ex Typographia Vaticana, 1889), 219. Latin: “Talis est princeps omnium lex naturalis, quae scripta est et insculpta in hominum animis singulorum, quia ipsa est humana ratio recte facere iubens et peccare vetans. Ista vero humanae rationis praescriptio vim habere legis non potest, nisi quia altioris est vox atque interpres rationis, cui mentem libertatemque nostram subiectam esse oporteat.” See also CCC 1954.