Aquinas on Conscience - Synderesis and Conscientia

Key Terms:

Synderesis: The inner principle directing a person towards good and away from evil

Conscientia: A person’s reason making moral judgements

Aquinas’ view of the conscience is unusual among theological views of the conscience in that the conscience is not a feeling or an inner voice but i rather the process of reasoning. It is the rational ability to ned voice b the difference between right and wrong.

Reasoning and God

Aquinas uses the idea of right reason (or rect ratio). He believes that our ability to reason is given to us by God as a result of being created in the image of God. It then becomes our responsibility to use our God-given reasoning correctly. We do this by developing the intellectual virtue of prudence or phonesis - the ability to make judgements based on the circumstances we find ourselves in.

Synderesis and conscientia

For Aquinas, conscience is the mind of man making moral judgements.

It comes in two parts - synderesis and conscientia.

Synderesis is our natural inclination that we seek to 'do good and avoid evil'. It involves our awareness of what the moral rules are (see Chapter 1, Natural Law).

As the quote ‘It is therefore clear that synderesis us not a power but a natural habit’ Aquinas, Summa Theologica, synderesis is not a one-off act but a habit of reasoning that we develop with practice so that we will come to understand and be able to apply the moral rules. One way of imagining this is to think of synderesis as a safe that we possess and developing our prudence/reasoning as acquiring the key.

Of course it is possible that we become confused as to what the good is and we seek an apparent good rather than a real good. We have a responsibility (1) to educate our conscience and become better at reasoning and thinking through the moral rules; (2) to develop our conscience through the repeated use of 'right reason'.

Conscientia is the practical outworking of synderesis. It is the intellectual process of making actual moral judgements and applying them to the situations that we face. Conscience is something that is an act. As Joseph fletcher would later argue, conscience is a verb not a noun; this is certainly true of Aquinas understanding of conscientia.