The Abuse of Conscience: A Century of Catholic Moral Theology by Matthew Levering (review)

Reviewed by: The Abuse of Conscience: A Century of Catholic Moral Theology by Matthew Levering Ezra Sullivan O.P. The Abuse of Conscience: A Century of Catholic Moral Theology by Matthew Levering ( Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2021), viii + 360 pp. In the maelstrom of modern morals, can we find sense in the cacophony of voices that flood the air with their assertions about Catholic morality and conscience? The sounds of too many ethicists and moral theologians create not a blessed harmony, but a disturbing dissonance regarding matters that range from life to death, male to female, heaven to hell. In response, Matthew Levering offers us a "sourcebook" that catalogues the thoughts of some of the [End Page 697] most important twentieth-century thinkers on one of the most dominant and controversial issues in this realm: conscience (1). The book consists of four chapters, plus an introduction and conclusion, all of which deploy the characteristic encyclopedic scholarship that readers have come to expect and appreciate from Levering. In addition to the text itself, the extensive endnotes of nearly one hundred pages comprise a veritable commented bibliography that deserve a close reading by moral theologians. There appear to be three starting points to which Levering is responding. First, there is the Pinckaers-Dominican tradition from which he comes. As he describes in the introduction, training in that tradition left him surprised (7) by the importance that conscience has held for ethical thinkers outside of that tradition—not only in centuries gone by, but also up to the present day: "I had imagined that conscience-centered moral theology was a thing of the past, or at least it was no longer attractive to the church of the present or the future. It became clear that I needed to relearn twentieth-century Catholic moral theology to understand the ongoing centrality of conscience" (8). The second starting point represents the failure of thinkers outside of the Dominican tradition to revitalize moral theology. Authors such as Fritz Tillman, Emile Mersch, S.J., and Gérard Gilleman, S.J., among others, worked in the 1930s and 1950s to renew moral theology away from the focus on conscience, yet their project mostly failed. Finally, the last starting point is offered by Brian Besong's important 2015 article in American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, "Reappraising the Manual Tradition"—for Besong presents a challenge to thinkers who have denigrated moral manuals. Levering states that, in reading the manuals more closely, he came to realize that they "were richer than is often supposed," but the main critiques against them—exemplified in Pinckaers's The Sources of Christian Ethics (English trans. 1995)—are fundamentally accurate. Levering's work, then, reconstructs part of the history of contemporary Catholic moral theology and diagnoses the causes that immediately led to the present situation, in which conscience-centered morality now exists in a "more problematic form" than before the Second Vatican Council (1). From the beginning of the book, Levering signals that he does not intend to "explore magisterial teaching" on conscience (17). Methodologically, then, the book excludes a treatment of the thought of John Paul II, who has contributed greatly to a reliable theology of conscience, as seen in works such as the 1984 Reconciliatio et Paenitentia (esp. §§18, 25, 26); the 1993 Veritatis Splendor (esp. ch. 2, pt. II, "Conscience and Truth" [§§54–64]); and the 1995 Evangelium Vitae (esp. §§24, 40, 69). Likewise, Karol Wojtyła [End Page 698] addressed the issue in Person and Act, chapter 4, sect. 2, "Self-Fulfillment and Conscience," among a number of other places. Despite the methodological exclusion of John Paul II, Levering treats Joseph Ratzinger and Benedict XVI in the chapter "Conscience and German Thought" (192–93). Related to the book's central theme are the issues of probabilism, tutiorism, and laxism. Although, as noted, the author means to avoid exploring Catholic magisterial teaching on these issues, in the course of discussing Dominic Prümmer, O.P., he notes Pope Alexander VIII's "censuring of Jansenist tutiorism" (81)—condemned because the "safer" (tutior) way often leads to do-nothing quietism, which minimizes human effort because it expects God to do everything for us. Readers might also be...