The Sisters of St. Joseph who taught me in grade school were not trained ethicists, but I can remember distinctly when they told us that the role of conscience was key to a good life. After you’ve encountered a moral problem, they said, think about how to respond by weighing the merits, the pros and cons, the ideals and benefits of your action to yourself and others. Then take counsel: read or consult experts on the question. Examine your own experience. Finally, pray. If you do all of these things, your conscience will be well formed and even though the resulting response may be objectively questionable—even illegal, or downright immoral—it will always be correct.

That these impressions have lasted nearly half a century is testimony to the power of conscience in the discernment of moral life, to say nothing of the influence of those sisters of my youth. It also grates at Matthew Levering, who sees in conscience a dilemma for moral theology. For Levering, the twentieth century marked an “abuse of conscience” (1)—one whereby the individual had only to resort to conscience to subordinate more authentic forms of moral life, especially prudence. Levering attempts to show how this came to be by putting into conversation the writings of 26 (!) philosophers and theologians who have made influential comments on the nature and role of conscience or otherwise shaped debates about it. These include the last gasps of the manualist tradition, neo-Thomists, German philosophers and biblical scholars, and more contemporary theologians whose work is seen as among the primary influences on the documents of the Second Vatican Council. Post-conciliar champions of conscience are engaged as well.

Even under the weight of so much amalgamated evidence, the author’s argument has some problems. His thesis is highly curated, drawing as it does from such disparate authors as Martin Heidegger and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Rudolf Bultmann and Servais Pinckaers. The Second Vatican Council seems attentive to the problem of the manuals’ stale rehearsal of conscience’s importance, but, Levering maintains, “a new conscience-centered morality emerged immediately after the Council, almost as though there had never been a critique of conscience-centered morality” (3)!

While I am in basic agreement that conscience has achieved a kind of institutional imprimatur, I am not convinced that that is a bad thing. As a diagnosis of the current malaise, the project is certainly suggestive, but the treatment for what ails us is not necessarily proven. I don’t think that resurrecting the virtue of prudence to supplant the role of conscience in current moral discourse is anything more than a panacea. Frankly, prudence can quell the courageous impulse necessary to activate the practical intellect, or even heroic choice. If we are trying to raise the moral bar, we need to go beyond that which is merely prudential, even if, as Jordan Aumann and others have maintained, prudence is “a fulcrum for all the other moral virtues” (see his Spiritual Theology, 1980, 276). When one gets down to the brass tacks of prudence invites scrupulosity or at least can be caught in its shadow.

Speaking of scruples, one who knew them all too well was St. Alphonsus Liguori. Early on in his study Levering takes St. Alphonsus’ method in the Theologia Moralis to task as “insufficient” (2). Nothing like going for the jugular of a Doctor of the Church as a mark of chutzpah! Alphonsus, it may be said, was particularly concerned with the lived realities of his day and less with dogmatic positions, though he read widely on those, too. Levering believes—with Dominic Prümmer, Benoît-Henri Merkelbach (and by extension, people like Francis Connell)—that the “primary task of moral renewal [lies with] integrating moral and dogmatic theology” (10). He ignores another and perhaps more vital project—the uniting of the role of conscience in the moral life with prayer (on this, see Dennis Billy and James F. Keating, Conscience and Prayer: The Spirit of Catholic Moral Theology, 2001). I would go so far as to suggest that the moral life must be brought into conversation with liturgical theology, for if we are to make our lives a reflection of the divine, then our baptismal call will necessarily find its culmination when we are joined to our Eucharistic Lord.

The role of conscience in pursuit of this ideal is not without pitfalls, but certainly remains essential. The imitation of Christ necessarily means attention to biblical and philosophical warrants, the bank of experiential wisdom, the psychological disposition or desire to hold fast or grow into the very idea of following a Christo-centric message, however abstract, into moral practice. I can’t see how conscience can be dethroned in favor of some other project. Perhaps prudence and conscience must be seen in tandem.

Levering’s concluding chapter rehearses the main ideas of his previous four on biblical accounts, moral manuals, Thomism, and German thought. There he is much more positive toward each approach to conscience, particularly the manualists who engage probabilism with the best of intentions. Thomists later correct its deficiencies. In the remainder of the chapter, he engages two moderns: James Keenan, SJ, and Reinhard Hütter. Thus, the implication is that the debate on conscience is still ongoing.

As a graduate student I would have craved a book like this. It is informative, analytic, and pointed. And it offers plenty of ideas over which the field is still, in many ways, wrestling. Thus, seminary libraries should stock it. Pastors who often find the moral conundrums of our day manifesting themselves in the confessional will also get much out of it. But for its central thesis, the work teeters toward an almost reactionary stance and so should be read wide-eyed and intently.