BOTH PSYCHOLOGY AND MORAL THEOLOGY are concerned with the tension between the real and the ideal in human living; yet with different viewpoints, and sometimes with very different emphases, as on the question of subconscious motivation. Psychology, in its exploration of the reality of the human person, can have a useful function in helping to define the vector which leads from the real towards the ideal.
This work begins with a discussion of problems of method and then surveys a number of areas of psychological research to reach an initial idea of the psychological resources and liabilities which people typically have.
There follows an organized outline of the ways in which such resources or liabilities may come to expression on each of the four levels of the subject’s operations, as these are analyzed by Bernard Lonergan: experience, understanding, judgment, and decision. Then an analysis of the tension between human desire and human limitation provides a broader context within which the significance of temptation and of conversion, as basic categories of moral theology, are examined. A clarification of the significance of the specifically religious and Christian in moral theology is attempted. There emerges also the possibility of a ‘material’ coincidence between psychological liabilities and moral or religious difficulties.
Finally, some implications on a more practical level are explored. It is argued that an integration of moral theology with contemporary psychology can, with the aid of a sufficiently critical method, be valuable in the effort to attain an anthropology that is both theologically adequate and practically useful.