Apocalypse? Not!

[In] the world of the intellectuals, most of whom were well off, the rejection of reform became all the louder, and revolution increasingly took on a divine quality. They demanded something completely new; reality as it was evoked a strange feeling of surfeit.

Values in a Time of Upheaval, 17

Reflection – Ratzinger here is offering a historical analysis of Marxism in the 19^th century. Of course the little snippet I excerpt here is one small part of a long and very fine analysis of this time period. The popularity of radical Marxist thought among the 19^th century intelligentsia and its relative lack of popularity among the very workers to whom it promised liberation is an interesting historical phenomenon.

So why blog about this in the year 2013? Because the underlying attitude described here is still very much with us, in wildly different ways. There are truly few people left who  long for the worker’s paradise and work for the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Class warfare is stoked up as an electoral ploy by cynical politicians; I personally don’t believe too many of those politicians actually subscribe to the whole Marxist theory of history behind that phrase. Certainly politicians on all sides of the spectrum are happy to live in upper class splendor and luxury, even as they make pious speeches about the evils of wealth and the need for solidarity.

But this revolutionary urge, this desire to tear everything down and create a new world—it still is alive in the hearts and minds of at least some of our contemporaries. Environmentalism for example: in itself it is a good thing. Human beings should take care of the earth and not poison the air, water, soil. Madonna House was recycling long before it was fashionable, and there is no way to reduce one’s carbon footprint more effectively than to live in community as we do. We’re all about environmental responsibility here.

But the radical revolutionary environmental movement is something quite different. Human beings are a plague, a disease upon the earth, a cancer. The (scientifically dubious) specter of total global catastrophe is evoked to call for truly totalitarian state policies governing human fertility—China’s one child policy on a planetary scale. It is this revolutionary apocalyptic urge—not simply for people to ‘give a hoot, don’t pollute,’ but a desire to seize the reins of power to utterly reshape society, at the cost of millions or even billions of human lives, that is troublesome, to say the least. One could say that these people don’t have power, so it is of no concern. One could have said that about Karl Marx and his disciples in the 19^th century, too.

The radical LGBTQ agenda is another example. I am all in favor of treating people kindly and with respect. I hope I succeed in doing so in my personal life. Yes, I am Catholic and will continue to explain Catholic sexual morality in public as long as I am allowed to do so. I am indeed opposed to same-sex marriage and have tried to explain my thoughts on the matter a few times on this blog. (By the way, Mark Shea does a great job on that here in a few trenchant words, which is why he gets thousands of readers to my hundreds). But I’m all about ‘live and let live’ otherwise.

But the LGBTQ radicals do not wish to live and let live. There is a large swath of the rainbow that desires to eradicate religion, stamp out free speech, and impose a de-natured ideology of gender diversity upon society. Where the radical Green want to kill everyone (frankly), the radical LGBTQs want to ‘queer’ everyone (this is their own words, not mine, by the way).

So Ratzinger’s reflections on the history and psychological dynamics of Marxism are quite relevant, and I recommend the book I’m quoting today quite highly. Whenever a group in society begins to wish to tear down everything a build a new heavens and a new earth, watch out for that group. Gulags and secret police tend to follow upon that desire.

Reality as it is, is fundamentally good. Our proper task is to make it incrementally better—to strive to identify and eliminate clear injustices, to personally strive for charity and kindness and fair treatment in our own lives, to generally promote decency and discourage nastiness in ourselves and others.

More than that—the revolutionary urge, the apocalypse now agenda—is from the evil one, and has always and every time yielded immense human suffering and horrors whenever it has assumed a position of power in the world.

Why I Am Not a Libertarian

How can the free world do justice to its moral responsibility? Freedom preserves its dignity only as long as it retains the relationship to its ethical foundations and to its ethical task. A freedom that consisted solely in the possibility of satisfying one’s needs would not be human freedom, since it would remain in the animal realm. An individual freedom without substance dissolves into meaninglessness, since the individual’s freedom can only exist in an order of freedoms.

Values in a Time of Upheaval, 48

Reflection – Values in a time of upheaval: well, it certainly has been a time of upheaval in the past week (even more so than usual). Tensions in the Middle East push the world further down the path to war and the chaos and turmoil that would bring. The economic climate remains rocky, and the future is uncertain. These words from Ratzinger are a helpful and necessary reminder to keep our heads and our focus in uncertain and dangerous times.

We have to remember always and never forget who we are and what we are made for, and the standard of charity and justice that this calls us to. When people are afraid, they all too easily devolve into fight or flight responses, into lashing out in anger or withdrawing into a safe cocoon, an illusory soap-bubble-thin façade of protection against the world.

We are Christians, and we can do neither. We are called to the great adventure of love, of openness, of receptivity, of hospitality, of service, of care for the poor, of forgiveness of enemies, of laying down our lives for the world.

This is freedom, you see. Some today, in the discussion about freedom in the world, wish to reduce freedom simply to this animal level: I do whatever I want. I have a measure of sympathy with that view, especially in the context of government controls and the passing of laws that would restrict human choices and actions coercively (thinking here of the Nanny State, or also speech codes, curtailing of religious freedom).

But… there is more to freedom than ‘I do whatever I want.’ And we have to bring this into the discussion. Ratzinger has labored hard to do just that. A freedom that is left at the animal level of doing whatever you want is a freedom doomed to failure. Someone else will come along and ‘do what they want’ to me, and where is my freedom then? Or my doing what I want will lead me to self-destructive choices, and my freedom will pass away quickly.

While I’m all in favor of the government generally leaving people alone to live their lives as they see fit, we have to realize that this kind of free society depends on people living morally responsible lives. The two go together; if people generally act like miserable vile barbarians treating each other like trash, the state has a vested interest in intervening. If people wish to be left alone in peace to live their lives, this has to occur in an ethical framework.

This is why I am not a libertarian, but a conservative. In the current context of out of control governments legislating every aspect of our lives, I have great sympathy with the libertarian perspective (as many of the lawn signs around this part of Ontario say, “This land is our land – BACK OFF, GOVERNMENT!”). But… every action we do on ‘our land’, so to speak, affects not just ourselves but the whole of society. Every choice I make is fashioning a world in which the rest of you have to live. Every choice you make fashions a world in which I have to live.

Libertarianism does not, it seems to me, take this into account. Freedom has to be directed by moral concern, responsibility, deep awareness of the solidarity and inter-connectedness of the human family, or it is doomed to failure. If this direction is not to come from intrusive and coercive government control, it must come from a shared moral vision derived from the traditional wisdom narratives of the human family—in North America and Europe this would be our shared Judeo-Christian ethos.

Without this, freedom is doomed to failure, as society degenerates into a Hobbesian jungle of competing self-interests and unrestrained appetites. We have three choices: anarchy; government tyranny; spiritual-religious-moral renewal. What’s it going to be?

Freedom is Not Free

Freedom entails the ability of the conscience to perceive the fundamental value of humanity, a value that concerns every individual.

Values in a Time of Upheaval, 48

Reflection – Well we have one of those nifty one-liners here, virtually tweet-like in its succinctness (132 characters, to be precise), which says more than many a vast volume of verbiage could voice. (Alliteration is fun!)

It is a huge theme of Ratzinger’s that freedom, so crucial, so necessary to the human project, does not stand alone as its own thing, independent and secure. Freedom exists in a matrix of values and truths without which it cannot survive.

Freedom simply as ‘I will do as I please,’ is doomed to failure. Either some other person will come along and in their freedom rob, rape, or kill me, doing as they please and leaving me a wreck or a corpse, or I myself will get subsumed into the collectivist thinking of the herd, where ‘what I please’ to do just happens to line up precisely with the messages and agendae of Hollywood and Madison Avenue.

Freedom has to be held secure by something else. And many people get this. ‘Freedom is not free!’ is a battle cry in some quarters, although (sadly) what is often meant by that is that we have to invade other countries and torture the people living in them so that we can continue to be brainwashed by Hollywood and Madison Avenue.

Ahem. Sorry. My inner hippy radical speaking there. S’true, though!

Ratzinger is (as usual!) right on the money when he says that freedom is held secure by the perception of the fundamental value of humanity, and its application to the individual. If I do not treat you as the inestimable being of value that you are, if you do not treat, or at least attempt to treat, each person you meet as if they are a V.I.P., literally, to look on everyone as a ‘thou’ and not as an ‘it’, then your freedom and mine are on very shaky grounds.

Why is this? Well, the Pope and I have written extensively about this over the past year. Clicking on the ‘freedom’ tag at the bottom of this post will give you a fair bit to chew on with the subject. It’s really a matter of knowing what freedom is for, which is really tied to the question of what human life is for. What is it all about, anyhow?

When we reduce the human person to something less than human, when we objectify, use, discard, destroy people according to some calculus of value or other, we lose what freedom is for. Freedom is for loving, for communion, for a joyous entry into the community of man, the human family, an entry and a communion that here and now is marked by struggle and anguish, but nonetheless is the essence of human life and flourishing.

To descend to a sort of law of the jungle, an approach to humanity marked by calculation and use, makes communion possible. If I use you, I cannot be in communion with you. If I cannot be in communion with you, I am no longer free. Life is reduced to a bare level of use and abuse, and ultimately I am enslaved by my desires, by the pressures of the marketplace, and by the pressures of the mass media and its group-think.

In other words, respect for life is the bare minimum requirement of a free society. So… is Canada a free society? Is America? Is Europe?

The struggle for the right to life is at the very core of restoring, rebuilding, and securing the freedom of our nations, and our claim to be humane and civil societies.

The Dictatorship of Relativism

Relativism contains a dogmatism of its own: this position is so sure of itself that it must be imposed even on those who disagree with it… if the majority, as in the case of Pilate, is always right, then what truly is right must be trampled upon…

Values in a Time of Upheaval, 62

Reflection – When I excerpt a brief passage like this from Joseph Ratzinger, I have to make it clear from the outset that he doesn’t just throw these observations out there in a void. This statement about relativism is part of a lengthy and well-thought-out analysis. The book it is from is one I highly recommend: short, to the point, and deeply relevant to our times.

Our times… you know, I really prefer not to discuss controversies and the affairs of the day on this blog. I don’t actually enjoy those kinds of conversations. I would rather talk about prayer or maybe philosophical analysis of this or that point. I really don’t like discussing the world and its problems—to be honest, I find the state of Canadian society incredibly sad and painful. I am a loyal Canadian who loves his country, and I am at a loss about what to do about what I see.

But events this week here in Ontario have been almost a picture perfect illustration of the dictatorship of relativism Ratzinger has described above and in many other places in his writings. So, a word is in order.

For those who are not from Ontario, a brief synopsis: last year, a gay teenager in Ottawa committed suicide after being bullied in his high school. This prompted the Ontario provincial government to pass an anti-bullying law whose purported aim was to eliminate bullying in schools.

One section of the law called for high schools to form clubs called GSAs (Gay-Straight Alliances) where self-identifed ‘gay’ students could bond together with sympathetic straight students to promote a gay-friendly environment in the school.

Now, Ontario has a publicly funded Catholic school system, alongside its ‘public’ (aka secular) system (it’s a long story why this is the case). Since GSAs are, besides being anti-bullying, essentially advocacy groups for the acceptance of homosexual orientation and activity as equivalent to heterosexual, the Catholic Church and the school board objected to this part of the legislation. We made a counter-proposal to establish clubs that would tackle the anti-bullying agenda from a Catholic point of view, promoting respect for every human being and an ethos of compassion and acceptance of the other, without the ideological overlay of GSAs.

This counter-proposal was met with derision and scorn, and the Ontario government passed the law this week. As one of the more anti-Catholic newspapers in Toronto trumpeted in its banner headline: “McGuinty [the premier] tells Catholic Church He’s in Charge!” There have been newspaper columns appearing in Canadian papers in recent weeks containing anti-Catholic and anti-clerical bigotry reminiscent of the German kulturkampf and the rhetoric of the Ku Klux Klan. It’s a strange time to be a Catholic in Ontario, in other words.

Anyhow, sorry for the ‘brief’ synopsis (that’s as brief as I could get it). Leaving aside the fact that students are bullied for all sorts of reasons, sexual orientation not even cracking the top five, according to a Toronto study, and leaving aside the wisdom of GSAs which impel students as young as 13 to identify themselves according to their emerging and (as we all remember) somewhat chaotic sexuality, and leaving aside the very probably question of whether this self-identification will actually encourage bullying and bigotry—leaving aside all this, there is a deeper question.

Namely, is there room in Ontario for more than one perspective? Is there room in a pluralistic society for more than one way of tackling a problem? Is there room in a (supposedly) tolerant society for different approaches to an issue?

According to the Ontario government, apparently not. The dictatorship of relativism has now arrived in Ontario, from being a de facto situation to a de jure one. The government of Ontario has, to be perfectly clear, passed a law that Catholic schools, paid for by Catholic taxpayers who want their children to receive a Catholic education, cannot present a consistent Catholic view of reality to their students.

Relativism ‘is so sure of itself that it must be imposed even on those who disagree with it’ – that’s what is happening in this neck of the woods, folks. So to my largely American readership and others, pray for us Catholics in Ontario. It’s a very strange time for us, very confusing. We don’t appear to be welcome here anymore, at least according to the elected government.

And for my Ontario readers, what are we to do? I wish I knew. Sorry to be of so little help. We certainly need to pray. We certainly need to be as clear as we can about the facts of the matter – the rhetoric is a bit muddled right now. You who are parents have a special duty to help your children make sense of all this—I realize it’s a heavy burden on you in particular. Maybe this blog post is of some help to you.

Above all, we need to persevere in presenting Catholic teaching in the most loving, clear way we can: the infinite value and beauty of each human person, the reality of human brokenness and disorder which affects all of us, the hope of healing and restoration in Christ, and the call to be part of this restoration by loving one another as Christ loved us.

This is the heart of Catholic teaching. That homosexual acts are one species among many of human disorder, that human sexuality is a gift to be expressed in marriage of man and woman ordered towards procreation in loving union, that all are called to chastity according to their state of life—all these are vital truths that we cannot deny without denying Christ, but they are secondary to the heart of the matter, which is the mercy and love of God poured out in Jesus Christ.

There is no hatred here, not for anyone. Just love, just mercy, and just a desire to express the truth as we understand it, because we believe the truth will set us—all of us—free. And a hope that in a society committed to freedom, we will continue to be allowed to present our vision of the truth in the public square. Object to us if you please, argue with us by all means, but do not silence us, for that is unworthy of the freedom and tolerance we claim for Canadian society.

Hard Heads and Soft Hearts

Our task as Christians today is to contribute our concept of God to the debate about man… God himself is Logos, the rational primal ground of all that is real, the creative reason that gave birth to the world and that is reflected in the world. God is Logos – meaning, reason, and word, and that is why man corresponds to God when his reason is open and he pleads the cause of a reason that is not allowed to be blind to the moral dimensions of existence.”

Values in a Time of Upheaval, 112

Reflection – G.K. Chesterton once said that we should strive to have hard heads and soft hearts. We need to be clear, disciplined thinkers, on the one hand, and tender merciful lovers, on the other. He went on to say that the modern world was characterized by soft heads and hard hearts—full of lots of sentimental guff and fuzzy headedness about ending suffering or caring about this or that vulnerable group—and the end result being heaps of corpses piled up to the heavens, a civilization steeped in blood and carnage.

‘Sentimentality leads to the gas chamber.’ I don’t remember right now who said that, but it is quite true. When we lose our hard heads—our sharp, clear, rigorous adherence to human dignity and rights and the absolute moral principles that flow from that rigor—we end up bathed in blood.

All of this is related to contributing ‘God to the debate about man’ which Ratzinger says is our task today. Of course the context in which he writes about this task is the field of political and cultural engagement. Hard heads and soft hearts, because God is both Logos (reason) and Love.

God enters in here necessarily for two reasons. First, as Creator He assures us that both our reason and our love, our hard heads and soft hearts, are grounded in the deepest reality. It is not just advisable or practical to think things through carefully; if we don’t, we have stepped outside of reality. It is not just ‘nice’ to be loving; to live without love is a living death. That both reason and love flow from the Center, Source, and Heart of reality establishes the deep necessity of these human actions.

Second, we need God’s help to be reasonable and loving! Sin darkens our intellect and warps our will back onto ourselves. God’s revelation establishes us in truth; His grace establishes us in love.

There’s much more to be said about all this, of course. My thoughts this week, though, are drawn (as my faithful readers may have noticed) to the March for Life in Ottawa this Thursday, and to the whole tragic situation of abortion in our society.

I find it difficult to write about abortion, you know, and rightly or wrongly tend not to ‘go there’ on this blog too often. The horror and utter evil of it makes it difficult to write about without descending to the level of less-than-helpful rant and screed.

In relation to this whole Logos business, it seems to me that legal, socially sanctioned abortion is safeguarded in Canada by a whole cloud of obfuscation, equivocation, euphemism, and smokescreen. At all costs we must keep the bare physical reality of what happens in an abortion from being made clear and plain. At all costs we must hide the reality of abortion behind closed doors and a conspiracy of silence.

This is why I consider the work of SilentNo More to be one of the most important pro-life initiatives out there. For women (and some men) to speak plainly and clearly about what they have experienced in their encounter with abortion, what happened to them, to their children—painful as this is, it is truth, and it must be expressed. I am very glad that they have become such central figures and leaders of the March for Life both in Canada and in the States.

God is Logos and God is Love. Truth and Love are one and indivisible. Hard heads and soft hearts are both needed to turn our society away from its ruinous course. We need to think clearly and love deeply—there are, literally, lives at stake.

Talking About Conscience XVIII (the Final Post of the Series, I Promise!)

We would dissolve Christianity into mere moralism if we were to fail to present a message that transcends our own actions… We can see this in an image from the world that also indicates how the anamnesis of the Creator in us reaches out toward the Redeemer and how every man is able to comprehend that Christ is the Redeemer, because it is he who answers our innermost expectation.

I have in mind the story of Orestes, who had killed his mother. He had committed this murder as an act of conscience (the language of the myth calls this an act of obedience to the commandment of the god Apollo). But now he is hunted by the Erinyes, who are to be seen as mythical personifications of the conscience that torments him, out of a deeper memory, by objecting that his decision of conscience, his act of obedience to the ‘divine oracle’ had in reality incurred guilt.

All man’s tragedy becomes visible in this conflict between the ‘gods’ in this contradiction of conscience. Before the sacred court, the white stone of Athene brings acquittal and sanctification to Orestes. The power of this sanctification changes the Erinyes to Eumenides, spirits of reconciliation, since expiation has transformed the world.

This myth portrays more than just the transition from a system of blood-revenge to the ordered law of society, and Hans Urs von Balthasar pressed this extra dimension as follows: “The calming grace always assists in the establishing of justice, not the old graceless justice of the Erinyes period, but that which is full of grace.” This myth bears witness to a longing that the objectively correct verdict of guilt pronounced by the conscience and the resulting inner distress may not have the last word and that there may exit an authority of grace, a power of expiation, that removes the guilt and makes truth genuinely redemptive.

This is a longing for a truth that does not merely make demands of us but is also a transforming expiation and forgiveness, through which –as Aeschylus puts it—“guilt is washed off” and our being is transformed from within in a manner far exceeding our own powers.

This is the real novelty of Christianity: the Logos, the Truth in person, is also this expiation, the transforming forgiveness that transcends all our own abilities and inabilities.

This is what is really new and on which the greater Christian memory is based, and that memory in turn is the deepest response for which the anamnesis of the Creator looks in us. If we fail to see and proclaim this core of the Christian message clearly enough, truth will indeed become a yoke too heavy for our shoulders, a yoke that we must try to throw off,. But freedom won in that manner would be empty, leading us into an utter wilderness, and such a freedom would disintegrate of its own accord. The yoke of truth became light when the Truth in person came, loved us, and burned up our guilt in his own love. It is only when we know and experience this from within that we become free to hear the message of conscience with joy—and without fear.

Values in a Time of Upheaval, 98-99

Reflection – Well, here we are, finally at the end of the conscience series. I have a longer excerpt from Ratzinger than normal, since the whole passage hangs together so beautifully. It also needs some commentary, I think, so this blog post is going to be a bit longer than normal. According to my stats, hardly anyone is still reading these posts about conscience anyhow, so I guess that’s OK!

You know, though, the above passage is deeply relevant to Palm Sunday and the sacred mysteries of Holy Week we are entering. The story of Orestes is one of the most profound pre-Christian reflections on the anguish of humanity, an anguish that calls out precisely for a redemption coming from beyond us.

You all remember Orestes, right? Maybe not… although I do recommend just reading the three plays of Aeschylus, the Oresteia. They’re not that hard to read; they are beautiful; and just think how smart you’ll feel if you can casually throw references to Electra, Clytemnestra, and the Libation Bearers into your conversation.

Essentially, Clytemnestra and her lover murdered Agamemnon, her husband. Electra and Orestes, their children, are bound by the laws of revenge to murder the two, yet forbidden by the laws of filial piety from murdering their own mother. Orestes at last performs the deed, and the rest of the story is outlined above.

In this bloody Greek tragedy emerges this central human insight: that conscience and morality, our striving for the good and the true, place us in an existential situation of anguish, guilt, failure, and tragic fall. The Greek dramatists looked profoundly into this situation, this human tragedy, in a depth and pathos that has never been matched since.

And this is the anamnesis of our humanity. Our remembrance of the good and the true, coming to us in a world of violence, hatred, darkness, deceit, is an anguished remembrance. It brings us into a place where we have to make terrible choices that may lead to no good outcome that we can see, where we are beset by contradictory impulses and imperatives, where moral failure and compromise lurks around every corner and under the surface of every situation.

The anamnesis of the good, then, far from being a panacea of banal smug moral certainties, brings us rather to desperately cry out for relief, for grace, for mercy. It pulls us out of our own self-sufficiency, our own complacency and easy answers, and in so doing draws us into the reality that we need a savior.

And we have a Savior. Grace has been given to us. There is a way out; there is hope. We are not left in the position of having to flee from the truth which is too much for us, or living in shame and guilt because we have all failed and fallen short, or hardening our hearts to a life of brutal self-interest.

We can live, instead, in the mercy of God. And this is the heart of the matter; this is where conscience and our struggles to form and follow our conscience leads us. It leads us to the foot of the Cross, to the pieta, to the tomb of Christ. It leads us to the stark and sobering fact that humanity, in its rejection of the Good, has killed the Son of God, has killed Goodness itself in our midst. It leads us to the deeper fact that we cannot kill Love, cannot destroy the Good, cannot abolish God from the world. He has come; He loves us; He has saved us. Mercy and grace are poured out upon all mankind, and the world is reborn in the light of his Resurrection.

Happy Holy Week to you all.

Talking About Conscience XVII

No one may act against his own convictions. But the fact that one’s conviction is naturally binding at the moment one acts does not mean a canonization of subjectivity. One who follows the conviction at which he has arrived, never incurs guilt. Indeed, one must follow such a conviction.

But guilt may very well consist in arriving at such perverse convictions by trampling down the protest made by the anamnesis of one’s true being. The guilt would then lie on a deeper level, not in the act itself, not in the specific judgment pronounced by conscience, but in that neglect of my own being that has dulled me to the voice of truth and made me deaf to what it says within me. And this is why criminals like Hitler and Stalin, who act out of deep personal conviction, remain guilty. Such grotesque examples are of course not meant to lull us into security about ourselves. They are meant to give us a shock that will bring home to us the seriousness of the prayer: “Clear thou me from hidden faults.” (Ps 19:12).

We are left with our starting question: is truth—at least, in the way the faith of the Church presents it to us—too lofty and difficult for human beings? After all our reflections, we can stay that the steep path to truth, to the good, is not easy. It makes great demands of man. But remaining comfortably at home will not redeem us. That leads only to atrophy and the loss of our own selves. If we set out on the mountainous path to the good, we will discover more and more the beauty that lies in the efforts demanded by truth, and we will grasp that it is this that redeems us.

Values in a Time of Upheaval, 97

Reflection – Well, we’re on the home stretch here of this lengthy essay on conscience that I’ve been blogging about off and on these past months. Ratzinger has earlier described the deepest level of conscience—what he calls the anamnesis (remembrance) of the good and the true—that lies at the heart of every human being made in God’s image.

I have jumped ahead a bit in the essay, omitting a rather technical description of the second level of conscience, which is that of conscious decision-making about what actions are permitted in general and what I will do right now. He concluded that section by saying that it is on that level that ‘an erring conscience’ excuses. We do, indeed, have to do what we think is right at any given moment.

But ‘any given moment’ lies in the larger context of our lives. If we drift along ‘comfortably at home,’ not making any serious effort to form our consciences and to truly learn what is good and evil even at the cost of our own comfort and complacency, then we may indeed never commit any great act of evil, but our guilt remains.

Every human being is charged with a great responsibility. The mountain of truth and goodness stands before each one of us; each of us is obliged to go into the depths of our being, to open to the breadth of human experience and knowledge, and to ascend the heights of spiritual wisdom. Each is obliged to do this according to his or her own capacities and gifts, but nonetheless this is the human task, the human experience.

Holy Week is upon us. The depth of life and love that opens up around us at this time of year is essential in all these questions. We live our human lives in freedom, called to exercise that freedom in truth and love, and this is morality.

But Ratzinger is about to take this essay in a wholly different direction. Morality and our own life of free choices is not the last word of reality. As we contemplate the deeds of God in this next week, we are inexorably pulled into this ‘last word’ by what we contemplate. Our moral strivings and the great responsibility placed on us to live thoughtful moral lives is nothing but a vehicle—although for sure a necessary vehicle—to bring us to this deeper reality, about which I will blog tomorrow.

Talking About Conscience XVI

The anamnesis which is given to us and is inherent in our being needs help from outside in order that it may become aware of its own self. But this ‘outside’ is not something opposed to anamnesis. It exists in order to serve it. It has a maieutic function, not imposing something alien upon our anamnesis but activating something that is its own, activating the openness of the anamnesis to receive the truth.

In the case of faith and the Church, whose radius reaches from the redeeming Logos over the gift of Creation, we must however add a further level, which is developed with particular care in the Johannine writings. John knows the anamnesis of the new ‘we’ that has been bestowed on us in our incorporation into Christ. We become one body, i.e., one ‘I’ with him. The Gospel observes several times that the disciples came to understanding only subsequently, when they remembered.

That first encounter with Jesus gave the disciples something that all generations now receive through their fundamental encounter with the Lord in baptism and the Eucharist: the new anamnesis of faith that, like the anamnesis of Creation, develops in the continuous dialogue between ‘inside’ and ‘outside.’ This is why John could reply to the presumption of Gnostic teachers, who wanted to persuade Christian believers that their naïve faith ought to be understood and formulated in quite different terms, by saying, you do not need that kind of instruction, because as ‘anointed’ (baptized) Christians you know everything (1 John 2: 20).

This does not mean that the faithful possess an intellectual knowledge of every single point of doctrine, but it does mean that Christian memory is unerring. It is always learning anew; its sacramental identity allows it to distinguish ‘from within’ between that which assists the development of its memory and that which destroys or falsifies it.

Values in a Time of Upheaval, 94-5

Reflection – OK, so this is a pretty dense passage. Bear with me, and I will make it all clear (promise!).

So Ratzinger is talking, as he has been, about the primeval ‘anamnesis’—remembrance—in the heart of every human being, our inner knowledge of the moral law written in our hearts. The moral law does not come to us merely from outside, but is an interior reality, an essential part of our humanity. This is why the wage of sin is death: not because God is a vengeful tyrant obliterating us for our transgressions, but because in sin we destroy our own selves in their deepest core.

But Ratzinger is concerned here to show how the teaching authority of the Church in matters of morality relates to this inner core of anamnesis. And he hits upon the word ‘maieutic’, which may not be the first word you or I would come up with, eh?

Maieutic means ‘mothering.’ That’s all. The sense is that this primitive inner knowledge of the moral law needs some help from outside. Needs some nurturing to grow and become fully operative in us. The Church does not write the moral law, or impose the moral law on people as an alien force; it fosters, nourishes, calls forth, reminds, cares for, encourages the human person on his or her moral path.

Do the human beings who are actually in the Church’s magisterial office at any give time do a very good job of this? Well, that’s up for dispute, even if as Catholics we maintain the Church’s freedom from actual error in its teachings. But that’s what the teaching authority of the Church is for; it is at the service of conscience, not in replacement of it.

He goes on, though, to add an even deeper reflection. God has not simply left his creation in its primeval state. Remembrance is not only to know what God has made, but what God has done with what He has made. Christ, salvation, the Church itself, the sacramental flow of grace—this too is written on the hearts

of each baptized person, and the Church here too serves a maieutic role in reminding us of God’s gifts.

It is a very rich and beautiful picture Ratzinger unveils for us in this passage: God’s love for each of us, his personal gift to each of us both in the order of creation and of salvation, and then the communal dimension whereby these personal intimate gifts of God are fostered and strengthened so as to become the fundamental principles of action and mission for each of us in the world.

Conscience remains primary in this picture, mind you, as the individual faculty whereby each one of us makes this beautiful picture our own picture, what we have chosen to live. And this is why we must defend the rights of religious conscience against incursions of the state if we are serious about religious freedom in our society.

Talking About Conscience XV

This is part of an ongoing series on the blog, the rest of which can be found here.

In the Gentile world, Israel had encountered something that was confirmed anew in the experience of the messengers of Jesus Christ: their preaching responded to an expectation. It encountered a basic prior knowledge of the essential elements of the will of God that had taken written form in the commandments, and this knowledge is found in all cultures.

This primal knowledge develops all the more purely where it is not distorted by the arrogance of ‘civilization’. The more a person leads a life guided by the ‘fear of God’ (see the story of the centurion Cornelius, especially Acts 10:34), the more concrete and clear will be the effect of this anamnesis…

St. Basil insists that the love of God, which takes on a specific form in the commandments, is not imposed on us from outside. Rather, it is infused into us a priori. “A basic understanding of the good is imprinted upon us,” says Augustine.

It is only on this basis that we can understand Newman’s celebrated remark correctly, that if he were asked to make a religious toast he would indeed toast the pope, but he would toast conscience first. The pope does not have power to impose on believing Catholics just because he wants to do so or because he thinks it useful to do so.

This modern voluntaristic concept of authority can only distort the true theological sense of the papacy. If the true essence of the Petrine ministry has become so incomprehensible in the modern period, this is surely because we can conceive of authority only on the basis of philosophical positions that exclude all bridges between  subject and object. In such a view, whatever does not come from the subject can only be a heteronomous imposition.

Values in a Time of Upheaval, 93-4

Reflection – The Pope can’t tell me what to do! Underneath some of the admittedly technical vocabulary in this passage (heteronomous… anamnesis… voluntaristic…), what we have here is Ratzinger’s response to this basic and commonly expressed sentiment.

Voluntarism means roughly the exalting of the will over the intellect. I want what I want—that’s all. No reasoning, or minimal reasoning: just will. So if someone else tells me to do something, there is nothing going on except that they are imposing their will on me—that’s heteronomy (literally, rule by another). A voluntaristic view of the papacy is just that: the pope just gets to tell us what he wants me to do, that dirty bum. Hmph! Laying some Catholic moral guilt trip on me. Down with the Pope! Ecrasez l’infame! (Yesterday, Sofia Loren, today, Voltaire—can’t say I’m not trying to mix it up!)

What Ratzinger (and remember, he wrote this before he became pope) is developing throughout this essay is the thought that the moral law which is from God is, in fact, written in our hearts already, by virtue of our creation by God. It is not an imposition of an external will upon our frail subjectivity. Rather, it springs up from the depths of our hearts. This is the ‘anamnesis’ he refers to – the remembrance of the moral law.

For this reason the Pope is at the service of conscience. For this reason, religious groups have to be allowed in a free society to both preach and practice the moral truths they hold. It is essential to the mission of a religion, among its central tasks, to teach its people, those who freely choose to belong to any given religion, what is true and false, good and evil, what the specific contents are of this moral law written on the heart of man.

If religion is forced by the government to falsify its preaching by its practice, then it is being forced to not be itself. In other words, freedom of religion is null and void. And if people are not free in matters religious, they are actually not free at all. If government can suppress religious freedom, then there is no freedom it cannot suppress.

And that’s what’s happening in America right now, which is sad. I hope it can be turned around there. We’ll see. Meanwhile, I’ll keep talking about conscience from time to time on this blog, and maybe we can all understand a little bit just what we are losing, and what that means for our humanity. Sadly, we’ll see.

Talking About Conscience XIV

The first level, which we might call the ontological level, of the phenomenon ‘conscience’ means that a kind of primal remembrance of the good and the true (which are identical) is bestowed on us. There is an inherent existential tendency of man, who is created in the image of God, to tend toward that which is in keeping with God. Thanks to its origin, man’s being is in harmony with some things but not with others.

This anamnesis of our origin, resulting from the fact that our being is constitutively in keeping with God, is not a knowledge articulated in concepts, a treasure store of retrievable contents. It is an inner sense, a capacity for recognition, in such a way that the one addressed recognizes in himself an echo of what is said to him. If he does not hide from his own self, he comes to the insight: this is the goal toward which my whole being tends, this is where I want to go.

This anamnesis of the Creator, which is identical with the foundations of our existence, is the reason that mission is both possible and justified. The gospel may and indeed must be proclaimed to the pagans, because this is what they are waiting for, even if they do not know this themselves (see Is 42:4). Mission is justified when those it addresses encounter the word of the Gospel and recognize that this is what they were waiting for.

This is what Paul means when he says that the Gentiles ‘are a law unto themselves’—not in the sense of the modern liberalistic idea of autonomy, where nothing can be posited higher than the subject, but in the much deeper sense that nothing belongs to me less than my own self, and that my ego is the place where I must transcend myself most profoundly, the place where I am touched by my ultimate origin and goal.

Values in a Time of Upheaval, 92-3

Reflection – This will be my last blog post for the time being on this series on conscience. There’s more stuff in this essay, and I’ll probably get back to it in a bit, but perhaps enough is enough for the time being.

Anamnesis—this is a good ‘word for the day’. It means ‘remembrance’, of course, and here the Pope is arguing that beneath and below the conscious operations of our conscience, that concrete decisions we have to make about right and wrong, good and evil, lies a fundamental remembrance of God, of truth, of goodness, and of beauty in the depths of our souls.

In the depths of our hearts we belong to God. Obedience, that fearful word, is not a tyranny imposed on us from without, but something that corresponds to our deepest being. We are made to transcend ourselves, and it is in the depths of our hearts that this call to self-transcendence is encountered.

So freedom of conscience remains the deepest freedom, not because the most important thing in the world is that “I get to do just as I please,” but because it is in the inner encounter of the human person with his or her own conscience that the true living out of our human destiny is fulfilled. If people are forced to do things by the state that violate their consciences, a terrible violence has been done.

This violence is currently what the Obama administration is pursuing in the United States right now, and this is a woeful thing, a path which, if not repented of, will lead to great destruction of much that is good in America. Let us pray for them, for one another, for the bishops, and for ourselves, that we may each respond to the call of God resonating in the depths of our hearts and so attain the fullness of life for which God has made us.

Talking About Conscience XIII

If we look more closely, we will see that talk about ‘conscience’ in a [relativistic] world view is merely a way of saying that there is no genuine conscience in the sense of a con-scientia, a ‘knowing with’ truth. Each one decides on his own criteria. In this universal relativity, no one can help anyone else in this matter, still less lay down rules for another person to follow.

This shows us how radical the modern debate about ethics and about the center of ethics, the conscience, really is. I believe that the only parallel to this in the history of ideas is the dispute between Socrates/Plato and the Sophists, which explores the primal decision to be made between two basic attitudes, namely, the confidence that man is capable of perceiving truth and a world view in which it is only man himself who posits the criteria he will follow…

If we detach Socrates’ controversy from the contingent elements of its historical framework, we soon see that this is essentially the same controversy that rages today (with other arguments and other names). If we give up belief in the capacity of man to perceive truth, this leads initially to a purely formalistic use of words and concepts.

In turn, the elimination of substance from our words and concepts leads to a pure formalism of judgment, in the past as in the present. One no longer asks what a man actually thinks. The verdict on his thinking is readily available, if one succeeds in cataloguing it under an appropriate formal category—conservative, reactionary, fundamentalist, progressive, revolutionary. The assignment to a formal schema is enough to dispense one from actually looking at the contents of what is being said. The same tendency can be seen even more strongly in art. It is irrelevant what it depicts; it may be a glorification of God or of the devil. The only criterion is the formal skill employed by the artist.

Values in a Time of Upheaval, 88-90

Reflection – Again, Ratzinger is taking us into deep philosophical waters here. But despair not – let me make it perfectly clear to you. What he is talking about is the triumph of style over substance, form over content. In other words, it’s not what you say but how you say it that counts.

The Sophists essentially held that language was a tool to use to get what you want. Socrates/Plato and the whole tradition following this, which was taken up in Christian philosophy and theology into the High Middle Ages, held that language was about truth.

The Sophists were like Humpty Dumpty in Alice Through the Looking Glass, insisting that when he used a word, the word meant whatever he decided it meant. When Alice commented that it sounded a bit confusing, he retorted to the effect that ‘all that matters is who is master.’

Well, welcome to the Internet, Humpty! Where clever packaging, rhetorical flourish, and snazzy graphics are what really count. Rules of logic and rigorous accuracy regarding facts are old-fashioned, ignored or derided.

So we see in the current controversy over the HHS mandate in the States forcing religious groups to pay for procedures that are morally repellent to them, that the battle is being fought, not over the actual facts of the matter, not over the true meaning of religious freedom in a pluralistic democracy, not over the limits of government power, certainly not over basic facts of the price and availability of contraception in America today.

Instead, the battle is waged on how the discussion is to be framed. “The mean old Catholic Church is trying to deprive women of life-saving, absolutely-necessary-for-freedom-and-happiness birth control! Boo, hiss, to the Catholic Church!” Now, absolutely nothing the Catholic Church is doing or could do in this situation could possibly deny women access to birth control. But that fact does not matter. It’s all about ‘who is master’ – who will frame the discussion and control its flow. Humpty and the Sophists have won.

Well, they might have won or even be winning in the political sphere, where sophistry always has had its best innings. But truth has a way of asserting itself in the end. Reality has a way of having the last word. But if we flout truth, and the justice and integrity that flow from living in the truth, reality’s last word has a way of being a pretty sharp one. When truth is not welcomed and acknowledged as the master, it remains master still—just not a very nice one.

And this is the abyss America is teetering at the edge of right now. Let us pray for them, and for all men and women, that we know the truth, and the truth will set us free.

Talking About Conscience XII

I believe that when we speak of a ‘man of conscience’ we are referring to these attitudes: a man of conscience is one who never purchases comfort, well-being, success, public prestige, or approval by prevalent opinion if the price is the renunciation of truth. Here, Newman agrees with that other great British witness to conscience St. Thomas More, who did not in the least regard conscience as the expression of his subjective tenacity or of an eccentric heroism. He saw himself as one of those timorous martyrs who reach the point of obeying their conscience only after hesitation and much questioning, and this is an act of obedience to that truth which must rank higher than every social authority and every kind of personal taste.

This indicates two criteria for a genuine word spoken by the conscience: it is not identical with one’s own wishes and taste; nor is it identical with that which is more advantageous, socially speaking, with the consensus of a group or with the claims made by political or societal power.

Let us look briefly at the problems that vex our own age. The individual may not purchase his rise in society and his well-being at the price of betrayal of the truth that he has come to recognize; nor may humanity as a whole do so.

It is here that we touch on the neuralgic point of the modern age: the concept of truth has in practice been abandoned and replaced by the concept of progress. Progress itself ‘is’ truth. But this apparent elevation deprives progress of all contents; it dissolves into nothing. For if there is no direction, everything can be interpreted either as progress or as regress.

Values in a Time of Upheaval, 87-8

Reflection – Happy Lent, everyone! Well, our reflections on conscience with then-Cardinal Ratzinger have taken us to a nice little Lenten spot today—the challenge conscience poses to us to be willing to risk persecution, suffering, loss of status or comfort, income or approval because we value the truth over all these things.

Ouch. And while Ratzinger promptly extends his reflection to humanity as a whole, society as a whole, I think it is salutary for us to linger on the individual level, given the political situation in America which has prompted this blog series.

We have to be willing to suffer for the truth. I’m sorry—it’s rough, and it’s very unfortunate that civil society is increasingly hostile to the truth claims of Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular, and seems bound to make us suffer for them. But we really have to summon up the courage of  Thomas More and John Fisher in our time.

More, before his eventual imprisonment and death, was reduced with his family to a state of considerable poverty as he had been forced to resign his office as Chancellor in an effort to avoid taking a public stand against the king. This was not easy for him, especially since his family themselves were far from clear about why he had to do this.

In the play A Man for All Seasons (which would make good reading right about now), the figure of More is contrasted with that of the Common Man (sadly omitted from the otherwise splendid film version starring Paul Scofield). The Common Man is the regular guy trying to make a living, trying to keep his head down and not get into trouble, trying not to rock the boat. He appears in various guises in the play. In the end, he is More’s executioner.

At one point, he is a prison guard and is dragging Lady Alice and Meg away from visiting More in the tower. When More begs him for one more minute with his loved ones, he says, “I’m just a plain man, I’ve got my orders.” More cries out, “Deliver us from plain men!” (I quote from memory, and may not have the exact words.) This is what we have to watch out for in our day. To just slide through and not make waves, to keep your head down—after all, you’ve got a family to feed, bills to pay! And suddenly, without quite knowing how you got there, you’re throwing your neighbors into jail and maybe even chopping off their heads, literally or figuratively.

I don’t think I’m being dramatic. Cardinal George of Chicago said that he expects to die in bed, his successor will die in jail, and his successor will be executed in the public square. Cardinal George is a serious, sober, measured man. These are serious times we’re living in. What are you going to do? What am I going to do?

It’s Lent. Season of prayer and fasting. Lots to pray and fast about in our world today. Happy Lent to you—make it a good one.

Talking About Conscience XI

In other words, the centrality of the concept of conscience in Newman is linked to the antecedent centrality of the concept of truth; only this latter concept allows us to understand what Newman means by ‘conscience.’ The dominance of the idea of conscience in Newman does not mean that this nineteenth-century theologian maintains a philosophy or theology of subjectivity in opposition to ‘objective’ neo-scholasticism… his attention [to the knowing subject] echoes that of Augustine, not that of the subjectivist philosophy of the modern period…

For Newman, conscience does not mean that it is the subject that has the final word vis-à-vis the claims made by authority in a world devoid of truth, a world that lives on the basis of a compromise between the claims made by the subject and the claims of a societal order. Rather, conscience signifies the perceptible and commanding presence of the voice of truth in the subject itself.

Conscience means the abolition of mere subjectivity when man’s intimate sphere is touched by the truth that comes from God… Newman’s conversion to Catholicism was not a matter of his own personal taste or of a subjective need of his soul. As late as 1844, on the threshold of his conversion, he wrote that no one could take a more unfavorable view than he himself of the contemporary state of Roman Catholicism. He was convinced that he must obey the truth that he had recognized, rather than his own taste, even at the price of his own feelings and of the ties of friendship formed with those who until then had been his companions… Newman, when listing the virtues, places truth above goodness—or, to make this point in language with which we are more familiar today, above consensus, above what is acceptable within the group.

Values in a Time of Upheaval, 86-7

Reflection – OK, this is a bit heady, I grant you. I considered omitting this part of the essay, except for the small detail that this is precisely where Ratzinger develops the key point he wants to convey to us. It is this: “conscience signifies the perceptible and commanding voice of truth in the subject itself… where man’s intimate sphere is touched by the truth that comes from God.”

This is far from the modern notion where conscience puts me in the driver’s seat, so no one can tell me nothing about what is right and wrong, because I have a conscience and conscience is supreme, man! Conscience rules! The pope drools!

OK, most moderns might put it a leetle more respectfully than that. But nonetheless that’s the basic gist. My conscience means I decide and no one can tell me I’m wrong. Here, instead, conscience means that in the depths of my being, in the innermost chasms of my mind and heart, I have a voice that is telling me the truth—not my truth, not the truth I want to hear, not my likes and dislikes dressed up as truth, but Truth.

This places each human being under a terrific responsibility, if you think about it. Each one of us must give an account of ourselves to this Truth; each one of us is a true actor, a true agent, a protagonist in a great drama, a morality play if you will.

No one is simply to be borne along on the waves of social conformity; no one is a helpless victim of circumstance; no one can say ‘I had no choice! I had to go with what everyone else was doing!’

We always have a choice. Not an easy choice, not a choice that is free from suffering and even death (see the martyrs, indeed see Christ Himself), but a choice nonetheless. God is at work in every human heart, every human soul, through the faculty of conscience, calling us to seek what is true and good, not what is convenient and pleasing. And it is right here, right in the call to listen to the voice of conscience and pursue it, that we are in an encounter with God Himself, where “man’s intimate sphere is touched by the truth that comes from God.”

This is why conscience claims cannot be messed around with. For the state to put people in a position of facing jail time, heavy fines, or cataclysmic shutterings of social, charitable, educational, and health care institutions due to an insistence on a course of action that is literally (in Cardinal Dolan’s words) unconscionable, is horrifyingly wrong, really. It is striking at the very heart of the human project, the call of each human being to deep moral responsibility at the heart of their own personal subjectivity. It cannot stand.

Talking About Conscience X

Let us pause for a moment here, before we attempt to formulate comprehensive answers to the question about what conscience truly is. We must first extend somewhat the basis of our considerations, going beyond the personal sphere that was our starting point…

[I want to] begin with the figure of Cardinal John Henry Newman, whose entire life and word could be called one great commentary on the question of conscience… To speak of Newman and conscience is to evoke the famous words in his letter to the duke of Norfolk (1874): “Certainly, if I am obliged to bring religion into after-dinner toasts (which indeed does not seem quite the thing), I shall drink—to the Pope, if you please—still, to Conscience first, and to the Pope afterwards.”

Newman intended this to be a clear confession of his faith in the papacy, in response to the objections raised by Gladstone to the dogma of infallibility. At the same time, against erroneous forms of ultra-montanism, he meant it to be an interpretation of the papacy, which can be understood correctly only when it is seen in connection with the primacy of conscience—not in opposition to the papacy, but based on it and guaranteeing it.

It is difficult for people today to grasp this point, since they think on the basis of an antithesis between authority and subjectivity. Conscience is seen as standing on the side of subjectivity and as an expression of the freedom of the subject, while authority is regarded as the limitation of this freedom, or indeed a threat to it, if not its actual negation. We must look somewhat more deeply here if we are to learn once again how to understand a vision in which this kind of antithesis has no validity.

The intermediate concept that holds these two together for Newman is truth. I would not hesitate to say that truth is the central idea in Newman’s intellectual striving. Conscience is central to his thinking because truth is the heart of everything.

Values in a Time of Upheaval, 86-7

Reflection – Ratzinger now launches into his positive presentation of conscience in earnest, and takes Newman’s famous after-dinner toast as his starting point. Now, I am no expert of any kind on Newman, so I can’t provide any bigger commentary on his words here and how they fit into his whole thought.

But these words often get quoted badly out of context, as if Newman is somehow ‘dissing’ the papacy. Since offering an after-dinner toast to somehow is not normally seen as an act of disrespect, I am not sure how this interpretation can be credibly offered. Wishful thinking on the part of those who offer it, I suspect.

Newman is praising the papacy precisely as an instrument at the service of conscience. And this is the whole key to the matter. We exercise our conscience, but our conscience must be formed. We have to make up our minds about good and evil, but good and evil are objective realities ‘out there’, not constructs of our mind. We are obliged to our conscience… but our conscience is obliged to the truth, and that’s the key to the whole matter.

This is why freedom of conscience and freedom of religion are so intertwined. Both are concerned with the capacity of human beings to seek the truth and live it out. And this capacity to seek and live the truth in freedom is central to the entire human project.

This is why, and I will keep repeating this, what President Obama is doing is not so much an attack on the Catholic Church (although it certainly is that) or even on religion. He is attacking humanity, and every human being of good will should be ready and determined to resist this attack in peaceful ways: the political and legal process, and civil disobedience if necessary.

Talking About Conscience IX

The capacity to hear God’s voice in the heart of man, a capacity that is almost extinguished, must be developed anew. It is only in an initial phase that error, the erring conscience, is comfortable. When conscience falls silent and we do nothing to resist it, the consequence is the dehumanization of the world and a deadly danger.

To put this in other terms, the identification of conscience with the superficial consciousness and the reduction of man to his subjectivity do not liberate but rather enslave. They do this by making us completely dependent on prevailing opinions, indeed lowering the level of these opinions day by day. To identify conscience with a superficial state of conviction is to equate it with a certainty that merely seems rational, a certainty woven from self-righteousness, conformism, and intellectual laziness. Conscience is degraded to a mechanism that produces excuses for one’s conduct, although in reality conscience is meant to make the subject transparent to the divine, thereby revealing man’s authentic dignity and greatness. At the same time, the reduction of conscience to a subjective certainty means the removal of truth.

Psalm 19 anticipates Jesus’ understanding of sin and righteousness and asks us to be set free from the guilt of which the one who prays is unaware. It thus indicates what we have just said: certainly, one must follow the erring conscience. But the removal of truth, which took place earlier and now takes its revenge in the form of an erring conscience, is the real guilt that lulls man in false security and ultimately abandons him to solitude in a pathless wilderness.

Values in a Time of Upheaval, 83-4

Reflection – Blog traffic is up since I started this series, so I assume I’m finding new readers through it. Welcome, new readers, whoever you mysterious people are! Now, that being said, this passage has to be read in light of what has gone before in order to make sense—otherwise it seems like Ratzinger is just making arbitrary statements here. We’re on number nine of the series: 1-8 flesh out some of what he says here.

What he touches on here is very important, though, in itself. If we identify the whole of conscience with ‘what I happen to think about abortion/contraception/homosexuality/car theft…’ and that is the only meaning, the beginning and the end of the matter, then we are indeed stuck in our own social norms and the opinions of the day, with no real way out.

Recently in the news there was a survey in Britain showing that more and more Brits, especially among the young, have no problem with lying, stealing, cheating on a partner. These most fundamental moral principles are being rapidly eroded in post-modern England, at least according to this survey.

If all that matters is doing what we think is right, then there can be no problem with that, right? If I think it’s right to lie, cheat, and steal, as long as I stay one step ahead of the cops, I’m fine, right?

Most people who have not already succumbed to neo-barbarism know that this is not fine. And even the neo-barbarians (I speak from personal experience!) are kind of defensive in asserting that they can do whatever they want. Something in us knows that this is not really true.

If we are not listening to God, we eventually cease to be human. This is the great paradox of our being. And we see it happening all around us—the coarsening and vulgarizing of speech and act, the loss of transcendent meaning and purpose in so many, the above noted erosion of basic honesty and decency.

This is why we have to reclaim and deepen our commitment to real conscience, the constant breaking out of mere subjective opinion into a true encounter with reality and with God. And that is why I am dedicating my blog for this couple of weeks to this series.

Talking About Conscience VI

(Ratzinger begins this section by describing a conversation in which the argument was made that Hitler, etc., were in heaven since they were following their consciences.)

…Since that conversation, I have been absolutely certain that there is something wrong with the theory of the justifying force of the subjective conscience. In other words, a concept of conscience that leads to such inferences is false. A firm subjective conscience, with the consequent lack of doubts and scruples, does not justify anyone.

Later, I read an essay by the psychologist Albert Görres that summarized briefly the insights I had slowly tried to formulate for myself and that I wish to set out here. Görres points out that guilt feelings, or the ability to recognize one’s guilt, is an essential element of man’s psychological makeup. The guilt feeling that shatters a conscience’s false calm and the criticism made by my conscience of my self-satisfied existence are signals that we need just as much as we need the physical pain that lets us know that our normal vital functions have been disturbed. One who is no longer capable of seeing his own guilt is psychologically ill, ‘a living corpse, a theatrical mask’ as Görres puts it. ‘In human persons, monsters—it is people like these who have no guilt feelings. Hitler may have had none; nor may Himmler or Stalin. Mafia bosses may have none, but it is more likely that they have merely suppressed their awareness of the skeletons in their closets. And the aborted guilt feelings… everyone needs guilt feelings… everyone needs guilt feelings.’

There is in fact a scriptural text that could have prevented the diagnoses put forward by my colleagues and shown them that the theory of justification by means of an erring conscience is untenable. Ps 19:12 contains words that deserve constant meditation: ‘But who can discern his errors? Clear thou me from hidden faults.’

The wisdom of the Old Testament takes a very different line from my professorial colleagues: the loss of the ability to see one’s guilt, the falling silent of conscience in so many areas, is a more dangerous illness of the soul than guilt that is recognized as guilt.

Values in a Time of Upheaval, 80-1

Reflection – In other words, guilt in itself is a good thing! So counter-cultural, this. Our whole idea is that we can or should be able to do just anything we want, and that the worst thing to do to someone is to tell them they are doing something immoral. ‘Don’t you dare call me a sinner!’ is the general attitude.

And yet once we realize that there is nothing worse than killing one’s conscience, that to do this is essentially to make oneself sub-human, than of course we can understand why one of the spiritual works of mercy is to admonish sinners. If someone (like, say, President Obama) is engaging in an evil course of action, then the bishops are doing him a great act of charity in pointing it out to him with great vigor and resolve. And I think almost anyone of good will can at least see the truth of this. If someone is doing a terrible evil and does not know even slightly that they are doing this evil, something has gone very badly wrong with them at a deep level.

Now of course the implication of this is that we live in a universe where moral behavior is not simply a matter of subjective choice. If morality simply means doing what you think is right, then the above analysis is literally nonsense. And we cannot have it both ways. If Görres is correct then we live in a world of moral order that surpasses our subjective ideas; if there is nothing to morality except our own subjective thoughts on the matter, then we are back to square one: Dexter as moral exemplar, etc…

Ratzinger is about to take this in a provocative direction—tomorrow (God willing) we will see that guilt and what it implies for us actually breaks us open from the prison of our self, and opens us up to a broader and deeper, more beautiful reality. To be continued…

Talking About Conscience V

(This is continued from the previous blog post, below)

Is the truth about the human person and God so sad and so difficult, or does truth not lie precisely in overcoming such legalism? Does it not lie in freedom? But, then, where does freedom lead? What path does it show us?..

I was initially shocked by the caricature of faith that I thought I saw in my colleagues’ argument. Further reflection suggested that he was employing a false concept of conscience.

His argument was that an erring conscience saves man by protecting him from the terrifying demands made by truth. Conscience was not envisaged here as a window that makes it possible for man to see the truth that is common to us all, the truth that is our basis and sustains us…

Conscience was not the decision made by man in favor of the foundations that supported his existence; it was not the power to perceive the highest and most essential of all realities. On the contrary, here conscience was a cloak thrown over human subjectivity, allowing man to elude the clutches of reality and to hide from it… Conscience does not reveal the road of truth, which we can take and so be saved—for either truth does not exist at all, or else it is impossible for us to meet its demands.

And this makes conscience the justification of a human subjectivity that refuses to let itself be called into question, as well as of social conformism that is meant to function as an average value between the various subjectivities and thereby enable human beings to live together.

There is no longer any need to feel obliged to look for truth, nor may one doubt the average attitude and customary praxis. It suffices to be convinced of one’s own correctness and to conform to others. Man is reduced to his superficial conviction, and the less depth he possesses, the better off he is.

Values in a Time of Upheaval, 78-9

Reflection – So in this extended exploration of conscience, we are very much still in the introductory phase. Ratzinger here is continuing to look at the idea of the infallible conscience, that the only relevant moral standard is to be quite convinced that what one is doing is correct. Previously (see below) he has shown the absurdity of this position; now he shows the outcome of this position.

In praise of shallowness! That’s where this view of conscience leads us. And there is a long human tradition of this. Let sleeping dogs lie, don’t think too hard, don’t bother your head with things too deep. Why so serious?

The whole idea that the only important thing is to get along, to fit in with the crowd, and to be complacent in one’s own proper behavior—this has long been among the great strategies employed by the human race.

Well, what’s wrong with it, then? People seem to get through life OK that way, and probably don’t commit too many heinous crimes. Why not? Well, in part the problem is that it doesn’t make sense—it is predicated upon, in fact, not thinking too hard, since it actually is a wholly irrational way to live.

Second, to simply live on the surface of life and go along to get along is not commensurate with our human dignity. We are made for greatness, for a truly heroic way of life, even if that heroism is lived out in very ordinary surroundings. To bob along on the surface of things does not conform to the truth of our humanity in all its awesomeness.

Finally, and this is relevant to what has occasioned my blog series on conscience, what happens when a society and its norms goes astray? This is hardly theoretical—the past century has seen multiple human societies go badly awry in horrific ways.

Our current society believes (generally) that it should be legal to tear tiny human beings into little pieces and suction them out of their mother’s wombs. Our current society believes that the sexual acts of two men or two women are absolutely identical to the sexual intercourse between a man and a woman out of which springs new human life. Human life then is a mere accidental by-product of some other process. Our current society believes that people who disagree with this and say so are expressing hate speech and should be silenced.

And in the States, it is entirely possible that Obama will succeed in pulling the wool over people’s eyes, and religious groups will indeed be forced to pay for products we believe are evil and harmful, and in fact homicidal.

A person who has chosen to live by social convention, to not think too deeply, and to go along to get along, has no defense against monstrous evils, once they become social norms. And that’s why we cannot ignore the demands of truth and the arduous struggle to learn it and live by it.