Let's Talk About Conscience

I would like to spend Wednesdays on the blog looking at some of the gnarlier questions of Catholic teaching and theology. I realize from both my priestly ministry of spiritual direction and my presence on Catholic social media that there is quite a bit of misunderstanding of Catholicism, even among Catholics. And of course some of the issues I hope to treat are hotly contested, widely rejected, and bitterly opposed. As those who know me and have read me for years know, that sort of thing only encourages me to keep writing about it. I don’t mind being disagreed with, but fiercely resist efforts to silence me.

Let’s start with something a bit less juicy, but fairly central in many of the hard questions of our day. Let’s talk about conscience. Now, in a single blog post I cannot do justice to the whole theology and philosophy of this matter, but let’s talk about why the Church insists on the primacy of conscience (cf Catechism of the Catholic Church 1782) and what that really means.

Conscience is the practical intellect, that part of our reasoning faculty by which, examining a decision that is to be made, we determine what is the good course of action, also known as the moral good. We determine the right thing to do, and we determine this right thing to do by the exercise of our conscience.

This is not moral relativism. Those Catholics and others who bridle at the mention of the word conscience are hearing it in a morally relativistic way, but that is simply not what the Church means by it. Using one’s intellect to determine what is the right and moral course of action is no different in essence from using one’s intellect to solve a math problem. You indeed have to do the solving (or, if you are using a calculator, you can have someone else do the solving for you), but nobody claims you can decide that 2 and 2 are five or that you can divide by zero and come up with a rational number.

And if you are doing math in the service of some practical project—building a house or paying your taxes—making mistakes in the numbers will have practical effects in the world. The house will fall down and kill you and your family; the taxes won’t get paid properly and there are legal consequences to that.

Conscience is much like that; we use our intellects to determine the right course of action. If we determine wrongly, and do something that is in fact morally wrong, we may be innocent in intent, but the wrong is still done. And actions are morally wrong, not by some arbitrary law given by a heedless Lawgiver, but because they are harmful to us. Some harms are immediate and obvious (reckless driving causes a crash) and some are long-term and gradual (smoking causes lung cancer), but the harm is done nonetheless.

It is absolutely vital that people exercise their consciences freely. Sometimes it comes up in pastoral ministry that a person wishes they didn’t have free will, that God would just tell them directly moment by moment what to do and even completely take over their volition. This is not the deal God has with us, though. The reason we must exercise our conscience is rooted in the very purpose and goal of God’s creative and salvific will for us. He made human beings so that there would be creatures of flesh, material creatures, who could freely choose to know Him and love Him, who could make a free choice to enter communion with Him and so give glory to God.

There is much more that can be said on that front (I hope to write a book about it some day). But that is the fundamental reason why conscience is primary and free will absolutely necessary. God does not violate us, does not force Himself on us, does not make us know Him and love Him (this is also why He hides Himself from us, painful as we find that hiding).

Conscience being free and primary does not do away with the moral law and with moral doctrine or teaching. That is really quite silly if you think of it. If I have a really hard math problem to solve, I am actually grateful to have a calculator, both to save time and to protect me from costly errors. And I trust the makers of the calculator to have created an instrument that provides reliable calculation.

Well, it is no different with conscience and morality. The ‘Maker’ of the moral law has provided us with a sure and trustworthy instrument to provide us with helpful guidance and answers, to save us from needlessly laborious moral reasoning and preserve us from deadly errors. And that instrument is the Catholic Church in its teaching office.

People often bridle at this. “So it comes down to just do whatever the Church tells you, then? Phooey!” Well, calm down there. For one thing, the Church is not telling me right now to write this blog post, nor is it telling you to read it. There are vast swaths of life we all live each day where we are making free choices that the Church offers us at best general principles to decide with (e.g., I should use my writing and intellectual gifts to help people, you should read helpful things).

The Church simply tells us that 2 + 2 = 4 and not 5. Sex is for marriage. Don’t steal - other people’s property is to be respected. Don’t tell lies. Don’t kill people. That kind of thing. Most of us can find quite a bit of freedom in our lives within the walls of the moral law; those walls enclose quite a vast estate of human action and choice.

Well, there is much more to be said about conscience – I wrote a whole series about it a while ago that you can access by clicking on the ‘talking about conscience’ label at the bottom of this post. But that’s more than enough for one day. My conscience is telling me to post this up and move on with the next duties of my state of life, and I guess I’d better obey it!

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.

Greetings, Shea Readers... Now About That Conscience Blogging...

Oh, I see that Mark Shea just gave me a link (thanks, Mark!). My series on conscience just wrapped up, at least for now, but is just down a few posts, or you could click on the 'talking about conscience' label at the bottom of this post. I do think it's crucial for us all to get clear as we can in our own minds about what conscience is, since it appears we are facing serious attacks on it and will be for the foreseeable future. What we don't understand, we will not fight to preserve.

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 VIII

Paul tells us that the Gentiles knew without the law what God expected of them (Rom 2:1-16). This passage deals a death blow to the entire theory of salvation through ignorance. Truth is present in man in a manner that cannot be rejected: and this is the same truth of the Creator that also took written form in the revelation of salvation history. Man can see the truth of God in the foundations of his created being. To fail to see this is guilt. If we refuse to see the truth, this ‘no’ of the will that prevents knowledge is guilt. The warning lamp fails to light up because we deliberately avert our eyes from something we do not want to see.

At this point in our reflections, we can draw our first conclusions to help answer the question about the essence of conscience. We can now say that it is impossible to identify man’s conscience with the self-awareness of the ego, with his subjective certainty about himself and his moral conduct. This consciousness may be a mere reflex of the social environment and of the opinions widespread there. It may also indicate a lack of self-criticism, a failure to listen to the depths of one’s own soul.

In the aftermath of the collapse of Marxist systems in Eastern Europe the situation that came to light confirms this diagnosis. The most alert and honest spirits among the newly liberated peoples speak of a terrible neglect of the soul that arose in the years of false education. They speak of a blunting of the moral sensitivity, which represents and more terrible loss and danger than the economic damage that occurred.

At the beginning of his time in office, in the summer of 1990, the patriarch of Moscow emphasized this in impressive words. He lamented that those who lived in a system of deceit had lost much of their powers of perception. Society had lost the ability to feel compassion, and human emotions had withered away. An entire generation had become impervious to the good and was incapable of human deeds. “We must bring society back to the eternal moral values,” he said.

Values in a Time of Upheaval, 82-3

Reflection -  Well, now we’re getting somewhere! After exploring at length (see Talking About Conscience I-VII) the inadequacy of the modern notion of conscience and its infallibility, Ratzinger now starts to develop a response, a better and deeper understanding of the word and the reality.

And this development shows clearly what a perilous condition we are all in. I started this series because of the alarming developments in America with the outright violation of conscience being imposed by the Obama administration. Some may ask me, “Well, what’s it to you? You’re Canadian, dude! Chill out.” OK, so they wouldn’t say the last three words unless they were surfers or something.

Well, first, I love America. I know Canadians aren’t supposed to do that; I don’t care. I lived in the States for two years, and it is a wonderful place with wonderful people. Also (and I know this is a very unfashionable thought in Canada), America is indeed a beacon of freedom in the world. If America collapses as a free society, the implications are global and severe.

But also, and in that, the questions and challenges raised by the Obama Administration’s assault on religious liberty are of the essence. And the above passage from Ratzinger shows that, I think. When societies turn away from the moral law, when the state and those who control it impose their own subjective certainties upon society, when the voice of conscience is silenced, then man is not only alienated from God, but from his own deepest self.

There is a truth about humanity and about life that is written in the depths of the human heart. We may struggle to read it; we may disagree about some of the things written there. But if the state can say to us, “Your heart and its moral knowledge are irrelevant—submit to me,” then the human person is crushed, annihilated, denied. And this has societal and personal consequences that I am afraid we will all have to live with, as Russia has had to live with the terrible consequences of the Soviet repression of freedom.

At the risk of sounding a bit dramatic: repent, President Obama. Repent, members of his administration. Repent, anyone reading this who may support this evil initiative. You are striking at the very heart of America, and its very survival is at stake in this issue.

Talking About Conscience VII

One who no longer pays heed to the fact that killing is a sin has fallen more deeply than one who still recognizes the abhorrent quality of his actions, since the former person is further away from truth and from repentance. It is not by chance that the self-righteous person is revealed in the encounter with Jesus to be the one who is really lost: when the tax collector with all his undisputed sins is more righteous in the eyes of God than the Pharisee with all his genuinely good deeds (Luke 18: 9-14), this is not because the sins of the tax collector were not sins or the good deeds of the Pharisee not good deeds. Jesus does not intend to say that man’s good deeds are not good in God’s sight or that his evil deeds are not evil (or, at any rate, not all that serious).

The reason for this paradoxical verdict by God is directly connected to the question we are examining here. The Pharisee is no longer aware that he too is guilty. He is perfectly at ease with his own conscience. But this silence of his conscience makes it impossible for God and men to penetrate his carapace—whereas the cry of conscience that torments the tax collector opens him to receive truth and love. Jesus can work effectively among sinners because they have not become inaccessible behind the screen of an erring conscience, which would put them out of reach of the changes that God awaits from them—and from us. Jesus cannot work effectively among the righteous because they sense no need for forgiveness and repentance; their conscience no longer accuses them but only justifies them.

Values in a Time of Upheaval, 81-2

Reflection – In short, there is nothing worse than being smug. And I think we kind of know this, even if in our classic human weakness fail to spot it in ourselves. But we know that we can take a lot from a person who is quick to admit his own faults and failings… and not so tolerant towards someone who thinks he is God’s gift to humanity.

It is this whole business of being open or closed to the world outside one’s own ego. The guilty conscience, the troubled mind that reproaches us that we have done wrong—this is actually a great gift to us. There is something within us, something in our very being, that bears witness to us that we are not sufficient unto ourselves, that we are not the center of the universe, that we are not the standard of judgment for all reality.

Now of course conscience, like everything else in us, can get derailed in various ways. We can become beset with neurotic scrupulous guilt, for one thing. But I think it is far more common in our time to see the other thing, what Pope Benedict and I have been reflecting on together: the disabled conscience, the silenced conscience. And this is a terrible curse. It locks us up in the castle keep of our own subjectivity. It prevents us from adopting the basic stance of humility towards life which opens us up to God and man, to the world that is bigger than us.

The inability to admit one’s own guilt, which is held out as such a great liberation by some, actually is the deepest imprisonment possible for human beings. We become trapped in a hall of mirrors, unable to see anything but our own petty judgments and standards for life.

Guilt frees us: “You shall know the truth, and the truth will set you free,” even if part of that truth is ‘you done wrong, son!’ For the gift of guilt, then, let us thank the Lord (hey, Lent is coming up, so this is very timely!).