Conscience

“What [John Henry] Newman says about conscience—that it is ‘the voice of God in the nature and heart of man’—shocks the modern secular sensibility, which treats it (if at all) as the ‘socially constructed’ result of any number of cultural influences. For Newman, it is a kind of participation in God, Who ‘has the attributes of justice, truth, wisdom, sanctity, benevolence and mercy, as eternal characteristics in His nature, the very Law of His being, identical with Himself.’ Conscience participates in this Law, because ‘when He became Creator, He implanted this Law, which is Himself, in the intelligence of all His rational creatures. . . . This law, as apprehended in the minds of individual men, is called ‘conscience’; and though it may suffer refraction in passing into the intellectual medium of each, it is not therefore so affected as to lose its character of being the Divine Law, but still has, as such, the prerogative of commanding obedience.’

What is most bracing about Newman’s understanding is its extraordinarily clarifying focus on the presence of God within us. But it is easy to avoid, if other matters—such as big money—become god instead. . . .

Conscience does not calculate how much profit might be lost by doing the right thing, nor, on the other hand, does it function as an instance of what Alexis de Tocqueville calls ‘self-interest rightly understood.’ Newman is clear on the point: ‘Conscience is not a long-sighted selfishness, nor a desire to be consistent with oneself.’ Rather, ‘it is a messenger from Him, who, both in nature and in grace, speaks to us behind a veil, and teaches and rules us by His representatives.’ The conscience of Sophie Scholl—or of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, or of St. Maximilian Kolbe—is the messenger of God: it gave them the courage to resist the Nazi tyranny, even to death. ‘Conscience is the aboriginal Vicar of Christ,’ writes Newman, ‘a prophet in its informations, a monarch in its peremptoriness, a priest in its blessings and anathemas.’

I’m also reminded of Newman by what Archbishop Charles Chaput said in a lecture last week at the Constitutional Studies Program of the University of Notre Dame. He does not explicitly mention conscience, but what he says calls upon its power: ‘It’s a good thing, a vital thing, to consider what we’re willing to die for. To even ask that question is an act of rebellion against a loveless age. And to answer it with conviction is to become a revolutionary; the kind of loving revolutionary who will survive and resist — and someday redeem a late modern West that can no longer imagine anything worth dying for, and thus, in the long run, anything worth living for.’”

~Glenn Arbery