On Conscience

(Notes taken while reading ON CONSCIENCE by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger. Ignatius

 Conscience, the highest norm that man is to follow even in opposition to authority. If this were the case, it would mean that there is no truth, at least not in moral and religious matters.

One must follow a certain conscience or at least not act against it.

Some would argue that we should be grateful to God that He allows so many unbelievers in good conscience. For if their eyes were opened and they became believers, they would not be capable, in this world of ours, of bearing the burden of faith with all its moral obligations. But as it is, since they can go another way in good conscience, they can still reach salvation.

According to this view, faith would not make salvation easier but harder. Being happy would mean not being burdened with having to believe or having to submit to the moral yoke of the faith of the Catholic Church. The erroneous conscience, which makes life easier and marks a more human course, would then be the real grace, the normal way to salvation. Untruth, keeping truth at bay, would be better for man than truth.  

If this were the state of affairs, how could faith give rise to joy? Who would have the courage to pass faith on others? Would it not be better to spare them the truth or even keep them from it?

Is conscience subjectivity’s protective shell, into which man can escape and hide from reality?

Conscience is a window through which one can see outward to that common truth that finds and sustains all, and so makes possible through the common recognition of truth the community of wants and responsibilities.

Conscience is man’s openness to the ground of his being, the power of perception for what is highest and most essential.

The liberal idea of conscience dispenses with truth. It becomes the justification of our subjectivity, which would not like to have itself called into question. Similarly, it becomes the justification for social conformity. As mediating value between the different subjectivities, social conformity is intended to make living together possible. The obligation to seek the truth terminates as do any doubts about the general inclination of society and what it has become accustomed to. Being convinced  of oneself, as well as conforming to others, is sufficient. Man is reduced to his superficial conviction, and the less depth he has, the better for him.

The Nazi SS would be justified and we should seek them in heaven, since they carried out all their atrocities with fanatic conviction and complete certainty of conscience. Since they followed their (albeit mistaken) consciences, one would have to recognize their conduct as moral and as a result, should not doubt their eternal salvation.

That is the  justifying power of the subjective conscience. Firm, subjective conviction and the lack of doubts and scruples that follow from it do not justify man.

To identify my conscience with the “I,” with its subjective certainty about itself and its moral behavior would make my conscience a mere reflection of the social surroundings and the opinions in circulation. On the other hand, this consciousness might also derive from a lack of self-criticism, a deficiency in listening to the depths of one’s own soul.

The identification of conscience with superficial consciousness, the reduction of man to his subjectivity, does not liberate but enslaves.

Whoever equates conscience with superficial conviction identifies conscience with a pseudo-rational certainty, a certainty that in fact has been woven from self-righteousness, conformity, and lethargy. 

For Newman, the connection between authority and subjectivity is truth.

Conscience is the perceptible and demanding presence of the voice of truth in the subject himself. Newman emphasized truth’s priority over consensus, over the accommodation of groups.

First: Conscience is not identical to personal wishes and taste

Second: Conscience cannot be reduced to social advantage, to group consensus, or to the demands of political and social power.   

Now-a-days  the concept of progress replaces the concept of truth.

Einstein’s theory of relativity describes exactly the situation of the intellectual and spiritual world of our time. Relativity theory states that there are no fixed systems of reference in the universe. When we declare a system to be a reference point from which we try to measure the whole, it is we who do the determining. Only in such a way can we attain any results at all. But the determination could always have been done differently.

What characterizes man as man is not that he asks about the “can” but about the “should,” and that he opens himself to the voice and demands of truth. It is the profound element in the witness of all martyrs. They attest to the fact that man’s capacity for truth is a limit on all power and a guarantee of man’s likeness to God. It is precisely in this way that the martyrs are the great witnesses of conscience, of that capability given to man to perceive the “should” beyond the “can” and thereby render  possible real progress, real ascent.

ANAMNESIS

Is the natural law written on the heart.

Is love of God, part of our natural nature.

Augustin: “We could never judge that one thing is better than another, if a basic understanding of the good had not already been instilled in us.”

The first so-called ontological level of the phenomenon conscience consists in the fact that something like an original memory of the good and true(same thing) has been implanted in us, that there is an inner ontological tendency within man, who is created in the likeness of God, toward the divine. This anamnesis of the origin, which results from the god-like constitution of our being, is not a conceptually articulated knowing, a store of retrievable contents. It is, so to speak, an inner sense, a capacity to recall, so that the one whom it addresses, if he is not turned in on himself, hears its echo from within. He sees: That’s it! That is what my nature points to and seeks.

The anamnesis instilled in our being needs, one might say, assistance from without so that it can become aware of itself. But this “from without” is not something set in opposition to anamnesis but is ordered to it. It has maieutic function, imposes nothing foreign, but brings to fruition what is  proper to anamnesis, namely, its interior openness to the truth.

[Maieutics  is a pedagogical method based on the idea that the truth is latent in the mind of every human being due to innate reason but has to be "given birth" by answering intelligently proposed questions (or problems). The word is derived from the Greek "μαιευτικός", pertaining to midwifery.]

Authority of the Pope: All the power that the papacy has is power of conscience. It is a service to the double memory on which the faith is based—and which again and again must be purified, expanded, and defended against the destruction of memory that is threatened by a subjectivity forgetful of its own foundation, as well as by the pressures of social and cultural conformity.

CONSCIENTIA

This second level of conscience is judgment and decision.

The acts of conscience: Recognizes,   Bears Witness,   Judges.

It is never wrong to follow the convictions one has arrived at—in fact, one must do so. But it can very well be wrong to have come to such askew convictions in the first place, by having stifled the protest of the anamnesis of being.

The guilt lies in the neglect of my being that made me deaf to the internal promptings of truth. 

For this reason, criminals of conviction like Hitler and Stalin are guilty. These crass examples should not serve to put us at ease but should rouse us to take seriously the earnestness of the plea, “Free me from my unknown guilt”

The yoke of truth in fact became “easy” when the Truth came, loved us, and consumed our guilt in the fire of his love. Only when we know and experience this from within will we be free to hear the message of conscience with joy and without fear.