Without Conscience There Would Be No Papacy - by Cardinal Carlo Caffarra +
Explaining Newman's doctrine on moral conscience, as well as any other themes of his philosophical and theological thought, is not easy. He builds his thoughts within the path of his inner life, as the exigency of his existence. His theology and philosophy is the answer to the problems of his life. He belongs, like Pascal to the family of Augustine: Speaking of himself, he spoke of every man. Newman is the Augustine of the modern Church. In the following presentation, I will try to stick to his theological style.
1. “MYSELF AND MY CREATOR”: The beginning of the way
In the life of the spirit, there is a moment in which the person becomes their self entirely. He/She awakens as a free and rational individual. Allow me to use as an example the experience endured by Augustine at the age of 19, reading the Hortensius, nowadays a lost work of Cicero. Augustine narrates: "Now it was this book which quite definitely changed my whole attitude and turned my prayers toward thee, O Lord, and gave me new hope and new desires. Suddenly every vain hope became worthless to me, and with an incredible warmth of heart I yearned for an immortality of wisdom and began now to arise that I might return to thee." Confessions III, 4.7; NBA I, p. 63). A new person was born.
A similar event also happened to Newman. It is narrated in the following way: “When I was fifteen, (in the autumn of 1816,) a great change of thought took place in me. I fell under the influences of a definite Creed, and received into my intellect impressions of dogma, which, through God's mercy, have never been effaced or obscured”. [Apologia pro vita sua, cap. THE; quotation from Italian ed. of Jaka book-Morcelliana 1982, p.21].
The text is of paramount importance to understand the doctrine of Newman on moral conscience. It is not only the intellectual discovery of what Newman will explain later as the dogmatic principle, but it was the discovery of his whole person of the light of truth, which reaches us through dogma. The moral conscience for Newman we can already say is the witness of the truth [common good]. That there may be a moral conscience that is not interested in the truth, Newman does not deny it, but this apathy is the deadly disease of the moral conscience. Skepticism is a deadly risk to moral conscience.
Also in 1816, accepting the invitation of his master, He read the book The strength of the truth by Calvinist Thomas Scott, and he was deeply upset. This is how Newman narrates the encounter with this author: he introduces him "In confirming me in my mistrust of the reality of material phenomena, and making me rest in the thought of two and two only absolute and luminously self-evident beings, myself and my Creator”[Apologia ... cit. pag. 21].
The text is famous. Newman discovers that in the depths of his moral conscience, he is anchored to God the Creator. The theme is a classic in Christian theology: The creator has engraved his image in the human person. Newman's originality is to place this human creator-creature relationship within the moral conscience. We can say that already in the young Newman we find the two pillars that govern all the arc of his doctrine on moral conscience: the "dogmatic principle", and the natural relationship of moral conscience with God.
The dogmatic principle. Thus Newman presents it [1845]. "That there is a truth then; that there is one truth; that religious error is in itself of an immoral nature; that its maintainers, unless involuntarily such, are guilty in maintaining it; that it is to be dreaded;… that the mind is below truth, not above it, and is bound, not to descant upon it, but to venerate it”. [The development of Christian doctrine, chap. VIII; ed. Jaka Boock, 2009, p. 344-345].
The opposite of the dogmatic principle is what Newman calls the liberal principle, as we will see later.
The moral conscience, in the light of these two principles is not the ability to decide, even after serious discernment what is good/evil. It is the ability to judge and tell the person what is good/bad, in the light of the truth that is superior to it. Therefore the first axiom of the doctrine on conscience is not: "Always follow your conscience", but: "Seek the truth about good/evil". We will later return to this point.
The moral conscience-God relationship. As Newman considers the relationship between God-moral conscience, he clearly expresses the following words:” Conscience—there are two ways of regarding conscience; one as a mere sort of sense of propriety, a taste teaching us to do this or that, the other as the echo of God's voice. Now all depends on this distinction—the first way is not of faith, and the second is of faith”.[Sermons notes; Notre Dame Un. Press, pag.327]. We could say: The first submits the truth to the opportunity; the second the opportunity to the truth.
Newman's doctrine on moral conscience was born.
2. THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE DOCTRINE
Newman always starts by describing the moral conscience as an experience that every human person witnesses within their self, every day. Today we can say it begins with a phenomenology of the conscience. Writes: “For moral conscience, I mean finding worthy deeds of praise or blame” [Note-Book; Proof of theism, in J.H. Newman, Philosophical Writings, Bompiani ed. Milano 2005, p. 611 (when it is not said otherwise, quotes are always from this bilingual text)]. Therefore, the moral conscience is the faculty by which it distinguishes, discriminates among the various acts that I can accomplish or have accomplished, the deeds worthy of praise and deeds worthy of disdain and immediately adds. “But the accuracy or truth of praise or blame in this particular case is a not a matter faith but of judgment”.
This is a fundamental point in Newman's doctrine. He distinguishes in the moral conscience two aspects or two dimensions, described in the following way. “The feeling of conscience […] is twofold: it is a moral sense, and a sense of duty.” [An essay in aid of Grammar of Assent, chap. V, §1; pag.1027]. Let me give an example.
Arriving at this point, we can already try to attempt a first definition of moral conscience, according to Newman. Moral conscience is the simultaneous conjugation of the moral sense with the sense of duty. It is light concerning what is good/bad, and at the same time guiding our daily choices we make in our lives. Newman generally prefers to speak of the moral sense, very mindful as it is of the actual person acting.
Ask now: How does consciousness guide our choices? How does conscience argue, when in a particular situation it dictates its prescription? A text, very profound, of the XV sermon of the Oxford University sermons, answers this question. In fact, the text has a general epistemological content, but it is also true of the moral conscience. "Further, I observe, that though the Christian mind reasons out a series of dogmatic statements, one from another […] not from those statements taken in themselves, as logical propositions, but as being itself [the Christian mind] enlightened and (as if) inhabited by that sacred impression which is prior to them, which acts as a regulating principle, ever present, upon the reasoning, and without which no one has any warrant to reason at all”. [n° 26; pag.601].
The text is not easy. I will try to illustrate it with an example. When a person comes to the conclusion that Chastity has its intrinsic beauty and ethical preciousness, He/She expresses this perception in a proposition, for example. Chastity is a moral virtue. Each person understands that this proposition is not maneuverable, it is not malleable according to the spirit of the time. It expresses something great happened in the human spirit: the light of good.
It may be that the prescriptive judgment or sanctioning of the conscience appears to the mind as the conclusion of an argument that goes from the universal to the individual. For example: stealing is dishonest, but the act you're carrying out is a robbery, so you should not do it. In fact, in the seventeenth century an art was born that teaches this way of arguing, educating with it: the case study. But according to the doctrine of Newman, the argument is generated by what he calls "the sacred impression which is prior to it". It is the light of the good, imprinted in the human spirit: signatum est Super nos lumen vultus tui, Domine says a Psalm.
At this point, we can understand the deepest nature of the moral conscience according to Newman: it is the bond of man with God. It is the natural and original way that leads us to have an encounter with God, it is not simply learned as a notion but as a reality. [The development of this idea is clearly exposed in the grammar of assent, chap. V, n ° 3, p. 1023ss].
The starting point is as follows: We have by nature a conscience [pag. 1025]. In this context, conscience has a definite meaning: It is a mental act by which, in the face of an action to be done or already accomplished, we feel in us an approval or reproach and as a result, we consequently judge it as right or wrong. It is on the basis of this inner experience that it is consciousness, that we have a real apprehension of a sovereign and divine judge. The heart of the argument is exposed by Newman in the following way.
“If, as is the case, we feel responsibility, are ashamed, are frightened, at transgressing the voice of conscience, this implies that there is One to whom we are responsible, before whom we are ashamed, whose claims upon us we fear. […]These feelings in us are such as require for their exciting cause an intelligent being”. [pag.1033].
We must carefully analyze the text, very famous. What Newman emphasizes are two things: the absoluteness of the moral imperative that resonates in consciousness; the personal character of the ethical imperative.
Absoluteness in this context means two things. The first: The imperative is categorical not hypothetical. Does not say: if you want...; But: you must. The second: It is an imperative that does not allow exceptions, when it assumes the negative form. It is our daily experience that our freedom can break the command. But the man feels in this case that he betrayed himself: “The wicked flees though no one pursues” [Prov. 28.1].
The personal character consists of the fact that the imperative is addressed to me, in my uniqueness. Peter cannot answer the servant of the High Priest: "Others have followed Jesus, why question me and not one of them?" It is Peter who is asked for an act of fidelity. The personal character is also the responsibility: I feel that I have to answer to what I did to someone.
Newman does not simply want to demonstrate the existence of God, but he wants to lead the person to an apprehension of his reality, as a living presence in the conscience of every man. Conscience is the burning bush that God uses to speak to man. Newman is in the line of thought that by Augustine through Pascal, he arrives at the adequate anthropology of K. Wojtyla-John Paul II.
We can at this point attempt a synthesis of Newman's doctrine on moral conscience. The moral conscience is the place where the mystery is made originally present; It is the original revelation of God as the guide of Man.
We can at this point attempt a synthesis of Newman's doctrine on moral conscience. The moral conscience is the place where the mystery is originally made present; It is the original revelation of God as the guide for man.
3. THE CONSCIENCE AND THE CHURCH
In October-November 1874, William Gladstone, first conservative and then head of the British Liberal Party strongly attacks the decrees of the First Vatican Council, arguing that they cannot be reconciled with intellectual autonomy and loyalty to the state. In January 1875 Newman responded with a Letter addressed to His grace the Duke of Norfolk, on occasion of Mr Gladstone's recent Exspostulation. And in chapter five he addresses the subject of moral conscience; More precisely: the affirmation of the primacy of conscience in relation to the magisterial and governmental authority of the Pope [Munus Docendi, Munus Regendi]. No one escapes the centrality of the theme.
Gladstone's thesis is as follows. Because the Pope enjoys infallibility in Doctrina fidei et morum; Because it has full jurisdiction on the faithful Catholic, the moral conscience of the individual must simply execute what the Pope teaches.
Newman's response is articulated and objective, he starts from the conception of the moral conscience elaborated throughout his previous work. Writes in the letter: “Conscience is the aboriginal Vicar of Christ, a prophet in its informations, a monarch in its peremptoriness, a priest in its {249} blessings and anathemas, and, even though the eternal priesthood throughout the Church could cease to be, in it the sacerdotal principle would remain and would have a sway”.
Whence does this sovereign dignity come to the conscience? By the fact that the divine law, supreme rule of human actions becomes such by means of the conscience. The whole sovereign magnitude of the conscience stems from the fact that it is the organ of the apprehension of the divine law. This law, as apprehended in the minds of individual men, is called "conscience”. Conscience is sovereign because it is subject. Or, as Newman writes: “Conscience has rights because it has duties”.
The real problem or the root of so many problems is that this idea of conscience is fought intellectually and in fact refused by the majority of people. Newman writes in the letter: “Conscience is a stern monitor, but in this century, it has been superseded by a counterfeit, […] It [counterfeit] is the right of self-will“. And again: “When men stand up as defenders of the rights of conscience, this does not mean at all to stand defenders of the rights of the Creator, nor of our duties in his regard... for rights of conscience they mean the right to think, to speak, to write, to act, as they like, without giving you any thought of God”. It is this counterfeit of conscience that makes any true relationship of conscience impossible with the Ministry of Peter.
Who truly has a faithful relationship with the pope, he knows that, Newman writes, “The championship of the Moral Law and of conscience is his raison d'être. The fact of his mission is the answer to the complaints of those who feel the insufficiency of the natural light; and the insufficiency of that light is the justification of his mission.”
The referent of conscience is the divine law, and the pope lives to help the conscience to be enlightened by the divine truth. Therefore, for the pope and for the conscience the referent is the same: the light of the divine truth. Both look in the same direction.
“If the Pope would speak against Conscience in the true sense of the word, he would commit a true suicide. He would be cutting the ground from under his feet.”
Newman does not reduce the Magisterium to a mere reproduction of the natural moral law. “Ma” Newman writes “But still it is true, that, though Revelation is so distinct from the teaching of nature and beyond it, yet it is not independent of it, nor without relations towards it.”
I would like to try concise the exposition of Newman's thought on the moral-Pope conscience relationship.
Newman starts from an affirmation, explicitly said many times: it was infused in us by God the Creator something that we could define "original memory of the good and the truth". That is, it is a conviction of the Christian thought that God the Creator has engraved us in his image and likeness. Newman interprets this anthropological argument by stating that every human person has the moral conscience, that is, the capacity before acting or after the action, to have an agreement or a disagreement between his person and the action.
However, the original memory needs external help to become capable of exercising. The child has a natural ability to speak, but it necessitates the external intervention of another in order that the natural capacity functions. The mother does not impose anything from the outside, but brings to fulfillment a capacity that is already present in the child.
Similarly, it takes place in the pope's moral-Magisterium-consciousness relationship. On the moral level, it does not impose anything from the outside. It prevents man from falling into the worst amnesia, that of good and evil; which weakens the natural capacity; functioning because it becomes increasingly capable of working. In the light of all this, we understand the profound truth of... Newman's toast: First drink to the conscience, then to the Pope. "Because without conscience there would be no papacy. All the power that he has, is the power of the conscience: Service to the twofold remembrance, on which the faith is based, That must be continually purified, enlarged and defended against the forms of memory destruction, which is threatened so much by a subjectivity that it forgets about its foundation, the pressures of social and cultural conformism”. [J. Ratzinger, the conscience in time, in church, ecumenism and politics, Ed. Paoli, Turin 1987, p. 163].
4. CONCLUSION
On the morning of May 12, 1879 Newman received the official communication that Pope Leo XIII had appointed him Cardinal, accepting the proposal known to many English laypersons, as the First Duke of Norfolk. Newman expresses his gratitude to the S. Father with a brief speech, passed to history as the "Ticket-speech".
The text is of extraordinary importance both in order to understand Newman’s whole spiritual journey and the comprehension of his thought. I wanted this wonderful text to conclude my own reflection.
Making a summary of his life, he writes: “For thirty, forty, fifty years I have resisted to the best of my powers the spirit of liberalism in religion. […] Liberalism in religion is the doctrine that there is no positive truth in religion, but that one creed is as good as another, and this is the teaching which is gaining substance and force daily. It is inconsistent with any recognition of any religion, as true. It teaches that all are to be tolerated, for all are matters of opinion. […] Men may go to Protestant Churches and to Catholic, may get good from both and belong to neither”.
It is in the liberal principle that Newman identifies as the main factor in reducing the conscience to a mere personal opinion, which no one has the authority to judge.
In the face of this counterfeiting of the conscience what should we do? Newman's answer is as follows.
“Christianity has been too often in what seemed deadly peril, that we should fear for it any new trial now. So far is certain; on the other hand, what is uncertain, and in these great contests commonly is uncertain, and what is commonly a great surprise, when it is witnessed, is the particular mode by which, in the event, Providence rescues and saves His elect inheritance. […] Commonly the Church has nothing more to do than to go on in her own proper duties …”mansueti hereditabunt terram et delectabuntur in multitudine pacis”.
Carlo Cardinal Caffarra
