The Most Religiously Attuned of Our Powers: Newman on the Conscience

Abstract

The Most Religiously Attuned of Our Powers:Newman on the Conscience Rev. Fr. Philip Cleevely C. O. (bio) For Newman, religion consists more essentially in acting than in knowing. And for this reason, he thinks that conscience is the most religiously attuned of our powers. In the experience of conscience, Newman writes, "we discover a relation between the soul and…something exterior, [which is] superior to itself; a relation to an excellence which [the soul] does not possess, and to a tribunal over which it has no power."1 In these words, Newman describes an encounter with a goodness that transcends us, but which also intimately summons our allegiance. Mysteriously, we are moved to give ourselves in order to receive ourselves. This, for Newman, is our experience of conscience, and it constitutes the primordial religious phenomenon. Because conscience belongs to humanity as such, it is larger than Christianity, and Christianity in a way depends upon it. But Christianity also brings it to completion. We can see all this if we consider for a moment how Newman speaks of conscience as "the aboriginal Vicar of Christ."2 It is a startling expression. What startles us is the suggestion that conscience and the papacy might be rivals. Now it is certainly true that, for Newman, conscience is not just a primitive beginning, confined to pre-Christian experience and destined to be superseded within Christianity. On the contrary, according to Newman, conscience remains, even within Christianity, the persisting inward criterion of our approach to God. How then does Newman negotiate the relation between conscience and authority? He conceives of it this way: conscience, [End Page 189] the inner criterion, finds itself fulfilled in the outward form and teaching of the papacy. But fulfilment here does not imply absorption. It is central to Newman's argument that obedience to the papacy in no way involves sacrificing individual liberty, coram Deo, in favor of an absolute institutional mediation. And he argues this precisely on the grounds that conscience, the aboriginal vicar and mediator belonging to humanity as such, testifies in its own voice to the authority embodied in the papacy. As Newman conceives it, then, the human finds itself corresponded to and completed in the ecclesial. It is a subtle and audacious argument. However, it entirely depends upon retaining the independence of conscience from ecclesiastical authority, so that there can be a genuine relation between them, rather than identity. But why not identity? What logic is Newman pursuing? He is working from the conviction that conscience alone grounds a religious understanding of things—even, indeed especially, of religion. His concern with preserving the independence of conscience from ecclesiastical authority is not so that he can proceed to play them off one against the other. It is to ensure that ecclesiastical authority preserves a properly religious self-understanding. Newman thinks that if authority were to try to neutralize conscience, it would damage not only conscience but also itself. According to Newman ecclesiastical authority isn't a religious power simply because it handles religious things; more importantly, it must handle things in a religious way, otherwise it will degenerate and lose itself however ostensibly—even hyperbolically—"religious" it may continue to appear. It will have become what Newman, in private correspondence, calls an insolent and aggressive faction. Authority—even the papacy itself—can discern and sustain its religious character only when practiced in the light of conscience. The alternative involves a loss of its capacity to attract and persuade—or, more precisely, and more ominously, to attract and persuade rightly. But Newman thought this not only with respect to authority but also with respect to reason itself. Conscience, as we have seen, is for Newman what he calls the essential principle and sanction of religion in the mind. This is why he said that authority—even (or rather especially) ecclesiastical authority—should not drift into separation from conscience and its demands. But for the same reason Newman tended to be unimpressed by philosophical approaches to God presented as exercises of reason practiced independently of the light of conscience. Arguments, Newman reminds us, depend upon evidence. But in matters of existential depth and complexity what counts as relevant...