Newman’s Conscientious Maximalism
In a previous essay, I explored John Henry Newman’s “minimist” method of reading doctrinal statements, in particular, those of the Catholic Church. Minimism (as Newman explains in his Letter to the Duke of Norfolk) requires the theologian to be scrupulously faithful to what religious authorities teach, but not “to impose upon the faith of others more than what the Church distinctly claims of them.” To understand what a pope or a council of bishops teaches, their acts and words “must be carefully scrutinized and weighed before we can be sure what really [they have] said.” A mature, measured reading of the Church’s statements—even the most notoriously “antimodern” ones—reveals that, in its history, the Catholic Church has in fact said rather little about what its faithful must believe and do. The scope of the Christian’s freedom is left quite broad.
Sadly, many Catholics have used apparently similar methods in order to read the magisterium in dubious ways. In 1968, when Humanae Vitae repeated the Church’s perennial teaching against the use of contraception, some theologians claimed the encyclical was not binding on Catholics because it failed to use the most solemn, infallible language (as when Pius IX defined the dogma of the Virgin Mary’s Immaculate Conception). Today some question whether the Church, in Nostra Aetate, really did condemn those who ascribe collective guilt to the Jewish people for Jesus of Nazareth’s passion. Others doubt whether in Dignitatis Humanae the Church rejected the use of fines, imprisonment, or other means typical of civil government (the power of “the sword”), to induce Christians to keep their baptismal vows.
Newman, however, strongly condemned “that uncatholic spirit, which starts with a grudging faith in the word of the Church, and determines to hold nothing but what it is, as if by demonstration, compelled to believe.” Newman, with the Church, rather holds that everyone already knows much of what God wants of them, without needing others to tell them.
The Aboriginal Vicar of Christ
Those who dissent from official Church teachings might, by a superficial reading of Newman, find a champion in him, because he goes remarkably far in defending the rights of individual judgment.
Not only does the Church exercise its authority over conscience very lightly, he says, but that authority is subordinate to each person’s conscience. The latter is nothing less than “the very Law of [God’s] being, identical with Himself,” which “He implanted … in the intelligence of His rational creatures” individually. It is the origin of each man’s moral knowledge, the apprehension of the law of our nature that reflects God’s nature. Conscience is “the aboriginal Vicar of Christ,” preceding Christ’s earthly vicar, the pope. In moral questions—“the first element in religion”—the pope’s duty, and that of the whole magisterium with him, is not to supply knowledge to conscience that it lacked before, but to “protect and strengthen” the knowledge conscience already has.
“Hence it is never lawful to go against our conscience,” says one authority (a certain Cardinal Gousset) that Newman quotes: “[A]s the fourth Lateran council says, ‘Quidquid fit contra conscientiam, aedificat ad gehennam’”—whatever one does against conscience paves one’s way to hell. Theologians across time, from Aquinas and Bonaventure, to the Spanish scholastics, to theologians of Newman’s day, agree: even if a man has an erroneous conscience—and even if the error is by his own fault—he “must act according to that error, while he is in it, because he in full sincerity thinks the error to be truth.” As another authority (one Cardinal Jacobatius) once said, even if the pope should punish a man for following his conscience (and such punishments are not infallible, not being universal statements of dogma), if the defendant cannot sincerely be persuaded that he is in error, “it is his duty to follow his own private conscience.”
Newman famously concluded: “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.”
The Burden of Proof
Are we then to say that, when the pope teaches contrary to one’s conscience, one may calmly ignore him? Not at all. The very reason why the pope must “strengthen and protect” the natural light of conscience is that there is an “insufficiency” to that light, a fact that should give every conscientious objector pause.
Conscience, “the sense of right and wrong,” is, as Newman says, “so delicate, so fitful,” and “so easily puzzled,” that, ordinarily, all of us end up with an erroneous conscience of some kind. Impressionable children easily take on the prejudices and misunderstandings of their parents and teachers. Lust, greed, and excessive self-love lead us easily to rationalize ignoring our duty and following our lower desires. Add to these trials the social pressure to conform to the thinking of one’s coworkers, neighbors, and countrymen, and one should expect that, left to themselves, human beings will eventually fall into moral corruption. Although the light of conscience never dies, it is continually beset by natural human limitations and the effects of original sin.
“Natural religion,” therefore, “needs, in order that it may speak to mankind with effect and subdue the world, to be sustained and completed by Revelation,” “of which the Church is the keeper.” Whatever formal statements the magisterium makes, even if they be not clearly infallible, the Catholic must accept them “with profound submission,” giving them the benefit of the doubt. The burden of proof against obeying the magisterium always lies “on the side of conscience,” Newman warns:
Unless a man is able to say to himself, as in the Presence of God, that he must not, and dare not, act upon [a] Papal injunction, he is bound to obey it, and would commit a great sin in disobeying it.
Conscience is not “that miserable counterfeit” which many moderns understand it to be—“a creation of man,” “a long-sighted selfishness,” or “a desire to be consistent with oneself.” Conscience “is a messenger from Him, who, both in nature and in grace, speaks to us behind a veil, and”—moreover—“teaches and rules us by His representatives.”
Although the religious believer’s first duty is to follow this “voice of God,” it is also his duty to remain within any framework that he knows God has established to preserve conscience from the ever-present danger of error—a danger that conscience itself should recognize. Therefore, if anyone believes, with Newman, that the papacy is part of—indeed, the foundational “rock” of—that framework, and if he disagrees in conscience with a command or teaching of the pope, it is his duty to act according to his conscience, but also “patiently to bear it, if the Pope punishes him” for so acting.
Let him not fear that such suffering may be in vain; it will be what God wants for him for his good and the good of all souls. After all, the history of Christianity is full of men and women who have achieved great sanctity by suffering blamelessly, but obediently, at the hands of ecclesiastical authorities. Teresa of Avila submitted to harsh treatment at the hands of her superiors in her religious order, and even to an inquiry by the Spanish Inquisition. Ignatius of Loyola submitted to similar inquiries into his life and teaching; for a time he was even imprisoned. Through these ordeals, both saints—who were eventually exonerated—became humbler, more fearless, and altogether more effective servants of God.
On the other hand, resistance to punishment wastes an opportunity for such growth in virtue, and it undermines the cause of truth that the conscientious objector claims to champion. Take for instance Girolamo Savonarola’s disobedience of Pope Alexander VI (in the late Renaissance) and his refusal to acknowledge his subsequent excommunication by the pope. Savonarola, prior of a Dominican convent in Florence, had been ordered to submit his convent to a different region of his order, which (as the Vatican surely foresaw) would have been less tolerant of his fiery preaching against moral corruption in the Church.
True, Savonarola’s censure probably had something to do with the fact that Alexander was personally quite immoral. And yet, the pope’s orders to the friar were made within his rights as governor of the Church, just as the superiors of Teresa and Ignatius acted within their rights. Savonarola—however conscientious he may have been, or at least claimed to be—undermined religion and conscience by opposing the authority that supported them. After his death Savonarola continued to have a reputation for holiness that inspired people, from Michelangelo to St. Philip Neri (as Newman himself once recalled). But the Church has not canonized him, and one wonders whether she ever will.
Accepting Our Accountability
Newman’s qualification of the limits of conscience does not, however, take away his great reverence for it. Conscience is not infallible, but its powers are still robust—robust enough to know the basics of the moral law (the core of what is necessary for salvation) without the extraordinary clarifications provided by official definitions. Conscience has rights because it has great powers, and therefore great accountability. That murder, adultery, and stealing are wrong should be clear enough to everyone, without much help from popes, bishops, and councils: such basic moral truths are written into the fabric of our being, as St. Paul asserted:
The wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and wickedness of men.… For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them … in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.… When Gentiles who [do not] have … [God’s] law [revealed to them] do by nature what the law requires, they are a law to themselves, even though they do not have the law. They show that what the law requires is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness and their conflicting thoughts accuse or perhaps excuse them on that day when … God judges the secrets of men.
If the laws of nature are unclear, sacred scripture confirms them in the Ten Commandments; in certain more complex cases, the Church gives further, usually modest clarifications. If human nature; holy writ; magisterial teachings like Humanae Vitae, Nostra Aetate, and Dignitatis Humanae; and the repeated confirmation of those teachings by subsequent popes are insufficient to persuade certain consciences, the most precisely and infallibly articulated anathemas might not be more successful. Indeed, they might make things worse: the more those in authority legislate, the more they tacitly suggest that only such positive legislation, and not the unwritten law of God’s own creation, is what ultimately binds conscience. Such a lesson would encourage moral rebellion; for although there is no getting around conscience—the voice of God’s infinite Word, written on our soul—one can very often find a loophole in positive laws, written in the finite words of men.
There would be no end to the religious legislator’s task if he had to condemn in detail every possible sin. Moreover, in so doing he would shrink the space in which man could practice exercising his judgment; with all of life predetermined for them, it would become impossible for men to learn both how to be prudent and how to love. Christianity would become not the family of the children of God, made for the freedom of glory, but a religion of “happiness” (if it even deserves the name) without freedom, of the kind defended by Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor. Such a parody of the Gospel is what those of “grudging faith” (as Newman calls them) implicitly seek: magisterial maximalism and conscientious minimalism.
By contrast, Newman, with the Church, is a “minimist” in understanding the role of the magisterium, because he, along with the Church, is a maximalist in understanding the dignity of conscience.