I Shall Drink to Conscience
Michiel Peeters - Newman on Conscience, “the Aboriginal Vicar of Christ”
Today, October 28, Pope Leo XIV will declare St. John Henry Newman co-patron of the Church’s educational mission, alongside St. Thomas Aquinas. In a few days, on November 1, he will proclaim him a Doctor of the Church. In this article, I discuss one of Newman’s most striking insights, namely that human conscience ultimately takes precedence over ecclesiastical authority, and that, paradoxically, denying this amounts to sawing off the legs of Peter’s chair. When presenting Newman’s thoughts, I will closely compare them with what has been said on the topic by Luigi Giussani, whose “pedagogical and theological genius” the Church has also recognized (Francis 2022).
While today’s dominant mentality in its theories denies the usefulness and necessity of authority altogether (but then St Ambrose rightly observes, “How many masters does he have who has fled from one?”), there are Catholics who—out of laziness or to “hold on” to people—would say that ecclesial authority overrules personal conscience, e.g., with the following reasoning: as long as one does not know Christ in his Church, conscience applies; but those who accept that Christ is God can and must simply obey Him and his Church. However, Fr Giussani says: “Woe that we should count on [ignorance and passivity] to ‘seize’ and ‘hold on’ to people! Adherence to Christianity, inasmuch as it is purely mechanical, has no value. Thus, we must question any purely traditional attachment or sudden enthusiasm. Freedom’s proper setting is enlightened and conscious conviction” (Giussani 2006, 15).
The affirmation Newman advocates in his Letter to the Duke of Norfolk (1875)—less than five years after the dogma of papal infallibility—is that “there are extreme cases in which Conscience may come into collision with the word of a Pope, and is to be followed in spite of that word” (Newman 1900, 246). With his famous aphorism: “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” (ibid., 261).
To understand this, it is crucial to grasp what Newman—and Catholic doctrine—intend by “conscience.” It is “a constituent element of the mind, as our perception of other ideas may be, as our powers of reasoning, as our sense of order and the beautiful, and our other intellectual endowments.” It is “a principle planted within us, before we have had any training, although training and experience are necessary for its strength, growth, and due formation.” (ibid., 248). It is not a “creation of man” but “the voice of God in the nature and heart of man” (ibid., 247).
It is “the internal witness of both the existence and the law of God” (ibid., 248; cf. Giussani 2023, 58–59, 118–120, 125). “It [cannot] be resolved into any combination of principles in our nature, more elementary than itself.” “It [is] a dictate, [and conveys] the notion of responsibility, of duty, of a threat and a promise, with a vividness which discriminated it from all other constituents of our nature.” “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.” In short, “Conscience is the aboriginal Vicar of Christ, a prophet in its informations, a monarch in its peremptoriness, a priest in its 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.” (Newman 1900, 248–249).
Newman then points out that none of this aligns with the current dominant mindset. In fact, the prevailing mentality is engaging in a “resolute warfare, I had almost said conspiracy against the rights of conscience, as I have described it… We are told that conscience is but a twist in primitive and untutored man; that its dictate is an imagination” (ibid., 249). Or when the word is used, it is not used in its proper meaning as a “stern monitor,” but in the sense of the “counterfeit” that has usurped its title in the 19th century, namely “the right of self-will” (ibid., 250). But conscience in its true sense is not a fancy or an opinion, but a “dutiful obedience to what claims to be a divine voice, speaking within us” (ibid., 255). It “holds of God, and not of man, as an Angel walking on the earth would be no citizen or dependent of the Civil Power” (ibid., 248; cf. Giussani 2023, 9–10).
When it has the right of opposing the supreme … Authority of the Pope, it must be something more than that miserable counterfeit…. If in a particular case it is to be taken as a sacred and sovereign monitor, its dictate, in order to prevail against the voice of the Pope, must follow upon serious thought, prayer, and all available means of arriving at a right judgment on the matter in question…. Unless a man is able to say to himself, as in the Presence of God, that he must not, and dare not, act upon the Papal injunction, he is bound to obey it, and would commit a great sin in disobeying it (Newman 1900, 257–258).
Having clarified that, Newman stresses that according to Catholic doctrine, we have the “duty of obeying our conscience at all hazards.” “He who acts against his conscience loses his soul.” “Of course, if a man is culpable in being in error, which he might have escaped, had he been more in earnest, for that error he is answerable to God, but still he must act according to that error, while he is in it, because he in full sincerity thinks the error to be truth” (ibid., 259).
Thus, if the Pope told the English Bishops to order their priests to stir themselves energetically in favour of teetotalism, and a particular priest was fully persuaded that abstinence from wine, &c., was practically a Gnostic error, and therefore felt he could not so exert himself without sin; or suppose there was a Papal order to hold lotteries in each mission for some religious object, and a priest could say in God’s sight that he believed lotteries to be morally wrong, that priest in either of these cases would commit a sin hic et nunc if he obeyed the Pope, whether he was right or wrong in his opinion, and, if wrong, although he had not taken proper pains to get at the truth of the matter (ibid., 260; emphasis added).
The now Doctor of the Church argues that the Church has never spoken against the authority of personal conscience. If it seemed that way, it was because its words were taken out of context (ibid., 251–252; cf. Giussani 2001, 145–146). “There is no scoffing of any Pope, in formal documents addressed to the faithful at large, at that most serious doctrine, the right and the duty of following that Divine Authority, the voice of conscience, on which in truth the Church herself is built” (Newman 1900, 252). Newman then elaborates on this last, essential point:
Did the Pope speak against Conscience in the true sense of the word, he would commit a suicidal act. He would be cutting the ground from under his feet. His very mission is to proclaim…, protect and strengthen that “Light which enlighteneth every man that cometh into the world” [John 1:9]. On the law of conscience and its sacredness are founded both his authority in theory and his power in fact. Whether this or that particular Pope in this bad world always kept this great truth in view in all he did, it is for history to tell. I am considering here the Papacy in its office and its duties…. It is by the universal sense of right and wrong…, as first principles deeply lodged in the hearts of men, it is thus and only thus, that he has gained his footing in the world and achieved his success. It is his claim to come from the Divine Lawgiver, in order to elicit, protect, and enforce those truths which the Lawgiver has sown in our very nature, it is this and this only that is the explanation of his length of life…. 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” (ibid., 252–253; emphases added).
In this last phrase, Newman refers to the necessity of revelation, given the existential difficulty the human being faces in remaining true to itself. According to Giussani, existentially, human reason describes a parabola: without divine help, we cannot hold fast to our highest intuitions, however accurate (Giussani 2023, 141–143, 146–151; cf. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae 1.1.1: “The truth concerning God that reason is able to attain…”). Again, Newman: “Natural Religion, certain as are its grounds and its doctrines as addressed to thoughtful, serious minds, needs, in order that it may speak to mankind with effect and subdue the world, to be sustained and completed by Revelation” (Newman 1900, 254).
Yet, while nature can arrive at some place even without revelation, the opposite is not the case. “Though Revelation is … distinct from the teaching of nature and beyond it, yet it is not independent of it, nor without relations towards it, but is its complement, reassertion, issue, embodiment, and interpretation” (ibid.; cf. Matt 5:17b). What is more, “the Pope, who comes of Revelation, has no jurisdiction over Nature” (Newman 1900, 254). Fr Giussani explains this clearly in “The Structure of Experience,” published in 1963 with the imprimatur of the Archdiocese of Milan. Where the Christian experience occurs as “a single, vital act, ... composed of three elements” (namely, the encounter with a human reality, the correct perception of the meaning of that encounter, and the free verification of that intuition), the authority of the Church is part of the first element; while the second element is the heart that judges the encounter with that reality, including its authority. Authority, therefore, is “within” the Christian experience; it cannot override it (Giussani 2019, 86–88).
Newman goes on to discuss an objection. Some grant that, indeed, the power of the Church rests on conscience; but, they say, once one submits to the Church’s authority, the Pope
uses [that religious sense] dexterously, forming under shelter of it a false code of morals for his own aggrandisement and tyranny; and … thus conscience becomes his creature and his slave, doing, as if on a divine sanction, his will; so that in the abstract indeed and in idea it is free, but never free in fact, never able to take a flight of its own, independent of him, any more than birds whose wings are clipped;—moreover, that, if it were able to exert a will of its own, then there would ensue [an unmanageable] collision…; for what would become of the Pope’s “absolute authority”…, if the private conscience had an absolute authority also? (Newman 1900, 255).
The English theologian then explains that the Pope’s infallibility is engaged in “general propositions,” and in the “condemnation of particular and given errors,” while conscience is not a judgment upon doctrine or speculative truth, but recognizes what here and now should be done or avoided (ibid., 256). Conscience, like the heart as such, is a capacity not to define in general but to recognize something present. A “collision” could therefore never take place in areas where the Church enjoys infallibility, but only in ecclesiastical decisions on practical matters, orders, legislation, and the like (ibid., 257), even if it is vital to stress that also here,
primâ facie it is [a Catholic’s] bounden duty … to believe the Pope right and to act accordingly. He must vanquish that mean, ungenerous, selfish, vulgar spirit of his nature, which, at the very first rumour of a command, places itself in opposition to the Superior who gives it, asks itself whether he is not exceeding his right, and rejoices, in a moral and practical matter to commence with scepticism. He must have no wilful determination to exercise a right of thinking, saying, doing just what he pleases, the question of truth and falsehood, right and wrong, the duty if possible of obedience, the love of speaking as his Head speaks, and of standing in all cases on his Head’s side, being simply discarded. If this necessary rule were observed, collisions between the Pope’s authority and the authority of conscience would be very rare. On the other hand, in the fact that, after all, in extraordinary cases, the conscience of each individual is free, we have a safeguard and security, were security necessary…, that no Pope ever will be able, as the objection supposes, to create a false conscience for his own ends” (ibid., 258).
It goes without saying that what Newman states about the relationship between conscience and the supreme authority of the Pope applies even more strongly to that of lower authorities in the Church. I suggest here, without being able to elaborate on it now, that what applies to conscience applies, and indeed a fortiori, to the “heart” in the Giussanian sense (the complex of original needs and “evidences” that accompany us in the encounter with everything; Giussani 2023, 7; cf. ibid., 6–12). Conscience concerns right and wrong, what to do and what to avoid. Newman wrote about conscience because the dogma of 1870 was about the Pope’s infallibility in matters of faith and morals, and also because in 19th-century philosophy, conscience was (still) an accepted fundamental human phenomenon (Lash 1979, 13). He wanted to show that even with his infallibility, the Pope does not prevail over human conscience, but affirms, complements, issues, embodies, and interprets it (Newman 1900, 254). Now human moral awareness is part of the heart (Giussani 2023, 111–113). We are not only endowed with a moral conscience, but also—even before it—with a sense of beautiful and ugly, true and false, liberating and suffocating, etc. Indeed, the heart must first recognize the presence of these values for conscience to dictate the appropriate action.
Therefore, what Newman says about the connection between conscience and ecclesiastical authority—namely that the former, with “unclipped wings,” ultimately takes precedence over the latter and that the Church’s authority and force is grounded in respecting and encouraging it—can be said of the relationship between the human heart and that authority. In the words of Giussani:
The challenge the Church launches can be summarized in this way: it bets on man…, [hypothesizing] that the message [of] which it [is the instrument, when] sifted by man’s elementary experience…, will reveal the wondrous presence. It also believes that the answer the message holds for the needs of the human heart will be unforeseeably and incomparably greater and truer than the fruit of any other hypothesis (Giussani 2001, 204).
Works Cited:
Francis. 2022. Address to the Members of Communion and Liberation, 15 October 2022. L'Osservatore Romano: Weekly Edition in English. 21 October 2022.
Giussani, Luigi. 2001. Why the Church? Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
———. 2006. The Journey to Truth is an Experience. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
———. 2019. The Risk of Education: Discovering Our Ultimate Destiny. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
———. 2023. The Religious Sense. Rev. ed. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Lash, Nicolas. 1979. Introduction to An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, by John Henry Newman. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.
Newman, John Henry. 1900. “Letter Addressed to the Duke of Norfolk, on Occasion of Mr. Gladstone’s Expostulation of 1874.” Pages 175–375 in vol. 2 of Certain Difficulties Felt by Anglicans in Catholic Teaching. London: Longmans, Green, & Co.
