What is a good conscience?

In 1991, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger gave an address in Dallas to the American bishops entitled "Conscience and Truth"; it was published and distributed by the Pope John XXIII Medical-Moral Center. A friend who knew of my work on conscience sent me a copy. I've been mulling it over ever since, with an increasing sense of disquiet.

At this point the need to come to grips with Ratzinger's reflections becomes urgent. In Pope John Paul's Denver address on conscience, I recognized some notes sounded by Ratzinger.

"Yes," I said to myself, "I've heard this song before."

And this may be only an opening aria. If preliminary reports of the upcoming encyclical Veritatis splendor are to be believed, a full symphonic treatment of this version of conscience is going to be performed for us all, agitato and con brio.

So what's my problem? If I agree with 80 percent of Ratzinger's message, which I do, as is usually the case with JPII too, why does the 20 percent that I can't abide bother me so much? Is it the case that I'm "a teabag left too long in the cup, and my steepings grow darker and bitterer?" (To steal a line from Wallace Stegner.)

No, I'm of the optimist persuasion. But Ratzinger's views as exposed in his 1991 address spell trouble. His stated beliefs about individual decisions of conscience are ominous. The key problem is not humanity's capacity for guilt---of course, guilt goes with moral freedom--nor would anyone deny that an individual's conscience may be in error.

Ratzinger maintains, however, that when a person possesses an erroneous conscience he or she is morally guilty; it' s not just a case of human limitation or ignorance. As Ratzinger explains it, "Man can see the truth of God from the fact of his creaturehood. Not to see it is guilt. It is not seen because man does not want to see it. The 'no' of the will which hinders recognition is guilt." In other words if you don't see the truth it's your own fault, "a deliberate looking away from that which we do not wish to see."

Ratzinger concedes that you have to follow an erroneous conscience, once it has come to that, but you are already morally guilty for the departure from the truth that took place beforehand. No more "salvation through ignorance" in this system. Only willful blindness and neglectful deafness keep you from recognizing those constant essential truths everywhere present in man.

But suppose I have no inner consciousness of betraying the truth and have tried hard to possess a clear conscience? Too bad; You are in worse trouble, more spiritually ill, when you don't feel your guilt any more, another culpable victim of "the subjectivist philosophy of the modern age."

To defend this radical position Ratzinger has to go all the way and put forth a two-level model of human consciousness and conscience. On the surface he finds a"superficial consciousness," a "self-consciousness of the I," prone to "pseudo-rational certainty." But this inner sense of one's self and one's judgments can be more or less dismissed. (So much for the power of human reason.)

Underneath self-conscious awareness there exists a deeper, more important unconscious level, where "an original memory of the good and true (both are identical) has been implanted in us." So, as Socrates understood, the human task is to remember, to recall the truth, to undertake Platonic anamnesis and recover the moral law written on our hearts. All humans are able to remember, to recognize and respond to the truth when it addresses us--if we haven't been guilty of turning in on ourselves.

And who is going to elucidate the recollection of our collective Christian memory? Who is going to discern and distinguish the true unfolding of recollection from falsification? You guessed it. The pope.

Papal authority springs from this task of advocating and defending the Christian memory of "simple faith." The pope must defend the church against the destruction of memory threatened by "a subjectivity forgetful of its own foundation." As Ratzinger sees it, "All power that the papacy has is power of conscience."

Well yes, that is surely correct in one sense. But in the Ratzinger reading of conscience, papal teaching authority would have to be ultimate and unquestionable. Think about it. First you claim that a person's unknown, unconscious nature is more important than any "superficial" self-conscious reasoning and awareness; then you assert that you have been given the key to elucidate the essential truths hidden beneath the surface. If some disagree, their dissent can only arise from their morally reprehensible denials of their internal promptings of truth.

Mmm. We've met this type of circular Catch 22 rationale elsewhere. Marxists in their heyday made the claim that if you balk at their class analysis you display your own false consciousness. Orthodox Freudians are past masters of the same game. The more you consciously protest and resist their interpretation of your unconscious the more you prove its validity. Perhaps some psychoanalysts (Jungians?) might still be found to agree with Ratzinger's overestimation of unconscious forces.

Ratzinger quotes an existentialist psychologist, Albert Gorres, to support his case for guilt. He also quotes Psalm 19 twice, "Free me from my unknown guilt." The problem here is that psychologists disagree (as do philosophers and theologians) on the nature and function of the unconscious, as well as on the question of whether we could ever possess unknown moral guilt.

Human memory and its function open another minefield of controversies. Unfortunately for a concept of anamnesis, we now know that false memories can be unconsciously programmed and called up in persons who "remember" that they took part in satanic rituals, or were sexually abused as children, or were abducted by UFOs.

Well, you can see the problem of relying on the unconscious. I dread seeing Ratzinger and the pope becoming wedded to such an inadequate model of persons and their moral functioning. As Karl Rahner once said, "no doctrine of God is possible any more without a doctrine of man, no theology without anthropology ." It follows that when your anthropology becomes askew there will be repercussions in your moral theology.

Perhaps the worst effect of Ratzinger's views is that they justify silencing dissent and reasoned dialogues. One must defend the church from erroneous sinners. Papal authority becomes one with the Truth, the whole Truth, and nothing but the Truth-- so help us, God. Immediate moral turbulence threatens once again.