Toward a Proper View of Conscience: The Insistence of God

CORPUS CHRISTI, TX (Catholic Online) – We commonly speak about God’s existence.  The word “exist” comes to us from the Latin words ex (“out of”) and sistere (“to cause to stand”).  Catholics believe–indeed, are required to believe–that God’s existence can be rationally demonstrated from the things that are made.  As the First Vatican Council stated in the document Dei Filius, “The one and true God, our creator and Lord, can be known through the creation by the natural light of human reason.”

Traditionally, of course, all manner of rational “proofs” were thought up by Catholic thinkers to show that it was reasonable to believe that God exists.  We have, for example, the famous “five proofs” of St. Thomas Aquinas. 

Using proofs such as these, by “looking out” into the world we can rationally establish God, and that He is.  These proofs all rely on the underlying assumption that the created world is true, and our senses are adequate to it.  As Pope Benedict XVI put it in his book Jesus of Nazareth, “The world is ‘true’ to the extent that it reflects God: the creative logic, the eternal reason that brought it to birth.”  The truth of the created world is therefore a witness to uncreated Truth.

Not only does God exist as may be rationally demonstrated, one can also say that God “insists.” 
The word insists likewise comes from Latin, specifically the words in (“into” or “in”) and sistere (“to cause to stand”).  To say that God “insists,” then, is to suggest that we can find a proof of God, and that He is, by “looking in,” specifically, by looking at our conscience.  This is what I mean by the “insistence” of God.

There are perhaps no two better guides for exploring God’s “insistence” than St. Augustine and Blessed John Henry Newman.  At least as far as I have found, nowhere do we find the notion of God’s “insistence” better explored, or at least more beautifully expressed. 

Blessed John Henry Newman, of course, might be called the Doctor conscientiae, the Doctor of Conscience.  Newman understood conscience to be something more than a sense of propriety, or convention, or feeling, or opinion, or taste, all of which he would have referred to as “counterfeit” conscience. 

Newman believed that conscience properly understood was “the echo of God’s voice.”  Authentic conscience had the “prerogative of commanding obedience,” of enjoining upon us a moral duty, a prerogative which convention, opinion, feeling, or taste do not have.  In describing conscience, it is difficult, even in the vast annals of Catholic thought, to encounter words as beautiful as these which come from Newman’s Letter to the Duke of Norfolk:

“The rule and measure of duty is not utility, nor expedience, nor the happiness of the greatest number, nor State convenience, nor fitness, order, and the pulchrum [beautiful].  Conscience is not a long-sighted selfishness, nor a desire to be consistent with oneself, but 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.  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.”

The Second Vatican Council embraces this concept when in Gaudium et spes (No. 16) it taught that “Conscience is the most secret core and sanctuary of a man.  There he is alone with God, whose voice echoes in his depths.”

Because conscience–again, not “counterfeit” conscience, but authentic conscience–is a witness to truth, it, like the created world, can be a witness to Truth, namely, God and that He is.  In his Grammar of Assent, Newman expanded on his belief that the sense of duty or command that he discovered in his conscience was proof of what I have called God’s “insistence,” of God, and that He is.

“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. If, on doing wrong, we feel the same tearful, broken-hearted sorrow which overwhelms us on hurting a mother; if, on doing right, we enjoy the same sunny serenity of mind, the same soothing, satisfactory delight which follows on our receiving praise from a father, we certainly have within us the image of some person, to whom our love and veneration look, in whose smile we find our happiness, for whom we yearn, towards whom we direct our pleadings, in whose anger we are troubled and waste away . . …