Newman on Conscience (3)

Given what I posted earlier, it might appear as if Newman considers it acceptable to dissent from the Pope’s teaching provided it is not an infallible statement and he has often been recruited as an advocate for such a position. But Newman will have nothing to do with such an attitude and whilst he certainly maintains that conscience must be obeyed under all circumstances, disagreement with the Pope must follow from serious thought, prayer and a serious ‘examination of conscience’ to ensure one is really doing right by one’s conscience.

This is a serious issue because Newman saw that in his day and age (and the same can be said of ours) there was something else acting under the name of conscience, a “counterfeit” which was really only the claims of a Nietszchean will-to-power, the assertions of self-will. Newman rejects any secular liberal conception of conscience which has no reference to God. Strictly speaking, for Newman, conscience and authority could not really come into collision over matters of belief. So the precedence accorded to conscience does not entail a precedence in the matter of collision contra what modern-day dissenters would assert. Newman’s idea of conscience is not synonymous with so-called ‘liberty of conscience’ which has, as Newman says, “has become a license to take up any or no religion…the right of self-will.” Nevertheless Newman’s work on conscience can be seen to have had an effect on the Church’s teaching. If he really is the ‘father’ of Vatican II, then his influence can be seen in such documents as ‘Dignitatis Humanae’ which asserts the right of freedom to worship according to one’s conscience. Newman’s assertion that conscience is the surest way to knowledge of God’s presence (as opposed to a mere assent to certain doctrinal propositions) would appear to be a more credible articulation of how an individual comes to know God, as opposed to any strictly 'rationalist argumentation that may be employed. Most people simply do not come to believe in God in such a manner. Most people, however, can be said to acknowledge a moral law, and certainly if they do not consider this to be a matter of mere subjective preference then surely they must ask from where this Law is derived. Newman wanted faith to be an affair of the whole person, something that would truly change one’s life. Thus he attempted to link doctrine to the moral sense in order to make it something existentially significant to the individual. This must not be presented as Bremond does, as if Newman advocated bracketing one’s faith before investigating a doctrine to see if it was enriching of the moral life. This would be to abandon the “obedience of faith”. (S.A. Graves) Nevertheless, Newman did feel that conscience gave a sort of affirmation of the truth of doctrine in that it bore real “fruits”.