I’m a little lost and wondering if you have any thoughts about making a distinction between the conscience and the heart. In Being Transfigured you argue against pietism and its proclivity to emphasize the conscience (how we feel about sin). But in a recent teaching on trauma and healing you talked about trusting our hearts (Ps 16) as the way God speaks to us. Do you think there’s a distinction to be made between the conscience and the heart? Or is the “heart” the “conscience” rightly ordered?
Cameron Combs sent me this question the other day, and I thought it’d be worth sharing my response, if only to spark some new lines of reflection.
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Karl Rahner defines conscience as “that element in man's experience of freedom which makes him aware of his responsibility,” and suggests that “the biblical term for conscience is the heart, in which God's will is written (Rom 2:15).”1 To have a pure heart, he says, is to “act out of inner conviction.” And that acting out depends upon the assumption of responsibility—to God, self, and the communities one belongs to—and the “obedient acceptance of the reality which is prior to freedom.” He admits that what he has said does not “settle the question whether in fact the conscience adequately recognizes truth”; for the conscience to be truthful it must be awakened by divine revelation and trained through moral and theological formation. Said differently, moral awareness and conviction are not “naturally” good, so, without grace, the witness of the conscience is finally unreliable. The heart must be converted and trained to love as it ought. Conscience must be freed in order to be freeing.
Joseph Ratzinger, commenting on Gaudium et Spes, speaks of conscience as transcendent: “It is the law written in the heart by God, the holy place in which man is alone with God and hears God’s voice in his innermost center.”2 In a 1991 keynote address at the National Catholic Bioethics Center, however, Ratzinger draws attention to the story of the Pharisee and tax collector in Luke 18:9-14 in order to illustrate a contrast between a living conscience and a dead one:
The Pharisee no longer knows that he too has guilt. He has a completely clear conscience. But this silence of conscience makes him impenetrable to God and men, while the cry of conscience that plagues the tax collector makes him capable of truth and love.3
From this, Ratzinger concludes that Jesus can reach and touch sinners, but not the “righteous,” because they are “hiding behind the screen of their erroneous consciences,” so that their hearts no longer accuse them but justify them.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer takes a similar line—but takes it further than Ratzinger would take it. As a natural faculty, conscience is born of the attempt to justify oneself, so that self-judgment is an act of faithless autonomy. As Clifford Green explains, conscience for Bonhoeffer is the voice of “sinful self-reflection… [and] in no way the voice of Christ.” Conscience is actually opposed to faith, for faith “looks solely to Christ (actus directus) and away from the self.”4 In the end, then, to be saved is to be freed from self-awareness and self-justification into Christ-directed (in both senses of the term) love for God and neighbor.
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We can, I believe, synthesize Rahner, Ratzinger, and Bonhoeffer. But to get that done we need to distinguish spirit from heart and heart from conscience. We can do that, in part, by appreciating the difference (explicit in Ratzinger’s address, almost entirely lost in Rahner’s essay) between a clean conscience and a pure heart. Knowing that difference allows us to see quite clearly how what Scripture calls the heart and what moderns mean by conscience are simply not interchangeable.
Conscience names a particular form of conscious awareness, our moral sense, the predisposition to judge ourselves as in the right or in the wrong. Heart names something deeper, more innate and truly natural. It is, in other words, created—not generated and conditioned in us by the principalities and powers of the world. As the Catholic Catechism describes it, is “the depths of one’s being, where the person decides for or against God.”
If Bonhoeffer is right, as I believe he is, conscience, at least in the form we know it without the Spirit, is a manifestation or fallout of fallenness. As such, it is never a faithful witness to the will of God. In fact, conscience in this sense is nothing but an issue or sign of a heart corrupted and desensitized by sin. That is why, as our own experience shows again and again, a clean conscience is quite often the surest proof of a defiled heart. Tragically, moral disorientation is usually camouflaged and compensated for by rigorous scrupulosity.
If we were to follow Ratzinger rather than Bonhoeffer, we might say instead that the conscience is good—but only so long as it is nursed and shepherded by goodness. That is to say, the voice of conscience is exactly as reliable as the heart in which it resides is pure and tender. Either way, of course, the difference between conscience and the heart remains essential.
My conscience, even at its healthiest, can only tell me that I’ve violated or upheld the expectations I had for myself. My heart, however, is the truth of who I am, a truth God is always making possible for me by giving me myself. My heart, therefore, does not and cannot lie, although it can be disoriented and so deceived. It is treacherous terrain, to be sure (Jer. 17.9), which means I can easily misread what my heart is saying or wanting. But it is not in and of itself deceitful. And what is treacherous for me is not treacherous for God (Jer. 17.10). The heart, we might say, is God’s habitat, God’s mother tongue.
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Another way of getting at the heart of this reflection on the difference between the conscience and the heart is to follow the argument Simone Weil makes against personalism. She speaks of the “profound but childlike part of the heart that always expects good,” distinguishing that from the “more superficial part of the soul” from which an individual “lays claims to his rights.” The cry of the deep heart, the cry that rises from the secret place, is always reliable. As she says, “every time the childlike lament rises from the depths of the heart—the lament that Christ himself could not hold back, ‘Why do they harm me?’—there is certainly injustice.” But childish complaint, a cry which rises from the surface of the heart, is not proof of injustice but only a symptom of selfishness.5
Talking in this way allows us to say that the deep heart or innermost conscience is truthful in ways the shallow heart and outermost conscience is not. Too often, the formation of that outermost conscience ends up stifling and even silencing the deep heart, so that the glory of childlikeness is lost, replaced by a childishness masquerading as maturity and wisdom.
Ratzinger makes a similar move, calling for a recovery of the medieval distinction between synderesis and conscientia.6 The deeper component or aspect of the heart/conscience is intrinsic and infallible; it remains intact within every individual, regardless of moral degradation, discovering the reality of basic principles like “obey God,” “honor your mother and father,” “protect your children,” and “do not harm your neighbor.” The second aspect of conscience, however, while also inherent, is prone to error because the timeless truths recognized by the inmost heart are often distorted and misapplied due to ignorance or flawed reasoning by the shallower parts of the soul.
This distinction helps explain how it is that conscience, although in itself good and inherently oriented towards the good, nonetheless becomes so easily entangled in misjudgment and the commission of injustice.
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What does “spirit” name? As Kierkegaard saw, it refers to my ability to relate to myself. The relationship between spirit and heart comes clear, I think, in Psalm 51, David’s prayer for forgiveness and healing:
Have mercy on me, O God, according to thy steadfast love;
according to thy abundant mercy blot out my transgressions.
2 Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity,
and cleanse me from my sin!3 For I know my transgressions,
and my sin is ever before me.
4 Against thee, thee only, have I sinned,
and done that which is evil in thy sight,
so that thou art justified in thy sentence
and blameless in thy judgment.
The truth of this confession, the truth of contrition, is the work not of conscience (at least as I want to use the term, following Bonhoeffer) but the work of the heart. Conscience cannot bring our sins before us, only our failures. It tells us about the bad we’ve done in our own eyes, not the evil we have done in God’s sight.
6 Behold, thou desirest truth in the inward being;
therefore teach me wisdom in my secret heart.
7 Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean;
wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.
8 Fill me with joy and gladness;
let the bones which thou hast broken rejoice.
9 Hide thy face from my sins,
and blot out all my iniquities.
Truth in the inward parts, that is what matters. Conscience is too shallow, to conditional, to receive the wisdom of God. Only the heart is deep enough, secret enough, to bear that weight.
10 Create in me a clean heart, O God,
and put a new and right spirit within me.
11 Cast me not away from thy presence,
and take not thy holy Spirit from me.
12 Restore to me the joy of thy salvation,
and uphold me with a willing spirit.
When I am dispirited, my heart is rattled and disorientated. As it becomes unreliable for me, I cannot help but become unreliable for God and neighbor. That is what it means to lose heart, for faith to fail, to forget first love. But as I am moved again by the Spirit, re-energized by a taste of the goodness of God, my heart is re-oriented and begins again to will me toward life and living. The evidence or shining forth of that re-orientation of the heart and renewal of will, marked always by the gift of tears, is the returning of joy—unspeakable and full of glory.
“Conscience” in Karl Rahner and Herbert Vormgrimler, eds., Theological Dictionary (NY: Crossroad, 1981), 89-90.
Joseph Ratzinger, “The Dignity of the Human Person,” in Vol. 5 of Commentary on the Documents of Vatican II, edited by Herbert Vorgrimler (New York: Herder & Herder, 1969), 134.
Joseph Ratzinger, On Conscience (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2007), 12.
Clifford Green, Bonhoeffer: A Theology of Sociality (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), 97.
Simone Weil, “Beyond Personalism,” Cross Currents 2.3 (1952), 59-76 (60).
To see how synderesis become a technical term, see Linda Hogan, “Synderesis, Suneidesis and the Construction of a Theological Tradition,” Hermathena (Winter 2006, No. 181), pp. 125-140. This is what she concludes: “It was only when the scholastics tried to make sense of Jerome's Commentary on Ezekiel and found that they had two distinct, though obviously related terms, that these categories acquired a theological significance. Whatever the origins however it is clear that these distinctions facilitated the development of a theology of conscience that could both affirm its inalienable dignity (which in the twentieth century was the basis on which the church accepted the right to religious freedom) and could also acknowledge that it can be in error.”
To which i would only add/wonder about what we can learn from Girard. It seems to me that conscience is inevitably mimetically formed by whatever tribe we are most immersed in, even ‘religious’ tribes. So grace must set us free from that. The ‘heart’ as i understand it is Christologically shaped/resonant - it will reflect in some way the fruits of the Spirit (Galatians). So the conscience might end up falling into alignment with the heart, but not the reverse. I think that’s my take on it.
Thanks for this Chris.