Conscience in Its Age

by Benedict XVI (Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger)

A lecture given to the Reinhold-Schneider-Gesellschaft, printed in Church, Ecumenism and Politics, by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (NY, Crossroads, 1987), pp. 165–79.

In his Conversations with Hitler Hermann Rauschning, president of the senate of the Free City of Danzig (Gdansk) in 1933 and 1934, reports the dictator saying the following to him: "I liberate man from the constraint of a spirit become an end in itself; from the filthy and degrading torments inflicted on himself by a chimera called conscience and morality, and from the claims of a freedom and personal autonomy that only very few can ever be up to." [1] For this man conscience was a chimera from which man must be liberated; the freedom he promised would be freedom from conscience. It fits in with this that Goering told the same author: "I have no conscience. My conscience is called Adolf Hitler." [2] The destruction of the conscience is the real precondition for totalitarian obedience and totalitarian domination. Where conscience prevails there is a barrier against the domination of human orders and human whim, something sacred that must remain inviolable and that in an ultimate sovereignty evades control not only by oneself but by every external agency. Only the absoluteness of conscience is the complete antithesis to tyranny; only the recognition of its inviolability protects human beings from each other and from themselves; only its rule guarantees freedom.

Here objections can be raised from very different quarters. A first and rather superficial objection would dispute the contemporary relevance of such a statement. While this might have its significance in the struggle against Hitler's dictatorship, are we not oppressed today by quite different problems? Today must not social duty instead of individual freedom, structural instead of personal liberation be in the forefront of the question? Certainly the focuses of the struggle for man can change and very different tasks come to the fore according to the characteristics of the age; but in this it remains true that the contemporary relevance of a subject cannot offer a criterion for measuring its importance on the human scale and that at the same time what is truly human always remains of contemporary relevance in a profounder sense. Even if it is not in the foreground of a historical scene, it belongs to the decisive powers of the human drama, and to forget it must have a lethal effect, whichever act of the drama one is involved in. Dictatorship, the enslavement of man under the pretext of liberating him, is always a danger that lies in wait for man, and the anatomy of totalitarianism and of its opposite thus belongs among the permanent tasks of reflection on what is human in man.

Beyond this I am bold enough to assert that the temptation we are exposed to today, however different the labels and the colours may be, shows for those who look more deeply a frightening similarity, indeed unity, with what apparently lies behind us in the past. In this context another reference to Rauschning is needed. In 1938 this man who had seen the demon face to face, and who for a time had believed him before he understood the terrible thing that was afoot, diagnosed National Socialism, in a book that is still of significance, as the revolution of nihilism. "In its active and leading circles this movement is completely lacking in requirements and programme, ready for action, in its best core troops instinctive, in its guiding elite very deliberate, cold and cunning," he writes. "There was and is no aim that Naziism would not be ready at any time to surrender or to adopt for the same of the movement." For a revolution of this kind there are no firm aims of foreign policy. As there are none of economic or domestic policy. The total pulverization of what had hitherto been the components of order is rather the only thing that characterizes the "doctrineless nihilistic revolution in Germany." [3] Of course even a doctrineless nihilism contains in its own way a doctrine, and to that extent these statements are open to criticism. But its basic content comprises very exactly what really happened then and thereby exposes a false interpretation which visibly has a disastrous effect: the nature of the revolution that took place then is only partly comprehended by the concepts "Fascism" and "nationalism" but to a more important extent concealed and misjudged. In the mental climate of the time Hitler's revolution made use of the nationalism of the bourgeoisie, which at the same time he fanatically hated and wished to destroy, and also of its order, which seemed to him like the real antithesis of his will. To this extent it is a historical perversion if one uses the slogan "law and order" to taunt the right with being fascist and Hitlerian in order to cover with this taunting precisely that revolution of nihilism which stands in the true succession to the disaster of 1933. Anyone who looks more closely and who does not let himself or herself be blinded by phrases will discover sufficient similarities between the disaster of that time and the forces that today proclaim as salvation revolution in itself, the denial of order in itself. The link between this nihilism and the social idea, and with our shock at the misery suffered by millions of men and women in this world, is no less deceitful than the link between the nihilism of that time and the national idea.

Only someone who is blind or who finds it convenient to be blind can overlook the fact that the threat of totalitarianism is a question of our age. Hence the men who at that time stood out against totalitarian "liberation" in obedience to conscience in freedom of conscience are today once again of fresh importance to us. Is conscience really a power we can count on? Must we not arm ourselves with more substantial weapons? In his novel about Las Casas, Reinhold Schneider has given an impressive portrayal of the mystery of conscience in the nameless girl of the Lucayos who slowly makes the conscienceless Spanish adventurer Bernardino understand the mystery of suffering and re-awakens the soul that has died in him by enabling him to become a sympathizer, one who shares in suffering. [4] This fragile young being who has no power left other than that of suffering embodies what conscience is among the adventurers for whom the only things that count are gold and the sword, hard economic or military power. She stands there, the fragile Lucaya, like a nobody, and that is how conscience stands in the world up to the present hour: a powerless girl abandoned to an early death over against the colossi of economic and political interests. Is it not sheer lunacy to count on this young girl conscience when one sees what really counts in the world and what alone counts in it? Is it not a vain and senseless reverie to look up to the witnesses of conscience in the face of the threats of today when all they can have to contribute is suffering? Should one then – and this is the objection that will be raised against us – conduct politics with poetry and use poetry to solve the problems of the age?

The nature and meaning of conscience

But a yet more difficult objection emerges. What is it really, conscience? [5] Does it even exist? Or is it not simply a superego which has been moved inwards and which transforms the taboos of one's education into divine commandments and thus makes them untransgressable? Do not finally those in power use the idea of conscience to shift their power into the hearts of those they shamelessly exploit by drumming all their claims into their victims' heads until the latter come to hear them as the "voice of God" from inside themselves? Then would not Hitler have been right after all in saying that conscience is a form of slavery from which before all else man must be liberated? But, we must now ask, what direction remains for the person who has liberated himself or herself from his or her conscience? What has he or she really been liberated for? Is he or she no longer bound by respect for the humanity of the other person when the higher interest of the society of the future demands that he or she should disregard it? Can crime therefore – murder, for example – become a legitimate means of bringing the future about?

It is not easy to answer all these questions. Certainly under the idea of conscience there can sneak in the canonization of a superego which prevents people from becoming themselves; the absolute call on the person to become responsible is then overlaid by a structure of conventions that is wrongly presented as the voice of God when in truth it is only the voice of the past, fear of which is blocking the present. Conscience can also become an alibi for the fact that one has let oneself be carried away and cannot be told anything, when one's defiant inability to correct oneself is justified by loyalty to one's inner voice. Conscience then becomes the principle of subjective obstinacy established as an absolute, just as in the other case it becomes the principle of the ego losing its autonomy by surrendering to the ideas of other people or an alien ego. To this extent the concept of conscience needs continual refining, and laying claim or appealing to conscience stands in need of a cautious honesty that is aware that one abuses something that is great when one rashly calls it into play. Someone who talks all too easily of conscience arouses suspicions similar to those aroused by the person who drags the holy name of God into anything and everything and thus serves idols rather than God.

But the vulnerability of conscience, the possibility of its being abused, cannot destroy its greatness. Reinhold Schneider has said: "What is conscience if not the knowledge of responsibility for the whole of creation and before him who has made it?" To put it quite simply, conscience means to recognize man – oneself and others – as creation and to respect the creator in him or her. This defines the limits of any power and at the same time indicates its direction. To this extent insistence on the powerlessness of conscience remains the fundamental pre-condition and the inmost core of every true restraint on power. When this inmost core is not maintained then fundamentally one can no longer talk of restraint on power but rather only of a balance of interests in which man and human society are reduced to the pattern of selection: what is good is what succeeds and survives, and to exist means to succeed and survive. Man lives no longer as creation but as the product of selection, and the power he or she sets out to restrain becomes his or her only criterion. He or she is destroyed in his or her humanity. That is why we need people who make a point of standing out alongside the poor fragile girl conscience, who embody the power of powerlessness and protest against the exploitation of human beings in no other way than by sharing in the suffering of this tormented being, man, by placing themselves on the side of suffering. For that reason Reinhold Schneider's sonnets were a power, "poetry" was a power, which the dictators feared as a weapon and before which they had to tremble. For reasons of conscience Schneider suffered from the abuse of power. Suffering for the sake of conscience is virtually the formula of his existence. Only suffering, one could say: what's the use of that? But ultimately injustice can only be overcome by suffering, by the voluntary suffering of those who remain true to their conscience and thus in their suffering and in their whole existence bear real witness to the end of all power. Slowly we are beginning to realize once again what it means that the salvation of the world, the overcoming of power, is the suffering of a hanged man, that it is precisely where power comes to an end in suffering that the salvation of men and women begins.

Las Casas and the problem of conscience

I would like to take this fundamental idea that the core of the control and limitation of power that is needed in this world is the courage to follow one's conscience and to try to develop it by using as an example the Las Casas material dealt with by Schneider. But first of all let us look briefly at the historical background. With the discovery of America, Christian Europe was faced anew with the question of the rights of man as man; in the course of the Crusades and the expanding contacts with the Arab world it had admittedly arisen with increasing urgency from the thirteenth century onwards, but it only gained its full intensity thanks to the powerlessness of the newly discovered peoples when faced with the weapons of the Spaniards. Up till now the problems of the limits of power had only emerged as to a considerable extent an internal Christian one in the counterplay of sacerdotium and imperium. With these two entities two powers, both of which were by their intention absolute, clashed in the Christian world: as Christian it seemed totally subordinate to the sacerdotium, as secular totally subordinate to the imperium, as Christian and secular, that is in the congruence of world and Church, it put to both the question of their self-limitation. But now there emerged what to a considerable extent was a new problem. Christian faith understood itself as absolute, as the revelation of the one truth that saves man; it knew of original sin by which human reason is clouded over, only to be made clear once again by faith and restored to itself. According to this it was only in faith that reason could find the foundations of real justice, and it could not really recognize structures of justice outside the faith as true justice; this in any case was what Augustine seemed to be saying in The City of God, in which he refused to allow heathen states that did not know God and thus neglected an essential part of true justice the characteristic of justice and defined them in practice as mere coalitions of interests which as such fulfilled a partial function of maintaining the peace and thereby gained their legitimacy as far as he was concerned. [6] But now the question arises: what criteria and what possibilities for the limitation of power exist when in the encounter between two peoples awareness of the superiority of the only binding truth is linked with superiority of weapons? Do the missions and colonialism together form the hybrid that created the misery of the third world? Where could the means of correction arise here? Reinhold Schneider's answer in his novel is that the means of correction can only emerge from faith itself – in the conscience that suffers and struggles and that is in fact aroused by this faith. The only thing that justifies this faith as truth is that on the basis of its founding principle it may not be a multiplication of power but the summons that awakens the conscience that limits power and protects the powerless. It is here that it has its absoluteness, in the protection of the other as creature.

Let us look once again at the findings of history. Did this conscience exist at all? Was it a real power or was there only that false absoluteness of faith in which it functions as the ideology of power instead of proclaiming the absoluteness of the creator in the absolute dignity of the powerless? In 1552, in his Brevissima Relacion de Ia destrucción des las Indias Occidentales, Las Casas wrote the most terrible condemnation of the powerlessness of conscience and of the brutality of power without conscience that we know. We are aware today that this work depends to a considerable extent on very dubious sources, that it is "extremely one-sided and often exaggerated and distorted"; that it keeps silent about the atrocities on the other side, such as that the Aztecs were in the habit of sacrificing twenty thousand human hearts at a single religious service. [7] Nevertheless there remains a monstrous charge against the Spanish conquistadores who unscrupulously enslaved and robbed people and by their brutal exploitation of them as a work-force condemned whole tribes to extinction. There remains the fact that conscience really was there just like a weeping Lucaya who could only watch the monstrous things going on, weeping and lost in unspeakable pain. Yet there was this conscience and Las Casas is by no means the only witness to it; the trail of conscience leads from the first laws of Queen Isabella, who declared all Indians free subjects of the crown and forbade their enslavement, by way of the laws of Burgos of 1512 to the "new laws" of 1542 which were decisively influenced by Las Casas and which tried to bring about the comprehensive liberation of and complete protection for the Indians; the prescription that they should with all possible care and love "be instructed in our holy Catholic faith" did not aim at dominating them but at putting them on the same level and withdrawing them from the arbitrary whims of those in power. [8]

The fact that here too success remained relatively modest does not alter the fact that conscience was fundamentally recognized as a limit of power and that thereby an attempt was made to allow faith to become effective as a political force without transforming it into yet another element of power among others. What must remain characteristic of it is precisely that its power lies in suffering, that it is the power of the crucified one; it is only in this way that it can be prevented from opening up for its part a new form of enslavement. It is only as the power of the cross that faith redeems; its mystery lies in its powerlessness, and in this world it must remain powerless in order to be itself. I think it is only from this perspective that the New Testament's stance on the problem of political power can be correctly understood. I shall only give a brief comment on this. Anyone who reads the sermon on the mount, anyone who takes up the New Testament with a view to the political pressures and difficulties of our time and Christians' responsibility for them, is for the most part disappointed. The whole thing seems to be an escape into an apolitical inwardness. There is hardly any talk of shaping the world, rather of a loyalty that seems to us like criminal passivity and an authoritarian mentality; whether one thinks of Romans 13:1–7 or I Peter 2:13–25, in every case the key word is [greek], subordination, patience, obedience – in the case of 1 Peter with regard to the example of the suffering Christ. And even Jesus's only saying about the state, Mark 12:17 ("Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's and to God the things that are God's"), remains fixed in a fundamental attitude of loyalty. In fact Jesus was no revolutionary, and anyone who asserts otherwise is falsifying history. It is also correct that as a result of its situation the New Testament did not feel itself called to develop a political ethics for Christians in a positive and detailed manner; here one can make no progress with mere biblical fundamentalism. The New Testament was written out of the minority situation of the slowly growing Christian Church and is thus ordered towards safeguarding what is specifically Christian in the midst of Christians' political impotence, not towards the ordering of a Christian power. Nevertheless it contains the decisive point which continually remains the basic principle. In his saying about rendering unto Caesar that which is Caesar's and unto God that which is God's Jesus separates the power of the emperor and the power of God. He removes the ius sacrum from the iuspublicum and thereby breaks up the fundamental constitution of the ancient world and indeed of the pre-Christian world as a whole. By separating the ius sacrum from the emperor's ius pubilcum he created the space of freedom of conscience where every power ends, even that of the Roman God-emperor, who thereby becomes a purely human emperor and changes into the beast of the Apocalypse when he nevertheless wants to remain God and denies the inviolable space of the conscience. To this extent this saying sets limits to every earthly power, and proclaims the freedom of the person that transcends all political systems. For this limitation Jesus went to his death; he bore witness to the limitation of power in his suffering. Christianity begins not with a revolutionary but with a martyr. [9] The growth of freedom that mankind owes to the martyrs is infinitely greater than that which it could be given by revolutionaries.

Conscience in its age

In his novel about Las Casas Reinhold Schneider's basic subject of the relationship between power and conscience is given a particularly impressive form. Alongside the Lucaya Las Casas himself and Charles V appear as living representations of what conscience is; all three together represent its function at different levels and they orchestrate the subject throughout its entire range. Without a doubt it is symbolized in its purest form by the girl Lucaya. In the humility of her suffering and in the simplicity of her faith conscience exists virtually in its pure untroubled nature. The people of the Lucayos to whom she belongs and whom she embodies are portrayed as follows by the knight Bernardino: "They were so defenceless and innocent as if Adam's sin had never fallen on them." [10] The islands where they lived meant for them the world of men and women. They believed that they were bordered by the world of spirits where the dead lived. When the Spaniards reached them all they could imagine was that these aliens came from beyond the world of men and women, from the land of the spirits. That was why they followed them full of innocent trust, because they expected to be brought to the souls of their ancestors by these strangers. On this Bernardino remarked: "And I must recall today how pure the conscience must have been of these people who were so very glad to look forward to being reunited with the dead, while we. . . perhaps had to be afraid of such a reunion, because then many hidden sins would become manifest and we would not dare to look those near to us in the eye." [11] People who live in family neighbourliness with the eternal, whose world stands open into the other world, whose standard of judgement is merely co-operation with what is to come and thus is conscience, encounter the brutal power that knows no conscience and has lost its soul. They think they are reaching heaven and land in hell. In my view this very scene shows how profoundly Reinhold Schneider had come to know and to suffer the way human existence and the world of experience is poised over the abyss long before he wrote Winter in Wien. Here reality is not smoothed over with edifying apologetics; here we do not have the world of Job's rationalizing friends who have a pious refrain for everything and an explanation for everything. Here what rings out is the cry of Job himself: people think they are going to heaven and are led into hell. Reality as it is strikes faith in the face and no deus ex machina arises to put things right. All that remains is the "muffled moaning and screaming" of the mass of humanity: [12] the silent weeping of the deceived woman and the face of the crucified. There remains the suffering of this woman who has suffered just as much over the conqueror as over her tortured brothers. For her he in his blindness is no less pitiful than they are in their torment, even if he himself does not notice how miserable his madness has made him, how much he stands in need of redemption in order to become himself once again. It seems to me that this mysterious figure of a woman expresses most of all in the entire novel what Schneider noticeably experienced as his own task and his own fate. It was not granted to him to become involved on the field of power. All that remained for him was to be the voice of conscience, to withstand the sin and guilt of the age in suffering, and through his suffering to authenticate the call of conscience.

Las Casas embodies a second possibility, how conscience can become mission. Alongside the suffering conscience he represents the prophetic conscience which shakes the power of the powerful, which raises the rights of those deprived of their rights, places himself calmly between the thrones and does not cease to disturb the rest of those whose power is at the expense of the rights of others. [13] Las Casas himself had been a soldier and encomendero; even after he was ordained to the priesthood he had been far more concerned about his income than about the Indians entrusted to him. Then something happened that is encountered more than once in the lives of saints: he suddenly recognized that a particular saying of scripture that affected his situation was intended quite literally and was meant to be taken literally by him. He reads Sirach 34:21–22 and knows that it concerns him: "The bread of the needy is the life of the poor; whoever deprives them of it is a man of blood. To take away a neighbour's living is to murder him; to deprive an employee of his wages is to shed blood." [14] From then on Las Casas becomes the guilty conscience of the powerful; hated, cursed, but no longer to be brought to silence. This is part of the real greatness of Christian faith: that it is able to give conscience its voice; that it relentlessly opposes the world that the faithful have established for themselves and founded with faith; that the prophetic "no" dwells in it; in general that it arouses prophets, people who are not the voice of an interest but the voice of conscience against other interests. Las Casas thus becomes at the same time a witness to the sovereignty of law: "Law does not need any human witness; it stands above man, not in man. But when people are not in agreement they can ask their conscience for counsel; and if they do so without hatred or zeal their conscience will help them." [15]

In the figure of the emperor Charles V we encounter a third possibility: the conscience of the man or woman on whom power is bestowed and who must try to exercise power responsibly. The scene where on a chilly evening the friar meets the tired emperor who has on his desk only a copy of the Imitation of Christ is extremely impressive. Its decisive key words are "conscience" and "cross." In a prophetic reproach to his own age Schneider portrays a ruler who wishes not to conquer but to reconcile; a ruler who is ready to jettison the greatness that is characterized by the burden of sin and guilt and who recognizes true greatness in responsibility for men and women. He portrays a man of power who bears power as a burden and suffering and hence is able to lead power towards its true meaning. [16] This idea reaches its full intensity with the bestowal of a Mexican bishopric on Las Casas; the prophet must take over power and thereby enters on his severest test: whether under the sway of power he remains loyal to the prophetic calling. Power as suffering and thereby as power that has been healed and made holy: in this vision the first and the third characters are intertwined. The absolute monarch lives under the restraint of power imposed by conscience, without which any restraint on power would be impotent.

Only power that comes out of suffering can be power for healing and salvation; power shows its greatness in the renunciation of power. A remarkable parallel to these ideas is to be found in Andre Malraux's description of his last conversations with de Gaulle. These dialogues circle continuously around de Gaulle's central subject of France and greatness, and they show how the idea of greatness had at the end changed for this remarkable ruler of our century. Asked what he would have said at the Invalides to commemorate the bicentenary of Napoleon's birth, de Gaulle answered: "He left France smaller than he had found her, agreed; but that is not the way a nation is conditioned. For France he had to exist…." [17] On this Malraux comments that de Gaulle did not think of France in terms of strength: "He thought Stalin's remark, 'France has fewer divisions in line than the Lubin government', idiotic." Still less did he think in terms of winning or losing territories. When he decided in favour of the independence of Algeria, "he had chosen the soul of France above everything else, and first of all against himself." [18] Mairaux must have been certain of his interlocutor's agreement when he remarked to him that France only found its own soul when it found it for others: "the Crusades, and the Revolution much more than Napoleon." [19] The balance of these conversations over­shadowed by a characteristic melancholy can be recognized quite clearly: the greatness the general could give his country consisted in the fact that he left it smaller, that he gave away an empire that stretched round the world. This greatness did not come about in the vain attempt to become once again a great power on the old pattern, but in the renunciation he taught himself and his nation. At the end the general measured himself no longer against Napoleon the conqueror but against the banished emperor and his saying that greatness is sad. Apart from the ambiguity that naturally still remains lurking in this saying it must mean that power attains greatness when it lets itself be moved by conscience. That is Reinhold Schneider's legacy to this age; that is the opportunity and the task of Christian faith in the midst of the conflict of powers in which we stand today.

Notes