The cinema has shown many dramas in which the conflict of its characters with their conscience is staged. I think of the film A Hidden Life (2019) directed by Terrence Malick, about the last years of the Austrian farmer Franz Jägerstätter, during the Second World War. He considered that he could not in good conscience take an oath of loyalty to Hitler, and refused to serve as a soldier in the German army. Tried in the military court, he was sentenced to death and guillotined in 1943 at the age of 36. He was beatified as a martyr of faith by the Catholic Church in 2007. At some crossroads, having a conscience and acting according to its dictates takes on dramatic features. The truth is that within us there is a voice of truth calling us to do good in peaceful or turbulent times. Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI) reflected on conscience on several occasions. The book Conscience Naked (CTEA, 2024) collects some of his interventions with enlightening ideas on this subject.
We witness so many acts of corruption, of bad and twisted practices that harm people and society. Stealing, killing, lying, defrauding… we condemn it. The extreme cases of these immoral behaviors usually begin with previous neglects. The first time this descent into the heart of darkness causes fear, but, once the door of evil is opened, the fall into darkness is precipitated. Evil ends up silencing the voice of conscience, muting it to the point of losing the ability to recognize the malice of these acts.
However, the dormant conscience can be awakened, because it is an original dimension of every human being. “It consists,” Ratzinger notes, “in the fact that something like an original memory of the good and the truth has been infused into us (the two realities coincide); that there is an inner tendency of the being of man, made in the image of God, towards everything that is in conformity with God. From its roots, the being of man feels a harmony with some things and finds itself in contradiction with others. This anamnesis (memory) of the origin (…) is not a knowledge already conceptually articulated, an ark of contents that only await to be called out. It is, so to speak, an inner sense, a capacity for recognition, such that whoever is questioned, if he is not internally withdrawn into himself, is capable of recognizing its echo within himself. He realizes: This is what my nature inclines me to and what it seeks!” (p. 24). A memory whose voice comes from the depths of the soul.
We have, then, the sense of good imprinted in the soul. And in this effort to keep alive the ability to discern good from evil “two criteria become evident for discerning the presence of an authentic voice of conscience: it does not coincide with one’s own desires and tastes; it does not identify with what is socially most advantageous, with group consensus or with the demands of political or social power” (p. 18). That is, conscience elevates us, adjusting personal conduct to the noble levels of the human condition. It reminds us that we eat to live and not live to eat, removing us from the excesses of pleasurable goods and their addictions. Likewise, it helps us distinguish the noble from the merely profitable, helping us to get out of the utilitarian whirlpool that reduces everything to how it is and how much there is. A conscience, likewise, that keeps us firm in the goodness and primacy of ethical principles, even when in the social sphere we live with our backs turned to these moral standards.
Diligently forming one’s conscience and living according to one’s convictions is an arduous task. It is a life in continuous search for the truth open to the free acceptance of one’s own being in dialogue with reality.
