Articles
Moral Conscience in Newman, Part 1
August 1, 2025
In the next few weeks the writers on this website will consider various aspects of St. John Henry Newman’s teaching on conscience, since Rome has announced he will be named Doctor of the Church. It is possible this might be St. John Henry’s title, as Doctor of Conscience
Newman’s teaching on conscience can be found in his Grammar of Assent, Letter to the Duke of Norfolk, the Apologia pro vita sua and many of his sermons.
As a background to his Christian understanding of conscience, Newman was familiar with different Greek and Roman theories of moral behavior such as that of Socrates, the Platonists, Aristotle, the Stoics, and the Epicureans.
The word itself is derived from con‑ (“with”) + sciō (“to know”), thus “knowing-with,” implying an inner witness to one’s ethical behavior. Conscience conveys both “awareness” (general consciousness) and in a more specific sense, moral consciousness or guilt. The inner witness is an important aspect to understand.
The philosopher Plato preferred using the term daimōnion—his personal term for the “inner voice” that warns him. However, the ancient Greek term most closely corresponding to conscience is συνείδησις (suneidēsis), and in Roman thought the equivalent is conscientia, both referring to the inward sense of moral rightness or wrongdoing.
For the Roman moralists such as Cicero and later church writers such as St. Augustine conscientia had an ethical sense or theological sense of inner moral judge. Newman found in these authors, and especially in the Bible, the doctrine of right and wrong and of that recognizable description of a reference to an inner voice. This classical understanding of the knowledge of moral acts began to change throughout the 18th and 19th centuries.
During the Enlightenment, thinkers emphasized reason and empirical evidence. The literature of this period gave rise to sentimentalism, which highlighted the role of emotion and moral sensibility in human behavior. According to this the concept of conscience as a moral guide is based both on rational thought and the capacity for empathy.
The 19th century ushered in Romanticism, a movement that valued emotion, individual experience, and the sublime aspects of nature. Romantic writers like William Wordsworth and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe explored conscience through the lens of personal introspection and emotional authenticity.
These conceptions of moral action highlight the subjective dimension of human acts. Attention is paid to a person’s emotions and experience. Newman does not discard this. He notes “Conscience has an intimate bearing on our affections and emotions, leading us to reverence and awe, hope and fear, especially fear” yet maintains the objective dimension of external laws that are given to man and of the Legislator. This Legislator is the Creator and He speaks to man in his inner self. Returning to the formulation by St. Thomas Aquinas, Newman describes conscience as a judgment or dictate of reason regarding how acts correspond to the eternal law as we know through natural reason. Newman says “This view of conscience, I know, is very different from that ordinarily taken of it, both by the science and literature, and by the public opinion, of this day. It is founded on the doctrine that conscience is the voice of God, whereas it is fashionable on all hands now to consider it in one way or another a creation of man.” (Letter to the Duke of Norfolk, ch 5).
In ch 5 of the Grammar of Assent, Newman dedicates some pages to explain the feelings produced by conscience, and distinguishes conscience from a mere sense of the beautiful or a moral sense. We quote at length his words:
Newman writes: “The feeling of conscience (being, I repeat, a certain keen sensibility, pleasant or painful,—self-approval and hope, or compunction and fear,—attendant on certain of our actions, which in consequence we call right or wrong) is twofold:—it is a moral sense, and a sense of duty; a judgment of the reason and a magisterial dictate.”
He continues: “Conscience is ever forcing on us by threats and by promises that we must follow the right and avoid the wrong; so far it is one and the same in the mind of every one, whatever be its particular errors in particular minds as to the acts which it orders to be done or to be avoided; and in this respect it corresponds to our perception of the beautiful and deformed.” However, “the sense of beautifulness, as indeed the Moral Sense, has no special relations to persons, but contemplates objects in themselves; conscience, on the other hand, is concerned with persons primarily, and with actions mainly as viewed in their doers, or rather with self alone and one’s own actions,”
“And hence it is that we are accustomed to speak of conscience as a voice, a term which we should never think of applying to the sense of the beautiful; and moreover a voice, or the echo of a voice, imperative and constraining, like no other dictate in the whole of our experience.”
After insisting on the moral conscience, Newman offers an argument for the existence of God. He indicates that through a child’s experience of conscience we can consider how conscience leads to the knowledge of God.
“if a child of five or six years old, when reason is at length fully awake, has already mastered and appropriated thoughts and beliefs, in consequence of their teaching, in such sort as to be able to handle and apply them familiarly, according to the occasion, as principles of intellectual action, those beliefs at the very least must be singularly congenial to his mind, if not connatural with its initial action. And that such a spontaneous reception of religious truths is common with children, I shall take for granted, till I am convinced that I am wrong in so doing. The child keenly understands that there is a difference between right and wrong; and when he has done what he believes to be wrong, he is conscious that he is offending One to whom he is amenable, whom he does not see, who sees him. His mind reaches forward with a strong presentiment to the thought of a Moral Governor, sovereign over him, mindful, and just. It comes to him like an impulse of nature to entertain it.”
Thus, for Newman the moral conscience is a dictate of reason which produces approval or guilt. It is the voice of God who as Creator speaks to the mind and heart of man, from a very young age.
