About Newman
The Conscience of Newman, Fisher and More
August 8, 2025
(Sir Thomas More by Hans Holbein the Younger)
The Conscience of Newman, Fisher and More
There is a sense in which obedience to conscience looks like the virtue of courage. In John Henry Newman’s writings, and importantly, in his life, his acts of conscience seem brave. In his teens, he finds God in the evangelical teachings of his aunt. He carries that simple faith to Oxford where he stands in contradiction to the lax morals surrounding him. As he grows in understanding of the sacramental church, he helps form the Oxford Movement, which suffers hierarchical disapproval as it gains in popularity. But truth beckons Newman forth and at the height of his fame, he converts to Roman Catholicism and what he perceived would be professional obscurity. In all this he acts against the grain, on a path out of darkness into light. He is led by his conscience.
To Newman, conscience is “the advocate of truth in the innermost part of the human person.” According to Newman, in the life of the disciple, there is no separation in one what one believes and what one does. Conscience, the “inner voice of God,” has two components: a moral sense, gained by patient study and reflection; and a sense of duty. Both the study and the life lived consistent with the learned truth are imperatives.
In his eponymous novel, he puts these words in the mouth of a truth-seeking third century Greek woman, Callista:
“I feel that God is within my heart. I feel myself in His presence. He says to me: “Do this: don’t do that!” You may tell me that this dictate is a mere law of my nature, as is to joy or to grieve. I cannot understand this. No, it is the echo of a person speaking to me. Nothing shall persuade me that it does not ultimately proceed from a person external to me. It carries with it its proof of its divine origin. My nature feels towards it as towards a person. When I obey it, I feel a satisfaction; when I disobey, a soreness … An echo implies a voice; a voice a speaker. That speaker I love and I fear.”
This “conscience Inspired courage” is famously seen in the lives of two sixteenth-century English saints, John Fisher and Thomas More. Their consciences cause them to lose their heads rather than act contrary to the voice of God within.
Fisher spoke a bold denial to the King’s demand for a written oath “ “No, sir, not I. You have not my consent thereto.” He offers as cause for his resistance: “I would never consent to no such act for it were much against my conscience.”
His friend Thomas More responds in kind. When all is taken from him – family, home, position, prestige, freedom – he still retains full possession of his conscience: “But as for myself in good faith my conscience so moves me in the matter… yet unto the oath that here is offered to me, I cannot swear without the jeopardizing of my soul to perpetual damnation.” More knew that “ a man may in such case lose his head and have no harm.”
These English Saints, and by that I mean Fisher, More, Newman and all the witnessing saints pre and post, knew that the centrality of conscience is not located in the supreme self but rather in submission to eternal truth. Not More’s truth or Fisher’s truth, or even the king’s truth, but ultimate truth.
To them, conscience was tethered to truth, the truth of Christ, as taught by his holy Church. In his Letter to the Duke of Norfolk, Newman contrasted the English emphasis on the “rights” of conscience, what he calls the “Englishman’s prerogative” to be master in all things, to the prevenient “duties” of conscience that so clearly animated the likes of More and Fisher. It is not the right of self-will but the duty to obey the divine voice within. That divine voice—conscience—speaks to issues of right and wrong, reconciliation, justice, truth, wisdom, sanctity benevolence and mercy. Properly informed, it is sovereign, irreversible, absolute in its authority. As Pope John Paul II would later say in his trip to America that if we have freedom to choose, we have a duty to choose wisely.
Fisher and More lived in the reality of Newman’s emphasis on the duty to properly inform one’s conscience, to ascertain the divine voice within; but once informed, they understood their duty to act according to it: fiat justitia ruat caelum (let justice be done though the heavens may fall). To do otherwise meant the potential loss of their soul.
Let us live by those examples, to properly inform our conscience, to act consistently with it, to follow the voice of God within, to live with “Christ-confidence.”
