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353 Multiple Consciences and the Rise of Solidarity 8 GOD when for sin He makes His children smart, His own He acts not, but anothers part: But when by stripes he saves them, then ’tis known He comes to play the part that is His own. —Robert Herrick, “God Has a Twofold Part”1 How then is the law of God to be apprehended and communicated? And is such a “law” given in agreement? Certainly, as Ratzinger writes, a “mere consensus” of (human) wills does not necessarily, nor might it ever, coincide with the truth. Yet in what way does the protest of one conscience against such consensus, however practically (i.e., procedurally) affirmed, itself ever attain to “truthfulness,” such that, in our discussion, the Church herself might and ought to take notice, such that she herself might become “one” with it? For it seems that every feint in the direction of one side or the other leaves ensnared the truth within the faltering divisions of perception itself. Hobbes and the Fabricated Renunciation of Conscience If I turn to Hobbes now as a positive guide in answering this question, it is precisely because his own sensitivity to the dilemma, one whose acuity 1 Available in the Early English Books Online database within the document His Noble Numbers, or, His Pious Pieces Wherein (amongst other things) He Sings the Birth of His Christ and Sighes for His Saviours Suffering on the Crosse (London: Printed for John Williams and Francis Eglesfield, 1647). 354 A Brutal UNity has also brought his conclusions into disrepute, rendered his analysis at least faithful to the real elements involved in any proper response. Hobbes understood that consciences are multiple, for any given individual and for a society made up of many members; he understood as well the malleable and social form of consciences; he knew their conflicts not only within one person but among them; and finally he grasped the fact that certain fundamental goods are gained by transfiguring individual conscience into a kind of service, one whose final form (though Hobbes himself would only hint at it) is given just in the One the Church would seek to follow. To be sure, Hobbes’ reformulations of the role of conscience have proved troubling to many, it seeming as if his overriding concern with public security simply swallows up the value of individual moral integrity altogether, let alone its demands upon the community, such as it is. As one commentator has put it, Hobbes’ is “a religion of conscience that aims at galvanizing human fear around the specific interests of obedience that preserve a secure and peaceable commonwealth”;2 and, to this extent, conscience for Hobbes is nothing else than a term for individual subjection to the state. But Hobbes, the defender of the state’s sovereignty over individual claims, is in fact a subtle investigator of the human mind, and it is worth seeing how conscience in his analysis plays a central role particularly as it bridges individual and public in a morally challenging, rather than simply numbing, fashion. For in this bridge lie some clues as to the character of that agreement called “Christian.” The reality of “conscience,” for Hobbes, is given simply in the individual ’s existence as a “judging” and thus deciding creature: as an individual judges something to be right or wrong, the work of “conscience” describes this activity. The theoretical human being who lives outside of any civil society will thus be an utterly conscientious being in that, assuming the individual acts according to his or her reasoning powers regarding right or wrong, everything that he or she does will be by definition “according to conscience.”3 But, in fact, apart from times of social dissolution—although such times are real!—no individual does exist outside of civil society. And because of this, it is wrong to speak strictly of a “private conscience,” as if reasoning and its decisions were normally a hidden or secret or atomistically individuated process, at least from a moral perspective. Within any 2 David S. Pacini, Through Narcissus’ Glass Darkly: The Modern Religion of Conscience (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 71. Pacini treats Hobbes especially in chap. 2 of his volume “Disenchantment and the Religion of Conscience,” 48–92. In what follows, I am not in fact making an argument about the nature of Hobbes’ personal Christian beliefs, only about the Christian application of some of his arguments regarding conscience. 3 Leviathan, 29. I have used...

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