The Otherness of Conscience

I recently had the pleasure to have a phone chat with Sr Theresa Aletheia, following her simultaneously harrowing and illuminating podcast Descent into Light, which provided a detailed account of her experiences of spiritual abuse and its aftermath, all of which had culminated in her founding of a new community, the Sisters of the Little Way.

Listening to her experiences and the fallout of it, especially within the Church, prompted me to begin a long term research project about an oft referred to but not often understood aspect of spiritual abuse, namely the abuse of conscience. Thanks to Sr Theresa’s podcast I had learnt of the work of Samuel Fernández and an article he published in Gregorianum that provided an important first step in defining the abuse of conscience within the specifically Catholic context, the properly scholarly study of which has been strangely lacking in the anglophone theological literature.

While the research is still very much in its early stages, what first jumped out at me from Fernández’s article is the role otherness plays in the proper formation of conscience (a theme that tied in very well with my reading of Byung Chul Han’s notion of the “negativity of otherness” (the dissolution of which I explored in A Theological Engagement with Pornography).

For Fernández, a properly human conscience does not involve a hermetic sealing of oneself (something he described as impossible in light of our social nature). Instead, Fernández spoke of conscience as shaped and mediated by others, and culminate in the conscience as the place of meeting another. In Fernández’s words, they are the place of “encounter with God” and the hearing of “the voice of God” (559-561).

Despite the necessity of others to form the concience however, the telos of a proper formation of conscience is the point at which the formator of that conscience is able to “illuminate the human conscience” instead of nullifying it. Put another way, a formator of conscience succeeds in bringing the otherness of the formatee’s conscience as a distinct other (561).

The formation of consciences then, for Fernández, becomes both a grave mission as well as a temptation, indeed, the gravity of the vocation of forming consciences becomes apparent in light of the temptation. The gravity of the vocation of forming consciences comes from the necessary work of mediating formation of another’s conscience as a properly independent seat of judgement. The temptation arises out of the very necessity for that mediation, namely the temptation to form a conscience in such a way that such independence is snuffed out (561).

I am grateful to Fr. Harrison Ayre (of the Clerically Speaking podcast of happy memory) for putting me in touch with Sr Theresa Aletheia, and for her work in putting her experiences so eloquently in the podcast. No doubt, other points will emerge that I will share as the research progresses.

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