When I went to publish this paper, I couldn’t find any venue that seemed right (it’s too long for the shorter places, too short for the longer, and too non-Thomistic for many), so I’m putting it here. Most of my pre-occupations are on display: +Ratzinger, Augustine, The Apostle John, Plato, and poetry. The point, in brief: conscience is memory.
The problem of conscience is a recurring theme in the theology of Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger/Pope Benedict XVI, often addressed through other subjects, such as the dictatorship of relativism and the threat to transcendent Truth from post-enlightenment thought. Because the roots of moral relativism are deeply entwined with modern issues of conscience, Ratzinger frequently returns to probe the nature of conscience at an ontological level. One author goes so far as to call Ratzinger’s work on conscience “a major contribution to moral theology.”[1] And yet it remains in seminal form, requiring other pieces of the puzzle to be integrated from Ratzinger and his sources.
In “Conscience and Truth,”[2] he presents a renewed way of considering the language of conscience by replacing the Scholastic sense of synderesis with the Platonic language of anamnesis. In this process of reconfiguring the Thomistic/Aristotelian model of conscience along uniquely Augustinian/Socratic/Scriptural lines (with an assist from Cardinal John Henry Newman) he offers us a chance to change how we think of conscience to better address the moral relativism of our age.
Ratzinger defines conscience as “the perceptible and commanding presence of the voice of truth in the subject itself. Conscience means the abolition of mere subjectivity when man’s intimate interior sphere is touched by the truth that comes from God.” [3] The primacy of conscience is such that Cardinal John Henry Newman could, addressing the subject of papal infallibility in his letter to the Duke of Norfolk, write:
Certainly, if I am obliged to bring religion into after-dinner toasts…I shall drink—to the Pope, if you please,—still, to Conscience first, and to the Pope afterwards.[4]
The pope’s authority itself rests on the ground of conscience, which Newman places at the center because it springs from and responds to truth. Truth is prior to conscience. The subject matters not because it is the source of truth, but because it is the way truth is experienced:
The subject is not the measure of conscience in a world where there is no truth, merely seeking accommodation between society and the individual. It is, rather, the perceptible and demanding presence of the voice of truth in the subject himself.[5]
Newman crossed the Tiber despite his deep reservations about the “Roman Church” because he felt the need to follow the truth where it led, even though the entire matrix of his life, career, custom, friendships, and the reflexive anti-Popish bigotry of his age, nation, and class held him back. His conversion therefore becomes an even greater testimony not only to his sanctity, but to the value he placed on conscience, which rests on truth and must be followed. In the order of virtues, he values “truth’s priority over goodness,” its “priority over consensus, over the accommodation of groups.”[6]
The authority of the Magisterium, therefore, is not arbitrary or imposed from without. It’s not exercised in a vacuum or on a ground of its own creation. It is a subjective expression of an objective reality. Modern ideology fails to understand this because it can only see authority as imposed from without—something separate from the subject—rather than what the Magisterium genuinely is: a bridge between subject and object.[7]
This more elevated notion of conscience as not separate from but prior to authority was already a dead letter in Newman’s time:
When men advocate the rights of conscience, they in no sense mean the rights of the Creator, nor the duty to Him…but the right of thinking, speaking, writing, and acting, according to their judgment or their humour, without any thought of God at all. They do not even pretend to go by any moral rule, but they demand…for each to be his own master in all things, and to profess what he pleases, asking no one's leave…. Conscience has rights because it has duties.[8]
By the next century, Joseph Ratzinger would discover that the understanding conscience had eroded even further, and not just in society but in the Church itself. In seminary, he encountered a flawed notion of conscience that arose after St. Thomas Aquinas, and led to the assertion that the conscience, even an erroneous conscience, not only must be followed, but would even lead to salvation if followed. He relates the story of a conversation among a group of theologians who suggested this meant we could seek the worst Nazi murderers among the saved. These modern theologians asserted that such was the case, because, as Ratzinger paraphrases it, “the objective terribleness of their deeds notwithstanding, they acted morally, subjectively speaking. Since they followed their (albeit mistaken) consciences, one would have to recognize their conduct as moral and, as a result, should not doubt their eternal salvation.”[9]
This mad notion of salvation-through-conscience is a distortion of the Thomistic teaching that conscience is binding on the individual, and one must always obey even an erroneous conscience, “since conscience is a kind of dictate of the reason.”[10] We have to consider this sense of the word “reason” as closer to the Biblical idea of wisdom than it is to our modern sense of logical deduction or intellectual calculation. In Thomas’s sense of the word, reason would naturally apprehend the universal good, which is God.[11] We obey an erroneous conscience because we believe it is not erroneous, and we must always act according to the truth, even if that truth is improperly understood. “Obedience to conscience is a universal and exceptionless moral absolute.”[12]
In the Summa, St. Thomas considers conscience as an act, not a power, because “Conscience can be laid aside. But a power cannot be laid aside.”[13] It is “a certain pronouncement of the mind.”[14] It is the act of applying knowledge to an individual case, “to witness, to bind, or incite, and also to accuse, torment, or rebuke.”[15] In the Scholastic formula, this is done by recognizing our actions or lack of actions, by bearing witness to them, and by judging what should or should not be done. Thomas acknowledges the fluid usage of the word conscientia, sometimes as a habit, and sometimes as an act, “for it is customary for causes and effects to be called after one another.”[16] Since a habit is the principle of an act, he distinguishes them by reaching back to Jerome’s use of the Stoic word synderesis to specify the ontological quality underlying the conscience. This “first natural habit” is called by “Basil, the natural power of judgment, and Damascene says that it is the law of our intellect.”[17] Synderesis, then, is the first principle of moral action judged by practical reason, while Conscience is particular action judged by practical reason.
This is not, of course, to blame St. Thomas for how the doctrine developed and warped over the centuries, but it does trace the roots of the common notion of the infallible conscience. Ratzinger observes a contradiction in this: if the conscience is always right, there is no truth, because judgments of conscience can contradict each other from person to person and even be at war within an individual. The subject becomes a slave to its own image of truth, unable to find common meaning at the heart of human experience.
This is a particularly pressing problem in the modern world, where the phrase “my truth” has move the dictatorship of relativism from the level of culture to the level of the individual. No longer are there merely groups of competing truths, but an endless number of particular truths, each vying for dominance. Notions of moral truth that previously provided cohesion within the individual, the family, the community, and the world come unravelled under the steady erosion of this caustic relativism, leading to the fraying of everything from international relations to the interior landscape of each human psyche.
Ratzinger likens the genuine conscience to a window through which we all view a common truth, and recognize it as the truth. It is, in his words, the ground of our being. The modern conscience, however, is like a “protective shell.”[18] It encloses and walls off the individual. The subject no longer needs to seek out the highest truth and draw from a deep and ancient well of wisdom, but may be content to examine his own views or that of society and call it “conscience.” Ratzinger’s window opens onto the endless vistas of God’s glory, and the subject bathes willingly in its light. The world’s window, however, opens only onto the world and its reflected microcosm, the solipsistic self.
A broken conscience is deformed by two factors: the individual and his willingness to look away from the good and toward the evil (intrinsic), and the society which conditions the conscience to conform to the world and not to God (extrinsic). The individual conscience in society is like ice placed in water: left to its own devices, it will melt until ice and water become one. Room-temperature immorality is such that throughout history you can find nominal Christians supporting slavery, endorsing unjust wars, divorcing, consuming pornography and drugs, and exploiting others at rates not notably different than non-Christians. Clearly, baptism and even the sacraments are no hedge against a faulty conscience.
But as St. Paul writes:
Even the unchurched know what God requires of those who would call themselves good. The truth of God is written in our hearts as well as in the pages of scripture. Man can see this truth plainly, and can only fail to see this truth by effort. Because this effort is an active capacity, the one who fails to see the good and avoid the evil is condemned. (Romans 2:14-15)
The truth is present in us. It has been revealed in history, and we can see it because we are fearfully and wonderfully made. “Not to see it is guilt…. The fact that the signal lamp does not shine is the consequence of a deliberate looking away from that which we do not wish to see.”[19] It is not seen because man does not want to see it. Choosing not to see it is an act of the will, and therefore conscience is no escape clause. It does not liberate us from the obligation to seek and know the truth which is intrinsic to our nature.
Man can either discover the standards of truth, or invent them. The problem of subjectivity is that, untethered from objective standards, it allows someone to call “conscience” was is little more than personal preference, and then claim it is infallible. This “unerring” conscience must then be followed even if it is wrong, because our first duty is to follow what we believe to be the truth. That “first” duty, however, is preceded by another duty: to make sure we correctly form our conscience, so that which we believe is true is genuinely Truth. This foundational action occurs prior to the action of the conscience, as man cultivates the imago dei in collaboration with the wisdom and teaching of the Church.
An erroneous conscience is not an excuse for an evil act, however. It is not wrong to obey an incorrect conscience, but it is certainly wrong to allow a conscience to become malformed by ignoring or even actively suppressing the plain promptings of the objective truth. The moment of an evil action is not in obeying a conscience that has erred, “but in the neglect of my being that made me deaf to the internal promptings of truth.”[20]
The measure of conscience is truth, and without it the subject is lost in a moral wilderness. The chaos of moral relativism is the result of a radical skepticism about truth claims and the authorities that make them, in particular religious authority. The subject is never adrift. It always has an orientation. It’s natural orientation is toward God, but our freewill allows us to steer by the polestar of our choosing, or even by multiplying, ever-changing polestars.
Society, which should guide and aid in forming the conscience, can just as readily mislead and corrupt it. Technology enables the endless production of new “truths” at an increasing pace. This dizzying moral disequilibrium goes a long way toward explaining the collective madness and anxiety of a modern world where the plainest truth can be doubted, with each person attempting to navigate by a compass oriented towards a different magnetic north. The only way to steer such a society is by coercion and force: a dictatorship of relativism.
Living in systems marked by indifference or hostility to the truth dims the ability of the conscience to discern good and evil. It blinds the eye and deafens the ear. In time, the conscience is silenced, and the subject becomes less fully human and more susceptible to lies. Surrendering the work of the individual conscience for the atmosphere of an amoral society erodes our humanity:
It makes us totally dependent on the prevailing opinions, and debases these with every passing day. Whoever equates conscience with superficial conviction identifies conscience with a pseudo-rational certainty, a certainty that in fact has been woven from self-righteousness, conformity, and lethargy. Conscience is degraded to a mechanism for rationalization, while it should represent the transparency of the subject for the divine, and thus constitute the very dignity and greatness of man.[21]
Post-Cartesian thought in general, and theological modernism in particular, is a triumph of the subjective over the objective. Modernists disagree on much, but most would agree with the radical subjectivism expressed by Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy in the decision for Planned Parenthood v. Casey: “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”[22]
Those aren’t, in fact, fluid “concepts,” but rather eternal verities. They are not defined: they are discovered. And true liberty only comes by seeking and following that which is eternally True, not by being tossed about by the raging, ever-shifting storms of modern ideologies. This was the message of Ratzinger’s homily before the conclave that elected him:
Today, having a clear faith based on the Creed of the Church is often labeled as fundamentalism. Whereas relativism, that is, letting oneself be "tossed here and there, carried about by every wind of doctrine", seems the only attitude that can cope with modern times. We are building a dictatorship of relativism that does not recognize anything as definitive and whose ultimate goal consists solely of one's own ego and desires…. An "adult" faith is not a faith that follows the trends of fashion and the latest novelty; a mature adult faith is deeply rooted in friendship with Christ. It is this friendship that opens us up to all that is good and gives us a criterion by which to distinguish the true from the false, and deceit from truth.[23]
Societies coalesce around a shared understanding of reality, and cannot function effectively or peacefully without it. If there are many competing “truths,” the powerful will define the truth that dominates. Democracy is no less tyrannical than a dictatorship in this case, since it becomes merely the tyranny of the mob, and in the technological age that mob can be generated, manipulated, deployed, and turned to a new target with frightening rapidity. Thus, the urgency of defining and defending the essential nature of conscience, and ensuring that laws protect conscience from the whims of the mob, becomes critical for surviving our times.
All of this provides the context for Ratzinger’s efforts to retrieve a lost language of conscience. In “Conscience and Truth,” he suggests that the prevailing Thomistic language of conscience has been compromised, so he offers a concept drawn from Socrates and given a new place in Catholic moral theology: anamnesis, which means “memory.”
Typically, when the church talks of “anamnesis,” she uses it to describe the liturgical action of the church as a “remembrance” of God’s saving deeds.[24] Ratzinger conceives it in a moral sense as our primal memory of God. Anamnesis is a recollection of what we already know. The process of recall allows us to access the very ground of our being, which orients us to do good and avoid evil. This is transcendent ground, which cuts across the subject/objective splits that are more vulnerable to relativism.
The first so-called ontological level of the phenomenon of conscience consists in the fact that something like an original memory of the good and true (they are identical) has been implanted in us, that there is an inner ontological tendency within man, who is created in the likeness of God, toward the divine. From its origin, man’s being resonates with some things and clashes with others. This anamnesis of the origin, which results from the god-like constitution of our being, is not a conceptually articulated knowing, a store of retrievable contents. It is, so to speak, an inner sense, a capacity to recall, so that the one whom it addresses, if he is not turned in on himself, hears its echo from within. He sees: That’s it! That is what my nature points to and seeks.[25]
We all have this “inner sense” and the capacity to respond to it: a capacity that is a gift of grace and strengthened in the sacraments. Belief in man’s capacity for truth made Hellenism (via Plato, Socrates, and Plotinus) capable of becoming a carrier of the message of Jesus, the Divine Logos. Ratzinger has frequently defended this Hellenizing influence, and even spoken of Socrates as a kind of secular “prophet” of Jesus. In his essay, Ratzinger only touches glancingly on the Socratic metaphor that inspired him, but it’s worth unfolding the notion from the source in more depth.
In the Theaetetus, Socrates claims that he himself has no wisdom, but is merely a “midwife” of ideas already within the student. This concept of midwifery gives us the useful Socratic method of maieusis, from the word for obstetrics, “which aims to bring a person’s latent ideas into clear consciousness.”[26] In an extended exchange, Socrates explains that midwives are older women who have borne children but are no longer fertile. They have drugs and incantations to bring on labor, make it easier, or even force a miscarriage. They are wise matchmakers. All these things are true about Socrates as well, except that his is “tending souls in labour, not bodies.”[27] He is
sterile in point of wisdom…not at all a wise person myself, nor have I any wise invention, offspring born of my own soul; but those who associate with me, although at first some of them seem very ignorant, yet, as our acquaintance advances, all of them to whom the god is gracious make wonderful progress…. And it is clear that they do this, not because they have ever learned anything from me, but because they have found in themselves many fair things and have brought them forth.[28]
We all have a memory of these “many fair things,” and the work of the Church is to “bring them forth.” Basil speaks in terms of “the spark of divine love which has been hidden in us,”[29] “implanted in us beforehand.”[30] For Augustine, and the Psalmist, it is stamped upon us:
The light of your countenance is stamped upon us, O Lord. This light is the complete and true good of humankind; it is seen not with the eyes but with the mind. The psalmist’s phrase, stamped upon us, suggests a coin stamped with the king’s picture. For the human individual has been made in God’s image and likeness, something which each has corrupted by sinning. Therefore true and eternal goodness is ours if we are minted afresh by being born again…You have given joy to my heart. Joy, therefore, is not to be sought outside oneself, by those who, still heavy in heart, love emptiness and chase falsehood. Rather, it is to be sought within, where the light of God’s face is stamped. For Christ dwells in the inner person, as the apostle says; and to Christ belongs the capacity to see the truth, for he said, I am truth (Jn 14:6). When the apostle asked, Do you presume to interrogate Christ, who speaks in me? (2 Cor 13:3), it was not a case of Christ speaking to him outwardly; Christ spoke within him, in his very heart, in that inner room where we ought to pray.[31]
Augustine, in particular, offers a model of knowing in which thought is the processing of things we know but have not uncovered. In his essays, Ratzinger doesn’t dwell upon Augustinian notions of memory and knowing, or the concept of divine illumination, but it’s worth at least touching on the distinctions introduced by Augustine into Platonic concepts of memory and knowing. For Plato, the memory we are recovering is present in the mind as a residue of pre-existence through the transmigration of souls. Naturally, Augustine rejects this, but he also rejects the idea that God has deposited fully formed ideas in the mind. Neither Augustine nor Ratzinger embrace a robust innatism, in which ready-made knowledge is merely deposited in the mind. Rather, we know things of the soul because we have a soul, which gives us the capacity to know the eternal truths. We know things of God because God is at work in us. The Imago Dei is formed in truth, and that truth calls to us through the obscuring noise of the world.
The anamnesis, then, is concealed within, like a beautiful painting that has been clouded by centuries of varnish, smoke, and the hands of other artists overpainting the original, or like an eye filmed over with a cataract. As when the restorationist carefully scrape away these accruals to restore a masterwork like the Sistine Capel or the Last Supper to its original luster, so does the Church in her teaching and sacraments restore the soul marred by the world. The evangelist, the catechist, and the holy witness is each like that art restorer, helping coax radiance from the layers of grime, or like an ophthalmologist restoring vision to an eye. The anamnesis is there within us all, but it must be set free by an encounter with the gospel. It’s not that the light of Christ doesn’t shine for all men. It’s that some close their eyes to it.
We encounter this anamnesis in John’s gospel, where the faithful remember the resurrected Jesus as a sudden epiphany, so that their hearts are burning within them. For the apostles, this was a direct experience of Christ. For all subsequent generations, it is the “foundational encounter with the Lord in baptism and the Eucharist, namely, the new anamnesis of faith, which unfolds, like the anamnesis of creation, in constant dialogue between within and without.”[32] This is not a matter of knowledge, as the Gnostics would suggest, but a knowing that is part of creation, capable of being fully awakened through the sacraments.
We can read 1 John 2:20 as a direct rebuke of the Gnostic sense of hidden wisdom, and a clear assertion of anamnesis: “But you have been anointed by the Holy One, and you all have knowledge.” This does not mean the Christian is infused with specific knowledge, but rather what Ratzinger calls the “the sureness of the Christian memory,”[33] which functions deep in the heart of the individual to discern what is genuinely of God and what is not. This is the conscience at work, attempting to save the true, the good, and the beautiful of God from their warping, obscuring, and twisting by the world. This process of discernment requires the lifelong nurturing and formation of a conscience in conformity with the magisterium, which, guided by the Holy Spirit, is the only reliable measure of truth in the world. As the custodian of Christian truth, the Church must fight the ongoing loss of memory, defending it against “the pressures of social and cultural conformity.”[34]
Conscience, then, becomes judgment exercised through and nurtured by the virtue of prudence, drawing from the anamnesis the knowledge it needs in particular circumstances. “The unity and integrity of man has an organ: the conscience.”[35]
Much of the conversation about modern morality is couched in the language of freedom, but is it freedom from something, or freedom for something? Genuine freedom seeks to understand a transcendent truth: something with an origin outside of ourselves. It’s “the conviction that was common to almost the whole of mankind before the modern period, the conviction that man’s Being contains an imperative; the conviction that he does not himself invent morality on the basis of calculations of expediency but rather finds it already present in the essence of things.”[36]
Christianity is a deeper freedom because it is grounded in eternals. This is what Ratzinger means when he draws on Newman to ground the teaching authority of the church in anamnesis. We are not imposing new truths from without, we are coaxing old truths from within. We are configured to the truth, but have been wrenched away from it by sin, society, and habit. He makes a striking connection between the moral law of Moses and freedom. Commenting on Deuteronomy 4:7 [37], he notes the nearness of God, who “makes himself permanently available, as it were, for the questions of his people…. Through the law he makes Israel wise and shows her the way a man should live, so as to live aright.” The law is not burden, but freedom; “not a foreign force of exterior origin, but the actual orientation of his own being.”[38]
The teaching authority of the Church is oriented to this same being, and thus imposes nothing. It coerces nothing. It forces nothing. But it offers everything. It is a guidebook to the forgotten country that is within all of us, and the sure evidence of its truth is the glimmer of recognition for each person who returns to that country and sees it for the first time with undimmed eyes. It is the journey which the poet T.S. Eliot spoke of when he wrote that “the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.”[39] Another poet in another century heard those same notes, that anamnesis, in the cries of a newborn child:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home[40]
Not in entire forgetfulness. The formation of the conscience, then, is a reawakening, a stirring of the anamnesis. Our duty to evangelize is found in this anamnesis. As the “ground of our existence,” this memory of the Creator is etched in the being of each person. This is what people hunger and search for, and what they replace with the shoddy imitations of the world. People respond to the gospel because it is written in their hearts, a memory of their maker. The Christian community stores the experience and wisdom of myriad choices and their results made over millennia, and passes that on: choose this, not that. As people of faith living under a dictatorship of relativism, it is the obligation of the Christian to help awaken people to what they already know, but have forgotten.
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Twomey, D. Vincent. Pope Benedict XVI: The Conscience of Our Age. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2007).
Newman, John Henry. The Works of Cardinal Newman: Difficulties of Anglicans, vol. 2. (Westminster, MD: Christian Classics, 1969).
Newman, John Henry. Certain Difficulties Felt By Anglicans In Catholic Teaching Considered. (London: 1900).
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Ratzinger, Joseph. Truth and Tolerance: Christian Belief and World Religions, trans. Henry Taylor. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004).
Ratzinger, Joseph. On Conscience: Two Essays (Philadelphia; San Francisco: The National Catholic Bioethics Center; Ignatius Press, 2007).
Ratzinger, Joseph. Homily Of His Eminence Card. Joseph Ratzinger Dean Of The College Of Cardinals, (18 April 2005). http://www.vatican.va/gpII/documents/homily-pro-eligendo-pontifice_20050418_en.html.
[1] D. Vincent Twomey, Pope Benedict XVI: The Conscience of Our Age (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2007), 37.
[2] The keynote address of the Tenth Bishops’ Workshop of the National Catholic Bioethics Center, on “Catholic Conscience: Foundation and Formation,” February 1991. Published in Joseph Ratzinger, On Conscience: Two Essays (Philadelphia; San Francisco: The National Catholic Bioethics Center; Ignatius Press, 2007). This edition is used throughout this paper.
[3] Joseph Ratzinger, On Conscience: Two Essays (Philadelphia; San Francisco: The National Catholic Bioethics Center; Ignatius Press, 2007), 25.
[4] Newman to the Duke of Norfolk, December 27, 1874, in The Works of Cardinal Newman: Difficulties of Anglicans, vol. 2 (Westminster, MD: Christian Classics, 1969), 261.
[5] Ratzinger, On Conscience, 25.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Ibid.
[8] John Henry Newman, Certain Difficulties Felt By Anglicans In Catholic Teaching Considered (London: 1900).
[9] Ratzinger, On Conscience, 17.
[10] Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, ed. The Aquinas Institute, trans. Laurence Shapcote, vol. 15 (Green Bay, WI; Steubenville, OH: Aquinas Institute; Emmaus Academic, 2018), 194.
[11] Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 192.
[12] Thomas Aquinas, A Summa of the Summa: The Essential Philosophical Passages of St. Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica, ed. Peter Kreeft (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1990), 425 footnote.
[13] Aquinas, ibid.
[14] Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 295.
[15] Ibid.
[16] Ibid.
[17] Ibid.
[18] Ratzinger, On Conscience, 16.
[19] Ibid, 20.
[20] Ibid, 38.
[21] Ratzinger, On Conscience, 21–22.
[22] John M. Haas, “Foreword,” in On Conscience: Two Essays (Philadelphia; San Francisco: The National Catholic Bioethics Center; Ignatius Press, 2007), 5.
[23] Josef Cardinal Ratzinger, Homily Of His Eminence Card. Joseph Ratzinger Dean Of The College Of Cardinals, (18 April 2005), http://www.vatican.va/gpII/documents/homily-pro-eligendo-pontifice_20050418_en.html
[24] Catholic Church, Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd Ed. (Washington, DC: United States Catholic Conference, 2000), 866.
[25] Ratzinger, On Conscience, 32.
[26] Catherine Soanes and Angus Stevenson, eds., Concise Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
[27] Plato, Theaetetus, Sophist: English Text, ed. E. Capps, T. E. Page, and W. H. D. Rouse, trans. H. N. Fowler, The Loeb Classical Library (London; New York: William Heinemann; G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1921), 35.
[28] Ibid.
[29] Ratzinger, On Conscience, 31.
[30] Ibid, 34.
[31] Saint Augustine, Expositions of the Psalms 1–32, ed. John E. Rotelle, trans. Maria Boulding, (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2000), 89–90.
[32] Ratzinger, On Conscience, 35.
[33] Ibid.
[34] Ibid, 36.
[35] Joseph Ratzinger, Truth and Tolerance: Christian Belief and World Religions, trans. Henry Taylor (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004), 206.
[36] Joseph Ratzinger, A Turning Point for Europe?: The Church in the Modern World, trans. Brian McNeil, Second Edition. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1994), 34.
[37] “For what great nation is there that has a god so near to it as the LORD our God is to us, whenever we call upon him?”
[38] Joseph Ratzinger, God Is Near Us: The Eucharist, the Heart of Life, ed. Stephan Otto Horn and Vinzenz Pfnür, trans. Henry Taylor (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2003), 104.
[39] T.S. Eliot, “Little Gidding,” Four Quartets, (San Diego: Harcourt, 1971),
[40] William Wordsworth, “Intimations of Immortality,” Wordsworth: Poetical Works (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 460.