Claims of conscience– by men like Thomas More, Martin Luther, even Henry VIII– were conspicuous and formative at the beginning of the modern age. And such claims are conspicuous still, at what Barzun and others have regarded as the end of that age. But although the genealogies may be traceable and the family resemblances discernible, the modern conscience is something quite different from what Thomas More invoked. In comparison with its progenitors, the modern conscience is no humble servant of God and the church or the scriptures; it is proud, inflated, and free-standing. It is closely entwined with the associated and even more conspicuous modern themes of “authenticity” and “dignity.” And its implications bear out More’s fears that conscience as it was coming to be understood contained the seeds of social and even personal disintegration.
Today, observing the destructive fruit of such seeds in the frightening polarization and fragmentation of our time, we might look back and wonder what went wrong. How did commitments that promised such gains for freedom and human dignity, and that have in some respects delivered on those promises in spectacular fashion, come to have such corrosive consequences of late? Where did conscience go off the rails? Who was, or who is, to blame?
Was it Luther? More seems to have thought so. Madison? Today there is a small but growing body of critics, sometimes clustered around an ideal of “integralism,” who would not hesitate to indict the “Father of the Constitution” for some of the evils we face today. Brennan? Though much admired, the justice surely has had his share of critics. One younger reader tells me that Brennan is not nearly the cultural icon today that he was, say, a quarter century ago.
But this is not the place either to accuse or to absolve any of these men or their fellows. And indeed, considered against the broad backdrop of the history we have been reflecting on, there may seem to be a kind of exonerating inevitability to these developments. Our examinations may thus support a sort of darker version of “Whig history.” Whig history is usually understood to be optimistic in character, viewing the past as somehow leading inexorably to the enlightened and humane state of affairs that we enjoy today. By contrast, the history we have considered here seems to run in the opposite direction-- promising and for a time providing enlightenment and emancipation, but culminating in fragmentation. And the label “Whig history” is usually thought to denote a kind of fallacy. But in this case are we dealing with a fallacy? In the men and events that we have studied, doesn’t there seem to be a kind of tragic inevitability?
So Luther no doubt played an important role in the breakup of Christendom, as Thomas More believed. And yet, from a distance, doesn’t that breakup seem pretty much foreordained? Hadn’t history been heading in that direction for some time, with Wycliffe and Ockham and Hus? And could the tenuously maintained, patched-together unity of Christendom really have persisted given the expansion of Western civilization into the Americas and elsewhere, and also given the scientific revolution that (“Enlightened” critics notwithstanding) medieval Christianity itself was bringing about? Moreover, as we saw in Act One, Thomas More himself was unable to contain the inherently subjective and subversive dimensions of conscience.
In retrospect, therefore, the operations of conscience in supporting the proliferation of pluralism, and the accompanying fragmentation, seem irrepressible. By James Madison’s time, that pluralism was already far advanced: it was not something that Madison mischievously concocted as part a subtle, long-range plan of social subversion. And given such conditions, wasn’t Madison’s effort to enshrine conscience as a unifying ideal by partially detaching it from its Christian foundations-- and, more subtly but ominously, from the historical commitment to formulated theological truth-- a necessary response to such pluralism? Notwithstanding the corrosive consequences of that detachment over the longer term? What else could he have done?
In the same way, William Brennan’s compartmentalization relegating religious truth to the private domain– first for himself and then for the nation as a whole-- may well have portended the kind of social and personal fragmentation we have considered in the last chapter. But Brennan and so many others– political figures like John Kennedy, philosophers like John Rawls-- have thought this compartmentalization to be necessary. Necessary and also just, given the country’s religious pluralism. Is it clear that they have been wrong on that point? What was the alternative, exactly?
