The Socrates of the Platonic dialogues is himself the result of a contact. Romano Guardini wrote in his Death of Socrates: “It is perhaps Socrates who possesses in the highest degree this power of touching and moving people.” The fate of Socrates is one of the principal themes in the history of the western mind. He was killed by the Athenian jury for corrupting the youth, for he told them to follow the interiority than the consuetudes in 399 B.C. Benedict Spinoza (1955) speaks of Him as the truest symbol of heavenly wisdom. Hegel called him the “inventor of morality” and Heidegger the “pure thinker of the West.”
Speaking at the 10th Workshop for Bishops February 1991 Dallas, Texas, on “Conscience and Truth”, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger said that morality of conscience and morality of authority may appear two opposing models, but conscience and authority have to meet in truth. Ratzinger quotes Albert Gorres, a German psychologist to explain whoever is no longer capable of perceiving guilt is spiritually ill, a “living corpse, a dramatic character’s mask.” Gorres says: “Monsters, among other brutes, are the ones without guilt feelings.” About the Pharisee who no longer knows that he too has guilt and has a completely clear conscience, Gorres says: “But this silence of conscience makes him impenetrable to God and men, while the cry of conscience which plagues the tax collector makes him capable of truth and love.”… “This diagnosis is confirmed by what has come to light since the fall of Marxist systems in Eastern Europe. The noblest and keenest minds of the liberated peoples speak of an enormous spiritual devastation which appeared in the years of the intellectual deformation. They speak of a blunting of the moral sense which is more significant loss and danger than the economic damage which was done.” But, then, the silencing of conscience leads to the dehumanization of the world and to moral danger, if one does not work against it.
When the subject of Newman and conscience is raised, the famous sentence form his letter to the Duke of Norfolk immediately comes to mind: “Certainly, if I am obliged to bring religion into after-dinner toasts, (which indeed does not seem quite the thing), I shall drink—to the Pope, if you please,—still to conscience first and to the Pope afterwards.” His allegiance to the Pope is after His conscience. The whole radicality of today’s dispute over ethics and conscience, its centre, becomes plain. The history of thought is the quarrel between Socrates-Plato and the sophists in which the fateful decision between two fundamental positions has been rehearsed. Cardinal Ratzinger calls Socrates “the prophet of Jesus Christ”, for he is rooted in the fundamental question: “Socrates’ taking up of this question bestowed on the way of philosophizing inspired by him a kind of salvation- historical privilege and made it an appropriate vessel for the Christian Logos. For, with the Christian Logos, we are dealing with liberation through truth and to truth.” What characterizes man as man is not that he asks about the “can” but about the “should” and that he opens himself to the voice and demands of truth. He continues: “It seems to me that this was the final meaning of the Socratic search and it is the profoundest element in the witness of all martyrs. They attest to the fact that man’s capacity for truth is a limit on all power and a guarantee of man’s likeness to God. It is precisely in this way that the martyrs are the great witnesses of conscience, of that capability given to man to perceive the ‘should’ beyond the ‘can’ and thereby render possible real progress, real ascent.” The martyrs were people who could read the interiority and arche-writing within their flesh and heart and think, dissent the external authority to the point of death. “When Gentiles who have not the law do by nature what the law requires, they are a law to themselves, even though they do not have the law. They show that what the law requires is written on their hearts while their conscience also bears witness …” (Romans 2:14 ). The priests and laity in the archdiocese of Ernakulam-Angamly are on the path of fast unto death against the imposition of the synod of bishops who refuse to think and dialogue. The imposition is simply a retaliation for alleging violations of laws of the Church and society in the archbishop’s sale of property and Vatican removing him from the administration of the archdiocese. Socrates converted his trial into a moral examination of Athens, sealing his fate. The self-examination earned him a place close to that of Jesus Christ and other religious leaders who were regarded as the great moral paradigms of human existence.