War and Conscience: A Narrative and Dialogical Account
Adam Tietje, DMin, ThD Student, Duke Divinity School
Until recently, the lens for the psychotherapeutic treatment of war veterans was that of trauma, specifically, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Certainly, trauma accounts for a significant amount of the suffering of veterans on the other side of war. Yet, war is not just what happens, it is, more significantly, something one does. Soldiers are not passive recipients of the violence of their enemies, but agents who initiate violent encounters and who respond to violence in kind. Soldiers are agents who making split-second decisions with irrevocable consequences. The consequences of such acts (or the perceived failure or inability to act) can be devastating; a child is killed in the crossfire, a friend bleeds out after a failed medical intervention, a prisoner is tortured, or human remains are desecrated. The suffering of soldiers after war as a result of similar such acts has come to be known by clinicians and others as moral injury. In their seminal 2009 study, Brett Litz et al. suggest that “perpetrating, failing to prevent, or bearing witness to acts that transgress deeply held moral beliefs” may be as emotionally, psychologically, socially, and spiritually harmful as PTSD (and perhaps much more so). In this new moral injury paradigm of psychotherapeutic intervention, the primary focus is the alleviation of guilt and shame. Set against the backdrop of a vague conception of conscience, moral injury is variously referred to as a wound of conscience, a violation of conscience, or even the damaging of conscience itself. The study by Litz et al., for example, posits that moral injury is indicative of an “intact conscience.”
Even as some notion of conscience is in the background of conversations about moral injury, conscience itself remains undefined in the literature. What is conscience? Giving voice to a modern conception of conscience with the individual as the center of freedom and truth, Fitche famously suggests: “conscience is infallible.” Freud’s account of the superego points in the direction of a socially-conditioned and deterministic account of conscience. Both drift toward dehumanization and abuses of power. This paper, following Joseph Ratzinger, makes the case for conscience as an event that is both narrative and dialogical. Conscience is narrative in that it is the stories one constructs before and after one acts. Conscience is dialogical because these stories are shaped in and for conversation with others, but ultimately in dialogue with the truth. For Ratzinger, this is truly dialogical because truth, for Christians, is the person of Jesus Christ. Acts of conscience are thus events that bear witness to the truth. Without an external referent of truth, the collapse of conscience into subjectivity or determinism is inevitable. This paper argues that what present clinical models of moral injury fail to properly account for is truth beyond subjectivity. Thus, forgiveness, in these clinical models, is the forgiveness one grants to oneself. However, true forgiveness of the guilty conscience comes in dialogue with the truth. In the Christian tradition, the truth that condemns is the same truth that liberates.
Even as some notion of conscience is in the background of conversations about moral injury, conscience itself remains undefined in the literature. What is conscience? Giving voice to a modern conception of conscience with the individual as the center of freedom and truth, Fitche famously suggests: “conscience is infallible.” Freud’s account of the superego points in the direction of a socially-conditioned and deterministic account of conscience. Both drift toward dehumanization and abuses of power. This paper, following Joseph Ratzinger, makes the case for conscience as an event that is both narrative and dialogical. Conscience is narrative in that it is the stories one constructs before and after one acts. Conscience is dialogical because these stories are shaped in and for conversation with others, but ultimately in dialogue with the truth. For Ratzinger, this is truly dialogical because truth, for Christians, is the person of Jesus Christ. Acts of conscience are thus events that bear witness to the truth. Without an external referent of truth, the collapse of conscience into subjectivity or determinism is inevitable. This paper argues that what present clinical models of moral injury fail to properly account for is truth beyond subjectivity. Thus, forgiveness, in these clinical models, is the forgiveness one grants to oneself. However, true forgiveness of the guilty conscience comes in dialogue with the truth. In the Christian tradition, the truth that condemns is the same truth that liberates.