CupCons

The Concept of Conscience in Early Christian Thought

J.A. McGuckin

The concept of an inner conscious sense of rightness and wrong, often thought of as an inbuilt moral compass set within human awareness by the Creator, is an idea that has been both warmly embraced, yet also sternly warned against, within the Christian tradition. The earliest writings of the Christian theologians show the roots of this ambivalence. The positive aspect of the notion venerates the inner voice of conscience as a quasi-revelation of the voice of God (or an angel) in the innermost heart or, alternatively, a manifestation of the God-given natural law of rational ethic in a person's life, whatever their stage of development. The negative approach to the idea tends to regard this kind of theological or moral inner certainty as a potentially dangerous spiritual state of discernment that always depends heavily on prior educational, ethical and religious formation and presuppositions (which may themselves be good or bad) but, at worst, is a possible high road to delusion, self-satisfaction and prejudice. The early Christian tradition is full of this ambivalence to the idea of conscience, both advocating its necessity yet questioning it; and arguably that foundational dichotomous attitude has not been resolved to this day.

The twin starting points for almost all early Christian thought on the matter were, of course, the scriptures and the writings of the Greek philosophers on ethics and transcendent epistemology: chiefly Plato, Aristotle and the Stoics. Both Plato and the Stoics in their various ways stressed the aspects of certain inner knowledge in relation to conscience; the one (at least in the iterations of Platonism in the Late Antique period) coming at it from the basis of the transcendental ideals mirrored in the spiritual capacity of the human (immortal) soul; and the others coming at it more concretely in terms of the theory of the universal natural law, to which an articulated human moral sense sought to conform by means of a liberated conscience. Late Platonism's affirmation of transcendentals greatly affected early Christian writers after the time of the New Testament. And, even from the time of the Apostle Paul, Stoic ideas on ethics as a return to a purer natural state of humanity chimed with Christian ideas on the advent of the reforming Kingdom of God. But the early Christian writers, Greek and Latin, were far from simple repetiteurs, badly harmonizing ill-meshing thoughts of their ancient predecessors. They were creative synthesists: and their form of synthesis rarely left untouched or untransfigured the raw materials they worked with. In that mix, which was the Patristic reworking of the Greek philosophical and biblical scholia that they adopted, the evangelical and apostolic dicta took preeminence. In this respect it might be illuminative to briefly review the philosophic and apostolic data they worked from.

Conscience in early Greek semantics begins as a deeply epistemological notion: synoida, syneidesis, the being aware of something. The pre-Christian Greek thinkers made it an interior and increasingly moral factor by making it reflexive: synoida emauto – “I know within myself.” Used in such a way within the Platonic dialogues, Socrates, for example, ponders on why the Delphic Oracle has called him the “wisest of men” when he himself is aware only that he knows so little. This crisis of “awareness” stimulates his entire approach to establishing the “proper” human life: namely to seek after wisdom by penetrative reflection teasing out a puzzle or an aporia. In the earlier levels of Greek thinking, there is little attempt to connect the terms with any theological determinants: the dominant hope was to establish the standards of reality, whether in terms of cosmology or anthropology. An individual learning to discern true motive and a clear awareness of the standards of his or her personal behaviour was performing a similar function in terms of consciousness, as was a thinker applying acute observation to natural phenomena and from them deducing true cosmic causes and effects in place of mythological ones. In this regard Aristotle made a lasting impact with his observation that moral behaviour in humans was more an issue of habituation than random insight. Moral Habitus had both to be educated in a person, and practised assiduously, only thus did it become arête, virtue or excellence.

By the First Century B.C.E. Greco-Roman and Jewish writers had widely adopted this notion of syneidesis as moral awareness and brought it into a more overtly religious domain. Plutarch, for example, writes about the burning force of a bad conscience which constantly reminds us of our sins and calls to mind the possible torments of hell. The very first reference in ancient secular literature to the concept of a “clear conscience” (kathara syneidesis) comes in an Egyptian papyrus of 136 C.E., where the author claims to have no awareness of any charge that may be laid against him. The Jewish philosopher, Philo, who was closely read by many of the later Greek Fathers of the Church, was one of the main writers who, using the Greek version of the Hebrew Scriptures known as the Septuagint, brought the idea of syneidesis to the fore as the quintessential biblical notion of a pure conscience. In this sense the concept of a “pure heart” was frequently found in the Psalms, and through them also made its way into the wider Christian consciousness via the monastic movement, which took the Psalter as its daily prayer book. For the Old Testament scribes, however, cleanness of heart was as much a matter of cultic and ritual purity as interior moral standing, though with the later prophets the moral impetus in the notion began to take the centre stage.

In his Late Antique exegetical labours Philo forged the first of the syntheses between Hellenistic moral-philosophical concerns, and Hebraic ritual notions of purity; in the cause of re-interpreting the demands of the Torah for his now thoroughly Hellenized Jewish readership in Alexandria. The philosopher Christian Maurer calls him, “the first to think through theologically a doctrine of conscience.” For Philo, and for most of the Greek Fathers following after, the primary scriptural authorities for this were the Old Testament passages that spoke of keeping a “clean heart,” largely understood as a pure conscience. This idea of conscience was intimately related to the biblical notion of repentance (metanoia), and thus conscience served for both the Hellenistic Jews and the Early Christians as primarily a mechanism of remembrance of misbehaviour that served, in turn, as a stimulus to return to the right way of living: orthopraxis.

In the non-Christian Latin-speaking world, the two main gatekeepers of this concept were Cicero and (more so) Seneca, who both brought Stoic philosophical reflection to bear heavily in their rendering of the key term of moral awareness as conscientia. Cicero already uses the argument that it is conscience that largely regulates humankind's behaviour. He describes it as having a “great force” and a “heavy weight” in and of itself. In Latin literature the turn from the more generic awareness of syneidesis meaning awareness, to specifically moral and spiritual (soul-centred) or religious reflection, is made more commonly evident. Caesar, for example, speaks of the animi conscientia or consciousness of the spirit. This trend was immediately picked up and used by the Latin Apologists among the Christians as a way of showing that the intellectual tradition of the Church was in broad harmony with the best traditions and aspirations of Romanitas, rather than (as persecuting authorities argued) a contradiction of classical values that needed to be extirpated. The Christian rhetoricians Tertullian, Cyprian, Minucius Felix, and Lactantius all follow this path, and in so doing deeply influenced the subsequent ecclesial tradition's approach to conscience from a Neo-Stoic perspective.

The Apostle Paul himself gave no clear definition of what he meant by conscience (syneidesis) though he used the term often (fourteen times) and thereby established the word with apostolic authority for later Christianity. More than half of these instances relate to his discussion whether Christians can legitimately eat meat that was previously offered in the cult of the gods: the custom of most urban butcheries in antiquity. He describes the crisis between the “weak” of the community whose conscience forbids them this contaminated food, and that of the more sagacious who have more fully realized their freedom in a more enlightened awareness of such matters (on the argument that the gods do not exist anyway, and no malign influence can attach itself to a believer in Christ). He ends, however, by appealing to the stronger-minded (whom he has commended) to follow the example of the weaker ones, so that they will not scandalise the weak who believe their conscience has indicated the only right moral path for the Church. So, here from the outset Paul validates the role of conscience as a moral guide, and simultaneously indicates that it is by no means an infallible compass, and must be subordinate to the deeper perception of an understanding of salvation (soteria), which, for Paul, is led by the overarching sense of how Christ, through his death and resurrection, has set the Church free both from the strictures of Jewish law and pagan religion. This encompassing mystery of salvation in Christ is, for Paul, a transcending gnosis that takes precedence over all things and re-orientates all things, conscience included.

Paul also sent out another warning shot about conscience when he made a marked contrast between his own inner sense of righteousness and the judgement of God who placed that type of conscience under judgement. This was to affirm his doctrine of salvation by grace: that one's state of moral rectitude did not emanate from self-training (askesis) or achievement (arete); but from the gift (charis) of God alone. Paul believed a person was only righteous if God declared him to be such (through Christ). Peace of heart and mind could thus only be found by trusting in the mercy of a forgiving God in the knowledge that no human moral achievement would ever suffice, and no self-satisfaction with one's moral achievement could be anything other than sinfulness. For Paul, consciousness of being graced is supplied to the conscience (understood as spiritual awareness) by the awareness of a spiritual harmony with the indwelling Spirit. This Pauline trajectory stood in marked contrast with most Hellenistic moral thought, and a large amount of Jewish reflection too. It was thus the sign of wisdom and an authentic connection to salvation to be ever uneasy in one's (human) conscience as one assessed one's manner of life and attitudes against the standard of Christ's Gospel. On other occasions, Paul suggests that those who are not “in Christ” (en Christo) will be expected to observe that law which is “written on the heart,” a duty that falls to Jew and pagan alike, and in which the conscience serves as a guiding compass to a high degree.

Paul's complex mystical approach took some time to be absorbed by Christian intellectuals after him. The first generation of the Greek Apostolic Fathers in the century immediately succeeding the New Testament, generally fell back to reliance on what had by then become something of the cliché among Stoic and Jewish writers, of the conscience as that good voice in the heart commending pure actions by its quietness, and frowning on evil tendencies by its agitation. Never an active dynamic we might note, but rather a passive form of litmus response. The frequently repeated terms used in the very early second century Christian writers generally concern inculcating “a good and blameless conscience” (syneidesis). But most of the writing simply echoes the generic moral paranetic discourses of contemporary late Antique Jewish and Stoic thinkers, content with repeating generic forms of the so-called Roman Household Code to advocate what was good (conformist) citizenship. It was a theme that was found at times in St. Paul also.

The Church's first serious, and arguably greatest, exegete of scripture who could claim a solid philosophical education, was Origen of Alexandria (185-254). His theory of exegesis approached the scripture as more of a body of oracular literature than any coherent historical evolution of traditions. He taught that the divine Wisdom, or Logos, of God had presented scriptures across the ages as a treasure that could only be unlocked once one had the proper key to understanding. It was not, in other words, internally logically coherent or self-explanatory in any of its messages. Truth was hidden and clues were given by the Logos to be recognized by the spiritually refined. For those who are not spiritually mature the literal word often led them astray because they were either unwilling or unable to lift their minds on high. But for those who were attuned to the deeper meanings hidden in the texts by the Divine Logos, it was clear that all things were meant to lead up away from matter and flesh towards an increasing purity of heart that allowed one the possibility of communion with the Logos who hid himself from the crass and the foolish (Alogoi). Origen taught consistently that scripture thus had to be read not historically and sequentially (as if it were a slow linear development) but eschatologically – out of time – and in the realisation that its hidden oracular truths were given in accordance with the mystical profundity of the original messengers who served as vehicles of the Logos, and also in the measure of the spiritual profundity of the reader who approaches them for insight. In short, there was a steep hierarchy of value in scripture.

To begin with, all the Old Testament had to be read in the light of (and subservient to) the New. (Origen was the first to introduce this distinction of Old and New Covenants). But more so, certain writers weighed more than others, and they were, as it were (using a notion borrowed from Rabbi Akiba) “the first fruits of the first fruits.” This, for him, meant that the two greatest authorities in all scripture were the two prophetic seers, John and Paul. After them came the Book of Psalms (seen by Origen as heavily filled with direct, non-historical, utterances by the eternal Logos) after that came Isaiah, the synoptic Gospels, and the Apostolic epistles, then other New Testament writings and finally the remainder of Old Testament books. This strict hierarchy of interpretive lenses means that Pauline literature assumed a very strong dominance on Origen's exegesis. Given that his biblical approach was so heavily used in the Greek Christian world after him, both by his friends and enemies, it meant that the Pauline doctrine on any major topic was pushed to the fore in Christian theological reflection ever after. After Origen, conscience among the Christians once more assumes the resonances of Paul's mystical teaching riveted to the wider Greek tradition of epistemological awareness. In short: the moral sense became the most acute form of human consciousness, and a border point, a liminal space, where refined consciousness (logos) merged into divine awareness (nous).

Already for some of the more philosophically advanced Greek Christians of the Second century onwards, syneidesis in the human being was preeminently understood as the “awareness,” or consciousness of God and divine things. For Clement of Alexandria this awareness is one of the preeminent energies (dynameis) of the soul. It is the force which, from the soul's knowledge of the exemplar of divine things, gives the moral compass to a believer's life. Clement calls it the best and strongest foundation of the correct life.

However, it was Origen who really elucidated the disconnected ideas present in Paul and who transformed the whole notion into a deeply mystical approach. For Origen, conscience was first and foremost a matter of acute awareness: wisdom (gnosis). It was the reflected energy in a human being of the Supreme Wisdom of God (Logos). It aroused within a human the realisation that each one was an eternal soul. Moral conscience, therefore, was ultimately the mystical sense of a remembered identity (the origin of the being of souls in eternal bliss with God) in communion with the Logos before the lapse to time and space. This lifted the moral imperative to ontological status: being ethical was not just a return to good behaviours, but more so to the springs of immortal being. Origen here was trying to merge aspects of late Platonic epistemology with Christian eschatology. He would get into hot water for this view, both in his lifetime and posthumously; but having purged pre-existence ontology from standard doctrine, the Church took this theological sense of moral conscience as a mystical apprehension of the divine presence to its heart. The idea would rise to great precedence in later tradition, particularly moved on by the monastic movement and its deep interest in the scrutiny of the inner mind and its motives.

Origen marked a radical return to close attention to the text of Paul. Like the Apostle he approached the notion of conscience from a mystical perspective: a matter of the sensing of the indwelling power of the grace of God. The Logos is, for Origen, the source of the whole structure and inner meaning and dynamic of the cosmos, especially the “likeness” to God Himself (homoiosis) which, as being the supreme divine Image (eikon) in the Cosmos Himself, the Logos has personally located in the human soul, especially rooting it in its higher dynamics of consciousness. For Origen, this close relation of “the image and the likeness” (divine Logos and human spiritual syneidesis) fulfills the text in Genesis that defines the original creation of humankind: “Let us make Man in our own image and likeness.” Using Platonic cosmology, where it suits, Origen explains that this consciousness of God is synonymous with the entrance into all wisdom (gnosis) since the soul (the individual considered as a spiritual consciousness) is a-temporal, and indeed the knowledge of God is a remembrance of a time before time when all souls enjoyed a deep ontological union with the Divine Logos, which now (in the fallen material condition) the lapsed soul struggles to rediscover. The return to this former pre-earthly glory (Apokatastasis) is driven (on earth's moral training ground) by increasingly wise recollection of the glory (doxa), and by the force of divine Eros which transfigures the soul through love. For Origen, here following Paul to a larger degree than Plato, this ascentive love is the force (dynamis) which makes moral effort, and the ascetical endeavour which underlies it (virtue as habitus), synonymous with mystical communion with the Logos. For Origen conscience is, therefore an epistemological factor, as it was with Plato; but more than Plato or any of the later Neo-Platonists, the ascentive force is divine eros leading to communion. This is why it is, therefore, quintessentially a mystical conception of conscience. Origen's magnificent Commentary on the Song of Songs is perhaps the best single work to demonstrate the unfolding of that master-theme; and it was a work that was a major, indeed overwhelmingly dominant, influence on the Latin, Greek and Syriac monastic traditions of the following millennium.

The Byzantine monastic fathers particularly took up Origen's themes and in John Klimakos' Ladder of Divine Ascent, an early seventh century book that was used (from its inception to the present day) as the training manual for a monk, syneidesis is not merely the moral consciousness of good and evil, but primarily the sense of divine indwelling presence that has to be nurtured and developed as a spiritual faculty in the soul, since it will then provide the full direction of a life well lived. This is the guarding (phylaxis) of the heart, which becomes one of the most dominant themes in later spiritual writing. The means of this guarding of the heart are the related attitudes of nepsis (focused awareness) and prosoche (attentiveness). The later Christian writers who continued Origen's tradition, such as Gregory of Nazianzus (c. 329-390), Gregory of Nyssa (c. 335-394), and Maximus the Confessor (c. 580-662), and the later Byzantine monastics who read them closely, also continued to stress the ascentive power of divine eros that made the soul of the believer like the lover in the Song of Songs, always seeking restlessly for its Beloved, and shaping all its moral and intellectual energies for the goal of loving communion. The strong link between this loving fidelity, and obedience to the moral norms, had long ago been established in the renowned mandatum of “Maundy” Thursday, when Christ said to his disciples: “If you love me, keep my commandments.”

The Latin Christians writers generally follow the lead of the Greek tradition in terms of the semantics of conscience. The word's first use (conscientia) is again to signify a state of “common awareness” (con-scientia), knowing something along with others: so a standard form of social belief. The Christian rhetorician Tertullian adopts and develops this usage when he uses the verb conscio to mean to “know well.” Used as a genitive object, however, the pre-Christian Latin writers used it to signify “awareness of evil behaviour.” The Stoic use, as demonstrated by Cicero, had spoken extensively about the moral good of a quiet conscience that is to be sought by the wise. This influence tends to predominate among the Latin Fathers, giving a lot of references a certain passive cast. Tertullian, however, uses the idea of freedom of conscience extensively to argue against the immorality of the Roman penal law, which classified all the acts of a religio illicita (which Christianity was in his day) as treasonable behaviour demanding the penalty of execution. His argument that religion is that which quintessentially demands full freedom of choice in order to be practised sincerely, did not hold much water at the time he made it, though it came to have a more dominant resonance in later times and served for subsequent Christian generations (even when they did not observe the principle too well) that the foundational Christian tradition had claimed freedom of worship in a society as an axiomatic right of humankind.

Lactantius (c.250-325), one of the wittiest and most learned of the Latin Church Apologists, considers the Stoic tradition on conscience carefully before slyly commenting on its defective theological basis:

And let no one imagine that things go well if there has been no witness to one's misdeed: for all things are known to Him in whose sight we live; and if we are able to conceal anything from all around us, we certainly cannot conceal it from God, from whom nothing can be hidden and nothing kept secret. Seneca closed his exhortations on this subject with an admirable sentiment: "There is," he says, "some great deity, and greater than can be imagined; and for him we endeavour to live. Let us make ourselves acceptable to him. What use is it if our conscience is constrained, when we ever lie open to the sight of God." What can be added with greater truth by him who knew God than has here been said by a man who was ignorant of true religion?

Here Lactantius was affirming the Stoic moral tradition of interiority but contradicting Seneca's theory that the consistently cultivated habitus of virtue would accumulate to a coherent guide for living (ars vivendi). The Christian theologian insists that morality is not a natural gift within human capacity to fulfill (as evidenced he says by the consistent failure of Roman philosophers to achieve the good life either individually or societally). It is rather a divine grace that lifts humanity out of an animal condition and gives mankind its true nature: homo erectus, the transcendent creature.

Observing the use of the term conscience in such later writers as Ambrose (c. 340-397) or Augustine (354-430), however, one notices immediately how much reliance they both give to the doctrine of the Stoics that the whole point of a conscience is to keep it quiet. The heavy reliance of Cyprian, Lactantius, Ambrose and Augustine (and through them the whole subsequent Latin patristic tradition) on Cicero is especially noteworthy. Ambrose's treatises (especially his book On Duty) profoundly rely on Cicero's De Officiis as a primary source, and Lactantius' De Opificio Dei, is evidently an attempt to offer a Christian version of the same. Ambrose attempts the same Christianizing plagiarism, but not as effectively as Lactantius. Often Ambrose could more or less be mistaken for Cicero. His concept of conscience is a simple repetition of Tullius: “Therefore the blessedness of individuals must not be estimated at the value of their known wealth, but according to the voice of their conscience within them. For this, as a true and uncorrupted judge of punishments and rewards, decides between the deserts of the innocent and the guilty.” Nevertheless, Lactantius' and Ambrose's Christianizing “slant” is typical of the other Latin ecclesiastical authors in two ways: firstly for bringing in more concretely and directly than the Stoics would, the concept of conscience's reliance on the immanent presence of the Divinity. Writing to Eugenius, for example, Ambrose puts it like this: “Although the imperial power is immense, still consider this O Emperor: how great is God. He sees the hearts of all; He questions the innermost conscience; He knows all things before they happen; He knows the innermost things of your breast. You yourself would never allow yourself to be deceived, so why would you desire to conceal anything from God?” Conscience, for the Christians, thus becomes more than just the effective moral compass within human nature, set there by the Creator, but also, in a real sense, the oculus dei searching within the heart.

In his more overtly episcopal writings (letters to the faithful and treatises relating to scriptural interpretation), this God-centred (what we may again call mystical) approach is more to the fore in Ambrose. Writing privately to his sister he speaks of conscience in an evangelical and spiritually Christocentric manner reminiscent of Paul: “The one who purifies his conscience from the defilement of sin is the one who pours water upon the feet of Christ, for Christ walks within the breast of each one. Take heed, then, never to have your conscience polluted, for then you would begin to defile the feet of Christ. Be careful that He never finds a thorn of wickedness within you, so that when He walks in you His heel may not be wounded.”

Augustine had, undoubtedly, the greatest long-term influence on the Latin Christian tradition. In relation to the notion of conscience he does not especially develop significantly further what Lactantius and Ambrose had already prefigured. He does not address the matter directly in any specific treatise for example. But he did change the overall scenario of moral reflection. His monumental City of God best shows his mature thinking in this regard when he considers, from the long perspective, the nature of social ethics. Augustine has been well described as the initiator of “realism-ethic.” What that means, in short, is that he taught that the human individual conscience was so deeply corrupted by the race's fall into sin from its early origins, that pride and selfishness are engrained in everything that a human does. From such a corrupt matrix nothing purely good can come, except as a result of the gift of divine grace that lifts humanity out from its natural tendency to lapse into evil. In practical terms, social power, even that of masters over slaves, is tolerable in preference to the anarchy that would result if men and women were allowed freed rein. It is a deeply pessimistic view of the human condition that the Greek Fathers of the Church never shared or endorsed; but it led Augustine to have a severely skeptical view of the power of the human conscience to move a person towards reformative action. Conscience could convict. It could not necessarily stimulate the good life in practice. For Augustine, only love could so move a human being: and the source of that dynamic energy that could transform was none other than the love of God Himself, who had fashioned the heart and its moral sensibility for the purposes of calling the heart out of darkness into light. In the following passage he begins by reflecting on the processes involved in a correct (non-literal, but spiritually symbolic) reading of the import of scripture, and from this basis moves on to what conscience means to him:

And, therefore, if a man fully understands that "the goal of the commandment is love, out of a pure heart, and a good conscience, and a faith unfeigned," and is bent upon making all his understanding of Scripture to bear upon these three graces, he may come to the interpretation of these books with an easy mind. For while the apostle says "love," he adds "out of a pure heart," to provide against anything being loved but that which is worthy of love. And he joins with this "a good conscience," in reference to hope; for, if a man has the burden of a bad conscience, he despairs of ever reaching that which he believes in and loves. And in the third place (Paul) says: "and of faith unfeigned." For if our faith is free from all hypocrisy, then we both abstain from loving what is unworthy of our love, and by living uprightly we are able to indulge the hope that our hope shall not be in vain.

Here, Love is the energy, conscience again is a compass of sorts, and divine grace directs the whole movement, especially through the close and formative study of the divine oracles in scripture. This is the fourfold system of Augustine: and in this regard it is useful to remember that it would be another millennium before the invention of Christian ethics as a separate intellectual discipline. Even so, this represents some of the earliest form of virtue ethics which elsewhere was reduced down to one of Augustine's most famous moral aphorisms: Ama et fac quod vis – namely, love first and then you may do whatever your heart desires – for if one truly loves then the desired result will inevitably be godly and thus good. Conscience for Augustine has value as a compass, but the primary energy in a moral life comes rather from the grace of divine love, as it is confirmed through the twin formative influences of scriptural teaching (about right and wrong) and the call to serve the neighbour selflessly (another form of love). As he puts it in his catechism: “Purity of life has reference to the love of God and one's neighbor; soundness of doctrine to the knowledge of God and one's neighbor. Every man, moreover, has hope in his own conscience, to the extent that he can perceive that he has attained to the love and knowledge of God and his neighbor.”

This, almost tangential, approach to the nature of spiritual interiority had a deeply formative effect on all later Latin Christian thought. Augustine's influence was so dominant in European Christendom that until the high middle ages, there was hardly another theological voice present, and even the earlier Fathers were processed through his theories. In the Greek East, in its classically formative period, from the fourth through to the seventh centuries, Augustine was not read at all. As we have seen, here it was largely Origen's permeating influence that was taken forward in an increasingly ascetical dimension to the Christian understanding of conscience. In both Latin and Greek Christian iterations, conscience, therefore, was never just an inner voice as to the rightness or wrongness of a thing, but rather a more sophisticated scripturally rooted set of reflections on the nature of spiritual identity.