Professor Sorabji's book covers a vast sweep, from fifth century Athens to contemporary India and the United States. He gives a history of the concept of conscience, taking in some of the problems of freedom that it raised in specific contexts. He aims to identify a ‘core concept’, which he sees as more or less stable, and which he hopes can thrive without the support of religion.
Inevitably his coverage, in a relatively short book, is selective. His story begins with the Greek tragedians and Plato, where he claims that the original concept involved the idea of splitting the person in two, one of which shared a guilty secret with the other. Here, he argues, there was no need for God. He continues via St Paul, to note the fallibility of conscience, and St Augustine, to examine his change of heart over using law to combat heretics, pausing to take in St Thomas and St Bonaventure, then Luther and Calvin, as representatives of their respective ages. Then the route switches mostly to England, with summaries of various positions engendered by civil war and its aftermath, ranging from Hobbes to the Levellers, on the freedom of the individual conscience before the state. Locke's pleas for toleration (though not for Catholics) could not be freely published in England until the arrival of William of Orange. With Butler, Adam Smith, Rousseau and J.S. Mill begin explorations of the basis of conscience in ‘sentiment’, taken further by Nietzsche and Freud with their critique of what they see as pathological guilt. Tolstoy, followed by Gandhi, returned conscience to the centre of the political stage. Finally, Sorabji tackles contemporary issues of conscientious objection, in particular in medicine and warfare, and freedom of speech.
En route, Sorabji discovers potential for secularising the concept, for example in Adam Smith's imagining of an impartial spectator assessing one's actions. However, the big difficulty for Sorabji's secular defence of conscience, as he recognises himself, comes not from believers but from critics of Christianity. It was Nietzsche and Freud whose different versions of anti-realism created a hermeneutic with which to read claims to express moral truths. Sorabji's main twentieth-century witnesses of conscience, Tolstoy and Gandhi, do nothing to ease the difficulty: both rely heavily on religious authorities and religious practice to inform their consciences.
Another interest of Sorabji's is conflicts: within a single conscience, as in the cases explored by the scholastics in which all choices of action seem wrong; between religious groups and the state; between individual beliefs and the law. His penultimate chapter weighs the dilemmas of political and religious freedom, using examples from India and the U.S.A. But how do you know in the first place if your conscience is right? With a side-glance at Gandhi, Sorabji proposes free and open dialogue as the solution. So far so good: but what is missing is a sense of the complexity of moral formation and judgement: the role of upbringing and community, the proper places of authorities and experts, the need to be attentive to the ways in which our judgements can be distorted by emotion, custom, prejudice, and personal histories. (Nietzsche and Freud cannot simply be ignored.) Again, the Catholic tradition could offer help: St Ignatius Loyola, for example, is notably absent from the Index.
Sorabji provides a comprehensive history of the concept of conscience, but he neglects the soil in which it grows. There could be no better book to fill this gap than Conscience and Authority in the Medieval Church. Alexander Murray is a master of the methods of history, and loves to search out the hidden voices in places that seemed silent. One of these places is sacramental confession, hidden not least because confessors were bound by the seal. Murray's five essays all hover around the constitution Omnis utriusque sexus of the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, which required of all the faithful annual Communion, preceded by individual confession to a priest. Confession was the point at which the secret heart and mind of the ordinary person met the community and the institution it represented. Murray thus coaxes from his sources the histories of conscience from both the inside and from the outside and their interplay with each other. He also traces the shifting relationship between sin and crime as the church responded to the changing powers of the state.
Murray argues, against a more conservative Catholic interpretation, that the evidence of confession to a priest before 1215 suggests that it happened largely in monasteries or on deathbeds. Exceptions, which increased in the decades leading up to Lateran IV, were pockets of lay people influenced by scholarly monastic pastors, including in 12th century southern England. Secondly, he explores the role of confessors in giving counsel and helping to form consciences, and notes the need for well formed clerics to serve an increasingly educated laity. (What advice, Murray wonders, might have been given to Dante in confession?) By eavesdropping on stories told by a Dominican preacher and confessor, he discovers that many people were neither sinners nor saints, but struggling, with the priest's assistance, to move from the former state nearer to the latter. The preachers in their turn were influenced by what they heard, which made them notably more sympathetic: intriguing evidence suggests that the translation into Latin of Aristotle's Ethics was driven in part by the need to learn how to give wise, sympathetic and moderate advice in the confessional. Murray then studies the attempt of Archbishop Federigo Visconti of Pisa to put the reforms of the Lateran Council into practice. He did this in particular with the aid of the new orders of friars, for the bishop needed nothing more than plentiful, well educated, zealous, and cheap pastors, preachers and confessors. The volume ends with an account of the development of excommunication from its role as a ferocious policeman protecting the abbeys when law and order were weak, to the time when secular law took over that role and a pope would be left free to explore the subtleties and perplexities of an ordinary woman's claim for an annulment.
The heroes of Murray's story are no longer household names: men such as the archdeacon Anselm of Laon, who initiated the new wave of biblical pastoral theology, Pope Innocent III, who learned this in the schools of Paris and used his reforming council to spread it across the Church, the scholar-bishop Robert Grosseteste, who helped to provide the intellectual resources for it, Thomas of Cantimpré OP who preached it, and wrote for men who preached it, in the parishes. Such people get no mention in Sorabji's pages, but they are able to give us a rich feel for how consciences, and reflection on the idea of conscience, actually develop. They also suggest the kind of soil in which they might flourish: Murray repeatedly notes the combination of the academic, the monastic and the pastoral. All are needed: the mind to reflect on ideas; silence to allow us to listen both to our own inner voices, rational and non-rational, and to the voices of others; community to give us guidance born of collective experience; and charity to inspire us to encourage each other to aim at goodness.
