Section LXXVIII. The Inner Revelation and the Conscience. (Concl'd) · Part 1

The revelation of the divine will to the moral subject, as given in the rational self-consciousness, is the conscience. This is not an originally ready power, but, as given at first only in germ, it must be developed,—stands in need of culture, primarily by God himself, and, in all after the first generation. by the already morally-matured spirit of men; and with its further moral development it constantly becomes more definite, more clear and more rich in contents. Now, as sin separates man from God and from the knowledge of Him, and also damagingly affects the moral training received from others, it is clear that the conscience has its full purity and power only in a sinless state.—As relating to the moral life-manifestations, the conscience appears as a morally-judging power, and as such it is either in harmony with the particular manner of action—in which case it awakens a joyous feeling of approval,—or it is in antagonism therewith, and in this case it awakens a painful feeling of disapproval; and either feeling prompts to a corresponding course of action. As the conscience is a revelation of the moral law as the divine will, hence it never exists without a God-consciousness,—it is itself, in fact, one of the phases of this consciousness, and is per se of a religious character, and is inexplicable from the mere world-consciousness. In its germ it is a primitive and not a derived power, and in this sense it is already presupposed on the entrance of the positive divine revelation. The actual acceptance of this revelation is of itself already a moral act which presupposes the conscience; but the latter is excited to activity and to full development only by the positive revelation. Conscience is essentially an integral part of man’s God-likeness,—is, like rationality in general, a divine life-power imparted to the creature.

The conscience is in its essence, not different from the God-consciousness, but is only the bearing of the God-consciousness upon the moral; as relating to the good, it relates also to God, for none is good but God alone [Matt. xix, 17]; and God is the criterion of all good, for the good is the God-answering; a conscience which is not a God-consciousness is a perverted, an unanchored one. As the conscience is an inner revelation of God to man, we place its discussion in this section, although it is an essential element of the moral subject.—The manners of conceiving of the conscience differ very widely; it is, in turn, regarded either as a cognizing consciousness, or as a feeling, or as an instinctive impulse; and consequently it is sought for in all the different spheres of the soul-life; it is indeed true that the conscience cannot be real without embracing in itself all three of these spheres; and hence the word may be used in all three significations. In the expression: “Conscience says to me,” or “it approves this and rejects that,” it is conceived of as a cognizing, judging consciousness; but we also speak of a joyous, or a chastising conscience; and again we say: “conscience compels me to this act or deters me from it.” The question, however, is: which of the three phases is the primitive, the fundamental one? which constitutes the essence of the conscience? According to what we have previously said as to the relation of feeling and willing to the cognizing consciousness, it follows very plainly that the essence of the conscience is to be found in that which its name directly expresses in various languages, namely, a being-certain, hence a certain knowing, a cognizing consciousness; in the New Testament the term συνείδησις—(from σύνοιδα, conscious sum, strictly: “I am a fellow-knower,” and in a higher sense: “I know with God,” in whom all knowledge centers),—an associate knowing with God, in virtue of his indwelling in rational creatures, is used of the conscience, both in so far as it leads to the good (αγαθή συνείδησις, or καλή or καθαρά), and in so far as, by reproving, it punishes evil [John viii, 9]; and the same word is used also directly in the sense of religious consciousness, presenting the conscience as a consciousness of the divine will [1 Peter ii, 19; Rom. xiii, 5; Heb. ix, 9]. The conscience, as differing from the enlightening influence of the Holy Spirit [Rom. ix, 1], is a power inherent in the essence of man per se, see Rom. ii, 14, 15; in this passage the λογισμοί are not the conscience, but the reflections that spring from the conscience, which itself is the “work of the law written in the hearts,” that is, the consciousness of the contents, of the requirements of the moral law; Paul is not speaking here of the true and perfect conscience, but of the natural conscience of sinful man; the essential features of the true conscience, however, still lurk in the disordered one; and this essential character appears here evidently as a consciousness of the moral. In the Old Testament the conscience is designated by the word heart, לֵבָב [Job xxvii, 6].

The conscience is not a mere simple knowing, it is an utterance of the practical reason, a direct judging of moral thoughts and actions, an approving or condemning witness as to the moral conduct of man [2 Cor. i, 12; v, 11; Rom. xiv, 22; Acts xxiii, 1; xxiv, 16; 2 Tim. i, 3; 1 Peter iii, 16; Heb. xiii, 18]. Such a judging presupposes the consciousness of a moral law, according to which the decisions are made; and this consciousness is the inner essence of conscience itself. The conscience is a judging power, for the reason that it is per se a consciousness of the law as the divine will; it utters itself discriminating and deciding (κρινών) because it is mindful of the eternal ground of the holy,—because it is the inner essence of the divine image as coming to self-consciousness; this latter is the essence of the conscience, the judging is its active manifestation.—The conscience can be awakened, cultivated, and refined by human instruction, but not generated; it is a perpetual witnessing of God as to himself and his holy will in the rational spirit of man, and for this simple reason it is not within the control of man, but is a power above him; it may be silenced temporarily, and led astray in its particular utterance as a discriminating power, but it can never be eradicated nor definitively perverted. It is not the person, strictly speaking, who has the conscience, but it is the conscience that has the person; it dwells indeed in the individual personality, but it is not itself of subjective character, since it is of divine quality; it does not express my personal peculiarity, but the holy will of God in regard to me. Conscience is the fact of the divine morality in man antecedent to all human morality; it is the germ proper of man’s God-likeness,—the God-likeness itself as bearing relation to free conduct, in so far as this consciousness constitutes a part of the essence of rationality. Without this divine germ of the moral in man, morality would be impossible—as impossible as is seeing without eyesight, no matter how much light there might be, or instruction without previously existing rationality as a basis. A convicting by argumentation is possible only when there is antecedently existing in the subject some certain knowledge wherewith the new truth shall agree. What axioms are in mathematics, that is the conscience in the moral sphere. He who does not recognize the axioms, and hence has, as it were, no mathematical conscience, is beyond the reach of instruction. He alone can become rational and moral, and live so, who is so already in the original structure of his being; and this deepest ground of moral rationality is in fact the conscience. He in whom the witness of the holy God does not witness for the holy, cannot be moral; but such an abandoned one there cannot be in the entire creation of God, for to none has he “left himself without witness.” A man may become ungodly, may be unconscientious, and yet not be free from the power of conscience; he may deprive himself of his eyes, but not of his reason, and consequently not of his conscience. For this simple reason, every sin is a fall of man from his own proper nature, an unfaithfulness toward himself. Conscience rests on the. discrimination of the personal creature and its will from the personal God and his will; it finds its universal expression in the words of the Lord: “Not my will but thine be done.” Whoever supposes himself to act from necessity, or merely according to his own individual will, for him the idea of the conscience is obscured; the irreligious are necessarily unconscientious. It is for the simple reason that it is not the individual ego, but the divine, that speaks in the conscience, that there can be a reproving, an evil, conscience, in which the difference of this twofold ego appears in an irreducible antithesis. But this voice of the divine ego does not first come to the consciousness of the individual ego, from without; rather does every external revelation presuppose already this inner one; there must echo out from within man something kindred to the outer revelation, in order to its being recognized and accepted as divine. Even as Adam at the first sight of, the woman recognized at once that she was flesh of his flesh, so recognizes man immediately on the utterance of the divine will by special revelation that this is spirit of that spirit which dwells and speaks within him,—not, however, as his individual ego, but as distinct from it, and as having uncontested right to rule over it.

The first manifestation of conscience in the Scriptures appears in the words wherein Eve opposes the temptation: “We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden; but of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said: ye shall not eat of it.” Here Eve distinguishes the command, as the divine will, from her own will; which latter, however, she afterward carries out; but this adversely judging conscience presupposes a previous first activity of the same, namely, the recognition of the divine command as obligating. The command itself spoke in fact, primarily, only to the understanding; the recognition of it as divine, as a legitimate determining authority for the individual will, the receiving of it into the heart, and the willingness to conform the individual volitions to it,—all this is not a matter of the cognizing understanding, nor in general of the individual spirit as such, but of that divine element in man which responds to the divine command—the conscience; and in the very first utterance of this power, it shows itself primarily, indeed as a consciousness, but then straightway also as a feeling of love as toward the congenial, the right, and as a willingness arising from this consciousness and this love.

The cognizing activity of the conscience relates primarily and directly only to the God-pleasing, and not also to the God-repugnant; for the former is real, but not the latter, and all true and real cognition relates to something real. Hence the second phase of conscience, that where men’s “eyes are opened” and they “know the good and the evil,” does not belong to the primative and pure conscience, but is a manifestation of the conscience as already in antagonism to the moral actuality of man. As primarily relating to the Godlike, and hence as attended by a feeling of approbation, the conscience has originally nothing to do with fear of punishment, but is on the contrary an expression of peace with God; fear presupposes already a disturbed harmony and a knowledge of good and evil; hence in the Scriptures we find conscience expressly distinguished from fear. [Rom. xiii, 5.]

According to Rothe, conscience is the divine activity in its passive form, that is, it is the soul’s self-activity as being determined by the body, or, in general, by material nature, and, in the final instance, by the divine self-activity, or, in general, by God himself,—that is, it is instinctive impulse as religious. In his opinion conscience lies not on the side of the self-consciousness, but on that of the self-activity, and relates not to conceptions and to the understanding, but to volitions and to actions. Conscience has essentially an individual character,—is of subjective, not of objective, nature; hence it is not correct to speak of a tribunal of conscience. “The conscience of another has not the least binding force for me, but only my own; when an appeal is made to conscience, there all further discussion is cut off, there all objective arguments become powerless; whatever is a matter of conscience to me is to me a sanctum sanctorum which none dare violate”—not even for objective reasons; nor does my conscience bind any one else. Conscience is essentially a religious instinct-impulse; and as being an activity of God in man under the form of an instinctive impulse, and hence also a sensuously perceptible one, it is attended by sensuously-somatic phases of feeling. Now every instinct-impulse is either positive or negative, hence conscience is either approbative or disapprobative; as disapprobative it is religious aversion,—an instinctive impulse toward the counterworking of the sin (hence stings of conscience); as approbative it is the religious appetite. Rothe takes occasion here to complain seriously of the prevalent confusion of phraseology on this subject,—namely, in view of the fact that conscience is treated of, sometimes as a propension, sometimes as a moral feeling, sometimes as a religious feeling, sometimes as such and such an instinct-impulse, or as such and such a sense; in this, however, he is manifestly unjustifiable; it is to no good purpose to quarrel with language which is, in fact, often profounder and truer than the boldest theoretical systems: No one has a right arbitrarily to define ideas contrarily to the general consciousness, and then to find fault with language because it does not harmonize with the definitions. In the present case we find language perfectly justifiable in making so wide a use of the term conscience, inasmuch as all the above phases are in fact embraced in it, though indeed not in equal degrees. The strange notion that conscience rests on a determination of the personal soul by the material body, so that by implication a rational spirit without a material body would not have any conscience, we pass over in silence, and make only the following observations. Should we admit that conscience relates to volition and action, it does not follow from this that it is not per se, and primarily, a consciousness; thought in fact may influence volition; and the necessary presupposition of every volition is a thought; but an unconscious instinct-impulse is neither religious nor moral, but irrational. The fact is, conscience lies most strictly on the side of the self-consciousness; otherwise an evil conscience could not contain a self-accusation. That the conscience is of subjective nature is only in so far correct as it constitutes an integral element of rational personality; but it is entirely incorrect in Rothe to reduce it to a mere individually-subjective phenomenon, and entirely to deprive it of objective character. If conscience is to be at all of a rational character, it must have a general, and hence also an objective significancy. That which is merely subjective has not the least moral significancy, rather is it the opposite of the moral; what is holy for me must be also holy per se and before God, and what is holy before God must be holy for all moral creatures. My conscience is true only in so far as it is an expression of the moral idea; but the moral idea is not of a merely subjective nature. For every Christian, it is a matter of conscience to follow Christ; this holds good in general as well as in particular, and not simply for me as such and such a particular person. The more the conscience bears a merely subjective character, the more defective it is; in a normal condition of humanity all moral consciences would necessarily be essentially concordant, inasmuch as there is only one God and only one divine will, and inasmuch as conscience is the expression of this will. Rothe comes himself into violent contradiction with his assertions, in that he makes conscience to be determined by a divine activity; for this divine activity must be objective to the subject; and, as of a holy character, it certainly does not determine each individual to a different decision: and a little farther on Rothe himself takes this position: that the conscience as an activity of God in man, has a direct and unconditional authority, and from which man cannot in any manner escape; that arguments avail nothing as against conscience,—that perfectly convincing arguments may be urged and yet the conscience remain unmoved; that consequently conscience is also infallible, that it never deceives and is incapable of being bribed; and that though we may blind ourselves as to its decision, yet it is itself not to be deceived. These positions, so utterly extreme and so contrary to all experience, are manifestly irreconcilable with his previous position, namely, that conscience, being entirely devoid of objective character, is a mere subjective phenomenon; for in the notion of an authority in conscience, and especially of an unconditional one, it is manifestly implied that the subject is subordinate thereto.—According to Schenkel (Dogmatik, 1858, I, 135 sqq.) the conscience is a special faculty of the human soul, or rather that one of its organs which has to do with religious functions, whereas the reason and the will do not relate directly to God but to the world; this conscience, in which the God-consciousness is primarily and immediately given, is at the same time also the ethical central-organ. What is to be gained by this freak of fancy it is difficult to determine. When men thus arbitrarily, and contrary to prevalent usage, limit the notion of the reason and the will, it is of course an easy matter to discover new faculties of the soul and new organs of the same; but whether anything important is gained thereby, and whether the supposed epoch-making new discovery will meet with much favor, we may seriously doubt.—Trendelenburg shows much more circumspection and acumen in considering conscience as the reaction and pro-action of the total God-centered man against the man as partial, especially against the self-seeking part of himself (Naturrecht, 1860, § 39).