Abstract:
In this paper we shall analyze the understanding of the concept of “conscience” in Early Renaissance, in other words what Luther, Erasmus and especially Thomas More called “conscience” to explain their decision. This analysis will be supported by Jean Gerson’s concept of the decision-making process. Indeed, Gerson a theologian and professor at the Sorbonne in the 14th century stressed that a decision should be made according to a personal evaluation of the risk to sin. Therefore, all decisions, according to Gerson, should be made on one’s bona fide opinion and not exclusively on an exaggerated fear of Hell as it was often the case then. We shall see then how Luther, Erasmus, and Thomas More, all men of the Early Renaissance made the courageous decisions which changed not only their life but also the Western world’s civilization: they freed men. Indeed, Luther showed that an individual could survive outside the power of the Roman Church, Erasmus showed that belonging to the Roman Church could also go together with an interpretation of the Scriptures, while Thomas More showed that the only true King one could and should follow was and is the Lord with the sole help of the Roman Church, the understanding of this help, and the acceptation of it based on a personal Faith.
Résumé:
Au cours de l’analyse qui suit nous examinerons le concept de “conscience” au début de la Renaissance, en d’autres termes qu’est-ce que Luther, Erasme et surtout Thomas More appelaient “conscience” pour expliquer leurs décisions. Cette analyse s’appuiera sur le concept de Jean Gerson concernant la prise de décision. En effet, Gerson, un professeur à la Sorbonne et théologien de renom au 14e siècle affirma que toute décision devrait être prise selon une évaluation personnelle du risque de commettre un péché. Par conséquent, toute décision, selon Gerson, devrait être prise en toute bonne foi personnelle et non dans la peur exagérée de l’Enfer, comme c’était souvent le cas dans cette période. Nous verrons alors comment Erasme, Luther et Thomas More, tous contemporains de cette période du début de la Renaissance prirent des décisions courageuses qui changèrent non seulement leur vie mais notre civilisation occidentale: ils libérèrent les hommes. En effet, Luther montra qu’un individu pouvait survivre hors de l’Eglise de Rome, Erasme montra que l’appartenance à l’Eglise de Rome pouvait aller de pair avec une interprétation des Ecritures, tandis que Thomas More montra que le seul roi que l’on pouvait accepter était et est le Seigneur avec l’aide de l’Eglise de Rome, la compréhension de cette aide, et son acceptation fondée sur une Foi personnelle.
The Renaissance period is ceaselessly seen as a key change in our Wesstern civilization, not only in politics and economy, but also in the development of knowledge at large, that is to say in sciences we would call today hard sciences, in philosophy trying to get away from theology, in theology hurried by the Reformation, in arts and literature of course. All these changes, major in many ways for our contemporary culture, nurtured and depended on the development of the nature and role of conscience. Indeed, a 21st century scholar cannot but wonder about the role of conscience in all these movements of projects, hopes, research and somehow fluctuating certainties – especially regarding Christian faith. Conscience as we understand it today, an apparently individual tool given to each of us to decide in all aspects of one’s life, is nonetheless a concept which built itself up along the centuries. Therefore, its meaning varied along human history to the point that it seems to be legitimate to wonder what was the meaning of “conscience” in the Early Renaissance period, the time of the New Man. Was one actually new in all aspects of one’s life, or was he/she still linked to aspects of life taking a long time to change like one’s spiritual life? This research question seems especially valid if we analyze the crisis brought about by the Reformation in the attitude of some outstanding men in society, namely Thomas More and some painters from the 14th to the beginning of the 16th century. If our interest in Thomas More’s interpretation of conscience seems rather banal – a great number of scholars have written about that since the 16th century – this interest might be enriched by replacing him within his cultural time. The evolution of the concept of conscience in the 14th century Italy and Northern Europe helped Thomas More build, in some way, his personality. In other words, we shall examine whether More was ahead of his contemporaries in his grasp of the role of “conscience”.
Therefore, in this paper we shall first try to define what was “conscience” in the Early Renaissance, then briefly analyze the circumstances of Erasmus’, Luther’s and More’s life during this period. Our analysis will follow a “red thread”: Jean Gerson[1]’s definition of the decision-making process, as he is still considered to have been a quite prominent thinker in theology and pedagogy.
What we call today Early Renaissance includes somehow the 15th century and the beginning of the 16th century. That is to say, the time after the devastating Black Death, the time of the beginning of faraway voyages, the spreading of the Reformation in northern Europe, including France and England. All these three elements had a definitive influence on the understanding of « conscience » for people of the period. Although the Black Death was more than 150 years before the adulthood of Erasmus, More, and Luther, its consequences in the development of people’s considerations on their stand in life went far.
Indeed, the Black Death brought about, for the survivors, a thirst for pleasure together with a sense of the fragility of life on earth as well as the universality of death and concrete existence of Hell. This awareness is a kind of new realism that could be called also a « new detachment » or even a « new selfishness ». Whatever name we apply to this new human being, he/she is ready for new enterprises, new explorations of aspects of life up to then ignored or simply discarded as prohibited by the Church. The interest or curiosity shifted from the divine or theological subjects to the lives and fates of human subjects. As Petrarch thought, in the mid-14th century, time had come to renew the once vibrant tradition so full of exploratory jaunts, surprising divagations, and delicious subtleties. They discovered, first in Italy, the pleasure of minds exploring, embracing, revising, and even loving ideas for their own sake, through the reading of Latin and Greek authors. For Petrarch, for instance, Dante belonged to the Dark Ages although this strong opinion was not shared by his contemporary Boccaccio who, instead, admired Dante. At that time, collections of books, especially old manuscripts in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic languages became a new enterprise for intellectuals, on which cultural Renaissance was built. These authors, poets, philosophers, thought to bring about a splendid new age in imitation of what once had been, at least on the intellectual level. They were called « humanists », although some scholars think today that they were rather philologists. They were not necessarily deep Christian religious men, but they adhered without any doubt to the Christian faith.
From Italy, Renaissance spread up to the northern countries, which were somehow shocked by the gaiety of the Italian authors and artists. This voyage north was helped by the extensive travelling of scholars who were often ambassadors of their monarch, and by the rich exchanges of books due to the development of the printing press.
Of course, voyages overseas had a strong influence on people’s culture as they helped open minds on differences among human beings. But this openness was limited because of the unexpected physical aspects of the people met, their civilization and religious beliefs all traits that the voyagers reject them, with a few exceptions.
Actually, the most important influence on the definition of the concept of “conscience” then has been the evolution of moral consideration on the one hand; on the other, Luther’s Theses. Before we consider these two points, let us say that overall religion was going to be primed to stoke new political conflicts everywhere as two kinds of expansiveness were staged: the expansiveness of humanism, issuing the easeful gorgeousness of the Renaissance, and the expansiveness of the Reformation, which would seek moral improvement, both personal and institutional, as well as the abandonment of error. Both these movements, expansiveness of humanism and expansiveness of the Reformation, found a strong ground in the understanding of the decision-making process initiated by Jean Gerson, two centuries or so before.
Indeed, in a very pertinent article, Rudolf Schüssler underlines Jean Gerson’s role on the development of more open morals in Catholicism. He also stresses that the emergence of skeptical arguments in the late Middle Ages is i regarded as a sign of an innovative capacity of Scholasticism that was not only preserved throughout the fourteenth century but did survive deep into the early modern era.[2]
In this article, Schüssler writes that Jean Gerson (1363-1429), born in a humble family, became an eminent theologian in his time. According to the author, Gerson focused his analysis on the problem of “scrupulosity” as the term was used then, that is to say referring to an exaggerated anxious agitation of the soul caused by a moral or religious insufficiency of the bearer.[3] To ease this rule Gerson chose an approach that implied a change in doctrines of moral decision-making under uncertainty. This moral uncertainty was understood as concerning the sinfulness of actions, which was due to the often disputable validity of precepts in concrete cases. Thus unnecessary engagement in moral-risky activities was regarded as a mortal sin by medieval theologians. In other words all good Christians had a duty to avoid moral risks.[4] According to Schüssler, Gerson remarked that this exaggerated risk-aversion was incompatible with a normal social life. Therefore, Gerson together with Franciscans and Dominicans did not hesitate to intertwined the old way (the via antiqua) with the new modes of scholastic and humanist thought, as long as the spiritual welfare of Christians was coming first. Indeed, Gerson and others had doubts about the analytical progress in philosophical theology as they were highly aware that a wealth of incompatible opinions regarding right moral action existed among theologians and lawyers. Therefore Gerson allowed all moral agents to adopt bona fide the opinion they regarded as most reasonable, as long as it was supported by a reputable group of experts. This was going to be an argument to the followers of practical ethics as, if superficially understood, a moral agent had only to do what was up to him in a certain context to avoid sin. Gerson’s open attitude toward the intellectual duties of ordinary Christians was shared by many colleagues with respect to the theological fallout of the Schism, but he extended it to business behaviour, according to Schüssler. One can see then that the medieval meaning of “scrupulosity” was quite softened by Gerson who transformed it into a kind of therapy of opinion,[5] keeping in mind that an opinion at that time was, according to the Scholastic definition, an act of a possible access to the truth of a sentence together with the fear of being wrong. An opinion was itself a process, a path toward a possible truth, but also toward a possible wrong, so fear and anxiety were always within the decision a moral agent could make. Actually, one can say about Gerson that he aimed, through his “technique” of sin-avoiding, at inner calmness. As an example of this, let us mention that during the Great Schism Gerson supported the idea that actions were to be approved if they were supported by good experts. This was a definitely positive step toward a moral and intellectual pluralism that was later unfolded by so-called guardians of conscience in the early modern era. Gerson furnished them with his concept of moral certainty, providing a means for a safe conscience on the basis of a satisfactory, but not necessarily burdensome, process of opinion formation.[6]
This trend toward a more personal moral attitude regarding one’s choices will be expressed more fully in Erasmus, Luther, and More.
First, we must keep in mind that all three men read The Imitation of Christ, the master work of Thomas à Kempis: Erasmus and Luther with the Brothers of Brethren, and More at the Charterhouse near London where he stayed during part of his studies.
Erasmus drew out of this reading the habit of interpreting all matters through the perspective of Jesus, therefore all his humanistic learning and enthusiasm for ancient texts were combined with his profound reverence for the received words of Christ, and not the exclusive teaching of the Church. Erasmus’ integration of the mood of the time is already evident in his first book, Adagia, and asserted more firmly in his Handbook of a Christian Knight in which he developed the argument that Christianity comes, to make it short, in two versions: the formalistic Christianity, concerned with only physical rituals and outward show, and a Christianity of the spirit that takes seriously the words and spirit of Jesus but is unconcerned with what Erasmus called “silly little ceremonies.”[7] Like Gerson, Erasmus takes the risk of making a decision regarding the interpretation of the Scriptures on his own, aware as he was that this decision-making required a profound faith, centered in Christ, free of all these superstitions that he saw in most Christians as he claims: Unfortunately most Christians are superstitious rather than faithful, and except for the name of Christ differ hardly at all from superstitious pagans.[8] A clear remark in which Erasmus shows pertinently the right and the wrong of a Christian attitude, what could be truth and what could be sin. This book was highly successful in Europe at the time: it was original and demonstrated a literate and clever criticism of religious formalism, also an awareness of the spiritual limits of the teaching of the Church. Erasmus looks here like a somehow deviant monk, as has been Luther, a contemporary of Erasmus and More.
Luther, as Erasmus, had been influenced by the Brothers of Brethren’s teaching through The Imitation of Christ and therefore showed a clear awareness of what was going on in the Church’s hierarchy of his time. His unexpected gesture then is that he put this awareness into action, secured as he was by the reading of the Bible, although it most probably was a quite subjective reading, and rebelled.
He made his decision to protest against the Church of Rome in the spring of 1517 when bands of plenary indulgences “salesmen” arrived in Hohenzollern Saxony. The system of indulgences was not new, but never clear then and now, and more often than not these indulgences were granted in return for monetary “donations” to the benefit of the Roman Church. When people from Wittenberg told Luther, in confession, what was happening, he was deeply troubled and felt compelled to act. The Theses were not nailed on the church door, as the legend goes. Instead, he courageously wrote to his bishop joining his statements, the Theses, to his letter. It was a rather common action used by any writers and university lecturers. The statement proposed by the writer was to be defended or opposed by reasoned argument in the course of a scheduled academic defense. But in this case, the theses came printed anonymously and spread around by a probably indiscreet secretary of the bishop who found them so new and astonishing that it was impossible to be neutral: a question of loving them or hating them. Luther showed here a full and boundless decision-making process, and a great courage indeed, a monumental courage as Cahill stresses.[9] “Conscience”, then, at the time, was not an arbitrary act of will, but an inference from an independently verifiable system of reasoning. It followed the highest degree of value: in Luther’s case the message of the Gospels instead of the Roman or temporal laws. He made conscience a matter of personal fundamental beliefs – what defines one as a person – and he directly questioned the right of any outside authority (ecclesial or secular) to contest these beliefs, although one can stress that these personal fundamental beliefs were taken out of a personal understanding of the Bible. Moreover, a person could make a wrong or faulty reasoning, as Gerson emphasized, but Luther’s action definitely shows his freedom from anxiety and fear of sin as he makes his choice on facts and personal reading of the Bible. Nonetheless, he lived his faith under God’s eyes. More’s attack to him, or onto the Reformation was from another perspective.
Indeed, More, if we can see him as a more austere man than Erasmus did not accept Luther’s statements either. Thomas More showed (and shows) another way to ground his decisions. Indeed, Thomas More, who read The Imitation of Christ as did Erasmus and Luther, seems to have been the more “medieval” of the three. Actually, if we go back to Gerson’s definition of decision-making in the context of faith, we can observe that More was very close to its limits: one could make a free decision only within the truth as he saw it through his Christian faith. As Brian Cummings states in his article Conscience and the law in Thomas More,[10] More’s decisions depended on truth values, and conscience for him was a kind of “truth condition”, a kind of mediation between man and the teaching of the church. Consequently, what matters for More is the truth, not what the individual believes, and conscience – the knowing of the truth – is the foundation of being right in accordance to the church’s teaching. If one’s reasoning is not founded on that, one is wrong. Therefore, the State is denied here any right to judge one’s decision. For More the laws of the land are subject to the laws of God, of the Church then, so the problem for him is to understand and accept the truth given or suggested by the Lord. No temporal prince can dictate to him what is right or wrong. Therefore, More might not be an example of what we would call nowadays a “free conscience” as it is stated in the Declaration of Human Rights, but he is rather an example of a seeker of truth in sources outside himself in order for him to guarantee Eternal Life for himself, as this is the only goal of a faithful person. This attitude is quite different from Fisher’s, for example, who thinks that conscience is a reminder of a truth that we might have forgotten but not truth itself,[11] a kind of a Socratic maieutic then. Certainly More’s understanding of the nature of conscience has been a long sinuous process given that he was not in a monastery or a somehow protected scholar like Erasmus or, to a point, Luther: More was living in the real world, that is a world made of diplomatic political moves, made of societal conflicts taken as he was between King and laws, King and Church. He knew he was in for a frightful voyage dealing with people who were not as worried as he was with the truth to live by, the truth to be found in the psalms and Gospels. On the contrary, he was dealing with a sovereign with an enormous ego. He was a realist, one could say maybe a saintly realist, a fearful realist, fearful of Hell as Marie-Claire Phelippeau clearly demonstrates: Il ne semble pas possible de mettre en doute la croyance de More à l’enfer éternel.[12] In a way, we can forward that indeed there has been a rather long way between the writing of the Utopia and Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulations. In the first one the reader can wonder whether More means for us to accept Utopia as an unalloyed ideal, or whether we are to pick and choose among various aspects, taking certain innovations to heart while rejecting others. Or should we instead view the whole story as a philosopher’s construct based on false premises? If atheism is permitted in Utopia, though hardly esteemed, and if Utopians are models of religious tolerance, what More states in the Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulations is definitely a strong declaration of his Faith. More illustrates indeed what conscience is for him when he declares that the truth is not in the king’s right to divorce, but in the king’s wrong decision to claim himself Head of the Church because this goes against Scriptures establishing Peter and his followers as Popes. Thus, at the end of his life, when facing his passage toward his Lord, More saw the only truth for him: God’s will, the rest being sins, and there nests his conscience. From the outside one could say that More’s understanding of conscience is carefully orthodox and conservative if we keep in mind that, after all, conscience was a staple topic in scholastic theology: they are indeed elaborate treatments of it in Bonaventure and Aquinas, but More’s use of it is unique because it is public and had a dreadful consequence not only on his life, but also on his family’s. In other words, conscience within his Faith or born in and limited by his Faith, became his way of life leaving behind any other philosophical reasoning or discussion. We are here very close to Gerson’s decision-making process stressing that there definitely is a right and a wrong choice, a right and a faulty choice to be kept within the framework of one’s Christian Faith. Indeed, for More, the right choice is the one and only made according to the Lord’s “rule”, without any consideration of the temporal law, while for Luther, “conscience”, because it was qualified as “personal”, was not free of temporal circumstance and influences as well as some free interpretation of the Scriptures. Although Erasmus was against Luther’s attitude, he does not seem to have been as strongly clear against him as More, but the latter had to face Henry VIII’s will to become Head of the Church: these two difficult situations pushed him to his most inner reasoning “in conscience” as we would say today…
Therefore, if conscience was not apparently an exclusivity of More he understood it as a question of choosing between right and wrong within his Faith. It was for him the only deep and true ground and reason to accept and wish to face, under a clear light, his Lord rather than bend to a state law. If one can say that More had a limited conscience of his freedom – limited to his faith in the Catholic Church – he shows the characteristics of a modern existentialist hero. If conscience was the spark lightning action, or, rather, igniting it for the overall period, for More it was the core of his life, what we would call today the blind point. Truly an exceptional man.
I don’t know whether the young Chinese facing the tanks on Tienanmen square in 1989, or Jan, the Czech student immolating himself on Prague’s central square in 1969 had read More or about More, but here their sense of conscience, our contemporary understanding of conscience is comparable to More’s, decidedly a man “for all men and for all time.”
Hélène Suzanne
References
Cahill, Thomas. Heretics and Heroes. New York: Nana A. Talese, Double Day, 2013.
Phélippeau, Marie-Claire. Pour l’amour du ciel – la Mort, le Péché et l’Au-delà. Moreana Editions, 2012.
Schüssler, Rudolf. Jean Gerson, moral certainty and the Renaissance of ancient Scepticism. In Harald E. Braun & Edward Vallance (eds.), The Renaissance conscience. London: Wiley- Blackwell, A. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, Publication, 2011. Originally published as vol. 23, issue #4 of Renaissance Studies.
[1]Gerson, Jean. Theologian and Preacher at La Sorbonne, 1363-1429.
[2]Schüssler, Rudolf. Jean Gerson, moral certainty and the Renaissance of ancient Scepticism. In Harald E. Braun & Edward Vallance (ed.) The Renaissance conscience. London: Wiley-Blackwell, A. John Wiley and Sons, Ltd, Publication, 2011, p.13.
[3]Ibid., p.15.
[4]Ibid., p.16.
[5]Ibid., p.19.
[6]Ibid., p.28.
[7]Cahill, Thomas. Heretics and Heroes. New York: Nana A. Talese, Double Day, 2013.
[8]Ibid., p.134.
[9]Cahill, op.cit., p.164
[10]Cummings, Brian, Conscience and the law in Thomas More. In Braun & Vallance, op.cit.
[11]Ibid., p.42
[12]Phélippeau, Marie-Claire, Pour l’amour du ciel – la Mort, le Péché et l’Au-delà dans les écrits de Thomas More. Moreana Editions, 2012, p.222.