Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet: Discourse on Universal History. Elborg Forster translation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976.

 

Bossuet, Bishop of Meaux, published his book in 1682. Louis XIV was king; Bossuet had tutored his eldest son, Louis’ presumptive heir, who predeceased his father and whose own son eventually reigned as Louis XV. Bossuet dedicated the book to the Dauphin, continuing the long tradition of courtesy books and mirrors for princes dating back to Xenophon’s Cyropaedia, a tradition revived and adapted to Christian teachings in the thirteenth century by several English, French, and German writers. The Renaissance saw two of the most eminent contributions to the genre, one by Castiglione and another (with a very different twist) by Machiavelli. The Bourbons had founded the modern state in France, inclining to deploy the Catholic Church as a civil religion; at the time of the Discourse‘s publication, Louis was quarreling with Pope Innocent XI over the extension of the droit de régale, whereby the king could claim revenues from vacant dioceses and abbeys. The most prominent French clergymen, beginning with Cardinal Richelieu, who had served as Foreign Secretary under Louis’ father, were suspected of some degree of Machiavellianism, and Machiavelli’s philosophic inheritors, Descartes and Spinoza, were widely read. Bossuet opposes them, reminding the king and especially his son that the divine right of kings can scarcely sustain itself without belief in divinity. As Elborg asks in his helpful introduction, “Is it significant that, regardless of edition, Bossuet’s history of Jesus comes almost exactly in the middle of the book?” Quite possibly so. 

In his dedication to the Dauphin, Bossuet states his intention: “to explain the history of religion and the changes of empires.” While religion is unitary and perpetual, thanks to God’s continuous direction, empires are plural and changeable, human-all-too-human. Moreover, “even if history is useless to other men, princes should be made to read it,” as it shows them the effects of passion and interest, time and circumstance, good advice and bad advice. “If they need experience to acquire the prudence of a good ruler, nothing is more useful for their instruction than to add the examples of past centuries to the experiences they have every day,” at no risk to themselves or to their people. This should have a salubrious moral effect. “Seeing even the most hidden vices of princes exposed to everyone’s sight, despite the spurious praise they receive during their life, they will be ashamed of the vain pleasure they take in flattery and will understand that true glory comes only with merit.”

History’s effect of moral and straitening complements its intellectual effect, the ability to make distinctions. “He who has not learned from history to distinguish different ages will represent men under the law of Nature or under written law as they are under the law of the Gospel.” Spinoza attempts precisely to bring men to accept a new form of the law of nature; the ability to distinguish pagan natural law from the law of the Gospel, and both from the law of Moses, will guard the prince against such beguilement. Central to Bossuet’s list of distinctions is the one between the time of liberty under Themistocles and the time of Macedonian rule under Philip. Is it significant that Bossuet places a lesson on liberty in this place, even as he places he places the distinction of France during its civil wars and France “united under that great king,” Louis XIV, in which “France alone triumphs over all of Europe,” last on the list? Does he suggest that liberty leads to factional strife, empire to peace? Or is he, on the contrary, thinking of Catholic Christian liberty, threatened by the imperial monarch?

However this may be, religion and empire are “the two points around which human affairs revolve.” “To discover their order and sequence is to understand in one’s mind all that is great in mankind and, as it were, to hold a guiding line to all the affairs of the world”—no small thing for any prince to discover. History identifies “epochs” in the course of events, stops or resting places, great events “to which we an relate all the rest.” Of these twelve epochs, the sixth is Solomon’s founding of the Temple in Jerusalem, the seventh Romulus’ founding of Rome; that is, in keeping with the two points of human affairs, there is no one central epoch but a pair. A third and truly crucial turning point in terms of empire is Charlemagne’s founding of the new, Christian empire, ending ancient history. It is noteworthy that Bossuet so often marks the beginning of new epochs in the course of events with a founding, beginning with God’s founding of the human race.

Bossuet titles the first epoch “Adam, or the Creation.” It lasted from the Creation in 4004 BC to the Flood in 2348 BC. As related by Moses, author of the Pentateuch and therefore “the first historian, the most sublime philosopher”—pace Spinoza—and “the wisest of legislators,” in Adam God fashioned “all men within one man,” as even his wife “was fashioned from him.” The formation of Eve out of Adam indicates God’s intention to establish “harmony in marriage and human society.” After the expulsion from Eden, God’s providential care nonetheless continued, as he taught men the arts indispensable to their survival: agriculture, animal husbandry, weaving, and “perhaps that of finding shelter. For his part, beginning the second epoch, Noah preserved those arts after having preserved mankind itself by the art of carpentry. The Epoch of Noah, or the Flood, lasted 426 years until 1921 BC. It saw the first three founders of nations: Japheth, who established the peoples of the East, Ham, who established the peoples of the South, and Shem, ancestor of the Hebrews. Acting in contradiction to these builders, Nimrod’s “violent nature,” consonant with the way of hunting, made him into the first conqueror, beginning his destructive work at Babylon, the symbol of human pride. In both their constructive and destructive efforts, peoples “were going their separate ways, forgetful of their Creator.” Human learning also began to flourish, as the Chaldeans invented astronomy, which they gave to Callisthenes in Babylon, then by him to Aristotle.

God’s calling of Abraham, “the beginning of God’s people and the Covenant,” began in 1921 BC and lasted until 1491 BC. God chose Abraham “as the stem and father of all believers,” and Bossuet cleverly adds “It was Jesus Christ whom Abraham honored in the person of the high priest Melchizedek, who represented him”—an elegant way of inserting the authority of the Christian clergy into an Old Testament story. Under this interpretation, the Catholic Church goes back a long way, indeed. And, like Christians in many times and in many places, “the Hebrews were unjustly hated and persecuted without mercy,” enslaved in Egypt. There, the great prophet, Moses, learned “all the wisdom of the Egyptians,” having been “brought up by Pharaoh’s daughter.” 

During this epoch, Cecrops founded twelve Egyptian colonies in Greece, colonies which eventually became the Kingdom of Athens. The Deucalion flood, “which the Greeks take to be the universal flood,” wiped it out. Deucalion’s son, Hellen, escaped, reigning in the Thessalian city of Pythia; hence the term “Hellenes.” In Thebes, a non-Egyptian set of Gods were introduced by Cadmus, the gods of Syria and Phoenicia. Thus, Greece became polytheistic and (to deploy an anachronism) multicultural, even as the Israelites were monotheists who integrated and subordinated foreign wisdom under divine law.

The exodus from Egypt and the establishment of that written law by Moses inaugurated the fourth epoch, which lasted from 1491 BC to 1184 BC. Previous to the receipt of God’s law, natural law, consisting of reason and ancestral tradition, guided human conduct. But God’s tabernacle among the Israelites now became the “symbol of the future” of humanity. Jewish history during this epoch consists of events, often violent, by which God “slowly mold[ed]” His people, an education and habituation recounted in Moses’ Pentateuch, in which he recorded these “foundations of our religion.” Elsewhere, Pelops ruled what is now called the Peloponnesus, beginning in 1322; the first Assyrian empire was founded in 1267. Hercules and Theseus came “later,” Theseus founding the city of Athens.

The fall of Troy occurred in 1184 BC, inaugurating the fifth epoch, which concluded with the completion of Solomon’s Temple in 1004. In the Gentile world, this epoch comes down to us in the form of legends and heroes. In sacred history, Samson, Eli, Samuel, and Saul ruled Israel, followed by David, the “pious warrior.” Athenians “abolished kingship and declared Zeus the only king of the people of Athens,” as the archons or rulers were made accountable to the people of the city. In Greece, then, monotheism was associated with popular rule, not monarchy, whereas in Israel monotheism issued led to a popular call for monarchy.

The first of the two central epochs began slightly more than a millennium before the birth of Jesus. With perhaps a glance at the French monarchy of his own time, Bossuet relates that Solomon’s reign “ended in shameful weakness,” as “he indulged in the love of women; his spirit grew base, his courage weakened, and his piety degenerated into idolatry.” This brought down God’s judgment, with the kingdom divided after Solomon’s death. Around 890 BC, Dido enlarged and fortified Carthage, a “warlike and commercial republic” with “aspirations for domination of the sea.” If Solomonic Israel parallels seventeenth-century France, ancient Carthage parallels seventeenth-century England. 

“In these times Homer flourished, and Hesiod flourished thirty years before him. The venerable old ways they depict for us and the vestiges of ancient simplicity they preserve with such nobility are most useful in making us understand much more remote times and the divine simplicity of the Scriptures.” For Bossuet’s modernity, French and English, the sixth epoch holds up the contrast between the decadence of rulers and purity of ancient poetry and the way of life it shows us, to some extent neatly harmonizing those pagan practices with the God-given way seen in the Bible. 

The reestablishment of the Olympiads, founded by Hercules but long discontinued, in 776 BC “marks the end of what Varro calls the legendary times—since up to that date secular histories were full of confusion and legend—and the beginning of historical times—in which world events in more faithful and precise reports,” thanks to the exact chronology those annual events made possible. Generally, in this chapter Bossuet impresses upon his reader the increasingly unruly character of the Hebrew nation, ruled by kings, and the corresponding improvement and democratization of the Greeks—especially of the Athenians.

Romulus’ founding of Rome in 754 BC began the seventh epoch, the second of the epochs Bossuet makes central to his book. Rome “was to become the mistress of the world and the seat of religion,” a city dedicated by its founder to the god of war, “whom he called his father.” Bossuet makes no mention of Romulus’ murder of Remus, which would parallel Cain’s murder of Abel and recall Bossuet’s strictures against violence. If France under the Bourbons has become the modern Rome, Bossuet wants no suggestion of crime at the founding of its ruling dynasty. And even in his version of Rome, after Romulus the lawgiver Numa “gave form to religion and softened the barbarous manners of the Roman people.” Gradually, Romans learned to restrain their warlike character without losing it. In the 670s, “as its conquests extended further, Rome established the rules for its militia; and it was under Tullus Hostilius that it began to learn that magnificent discipline which was to make it mistress of the world” and, not incidentally, to “make citizens of its enemies” after mastering them in battle.

Away from the proto-French Romans, several potential rival empires emerged during this epoch. Weakened by the misrule of an “effeminate prince,” Sardanapalus, the first Assyrian empire fell to the “warlike Medes.” After this event, the Medean empire, the second Assyrian empire, and the Babylonian empire rose and fell in succession. By 600 BC, “Babylon was threatening to enslave the world” and Solomon’s temple was burned. In 562, Nebuchadnezzar died in Babylon, not after foreseeing “the coming ruin of his superb city” while on his deathbed. Indeed, Cyrus the Great of Persia would conquer Babylon not long afterwards. By joining the Kingdom of Persia with that of the Medes, Cyrus “became the uncontested master of the East and founded the greatest empire the world had ever seen.” Under his rule, he ordered the “restoration of God’s Temple in Jerusalem and of the Jewish people in Judaea.” 

Bossuet draws his account of Cyrus from the Bible and from Xenophon’s Cyropaedia. Among the several Gentile historians, he regards “the wise philosopher and skillful captain,” who served in Persia, as the most reliable. “What determines me in my choice is the fact that Xenophon’s history, more coherent and more probable in itself, has the added advantage of being more consistent with the Scriptures, which, because of their antiquity and the relations of the affairs of the Jewish people with others in the East, would merit being preferred to all Greek histories, if we did not know that they were dictated by the Holy Spirit.” As for Greek historians generally, he judges them to have been “more eloquent in their narrations than painstaking in their research.”

The years between 536 BC—the year the Jewish people returned to Jerusalem—and Rome’s conquest of Carthage in 202 saw the beginning of the hostility between the Jews and the Samaritans, who mixed worship of false Gods with Jewish observances and were on that account denied participation in rebuilding the Temple. “Irreconcilable hatred sprung up between the two nations, and there is no greater opposition than that between Jerusalem and Samaria.” Among the Gentiles, the year 510 saw Athens liberated from tyranny, with the Romans overthrowing the Tarquins a year later. The invasion of Greece by the Persians was defeated at the battles at Marathon and Thermopylae early in the fifth century.

“Meanwhile, the new magistrates that had been given to the Roman people exacerbated the divisions within that city. Having been shaped by kings, Rome lacked the laws necessary for the proper functioning of a republic.” The Romans sent delegates to Athens to study the laws there, resulting in the rule of the decemvirs, who wrote the Laws of the Twelve Tables, “the foundation of Roman law.” Simultaneously, in Jerusalem Ezra and Nehemiah “reformed abuses and enforced the Mosaic Law, which they were the first to obey,” making all the Jewish people, “and especially the priests” to divorce the foreign women they’d married in violation of that law. The Old Testament books named for those men “complete the long history begun by Moses and continued by subsequent authors without interruption until the restoration of Jerusalem.” “Thus the last authors of sacred history meet with the first author of Greek history; and when it began, the history of God’s people—to take it only since Abraham—already comprised fifteen centuries” when Herodotus first began to write. 

The Peloponnesian War began in 431 BC, raging on until 404. After the Spartans won they supported Cyrus the Younger in his revolt against Artaxerxes. When Cyrus was killed, the 10,000 Greek soldiers in his service retreated under the command of Xenophon, who chronicled this in his Hellenica. It was Thebes, under King Epaminondas, which broke Sparta’s hegemony in Greece, and this weakened the nation sufficiently to enable Philip of Macedon to conquer it. His son, Alexander, caused “all of the East [to come] to know Greece and {to] learn its language,” since although he died at the age of thirty-three, his fellow Macedonian generals founded the Seleucid Empire in Syria in 312 and the Ptolemaic Dynasty in Egypt in 305.  As a result of these interrelations between East and West, “the Jewish religion and the Jewish people came to be known among the Greeks,” who translated the Hebrew Bible into Greek in 277. Centuries later, the New Testament would be written in “the Hellenistic language,” that is, “Greek interspersed with Hebraisms.” “All during this time, philosophy was flourishing in Greece.” Bossuet mentions the outstanding natural philosophers but emphasizes Socrates, who “brought philosophy back to the study of proper living and became the father of moral philosophy.” Of the several schools of moral philosophy, Bossuet deprecates only the Epicureans—if, indeed, “we can call philosophers those who openly denied the existence of Providence and who, not knowing what duty is, defined virtue by pleasure.” The Romans, too, began to delve into philosophy “of another kind,” one “which had nothing to do with disputations or discourses but consisted of frugality, poverty, and the hardships of rustic life and war.” This befits a people who had fought wars for some five centuries, “found themselves masters of Italy,” and went on to defeat the Carthaginians and their great general, Hannibal.

Scipio’s final defeat of Carthage in 202 BC marks the beginning of the ninth epoch. By now, “the Romans were feared throughout the world and no longer wanted to tolerate any power but their own.” In 173, “the persecutions of God’s people began,” not under the Romans but under Antiochus the Illustrious, a Syrian who “ruled like a maniac” and provoked a Jewish revolt against his tyranny. A few years later, after Antiochus’ death, however, Rome placed the Jewish people under their protection, “delighted with the opportunity to humiliate the kings of Syria.” In the course of their conquests, the Romans destroyed Corinth, “the most beautiful and voluptuous of all Greek cities,” taking care to remove “its incomparable statues” and to bring them to Rome, albeit “without knowing their value.” In general, “the Romans knew nothing about the arts of Greece, being satisfied with their knowledge of war, politics, and agriculture.” But by 133, Rome saw a major slave revolt against its rule at home; the Romans “were becoming too wealthy.” They continued to press their conquests, “but though the aspect of the republic was made resplendent on the outside by these conquests, it was marred by the unbridled ambition of its citizens and internal struggles.” “Everyone wanted to rule,” none to be ruled. “Even a man like the gladiator Spartacus believed that he could aspire to the command,” leaving a second slave revolt in 103. 

The republic was slowly failing. By 58 BC, a supremely ambitious general, Gaius Julius, conquered Gaul, “the most useful conquest [Rome] ever made,” the patriotic Bossuet remarks. Julius defeated the rival general, Pompey, in 49, ended the republic by becoming emperor in 44, died by assassination a year later. Twelve years later, Octavianus defeated Marcus Antonius at the Battle of Actium. “Forsaken by all his friends, including Cleopatra, for whom he had ruined himself,” Marcus Antonius committed suicide, as did Cleopatra, the last of the Ptolemaic line. In 27, Octavianus became the Emperor Augustus.

It was under Augustus’ long and largely peaceful rule that Jesus Christ was born, beginning the tenth epoch of human history, approximately 4,000 years after Creation. Bossuet saves his considerations of Jesus for Part Two; in this chapter, he focuses his reader’s attention on Rome. In 66 AD, the Emperor Nero became “the first emperor to persecute the Church.” But this didn’t prevent the Church’s advance throughout the empire, which proceeded throughout the second and third centuries AD. “The purity of its ways was so striking that it was praised even by its enemies.” A series of invasions by Germans and Goths in the West, Scythians and Persians in the East, weakened the Western Roman Empire and eventually overran and divided it. “Still hostile to Christianity,” Rome “made a last effort to smother it but, in the end, established it definitively” under Galerius. “New tortures were invented every day” and “the modesty of Christian virgins was attacked as much as their faith.” But “the Christians exasperated” the Romans “by their patience,” and “other nations, impressed by their saintly way of life, converted in large numbers.” The frustrated Galerius “lost all hope of vanquishing them,” dying a few years later. “But Constantine the Great, a wise and victorious prince, publicly converted to Christianity” in 312 AD and ruled the Eastern Roman Empire for the next twenty-five years—thirty-one in all. 

In accordance with this emphasis on Rome, Bossuet places the two men he considers its finest rulers in the center of this chapter. Antoninus Pius, who ruled from 138 to 161—patron of religion, the arts and sciences, who fought no wars of conquest—and Marcus Aurelius—who ruled from 161 to 180 as that rarest of men, the philosopher-king—defended the empire and persecuted no Christians.

Bossuet titles his chapter on the eleventh epoch “Constantine, or the Peace of the Church.” The Peace of Constantine lasted until the accession of Charlemagne to the throne of the Holy Roman Empire, the new Rome, in 800. Constantine’s reign saw the condemnation of the Arians, who denied the divinity of Jesus, at the Nicaean Council in 325, followed five years later by the reconstruction of Byzantium, renamed Constantinople. A century later, Macromeres founded “the monarchy of France, the most ancient and noble of all the monarchies in the world.” But the fifth century, “so unfortunate for the empire, and in which so many heresies sprung up, was nevertheless a fortunate one for Christianity. No discord was able to shake it, no heresy to corrupt it. The Church, rich in great men, confounded all doctrinal errors.” And so, while the Western Roman Empire was “irretrievably lost” in the 470s, the French king, Clovis, converted to Christianity two decades later and the great Christian emperor Justinian ruled in the East, beginning in 527. Later in the sixth century, St. Gregory the Great became pope, sending Augustine to England to convert the pagans there.

Gazing further to the East, Bossuet describes the failure of the Persian Empire. With what is likely another allusion to Louis XIV’s Versailles and the character of the Dauphin, Bossuet comments, “debauchery is often more harmful to princes than cruelty.” The Persians captured, then lost, the True Cross and, their power broken, Mohammad “posed as a prophet among the Saracens,” “subjugating all Arabia by fair means or foul, thus laying the foundation for the empire of the caliphs” and threatening Constantinople itself. By the second third of the seventh century, “the East was going to its ruin.” “While the emperors were consuming themselves in religious disputes and inventing heresies,” the Saracens invaded and occupied Syria, Palestine, Persian, parts of Africa, and Cyprus. It remained for a French general, Charles Martel, to defeat them in the Battle of Tours in 725. “Powerful in peace as in war, and absolute master of the kingdom,” Charles “ruled under a number of kings, whom he made and unmade as he saw fit, without daring to assume that great title.” His son, Pepin, did assume the throne as king of France; Pepin’s son, the future Charlemagne, defeated the Lombards, “enemies of Rome and its popes,” in a three-year series of campaigns ending in 776. 

Charlemagne inaugurated the twelfth and final epoch of world history, being elected Emperor of the Romans in 800. At this point, however, Bossuet ends his chronological narrative. In order to understand the history of God’s people and the history of the great empires, “it is sometimes necessary to separate them and to examine in detail the things which are peculiar to each.” He devoted Part II to Church history, Part III to imperial history.

Bossuet titles Part II “The Continuity of Religion.” It consists of 31 chapters. The seventeenth, central chapter consists of a critique of Judaism; the center of the book as a whole comes a few pages later and consists of a statement of what has come to be called ‘supersession theology’—the claim that Christianity became the true Judaism, and that what is now called Judaism has deviated from its origins. In Bossuet’s terms, the continuity of religion means that religion has been “always the same since the Creation of the world” but that human beings have consistently deviated from God’s way. This is also the claim of the Old Testament, and therefore of orthodox Jews to this day, who regard Christianity as anything but the true Judaism. The question, then, is how political regimes should address this principled disagreement between Christians and Jews. Bossuet’s formula opens Jewish citizens (or subjects, as in the absolute monarchy of Louis XIV) to vile persecution. To recount his argument is profoundly offensive but also useful in the sense that it opens a window into the minds of those who inflicted pogroms upon innocent persons precisely because they were deemed guilty of the most heinous crime by the highest religious authorities of those times and places, men like the Bishop of Meaux.

“Religion and the continued existence of the people of God throughout the centuries is the greatest and most useful of all things a man can study,” Bossuet begins. This continuity “shows clearly God’s sustaining hand,” His providential rule over his creatures. Creation itself bespeaks that care; although He could have done it in an instant, God took six days to create the world “to show that he does not act out of necessity or blind impetuosity, as some philosophers have imagined.” On the contrary, “the account of the Creation as given by Moses shows us this great secret of true philosophy: that fecundity and absolute power dwell in God alone,” and not, he implies, in the ‘absolute’ monarchy of Louis XIV or any other human ruler. 

When God says, “Let us make man,” his use of “us” deserves note, Bossuet remarks. “Nowhere in the entire Scriptures does anyone but God speak of himself in the plural,” and He does so “only two or three times,” using this “extraordinary language for the first time when it is a question of creating man.” That is because when God creates man “he speaks to someone who creates as well as he, to someone of whom man is the creature and image; he speaks to another self; he speaks to him by whom all things were made, to him who says in his Gospel, What things soever the Father doeth, these also doeth the Son likewise.” Not only does God speak to Jesus, “he speaks at the same time with the almighty Spirit, equal and coeternal with both of them.” The trinitarian God has existed since before “the beginning.”

To speak this way also indicates “a new order of things,” a founding. “The Trinity manifests itself for the first time when it creates a creature whose intellectual operations are an imperfect image of those eternal operations whereby God is fruitful in himself.” And this is itself a new kind of creating. Prior to Man, God had never touched the “corruptible matter” he created, “but to form the body of man, God himself takes earth; and that earth, molded by such a hand, receives the most beautiful form that has yet appeared in the world,” a creature whose “body is straight, his head…held high, and his sight…turned toward Heaven”—a form which shows this new being “whence he has come and whither he must go.” Again: providential. Even “more wonderful” is way God ensouled man with “a breath of life that proceeds from God himself.” “Let us not,” Bossuet cautions, “believe that our soul is a portion of the divine nature, as some philosophers have dreamed.” It proceeded from God, but it was a new act of creation; God is not immanent in Man, whose soul, and particularly his intellect, are rather created in the image of God. “Woe to the creature that delights in itself and not in God!” That is why the angels who fell, fell.

Man’s imperfection manifests itself rapidly. The successful temptation of Eve by the Serpent “is the beginning of the spirit of revolt” in Man: “first, the command is discussed, and then obedience is brought into doubt.” Adam wants intellectual satisfaction—knowledge of good and evil—and sensuous pleasure—his wife convinces him that the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge is good to eat. The result is that “the rebellion of his senses” against God’s command. It is impossible not to see in this a tacit critique of Bossuet’s contemporary, Descartes, who makes so much of doubt as the pathway to knowledge, a method by which the human mind can clear itself of everything we have been told, including anything we’ve been told not to do. Such efforts fail, Bossuet thinks, because doubting God’s commands leaves the human mind defenseless against the power of the passions. “For Adam, “the rebellion of the senses makes him observe in himself something shameful,” requiring him to clothe himself, covering up the physical being God made because he knew he was no longer worthy of his God-breathed original being. The Serpent’s “You shall be as gods” tempted Eve, then Adam, to attempt to overcome, irrationally, the distinction god had delineated, the distinction between Creator and created. This soon leads Adam’s progeny to another form of sensualism—idolatry, whereby men begin to worship physical objects they themselves have ‘created.’ this is the final derangement of man’s God-breathed reason. Having been formed by God, Man absurdly “thought he could make a God.” All of this shows that there is “no power more inescapable or tyrannical than the power of vice and passion.”

Each generation of men degenerated further—so much so that God lost His patience with His creatures, destroying all but the relatively decent few in the worldwide Flood. Even after receding, the waters left all of nature weakened, as the lingering moisture accelerated decomposition and the human lifespan shortened. Enfeebled human beings began to supplement the vegetarian diet with meat, fueling warfare. 

The simple Noachide commandments God imposed upon mankind proved insufficient to hold human attention. To counteract men’s continued failure to follow in God’s way, His regime, God gave Moses not another set of verbal commands but a system of written laws to a people He chose to bind “with fearful strictness” and thereby improve, providing (for example) “stronger barriers against idolatry.” In choosing the Israelites he did not reward them for any merit; they “were as vulgar and rebellious as any other people, or more so.” And in preventing Moses from entering the Promised Land, God offered Israelites and the rest of mankind an indispensable lesson: “His Law made nothing perfect.” Like Moses, thanks to God’s lawful guidance we can see His promises “from afar”; the Law “conducts us at most, as it were, to the gateway of our inheritance.” It was Joshua, whose “true name” is Jesus, who brings God’s people into the Promised Land itself.

Bossuet draws many such parallels between the Old and New Testaments. The warrior-king David fights God’s wars but Solomon, the man of peace and wisdom, is the king God permits to build His Temple in His city, Jerusalem. “David’s wars showed how much toil it takes to attain [the glory of Heaven], and Solomon’s reign showed how peaceable is its enjoyment.” For their part, Bossuet asserts, the prophets who spoke truth to the Israelite kings saw Jesus; this may be why he spends so much effort in retelling stories from Hebrew Scripture to the heir apparent to the French throne. One day, “Under [Jesus’] admirable reign the Assyrians and the Egyptians shall form with the Israelites but one and the same people of God. Everything becomes Israel, everything becomes holy. Jerusalem is no longer an individual city: it is the image of a new society, in which all nations are gathered together.” Throughout all the vicissitudes to come, “God never permitted his voice to become extinct among his people.”

His power never ceased to enforce what His voice said, and that power was not uniformly gentle. “When the royal sons of David follow their father’s good example”—Dauphin, take note—God “works surprising wonders on their behalf; but when they degenerate, they feel the invincible strength of his arm.” God eventually allowed the Assyrians to destroy His Temple, to let Israelites “see that he was not confined to an edifice of stone, but that he would find his habitation in faithful hearts.” Nonetheless, “the overthrow of the cities and empires which harassed God’s people or profited by their destruction were written in the prophecies,” enabling (for example) the Jewish people to escape Babylon, “having timely warning.” To His chosen people, God administers fatherly chastisement, “merciful judgment,” punishing them for their own good; to the Babylonians and other nations he administers “rigorous judgment” and chastisement, ruining them. “God left no appeal” for the Babylonians. “But not so with the Jews. God chastened them like disobedient children, whom he returns to their duty by correction, and then, moved by their tears, he forgets their faults.”

As always, however, God sets limits to His patience, as seen in the promises and warnings of the last prophets. Daniel foresees the life and death of Jesus. Jacob had taught the future advent of the Messiah; he did not “tell us that his death should be the cause” of Judah’s downfall. “God revealed this important secret to Daniel and declares to him that the ruin of the Jews shall be the consequence of the death of Christ and of their rejection of the Messiah.” That is, Daniel learns that many Jews will become like Gentiles, rejecting their Messiah, and will afterwards be judged and chastised as Gentiles had been judged and chastised. The prophecies of Zechariah and Haggai foretell the betrayal of Jerusalem “by her own children”; the last prophet, Malachi, looks forward to John the Baptist and Jesus. After these prophets, prophecy ceased. There was no more need for them. “The proofs [the Jewish people] had received were sufficient, and once their incredulity had been not only overcome by events but also frequently punished, they at last became docile,” eschewing idolatry and the words of false prophets for a long time. 

In secular terms, “instructed by their prophets to obey the kings to whom God had subjected them,” they found those kings to be “their protectors rather than their masters,” living under their own laws with “the sacerdotal power…preserved in its entirety.” “The priests guided the people; the public council, first established by Moses, enjoyed its full authority.” This was in fact the way most ancient empires ruled their subject peoples. Limitations of transportation and communications enabled rulers to rule no other way. “For 300 years they…enjoyed this rest, so often foretold by their prophets, when ambition and jealousy arose among them and came near to undoing them.” They began to imitate Greek ways, “prefer[ring[ that vain pomp to the solid glory which the observance of the laws of their ancestors acquired for them among their countrymen.”

The Jews’ “whole history, everything that happened to them from day to day, was but one continued unfolding of the oracles which the Holy Spirit had left them.” As for the Greeks, who ruled the Jewish people at that time, even what took place among them “was a preparation for knowledge of the truth.” Greek philosophers understood “that the world was ruled by a God very different from those whom the populace worshiped and whom they themselves worshiped with the populace,” albeit mostly for the sake of safety from ridicule or even (in the case of Socrates) persecution. [1] But this should not be taken as an independent discovery. “The Greek histories show that this excellent philosophy came from the East and from places to which the Jews had been dispersed.” Whether this claim of origins is true or false, mankind “began to awaken” to teachings that “furnished beforehand certain proof to those who were one day to rescue [the Gentiles] from their ignorance,” namely, the Apostles of Christ, who would cite the doctrine of ‘the god of the philosophers’ when teaching who that god really is. Philosophy, however, is not quite enough. “The most enlightened and wisest nations, the Chaldeans, Egyptians, Phoenicians, Greeks, and Romans, were the most ignorant and the most blind in matters of religion, which only proves that one must be brought to wisdom by a special grace and by a more than human wisdom.” 

In the end, and as per the original Satanic temptation, the Jewish people “succumbed to ambition.” By now, they were under the Roman Empire, wherein they enjoyed a substantial degree of self-government. “The Pharisees wanted power and accordingly assumed absolute power over the people, setting themselves up as arbiters of learning and religion.” Their “presumption went so far as to arrogate to itself the gift of God.” Under their regime, “the Jews…forgot that [God’s] goodness alone had set them apart from other nations, and they looked upon this as their due,” confusing divine grace for divine justice. They “thought themselves of a different species from other men, whom they considered deprived of the knowledge” of God, “look[ing] upon the Gentiles with an unbearable disdain.” “They fancied themselves holy by nature”—a contradiction, given nature’s postlapsarian corruption. “It was the Pharisees who, priding themselves on their own lights and on their strict observance of the ceremonies of the Law, introduced this opinion in the latter days.”

Factionalism resulted. In search of a cure, the Jewish people allowed “all public power” to pass “into the hands of Herod and the Romans, whose slave he [was], and he shook the foundations of the Jewish state,” hitherto self-governing if not sovereign within the Roman Empire. The Pharisees and the people alike chafed under “the yoke of the Gentiles,” their “contempt and hatred” intensified. They yearned for a Messiah who would be a David, not a Solomon, a man of war not of wisdom and peace. “Forgetting the many prophecies which told them so specifically of [the Messiah’s] humiliations, they no longer had eyes or ears for any prophecies but those which announced triumphs.” The triumphal entry of Jesus into Jerusalem on an ass was not what they anticipated.

Readers of the Hebrew Scripture know that God’s prophets do not hesitate to denounce the bad behavior of God’s people. In his retelling of the times before Jesus’ birth, however, Bossuet sometimes inclines to identify corrupt priests with the Jewish people as a whole. This is a dangerous thing to do, and one must watch closely as he proceeds, next, to give his account of the life of Jesus, having now reached the center of his book.

 

Note

1. “Plato, speaking of the god who had formed the universe, says that it is hard to find him and that it is forbidden to declare him to the people. He protests that he never speaks of him but enigmatically, for fear of exposing so great a truth to ridicule.” Thus “mankind was plunged into such an abyss that it could not bear the least idea of the true God!” Bossuet places this account of Greek philosophy in the sixteenth, central chapter of Book II.

 

Sinclair B. Ferguson and Derek W.H. Thomas: Ichthus: Jesus Christ, God’s Son, the Saviour. Edinburgh: The Banner of Truth Trust, 2018.

 

According to the New Testament, God requires us to know Christ, if we desire salvation. Very well, then, who is He? The authors provide a clear account of the identity of Jesus based upon the principal events of His life as presented in the Gospels.

At birth, Jesus was God incarnate—a status vehemently disputed by Jerusalem rabbis when He laid claim to it in their presence, some thirty years later. The rabbis demanded His execution, the penalty for blasphemy under Jewish law. Because they lived under Roman law, they could not themselves execute that penalty but instead prevailed upon the Roman governor to have Him crucified. Jesus’ death thus in a sense followed from His birth, but in a way unlike any other human being. No one had accused him of any illegal or sinful act prior to His alleged blasphemy; there was no evidence to suggest that He had been subject to ‘original sin,’ or the curse entailed by it, until the allegation of blasphemy that led to his execution.

To explain the Incarnation, the authors begin by citing the famous opening lines of the Gospel of John: “In the beginning was the Word….” In this case, perhaps unique in the ancient world, ‘word’ or logos refers to a Person, not an idea or a faculty of the soul, and not simply an utterance. Whereas Matthew begins his account of Jesus with an account of Abraham and Luke begins with John the Baptist’s parents, “John begins with eternity,” to “the very first words of the Hebrew Bible.”  “John is helping us understand creation. That creative speech of God described in Genesis chapter 1 was not simply a sound” but “a person”; “the entire created order has a personal, not an impersonal foundation.” What is more, the Word was with God; as the Son of God, Jesus was with His Father, capable of looking upon His Father and living, unlike any other human being. And the Word was God; that is, “He is uncreated,” a being “on the side of God, not on the side of creation,” with “the authority to bring us into the family of God.” At the same time, He is incarnate, ‘approachable’ or ‘viewable’ by human beings, unlike His Father. “If we know Christ the Logos then we know the one who has been from eternity, always is, and ever will be, face to face with the heavenly Father.” “This for John is the wonder of the incarnation. The one who was able to live ‘face to face’ with God in that holy atmosphere, and to gaze into the eyes of his Father, has assumed our flesh and come to live ‘face to face’ with us in our fallen world, in obedience to his Father.” Without the Incarnation, without the assumption of physical, human being by God, there could be no “substitute and sacrifice for human sinners.” “The Son of God became what he was not in order that we might become what we were not.” He came “as one person who functioned appropriately according to each of his two natures”—functioning “as the creating and sustaining Word” in His divine character to redeem creatures powerless to redeem themselves, yet experiencing weariness, thirst and hunger, calm and joy and sadness, amazement and sorrow, finally death on the Cross, in His human nature. “In the incarnation of the word, God himself was sovereignly at work to bring salvation” to human beings. 

In so doing, not only His death but His life was a continual sacrifice. Human beings “have never truly and fully tasted or sensed how sinful sin is because it is so normal to us. Jesus, by contrast, saw how abnormal, distorting, ugly, and deeply rebellious it really.” God embodied must feel the difference between holiness and unholiness more than any other being. At the same time, by bringing the divine light of the Word to earth, among mere humans, God illuminates their intellectual and moral darkness, a darkness otherwise terminated only in the final darkness of death.

After His birth, His incarnation, the next major event in Jesus’ life is His baptism. Born of Mary’s sister, John the Baptist lived to denounce the Pharisees and Sadducees as a brood of vipers, in need of baptism as a sign of their repentance. More, “He who is coming after me is mightier than I, whose sandals I am not worthy to carry,” a Person who will baptize you not with water but “with the Holy Spirit and with fire.” But before He does that, and to John’s astonishment (the full truth had not been revealed to the prophet), Jesus comes to be baptized by John. Why would the Son of God, infinitely superior to John, with no sins to repent, come to John for baptism?

“John was the first prophet to appear in Jerusalem or in its environs for four centuries,” the last of the type of prophets seen in the Old Testament. He attracted huge crowds who gathered to listen to his words. “A massive spiritual awakening seemed to be underway,” along the lines of similar ‘revivals’ which had occurred in the history of the Israelite nation. John’s baptism, “a baptism of confession of sin and repentance,” recalls the baptisms ordained for the conversion of Gentiles to Judaism. “Unclean by definition,” Gentiles “needed to be washed.” At the same time, John’s baptisms occurred at the River Jordan, where Israel had entered the Promised Land, where Elijah was last seen before ascending to Heaven. If John is the new Elijah, then he “the appearance and the message of the divinely appointed herald of the end of the age.” Ages end when God visits His righteous anger upon them, sending flood waters over the world or drowning the Egyptian army in the Red Sea. 

But this only highlights the significance of Jesus. It does not explain why He would want to be baptized by a mere mortal, however divinely inspired. John quite reasonably asks, “I need to be baptized by you, and you come to me?” Jesus replies, “Let it be so now, for thus it is fitting for us to fulfill all righteousness.” What righteousness does the Son of God, of all Persons, need to fulfill? 

The authors suggest that Jesus invokes Isaiah 53, where the prophet’s songs “describe and interpret the life and suffering of a figure simply described [by God] as ‘My servant.'” “By his knowledge,” the prophet sings, “shall the righteous one, my servant, make many to be accounted righteous, and he shall bear their iniquities.” If Jesus “came to be that Servant, to identify himself with us in our sin, and to become the one who would bear the iniquities of his people,” then Jesus thinks of John’s baptism as preliminary to taking on the sins of the humanity whose nature He has assumed. Since baptism is not only a cleansing ritual but a naming ritual, this baptism ‘names’ Jesus “among sinners,” counts Him in the census of covenant-breakers. The authors quote John Calvin: Jesus “willed in full measure to appear before the judgment seat of God his Father in the name and in the person of all sinners, being then ready to be condemned, inasmuch as he bore our burden.” Therefore, Jesus’ baptism is “an act of substitution.” “The Egyptians received the curse; but God’s people got the blessing. So it will be when our Lord’s symbolic baptism becomes a reality. The curse he bears is ours; the blessing we receive is his.” Jesus’ death “draws both the guilt and sting of sin,” while His resurrection is the act “through which we are raised into a new life altogether.”

Immediately after Jesus’ baptism, he is anointed by the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove. The dove recalls the dove Noah released from the ark. The dove returned carrying an olive branch, proving that life on land had revived, signifying “that the judgment of God [on humanity] had passed and that a ‘new creation’ had begun.” The Holy Spirit is said to “hover” over the waters, perhaps an allusion to God’s hovering over the waters of chaos during the creation week. “Now, through Jesus’ identification with covenant-breakers, God is going to bring about not only the redemption and regeneration of individuals but something far grander even than that—a new creation altogether.” The Holy Spirit “has come to help” the Son, a human as well as divine Being, who has entered a new and far more dangerous time in His “life and ministry,” the “prolonged war” with Satan “for which he had been in preparation these past thirty years. “Until the end, even in his death,” Jesus “will be upheld by the Spirit.” While it is true that, qua divinity, Jesus would need no assistance whatever in displaying His power. But to do so would not accomplish this mission. “He would no longer be the second man, the last Adam,” “our representative,” the one who suffers for humanity’s sins in place of humanity. He would ‘only’ be God on earth, performing wonders.  

Where is the Father? Right here, at least in His voice, which confirms, “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.” God the Father may utter these words “to confirm to the human mind of Jesus his identity as the second person of the Trinity.” The human mind needs such confirmation, as it will wonder, “how can this man be himself God?” In submitting to baptism by John the Baptist, Jesus obeys the Law of His Father and submits “to the Father’s plan” as the sacrificial substitute who “tak[es] the place of Adam and his posterity.” This means that we are not only pardoned for our sins, but that Jesus’ righteousness counts in our favor. Baptism is an act of justice, of righteousness, which clears the way for divine grace, which is far beyond justice. Among the Israelites, men sacrificed something they might have eaten, something that might have sustained their flesh, for the spiritual purpose of ‘getting right,’ realigning their souls, with God. Jesus will sacrifice His own human-all-too-human flesh, flesh never made to sin by His own divine character but baptized as if it had been. Baptism in obedience to the Father’s Law signifies His readiness to sacrifice that flesh in substitution for the sin-directed flesh of human persons.

Jesus’ forty days in the wilderness evidently parallels the Israelites’ forty years in the desert, Noah’s forty days and forty nights in the ark. The authors remark that Luke’s version of the Temptation differs from Matthew’s; Luke begins Jesus’ genealogy with Adam instead of Abraham. By calling attention to Jesus’ human ‘lineage,’ Luke wants his readers to notice that Jesus is the Second Man, the Last Adam. (Nietzsche satirizes this when presenting his own ‘Last Man,’ whom he regards as the culmination of Christian egalitarianism.) Luke sets “our Lord’s ministry within the cosmic context to which it belongs.” Having “entered the bloodline of Adam,” Jesus “is being led on to the front line to do battle against Satan,” but “this time—as Mark points out—not in a garden where the animals were named by and obedient to Adam, and where food and beauty abounded,” but “in a wilderness where there was neither food nor water, and where wild animals roamed.” Against Adam’s condemnation, defeat, and bondage in sin as a consequence of his disobedience, Jesus sets obedience, freedom, victory, and salvation. “This temptation narrative tells us that what Adam failed to do, Jesus has come to do. The image of God that was marred through Adam is now being repaired through Christ.” By entering Satan’s desolate territory, Jesus makes war against him, seizing his hostages, the sons of Adam. The temptation story calls attention to Jesus’ acts, not His ‘being.’ His incarnate Being enables Him to launch a counterattack on Satan, and win.

What is Satan’s strategy in response to Jesus? “Satan is not interested in tempting [Jesus’] deity, for he knows God cannot be tempted with sin”—what, indeed, would an all-powerful Being gain by contradicting Himself? “Rather he is focused on destroying the ministry that the Savior was sent to exercise.” Each of Satan’s temptations aims at getting Jesus to deny not His godhood but His manhood, the conduit (as it were) whereby He can take on the burden of humanity’s sins.

Satan first tempts Jesus by challenging Him to turn the stones that surround them into bread. Why is this a temptation? What is morally wrong with turning stones into bread? Nothing, in itself.  Satan implies that Jesus has the ‘right’ to do so, in order to end His hunger. But it isn’t “because of any need he has for himself as the Son of God that Jesus is in the wilderness. He is there as the Second Man. Where Adam became disobedient by taking and eating, Jesus means to be obedient by not taking and by not eating,” by acting as “Adam in reverse.” Jesus is God, so He can perform the miracle, but what has He to prove to Satan, who already knows who He is? He is in the desert to humiliate Himself before the Father and thereby to redeem mankind, not to react proudly to Satan’s provocation and thereby to confirm it. Hence His reply, the authors observe: “Man shall not live by bread alone.” He is “here for man and therefore…must live as man“—not to use His divine powers as a means of relieving his all-too-human bodily desires. Satan lied to Eve, telling her that she and Adam will not die but live as gods; Jesus chooses to live as a man and to die as one because there is no use lying to the One who is the incarnate Word. “Where Adam sought exaltation, Jesus embraced humiliation.“

It is worth adding that by saying “Man does not live by bread alone,” Jesus points to one of the distinctive characteristics of human nature. God does not live by bread, at all. Neither do angels. Animals live by bread, only. Only man lives by bread, but not by bread alone; man alone by his nature combines material with rational and spiritual qualities. Jesus combines those qualities, too, but in a different way, remaining divine while being human.  

Satan’s second temptation is ‘Worship me, and I will give you authority over all the kingdoms of this world,’ thereby offering Jesus the authority Adam had lost, without needing to endure crucifixion. Since Jesus can have authority over all the kingdoms of this world whenever He wants it by overthrowing Satan, impotent in the face of His power, the promise is empty. Satan’s offer amounts to an attempt to prevent Jesus from seizing Satan’s human subjects. Indeed, if the Son of God acceded to it, the Father might well punish Him for disobedience, as Adam was punished. Jesus would lose His authority over the world He created, and Satan might rule it a bit longer. But Jesus loves His Father and men, not Satan, and although He is harmless as a dove, he is even more prudent than a serpent, including the Serpent.

Satan finally challenges Jesus to throw himself down from the pinnacle of the temple. Again, the temptation or test consists of proving His deity. But Jesus “has not come to play in the world he has created, but in order to save it at great cost to himself.” Satan wants Jesus to tempt God, to do what Satan himself is doing, to perform an imitatio Satani. In refusing, Jesus “exposed the devil for what he really is behind his mask: the enemy of God, and at the same time the enemy of humanity.” In refusing, Jesus puts the lie to the liar. He will prove His divinity not in jumping off the temple, by falling, but by rising from the dead. He will prove His divinity on the Father’s terms, not Satan’s.

Before he does that, he must go not to the wilderness but to the mountaintop. Peter, John, and James accompany Him to the mountain to pray. There, Moses and Elijah appear before them, to be told by the Father that only Jesus is His Son, His Chosen One. Moses had brought the Law of God; Elijah had brought His prophecy. Jesus will fulfill both God’s Law and God’s prophecy. Jesus is transfigured, giving three of his disciples “a glimpse” of “the kingdom of glory to be ushered in by his return,” after His crucifixion and resurrection. “Peter said that they were ‘eyewitnesses of his majesty.'” John said that “Jesus was always ‘face to face with God,’ bathed from all eternity in his Father’s love,” “full of grace and truth.” Having seen Jesus as a man, they now see Him as the true Son of God, as divine. 

Moses and Elijah appeared on the mountaintop to speak with Jesus about “the exodus which he was about to accomplish in Jerusalem.” Moses knows that the exodus he had led from Egypt to the border of the Promised Land prefigured “a greater Exodus,” not from human tyranny but “from a deeper oppression under sin, Satan, and death.” In ascending from the dead, Jesus will lead His people to the holiest of promised ‘lands’—in Heaven, not on earth. By appearing to the Son, the prophets, and the apostles in the form of a cloud, the Father does something He has done before: during the first exodus, He had “manifested his presence” by the means of a cloud; he had done so when Moses met with God on Sinai; he had covered the tabernacle that way, and filled Solomon’s temple that way, also. “It is the Shekinah—the glory cloud of the presence of God coming down.” The men all fear it. The cloud “overshadows” them, as it had done to Mary “when he came to empower her at the conception of the Lord Jesus.” It may be that it will come at Calvary, too, when the sky darkens. “It is the physical expression of God’s presence in space and time inexorably fulfilling his purposes.” It is only after the Father has attracted their fearful attention that He speaks, telling them that Jesus and only Jesus is His Son. Jesus was born of a woman, but He is the Son of God. “If we are going to live” the Christian life and live it “well and to the glory of god, then Jesus alone must be the one who fills our horizon,” the authors conclude. Although “we have a thousand different needs,” “at the end of the day, there is only one need,” to “see the glory of the Lord Jesus Christ, and to know” Him as the only one who truly offers salvation.

In their fifth, central chapter, the authors move to the garden at Gethsemane, where Jesus asks His Father not to send Him to the Cross but obeys when not relieved of that burden. His “spirit is willing,” but His “flesh is weak.” The ‘Man’ dimension of the Man-God can only shrink from the prospect of torture, scorn, and crucifixion. “This is the decisive moment,” the central event in Jesus’ life on earth—another decision in a garden, made in “the hour of the power of darkness,” in full realization of “what it would mean for him to be the Mediator between a Holy God and sinful humanity.” “Humanly speaking it is unhinging him”—the prospect of “enter[ing] into the unique horror of making atonement, of being someone who knew no sin but was made sin for others.” Moses had trembled at the presence of God. “But what he saw was God in covenant,” God self-restrained by His own guarantees. “What Jesus sees is the unmitigated wrath and anger of God unleashed against covenant-breakers,” with “no mercy,” fury descending on him as he “tak[es] the place and undergo[es] the curse due to ‘sinners in the hands of an angry God.'”

Not only as Man but also as God, Jesus must find crucifixion repellant. Having lived sinless, incarnate in a sinful world, was pain enough, “but to be reckoned sin—to ‘be made sin for us, who knew no sin’—surely his revulsion of that must have been total?” Yet “the will of the Son of God in his divine nature is exactly the same as the will of his Father,” there being “only one divine will.” Jesus’ decision is the supreme manifestation of self-sacrificing agapic love, the specifically Jewish and Christian form of love. When the Christian prays, “Thy will be done,” he aligns himself with the same will, but never so perfectly, and never at such a cost. 

For their discussion of Christ’s Passion on the Cross, the authors turn to the Gospel of Mark. “For as many as twenty hours the Lord Jesus was subjected to unmitigated, relentless and ruthless shame, climaxing in the final exposure of the cross.” This was more than physical torture. The Being most deserving of honor was shamed by a cohort of Roman centurions, sneering at His nakedness and His agony. Being nailed to a cross is to be exhibited, held up as an example of what happens when you violate the law. Unknown to His torturers, He was indeed being held up as an example, the supreme example of sacrifice on behalf of those torturers, among whom all human beings have numbered, insofar as they really do sin. “Ecce homo, indeed. Behold the man, now dehumanized by men, that we who have been unmanned in sin might become truly human again.” The most courageous guardians of Rome, the glory of their time and place, not only utterly despise the Being who is their only real guardian, but they mar him “beyond human semblance,” unwittingly doing exactly what needed to be done, namely, to destroy the one example of perfect human nature since Adam’s fall into sin, so that God and not ‘humanity’ may become the example, the guide, the guardian of human conduct. His nakedness recalls the nakedness of Adam before Adam’s sin, when ‘Man’ or Adam was truly man as God intended him to be. At the same time, His agonized question, “My God, my God, why have You forsaken Me?” is the last cry of the Last Man, the words of Man in his imperfection, loaded with sin. 

On what grounds as Jesus been condemned to die? And why is it that those who condemn Him “recognize and acknowledge that he is in fact innocent”? The first charge is the charge of the rabbis, who accuse Him of blasphemy against God. The second charge is the charge of treason against Caesar in calling Himself a king. But “Jesus is not guilty of the religious court’s charge of blasphemy,” since the witnesses “cannot agree” on what they heard Him say. As for Caesar, the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, finds “nothing worthy of death in this man.” He yields to the clamor of the rabbis, thereby himself committing treason against Caesar, committing the crime Jesus was tried on, before the judgment of Rome. “Why, then, when he is innocent is he crucified?” Because He took on the guilt of all human beings, suffered punishment for “the charges of which we are all guilty before the judgment seat of God.” All human beings stand guilty of blasphemy, having “made ourselves, rather than God, the center of our universe.” All human beings are traitors, too, having “rebelled against [God’s] authority over us.” “He is being crucified for us.”

Upon His death, the curtain of the temple was torn from top to bottom. The curtain had separated the holy of holies, “the one room that represented the presence of God” on earth, from the rest of the world, from the unholy. The curtain separated Creator from creation. Only the Jewish High Priest could enter that room, only once a year, carrying the annual sacrifice. But now that the supreme sacrifice had been made, “no other sacrifice will ever be needed.” The Father, “not in sorrow, but in the welcome of the gospel, tore the veil that hid him from us and barred sinners from entering his holy presence.”

From Jesus’ crucifixion, the authors move to John 20:1-23, the account of His resurrection. The tomb is empty. That discovery “set in motion a change to everything—absolutely everything.” Among the many messianic movements in the decades that followed, only one survived, its Messiah alone having survived death according to some 500 witnesses. The Sanhedrin had warned Pontius Pilate that Jesus’ disciples might steal the body and claim it was resurrected—the rabbis of the major Jewish sect, the Sadducees, did not believe resurrection possible—but many saw the living Christ.

The first of these was among the humblest. The former prostitute, Mary Magdalene, could not have given legally admissible evidence in the courts of that time, under that regime. This, the authors argue, makes the account more likely to be true, since a fictional account more probably would cite a man as the first witness. Indeed, Mary Magdalene initially mistakes Jesus for a gardener, an unwitting allusion to Adam, the First Man. Her error is telling: “the Creator had become the Second Man, appointed to do the work which the first gardener, Adam, had so signally failed to do” by “replanting this fallen world and beginning a new creation that would eventually become a glorious garden.” She recognizes Him not by seeing but by hearing—rightly, since the sheep know their master by his voice (John 10:3). His first human body mutilated, He has remained in bodily human form. She reaches out to confirm His presence by touch, but Jesus tells her “not to hold on to him,” as “I have not yet ascended.” Resurrection is only the first part of Jesus’ exaltation; His “ascension to the right hand of his Father” would soon occur, and that is why Jesus must not suppose that he has “simply been resuscitated so that his former life can continue more or less as it was.” 

Jesus appears to His disciples, greeting and blessing them with “Shalom“—Peace be with you. “The word signified wholeness, well-being, complete healing, integration; peace with God, peace with themselves, peace with each other, peace with creation.” Isaiah had prophesied that the Suffering Servant would endure “the chastisement that brought us peace.” Through the Holy Spirit, Jesus will give his disciples the authority to forgive or not to forgive—sharing with them a portion of His lordship. Luke 24:50-53 relates Jesus’ blessing of His disciples and His ascent to Heaven; Acts 1:1-11 records the disciples’ receipt of the authority, as witnesses of His ascension, to tell the world of it. 

Jesus stayed with His disciples for six weeks after His resurrection. During that time, he taught them that he was not intending to restore the kingdom to Israel, as they had imagined, but that His destination was not Jerusalem but Heaven, where He “would be seated at the right hand of God” and “exercise all authority in heaven and earth, not merely over the Jewish people.” In so doing, He would never relinquish His embodiment. “The incarnation did not provide a merely temporary vehicle in which the Son of God was able to make a sacrifice for our sins” but His permanent body, in which He will reappear when the Last Day arrives. “He will come again in the same way he left—visibly, physically, bodily.” Bodily presence implies weight and force. “The ascension is about the kingship of Jesus,” His regime. Having “been in a prolonged and fierce battle” against Satan, God’s rival for rule, having “proved victorious,” He now “mount[s] his throne.” Such a visible triumph was familiar to Romans, as their victorious generals would return from the wars to a victory parade in the capital city. To prevent hubris, the triumphal procession would include a slave who accompanied the general in his chariot, repeating Homos es—you are a man and (by implication) not a god. “But this triumph,” Jesus’ triumph, “is different,” as this warrior really is God. His triumphal movement isn’t ‘horizontal,’ along the streets of Rome, but ‘vertical,’ an ascent to Heaven. Moreover, when Luke writes Christos kurios, Christ is Lord, he corrects the Romans’ practice of deifying their emperors. 

Before that, Jesus teaches the disciples something else, that the Holy Spirit will come to them, “another Helper,” one who will never depart from them, one that will descend to them not ascend from them. This outpouring of the Holy Spirit occurred on the holiday of Pentecost, when Diaspora Jews gathered from around the world in Jerusalem. Feeling that holy Presence, they heard Peter’s explanation, that this was “the guarantee that Jesus had now ascended into the presence of the Father and had asked for the Spirit to be sent to the church,” as He had promised the disciples. Peter spoke to them in Hebrew, in one language, as if the curse of the destruction of the Tower of Babel had been reversed and mankind could now listen to one voice. Only “the convicting and converting power of the Holy Spirit” could do such a thing. As a result, “Christ’s Spirit is present with us, indwelling us and carrying out his mission of making the things of Christ known to us, and distributing his gifts among us.” In fulfilling this promise to the disciples, Jesus strengthens Christians’ faith in the fulfillment of His still greater promise of return. 

“The second coming is about Christ himself.” In his letter to the Thessalonians, Paul addresses the worries of Church members who wonder what will happen to Christians who die before Christ’s return. Their initial hope that He would return quickly, during their lifetimes, had been falsified. (For one thing, Jesus had said that He wouldn’t return until the Gospel had been preached “in all the world,” giving all human beings a chance to hear and to respond to it.) Meanwhile, will the Christian dead “miss out on the blessing of the second coming”? 

Paul reassures them, pointing to the rule of Christ over His Church as a regime. “The gospel message is that the kingdom has already arrived in Jesus Christ, although it is not yet consummated (hence we continue to pray “Your kingdom come”). Christians are its citizens here and now. ‘The gospel of the kingdom’ is the only gospel there is.” As for the timing of His return to earth ‘in the flesh,’ He explicitly stated, “It is not for you to know” (Acts 1:7). Instead of wasting time in speculation, Christians should live “in the light of the possibility that Jesus could come back within our lifetime.” Out of sight, out of mind, as the saying goes; living as if He will return soon, in the confidence that our salvation doesn’t depend upon whether or not he does, will prove a good way to keep the Ruler of the Christian regime consciously present in our minds throughout our lives.

How will we know when He does return? For one thing, a trumpet will sound: in Jesus’ time, the trumpet was the herald of the arrival of the ruler; the trumpet called soldiers to battle; the trumpet proclaimed the Year of Jubilee, “when all debts and all bondage came to an end”; prophets had described the trumpet sound as the warning of “impending judgment.” “The ‘last trumpet’ functions in all these ways,” above all as a proclamation of “the beginning of an eternal jubilee, in which the Lord of glory will bring in the day of eternal joy.” 

Although a sound will herald Jesus’ arrival, He will be seen. The main terms associated with His return—epiphaneia, apokalupsis, parousia—all “suggest visibility.” More, He will see in addition to being seen, and “His gaze will cause a reflection of himself to become visible in his people.” The metamorphosis of their souls, already initiated by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, invisibly, will become manifest in their bodies. They will “become like him.” 

Then what consolation has the dying Christian? “For the believer the process of dying may be a trial, a sore ideal, a difficult stage in the journey to the celestial city. But Christ has drawn the sting of death” by making it into “the gateway of life.” The metamorphosis of the living bodies of Christians will be paralleled even more miraculously by the resurrection of dead bodies—many of them now reduced to their elements. “No matter how disintegrated they may have become, he will regenerate these bodies marked by humiliation so that they will become like his body of glory.” What has disintegrated will then be integrated into the body of Christ as part of the politeuma of God’s regime.

Jesus Christ is the Second Man, having shared in the death inflicted upon Man for Man’s sin, and having suffered for Man’s sin, taking Man’s just punishment for him. Jesus Christ is also the Last Adam, having been resurrected, conquering death, and uniting His people with Him in His Kingdom then, now, and especially in the future, for eternity.

The authors title their book Ichthus, a reference to the familiar Christian symbol of the fish, which dates to the earliest years of the Church. This may have been a way for one Christian to signal his identity to another, during the many years of persecution under the Roman Empire, the rival regime at that time. According to a long tradition, the letters spell out an anagram meaning “Jesus Christ is the Son of God and Savior.” In writing this clear statement of what that means, Ferguson and Thomas provide a straightforward account of the core principles of the Christian regime, of what the rule of God is for. 

 

Bonaventure: Conscience and Synderesis. Arthur Stephen McGrade, John Kilcullen, and Matthew Kempshaw translation. In McGrade, Kilcullen, and Kempshaw, eds.: The Cambridge Translations of Medieval Philosophical Texts.  Volume II: Ethics and Political Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

 

The Franciscan theologian Bonaventure flourished in the middle of the thirteenth century, eventually serving as Minister General of the Franciscan order and Cardinal of Albano, having first come to prominence in Paris as a lecturer on Peter Lombard’s Sentences. Conscience and Synderesis is a commentary on Lombard’s book.

Following the structure of that book, Bonaventure divides his commentary into two articles, the first on conscience and the second on synderesis. He calls conscience “a certain directive rule of the will,” whereas synderesis “is called the spark of conscience.” Synderesis thus seems to be something like what Aristotle calls the “efficient” or originative cause of conscience, its archē. 

He intends to answer three questions about conscience: Is it in the cognitive part of the soul or the affective part? In its origin does it exist by nature or is it acquired? And in its effects “does every conscience obligate?” Or can one rightly refuse to obey it?

There are five arguments for conscience as existing in the cognitive part of the soul. First, Ecclesiastes 7:22 describes conscience as something that knows; in that passage, the prophet observes that a wise man knows that even righteous men have sinned by cursing others. Second, Damascene calls conscience “the law of our understanding,” and Scripture “directly respects the understanding,” presumably in the sense that divine Revelation tells the truth to human souls. The third argument is etymological: the word for knowing, scientia, is built into conscientia. Conscius means awareness of something in a sciens or knower, a person who has experienced a cognition. Fourth, conscience could be right or wrong. Since making a mistake “relates to a habit or act of understanding”—a passion in itself cannot make a mistake, although of course it can be misdirected by a part of the soul that is mistaken—it “seems that conscience resides in a cognitive power.” Finally, cognition acts in certain ways. It reads, judges, directs, witnesses, and argues. These are all rational acts, not (for example) sense perceptions or appetites. “But all these acts are attributed to conscience, for conscience is a book in which we read, conscience judges inwardly, conscience witnesses, conscience argues, and conscience rule and directs.”

There are five arguments for conscience as existing in the affective part of the soul. A passion cognizes nothing; a habit is ingrained, unchanging once established, hence unlike knowledge, which changes readily and substantially. But if conscience is cognitive, and “the cognitive power is concerned with everything,” both action and contemplation, conscience would “extend not only to moral matters but also to things taught in the various disciplines, which is obviously false.” Second, understanding is to the true what affect is to the good. Conscience has to do with the good; it is a matter of agapic love, of caritas. Third, “the law of the flesh fights against the law of the mind”; both are “motive powers,” not cognitive. Conscience has to do with motive, with fighting the good fight, and hence ranges itself “on the side of the affective.” Fourth, conscience can cause remorse, “a certain grief and passion.” Finally, “the pleasant and the painful reside in an affective power; for example, “the damned will be in great pain from the gnawing worm of conscience.” 

Bonaventure resolves the question by classifying conscience as a form of cognition, not as cognition simply, in the broadest sense. He begins by remarking that just as the term “understanding” can be understood in three ways—as the power to understand, as a habit, and as a principle that is understood—so “conscience” can be taken “as the thing of which one is aware” (“the law of our understanding,” as an earlier theologian put it), as a habit (“that by which we are aware”), and as “the power to be aware” (a “natural law written in our consciences”). Bonaventure chooses the definition of conscience as a habit, that by which we are aware; this is what the term is “more commonly taken” to mean. By this definition conscience must be “a habit of the cognitive power,” since awareness is a cognitive capacity, not an affect. [1]

However, there are two ways of knowing. There is “speculative” or theoretical knowledge: knowledge of natural laws, for example. And there is practical knowledge, which aims at right action. Aristotle draws this distinction, saying that theoretical and practical understanding are equally matters of cognition, but they have different aims. Theoretical knowledge is knowledge ‘for its own sake,’ aiming only at the satisfaction of the human desire to know. Practical knowledge is knowledge of ‘what to do’; it “dictates and inclines to movement.” An example of theoretical knowledge is ‘Every whole is greater than its part’; an example of practical knowledge is ‘God should be honored.’ The habit of knowledge simply is called scientia; the habit of practical knowledge is called conscientia. Conscience “does not perfect the speculative power in itself but as it is joined in a certain way to affection and activity.”

Therefore, in reply to the five arguments claiming that conscience is not cognitive, Bonaventure says that insofar as conscience is a power it is a power “applied to knowing about conduct or morals.” As a habit, it can be either natural or acquired, and as such it can go right or wrong, either purifying or defiling the soul. Insofar as it is good it “dictates and inclines to good and draws back and flees from evil.” That doesn’t make it “affective,” only that “it has a certain concomitance with will and affection.” And while it is unquestionably true that the law of the flesh is opposed to the law of the mind, the law of the flesh “presupposes a disordered representation of carnal things in fantasy and cognition”; it has a cognitive element, albeit a mistaken one. The remorse we feel after violating conscientious knowledge is of course affective, but that feeling is not itself conscience. Similarly, the painful and pleasurable feelings we experience in response to our thoughts and actions may well be conscientious but are not conscience itself. The conscience testifies and judges, the feelings of remorse or rejoicing follow from those cognitive perceptions.

It might be suggested that the question of conscience as Bonaventure addresses it points the way to a distinction between Christian Aristotelianism and classical philosophy generally. The classical philosophers understand the soul as a natural entity with a firmly established and well-articulated set of characteristics. In the relatively simple description offered by Socrates in Plato’s Republic, the soul has three parts: logos or reason, thumos or spiritedness, and the epithumia or appetites. In Christianity, the human soul proves more malleable. The first human being was made in the image of God, but the image has little of the Original’s firmness. Eve is readily beguiled by the Serpent; as far as the reader can tell, Adam simply goes along with her offer of the forbidden fruit of moral knowledge. Even the chosen nation, Israel, wavers repeatedly between obedience and disobedience to God’s commands. And in the New Testament, the soul appears as a battleground on which much more powerful forces, divine and demonic, struggle for rule. This may explain why in Christian thought, including that of Bonaventura, Socratic thumos is replaced by the will. Spiritedness has a firm object: it loves honor. (In Augustine, closer to Platonism than many Christians, this takes the evil forms of pride and love of domination.) In Christianity, however, the will tends to waver, even before its corruption in the Garden of Eden. Will is ‘free’; it can incline one way or another, depending upon which external spiritual forces seize control of it. Bonaventure’s treatment of conscience as a natural habit as it were borrows some of the solidity of Aristotelian ‘naturalism’ for Christian purposes.

Bonaventure moves next to the question of whether conscience is an innate or an acquired habit. There are six arguments for its innateness. In Romans 2:14-15 the Apostle Paul remarks that gentiles without the divine law are nonetheless “a law unto themselves because they show that the work of the law is written in their hearts, their conscience bearing witness to them.” Scripture itself testifies that “conscience bespeaks a habit naturally inscribed in the human heart.” Augustine concurs; human beings have “a natural judicatory” within them, a standard of conduct. Another Father of the Church, Isidore, teaches that “natural right is that which nature has taught animals,” and if animals have so been taught, “much more has it taught human beings, who excel all animals.” Further, “the cognition of natural right is nothing other than conscience.” Moreover, “we have a natural instinct to seek blessedness and honor” from our parents; since we could not be this way “without some prior cognition,” and conscience is a kind of moral cognition, conscience must be innate. As a consequence of these first four arguments, Bonaventure remarks that since human beings cognize natural law, that cognition must occur “either by acquisition or by nature. If the former, it is similar to “the political virtues.” If by nature, “the cognition of natural law is nothing other than conscience. Finally, “natural right binds the will naturally.” But to be bounded, the will needs to know what it is that it is to do; “understanding precedes affect.” Conscience is the cognition of natural right or law.

Against the claim that conscience is innate, opponents make six arguments of their own. In On the Soul, Aristotle compares “the soul at birth” to a blank tablet with nothing inscribed on it. (By this reading, Aristotle anticipates Locke.) If so, the soul can have “no innate cognition.” Augustine adds a Platonic argument: Yes, the soul has knowledge in it at birth but “burdened by the weight of the body, it forgets the things it used to know.” However, Augustine cites this argument in his Retractions. “He would not retract this unless he held it to be false,” and indeed Augustine did convert from Platonism to Christianity, necessitating exactly this kind of retraction. The opponents’ third argument is more elaborate. To know something complex, we first need to know the simple elements that compose it, the “incomplex.” For example, we can’t know a principle “unless we have cognition of its terms.” So far, this accords with Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics. But—and here again, the opponents come across as proto-Lockean—we know the “incomplexes” only through the senses; no one understands color without sight, and to lose a sense is “necessarily [to] lose knowledge.” Therefore, “all cognition of complexes” too “is necessarily acquired and taken from sense.” Conscience being “a cognition of a complex”—of what Locke calls a complex idea—namely, natural right—conscience must be an acquired habit, not an innate, natural one. Similarly, if conscience aims at practice, at conduct not theory, and “things pertaining to conduct are as difficult or more difficult to know than those pertaining to simple contemplation,” conscience must be an acquired habit, a thing gained from experience not simple sense perception. Sense perceptions, moreover, are infallibly correct, although we may misinterpret them. Since conscience can err, it must be an acquired not a natural habit. Finally, “natural habits are present in everyone and at all times, because those things are natural which are the same for all and which go with a nature inseparably. But consciences are not the same in all,” nor are they present in the same person at all times. The opponents give the example of a person entering a religious order who develops “a conscience that forbids acting against the counsels [of perfection], a conscience one did not have before.” Therefore, conscience is acquired, not natural.

Dismissing the Platonic argument that both Augustine and Aristotle have refuted, Bonaventure isolates “three opinions among the learned about the origin of cognitive habits,” all of which hold that they are both natural and acquired. These opinions “differ, however, in assigning the ways in which these habits are innate and acquired.”

The first formulation distinguishes the “active understanding” or “active intellect” from the “possible understanding” or “possible intellect.” It is the possible understanding that begins as a blank slate, then receives sense impressions, with no assistance from the active understanding. Bonaventure rejects this. If the active understanding has cognitive habits, why would it not “communicate them to the possible understanding without help from the senses”?

The second formulation holds that cognitive habits are innate insofar as the mind perceives universals, acquired insofar as it perceives particulars. A variation of this formulation holds that cognitive habits are innate with regard to principles, “acquired with regard to cognition of conclusions.” This, however, also diverges from Aristotle and Augustine. They both deny the Platonic claim that the mind contains principles innately. On the contrary, “cognition of principles is acquired by way of sense, memory, and experience” (Aristotle) or by means of “a certain unique incorporeal light,” analogous to the way “the fleshly eye sees things in front of it in physical light” thanks to its natural power (Augustine). 

Bonaventure endorses the third opinion. For cognition to occur, two things must happen: “the presence of something cognizable and a light by which we make judgement about it.” Thus cognitive habits are innate “by reason of an inwardly given light of the soul,” acquired because the thing cognized has a species or form to be perceived by that inner light. Bonaventure calls this natural light “a natural judicatory.” We “acquire” the external species by means of the senses: How else would I perceive the distinction between a whole and a part if I never saw or heard or tasted or touched a whole thing and one or more of its parts? “On the other hand, that light or natural judicatory directs the soul itself in making judgments both about things that can be cognized and things that can be done.”

Bonaventure adds another distinction. Some cognizable things are “very clearly evident, such as axioms and first principles,” while others are not so clearly evident, such as the conclusion of a geometric proof based on the axioms. The same goes for cognition aimed at practice, for “things that can be done.” It is easy to perceive “Do not do to another what you do not want done to you,” but that cannot tell me what to do if I’m thinking of asking for elective surgery. The innate light of cognition is necessary but not sufficient to reach a scientific conclusion; the same goes for moral conclusions, things “which we are bound to do” that we know not by consulting moral principles but “only through additional instruction.” Hence conscience, which has to do with morality, with choices about actions, is “an innate habit” in one way, “an acquired habit” in another. The “natural light” of conscience “suffices for knowing that parents should be honored and neighbors should not be harmed,” but the species “parent” or “neighbor” doesn’t exist in me prior to sense impressions I acquire from the outside world. The innate, non-sensory cognitions (awareness of God) and the innate, non-sensory “affects” or feelings (love, fear) are what Bonaventure calls “essences.” The awareness of God and of self, love, and fear do not come to us from any acquired cognition through the “outer senses.” This is why Aristotle says that “nothing has been written in the soul”—as Locke claims—not “because there is now awareness in the soul, but because there is no picture or abstracted likeness in it.” Or, as Augustine argues, “God has implanted a natural judicatory in us,” the truth, which “is naturally impressed in the human heart.”

The third question Bonaventure addresses with respect to conscience is “Must we do everything that conscience dictates as necessary for salvation?” Advocates quote Romans 14:23, “Whatever is not of faith is sin,” drawing the conclusion that since whatever is not of faith is against conscience, “we must do everything that comes from a dictate of conscience.” They also say that laws are obligatory, binding; since “conscience if the law of our understanding,” we must obey it. They also argue that “we must do what a judge commands”; “conscience is our judge”; ergo, we must obey it. Finally, that if I do something I believe to be a mortal sin it is indeed a mortal sin because I show “contempt for God” in so acting. “If we cannot not believe what conscience dictates,” we “sin mortally if we act against it.”

Those who deny that we must do everything conscience dictates to receive salvation contend that “conscience sometimes dictates doing something that is against God.” It must then be that our conscience is mistaken, not God, and we should disobey our conscience. Further, “conscience cannot obligate to anything to which God cannot obligate, since conscience is below God.” Acting against God’s law is the true sin, not acting against conscience; “conscience does no in virtue of itself bind anything.” Nor can conscience absolve us from any obligation impressed upon us by God or indeed by any other superior authority.

Bonaventure thinks that some distinctions are in order. 

1. To what does conscience bind?
2. Does it bind to everything it dictates?
3. Is a human being “caught in perplexity when conscience dictates one thing and divine law dictates the contrary”?
4. To which we owe our obligation, when conscience and “the command of a superior” conflict with one another?

It depends. Sometimes conscience dictates “what is according to God’s law, sometimes what is aside from God’s law, sometimes what is against God’s law.” This doesn’t apply to counsels or persuasions, only commands—laws being one form of command. Conscience of course does bind when we act according to divine law. If conscience tells us to do something that has no relevance to God’s law, we may do it so long as conscience tells us to do it; Bonaventure gives the example of a conscientious urge to pick up a straw. If conscience tells us to act in violation of God’s law, however, conscience is wrong and God is right. In such instances, conscience actually “puts a human being outside the state of salvation” so long as the urge lasts. If we don’t “set conscience aside” we “sin mortally.” The dilemma is that in acting against conscience we involve ourselves in showing contempt for God, “as long as we believe, with conscience so dictating to us, that what we are doing is displeasing to God, although it may be pleasing to God” in fact. This is the point Paul the Apostle makes in Romans 14 in saying that whatever does not proceed from faith is sin. 

Why? Because “God attends not only to what we do but to the spirit in which we do it.” If we act against the divine law while our conscience mistakenly tells us we are acting in obedience to it, we act “not in a good but in a bad spirit and because of this” we sin mortally. We should therefore obey the commands of our superiors, as Paul himself tells us to do, respecting the commands of emperors, not only in fear of punishment but in fear of sinning. Conscience “truly is a law but not the supreme law.” At the same time, “whenever we believe we are sinning mortally, we are sinning mortally.” It is only when we knowingly sin against divine law, including the divine law that commands us to obey human superiors, that we sin mortally. “Conscience is like a herald or messenger of God, and it does not command what it says from itself, but it commands, as it were, from God, like a herald proclaiming the edict of a king”; conscience “binds in things that can—in some way—be done well.” In those circumstances in which we “do not know how to judge maters, in that we do not know God’s law, we ought to consult those who are wiser, or, if human counsel is lacking, turn to God in prayer.”

Bonaventure next turns to synderesis, “the spark of conscience.” Should it be classified as cognitive or affective? Can it be extinguished by sin? Can it become depraved through sin?

Four arguments support the claim that synderesis should be classified as affective—a feeling, not a form of knowledge. The Church’s Gloss on Ezekiel 1:10 calls synderesis “the spirit that intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words”—as a profound feeling, not as logos. For his part, Ambrose describes men and women as beings who “naturally will the good” even as they are “subject to sin.” Will is affective, not cognitive; it motivates but it does not know. Since conscience aims at knowing, the spark of conscience, the thing that impels it to action, must be synderesis, not conscience itself. Human sinfulness or corruption stems from sensory motives—finding the apple pleasing to the eye and apparently tasty. This “rational motive part,” the thing that inspires conscience, can be “nothing except synderesis.” Finally, “just as understanding needs light for judging, so affect needs a certain heat and spiritual weight for loving rightly,” a “natural judicatory in the cognitive part of the soul.” This is conscience. In the same way, there needs “a weight in the affective part of the soul directing and inclining good.” That is synderesis.

Four arguments contradict the claim that synderesis should be classified as affective. Jerome maintains that the prophet Malachi’s adjuration to “guard your spirit” and remain faithful to your wife cannot arise from “the animal part” of the soul, which might advise one rather differently, but from the rational part, which Jerome calls synderesis. The Gloss on Luke 10:30 holds that a man’s “sense of reason” cannot be stripped from him even if he is inflicted with a severe beating; since “the sense of reason resides in reason,” and the sense of reason is synderesis, synderesis must be rational. Indeed, if synderesis is the spark of conscience, and conscience is cognitive, why would synderesis not belong to cognition instead of the affective? Finally, synderesis must be a habit by process of elimination. If it were affective, a thing “on the motive side” of the soul, it would be “either a power or a passion or a habit.” It isn’t a passion, since it is not sinful. It isn’t a habit, because a good habit is a virtue, a bad habit a vice, and synderesis is neither a virtue nor a vice. Nor is it a power, because “the power of will is related equally to any object of appetite whatever, including such objects as food and drink. Synderesis is the spark of conscience, not of hunger or thirst. What else can it be, then, but an element of cognition?

More generally, Bonaventure asks, what exactly is synderesis? How is it related to natural law and conscience? How is it related to the three “powers of the soul” identified by Plato’s Socrates: the rational, the “irascible” or thumotic, and the “concupiscible” or appetitive? Is synderesis a fourth part of the soul, “outside and over” these three powers, an eagle soaring above them all? Or is synderesis a part of one of the three powers or ‘parts’ of the soul already identified by the philosopher?

One plausible but inadequate account holds that synderesis is part of the rational part of the soul, the “higher portion,” which turns the soul toward God and is therefore always right, in contrast with the lower portion of the rational part, which turns the soul toward earthly things, toward practice, and is called conscience. Synderesis directs us to the divine law, conscience to the natural law. The problem is that, as already established, reason may err, even to the point of committing a mortal sin. Further, as Jesus commands, we must love not only God but our neighbor, who resides in this world and not yet in Heaven. 

According to “another way of speaking, we should understand motivation insofar as guided by reason to consist of two aspects, the way of nature and the way of deliberation—speculation or theory and practice; similarly, “just as free judgment consists of reason and will as they move deliberatively, conscience and synderesis relate to reason and will insofar as they move naturally. Synderesis, conscience and the natural law “always incline to good, “but free judgment “sometimes inclines to good, sometimes to evil. Synderesis is the power; conscience is the habit; natural law inheres in objects. Since conscience is cognitive, either there must be something that directs us to action other than conscience or synderesis, or that synderesis is that thing which so directs us. 

Which is it? “There is a third way of speaking”: the understanding “has a light which is a natural judicatory for it, directing the understanding in what is to be known”; affect also has “a certain natural weight directing it in what is to be sought.” The things to be sought are either morally honorable or advantageous. Similarly, cognizable things may be objects of contemplation or those relating to morals. Conscience is the name for the judicatory power that has such a habit, such a way; synderesis is the name for a power “susceptible to habituation rather than a habit.” “Power as thus habituated” urges us toward the morally good, and therefore belongs to the affective side of the soul. When we appeal to God with sighs too deep for words,” we exercise just this affective habit toward the good. Synderesis is the spark of conscience in the sense that “conscience alone,” being cognitive, “can neither move nor sting nor urge except by means of synderesis, which, as it were, urges and ignites.” “Just as reason cannot move except by means of will, so neither can conscience move except by means of synderesis.” Synderesis isn’t “a power of will in general but only will insofar as it moves naturally.”

What, then, is the relation of synderesis to natural law, as distinguished from deliberation, the realm of virtues and vices? Natural law relates to both synderesis and conscience. “We are instructed by natural law and are rightly ordered by it”—that is, the three parts of the soul attain their right order by conforming to nature, to what a human being really is. Natural law is a habit or way including both understanding and affect, conscience and synderesis. “In another sense natural law is called a collection of the precepts of natural right, and in this sense it names the object of synderesis and conscience,” with conscience dictating and synderesis inclining us either to seeking or to refusing. This latter sense Bonaventure considers the more proper meaning of natural law. Synderesis is then “an affective power insofar as it is by nature easily turned to good and tends to good,” whereas conscience is “a habit of practical understanding.” “Natural law, finally, is the object of both.” Synderesis is the word for “the affective power as its motion is natural and right,” indeed flying like an eagle “over the others,” the other parts or powers of the soul, “not mingling with them when they err but correcting them.”

But can synderesis be extinguished by sin? The Gloss on Psalm 14:1 states that some men are “devoid of every rational power.” And if you argue, as Bonaventure does, that synderesis isn’t a rational power, there is the Gloss on Psalm 56:2-3, saying that “foolish arrogance is like a numbness, when someone trusting himself neither fears nor is cautious”—a symptom of “spiritual sickness” occurring when synderesis has been extinguished. Too, “heretics endure death for the sake of their errors without any remorse of conscience,” another sign that synderesis “seems to be entirely extinct in them.” Finally, since sin can be “totally extinguished, as is clear with regard to the Blessed Virgin,” so too “synderesis can be extinguished by a multitude of sins.”

The contrary view hold that the spark of conscience wasn’t extinguished even in Cain, “a great sinner.” Augustine also testifies that there is no shamefulness “so vicious that it makes one lose all sense of what is morally honorable.” Synderesis “is naturally inherent in us,” unalienable; vice “does not destroy the last vestiges of nature.” Finally, even the damned suffer “remorse of conscience,” which can only be ignited by synderesis; indeed, “this remorse is especially intense in them,” one of the worst torments they suffer.

Bonaventure answers that synderesis can be impeded temporarily but not extinguished because “it is something natural” to us. The “vain and fictive joy” of heretics, who “believe that they are dying for the piety of faith when they are dying for the impiety of error; “the wantonness of pleasure” whereby “a human being is sometimes so absorbed by a carnal act that there is no place for remorse” or for reason, either; “the hardness of obstinacy,” seen in those “who are so far confirmed in evil that they can never be inclined to good”: all these conditions of the soul finally earn the rebuke of conscience, sparked by synderesis—a rebuke “especially vigorous in the damned,” for whom it comes too late. The damned retain their human nature, and with it synderesis, now acting in them “as punishment.” Although “synderesis can be impeded in its act yet never universally extinguished, permanently and with respect to every act.” Adam’s fall did not extinguish his humanity, or ours.

But, if not extinguished, can synderesis become depraved through sin? Evidently so, some say, inasmuch as there are “shameless sinners” in whom synderesis has been “overthrown.” The Gloss on Jeremiah 2:16 explains, “A malignant spirit reaches all the way from the lower members to the top of the head when the sickness of defiance corrupts the mind’s chaste height,” which is “synderesis itself.” Since conscience can err, so synderesis must be deviant at such times. Sin can rule the soul at the same time as synderesis remains within it; therefore, synderesis can become depraved through sin.

Those who deny that synderesis can become depraved through sin recall the Biblical comparison of synderesis to an eagle, which soars above the other three parts of the soul, correcting them when they err. Even when I do what I do not want to do (Romans 7:16), synderesis is what tells me I do wrong. “The act of synderesis always reacts against fault, even in the worst sinners,” and so cannot be said to have been depraved, though they are. And finally, we know that even the worst sinners sometimes repent. While there is life there is hope. “But the rightness that adheres most tightly is rightness by way of nature, and this is synderesis”; “therefore, it does not seem that it can become depraved through fault.”

Bonaventure is especially concerned with answering the claim that sin corrupts the highest part of the human mind. The argument claims that “the higher portion of reason has two ways of moving: either as it is turned toward God and is ruled and directed by eternal laws, and, in this way, sin does not exist in it; or insofar as it is turned toward lower powers, and in this way it takes from them occasion for deviation and can become depraved by sin.” He replies that “synderesis of itself always urges to good and reacts against sin.” Sin is a deliberate act of the will, not an act of the will “as it exists by nature or moves naturally.” What happens when we sin is rather like what happens when a good ruler is overthrown by rebels. He is still good, but the rebels overpower him. “For a lord’s presiding depends on two things, namely, the rectitude of the one presiding and the submissiveness of the one serving.” Synderesis “of itself is always right, yet because reason and will frequently hinder it (reason through the blindness of error and will by the obstinacy of impiety) synderesis is said to be overthrown, in that its effect and its presiding over the other deliberative powers is repelled and broken through their resistance.” For its part, conscience “is always right when it stays on the level of the universal and moves in a single direction,” but when it “descends to particulars and makes comparisons it can become erroneous, because here it mingles with the acts of deliberative reason.” Bonaventure gives as his example the adherence of Jews to the laws commanding circumcision and the avoidance of certain foods. They are right in believing “that God should be obeyed,” a prompting of the “natural judicatory” of conscience. They are mistaken, he claims, in those particulars, which are particular applications of that prompting. In this as in all conscientious mistakes, “it is not synderesis” that is “turned aside, although conscience errs.” Another way of putting this is that synderesis is a natural power, naturally habituated. “Nature, taken by itself, always moves rightly.” But conscience is not only a natural but also an acquired habit, and acquired habits “can be either right or deviant in character,” right or erroneous. Free judgment is under synderesis, not the other way around. 

 

Note

1. In this, Bonaventure follows Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1094a, where the philosopher writes that “awareness” of the highest good must “have great weight in one’s life,” that is, in our choices and practices.