Bound in Conscience: Public Institutions and the Early Modern Forum Conscientiae

• In Event: Reimagining the Republic: Institutional Renewal & Virtue in Early Modern Europe

Abstract

Contemporary political parlance frequently invokes the conscience as a source of nonconformity or resistance to institutional authority. While there is a universally acknowledged duty to obey democratically passed laws, many modern liberal states carve out defined exemptions to this obligation on the basis of “conscientious objection.” This practice is consistent with a particular understanding of the conscience as an “inner voice” developed by the citizen’s voluntary judgments and individual principles. Out of liberal deference for these individual values, many modern states allow for conscience claims to abrogate normal institutional and legal obligations.

This modern, Thoreauvian individual conscience is in at least one sense very nearly the opposite of how late sixteenth and early seventeenth century political thinkers treated the inner conscientia. In this period, as clashes among religious and political authorities imposed high demands on individual judgment, there was an uptick in philosophical interest in the conscience. While political and philosophical tracts of this period are peppered with the term “conscience,” the majority of these references to the private conscience are occupied with delineating in what way the conscience might legitimately be “bound,” or laid with obligations. Unlike the modern formulation, in which claims of conscience resist conformity to institutions, early modern interest in the conscience first coalesced around determining how the individual conscience is formed and even coerced from without by external and institutional authorities.

This paper examines one set of approaches to this question of the relationship between institutions of civil and religious authority and the moral formation of individual conscience. It traces the work of early modern Jesuit political thinkers, primarily under the generalate of Claudio Aquaviva (1581–1615), and examines how they developed scholastic political thought to address the question of the influence of institutional authority on individual conscience. The paper is particularly attentive to Suarez’s work on the binding nature of civil commands (De Legibus; Defensio Fidei) and Robert Bellarmine’s work on how oaths, vows, and political agreements compel the individual (De laicis; Tractus de potestate summi Pontificis in rebus temporalibus). This paper argues against scholarly views that suggest that early modern Jesuits’ espousal of an early formulation of popular sovereignty commits them to an individualistic and consent-based view of the conscience. Instead, it shows how these scholastic accounts describe many sources of legitimate coercion of conscience: the natural law, the divine law, the ruler, contracts, religious superiors, etc. Here the early modern scholastic theory of moral obligation is dependent on the possibility that the conscience may be legitimately bound to the performance or forbearance of actions by institutions of authority, whether chosen freely or not.

Author

• Evelyn Boyden, Harvard University