Conscience: A Very Short Introduction by Paul Strohm (review)

The Oxford Very Short Introductions series, whose initial volumes appeared in 2000, now boasts well over 350 pocket-sized books, of which Paul Strohm’s offering on conscience is a gem. Strohm weaves a richly informative and often fascinating story about the history of conscience that will amply reward students and general readers seeking an introduction to the topic. Moreover, scholars unfamiliar with the issue will find Strohm’s book to be nuanced, sophisticated, and provocative in its approach.

Strohm begins with a pithy introduction that articulates the scope of the volume. While he acknowledges that various notions of “ethical self scrutiny” appear in non-Christian traditions such as Judaism, Hinduism, and Buddhism, he confines his discussion to the long history of conscience as it evolved and changed from its European and “European-derived” origins (3).

Medievalists presumably will be interested in the discussion of medieval thinkers in Strohm’s first chapter on “Christian Conscience.” The chapter begins by stressing the hybridity of conscience as it appeared in Christian discourse. That mixing resulted from Jerome’s pivotal decision to use the Latin term conscientia for the Greek syneidesis while translating Paul’s epistles. Conscientia, for the Romans, was an entirely external entity and referred to “public or social opinion” (6). The Greek term syneidesis, in contrast, denoted an inner quality of “knowing by the self ‘that knows with itself ’ “(8). Jerome’s mingling of inner and outer “meant that Christian conscience would always potentially serve two masters,” as witnessed early on in the possession by Augustine’s conscience of both personal information and knowledge shared with others in his Confessions (8). Strohm goes on to discuss the blending of inner awareness and public norms of conduct (norms elaborated in the doctrinal dicta of the western Church) in an array of medieval sources including Peter of Celle, Dan Michel, and The Prick of Conscience. William Langland’s Piers Plowman serves as a key instance of how the late medieval world was not monolithic but instead gave rise to iterations of a personal sense of right and wrong that countered orthodox proclamations on morality. Langland, in addition to John Wyclif, exemplifies how the concept of an oppositional and individualized conscience began not during the Protestant Reformation but rather in the fourteenth century (14). Strohm then turns to the emergence of a climate newly conducive to the idea of a sacrosanct personal conscience during the early sixteenth century, when Henry VIII cited his scrupulum conscienciae as grounds for his divorce, and Martin Luther promoted a direct relationship with scripture unmediated by papal or other religious authorities. The almost immediate querying of a wholly personal conscience emerges in the literary and theological writings of Luther himself, More, Erasmus, Shakespeare, Calvin, and Hooker. Strohm ends his chapter on Christian conscience with a look at contemporary Protestant and Catholic debates on how to balance “claims of singular, interior revelation with general, institutional authority” (32).

Chapter 2 traces the history of the secularization of conscience starting with John Locke, “whose demystified and decentered” conscience is governed not by faith but reason (42). Yet after Locke, shifting anxieties over, on the one hand, the fallible nature of an entirely personal conscience and, on the other hand, the tyrannous effects of various external authorities, mobilize treatises by Kant, Stuart Mill, and Adam Smith. Chapter 3 discusses the critiques of conscience generated by Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, and Freud. Chapter 4 explores the tensions emerging from public inaction—typically forms of conscientious objection to military service and other services—authorized by individual conscience. It includes an interesting discussion of debates that ensued in the wake of the universal right to conscience asserted in the 1948 United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. Strohm’s telling discussion prompts such difficult questions as: Is there such a thing as a universal conscience? Is the UN declaration ironically oppressive, insofar as it enforces a Eurocentric Christian concept that contravenes non-European freedoms?

Strohm returns to medieval and patristic authorities in his final...