The Category of Conscience in Moral Theology in the 18th and the First Half of the 19th Centuries

Abstract

The article presents a general overview of the interpretation of the category of conscience in the Synodal period. As a theological term, the word “conscience” entered the Old Russian language together with Christianity, that is why virtually all its meanings were associated with the New Testament and the texts of the Holy Fathers. Speaking of conscience, the scribes of the pre-Synodal pore understood it in a traditional way for Eastern Christianity. In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, a systematic description of conscience as a moral category emerged under the influence of a methodology that had taken shape in the West, primarily in the context of what was commonly referred to as casuistry. A peculiarity of this approach was the emphasis on a vague or scrupulous conscience and its errors. Later in the second half of the 18th century, the Catholic influence was replaced by a Protestant one, which affected the way of thinking about conscience in the first half of the next century as well. The doctrine of conscience became more balanced, because the emphasis was no longer only on error, but on its transformation by the grace of baptism. Finally, in the first half of the nineteenth century, the first experiments in the independent courses in moral theology appeared, the authors of which considered conscience in the context of sacred theology.