John McGuckin examines early writings of Christian theologians about conscience. These relied upon the Scriptures and upon Plato, Aristotle, and others, and they regularly grappled with the positive and negative possibilities of conscience. But Christian writers made religious inquiries. St. Paul wrote about conscience in connection with a law “written on the heart,” a guide to everyone, but fallible and in need of the grace of Christ. The Greek fathers, led by Origen, emphasized conscience as an awareness of divine things, albeit impaired by man’s fall, yet still oriented to God and to obedience to moral norms. The Latin fathers, led by Augustine, emphasized humanity’s corruption after the fall and need for divine grace. Thus, conscience may convict, but might not provoke a person to goodness. Only loving God could do this. In both Latin and Greek thought, therefore, conscience was more than an inner voice instructing about right and wrong. It was a set of reflections on the spiritual identity of human beings.

in search of the trinity

In terms of this overview of the Greek patristic theology of the Trinity, it might keep us from sinking into a welter of details to imagine five great acts of a play, each of which is differently weighted, to be sure, but which are all, in their own ways, progressive variations upon biblical premises, mediated through the lived experience of the church. The first is the sparse collection of second-century theologians. The second is the quickening of pace that occurred in the third-century Apologists. The third is the towering genius of Origen of Alexandria, whose work began a revolution. The fourth (a long-drawn-out scene) is the Nicene and post-Nicene reactions to Origen. Finally, Act Five – are we still in it? – is the bemused aftermath, a long quieting-down as the Trinity becomes a fixed dogma, a quieting that often lapses into silence.

This patristic period may be startling because of the speed and variety with which schools of thought during this time spun out new reflections on deeply mysterious ideas about God and his action in the cosmos. Yet it is also illuminating in that it shows how fluid and inter-reactive the early Christian theologians were. In general, for the Fathers, the scriptures and the liturgical mysteries of the church were always more immediately influential than anything else.

ORTHODOXY AND RIGHTS: SOME BASIC TERMS OF ARGUMENT AND REFERENCE

In many recent fora, the Orthodox Church has been depicted as fundamentally an “Eastern” tradition that has not been squarely represented in the counsels that constituted the formation of Western Christendom. Given that this is an opinion often aired, in explanatory ways, in relation to why the Orthodox Church sometimes takes angular, not parallel, positions in relation to European human rights discourse, it is important to remember that this is fundamentally a late modern view, highly contentious in character, and one that raises as many problems for its inherently orientaliste agenda than it resolves. Insofar as world Orthodoxy still represents a common intellectual allegiance to foundational biblical prescripts, determinative patristic doctrinal and conciliar formulations, and enduringly influential Byzantine social, philosophical, political, and cultural influences then, simply put, it is necessary to insist that the Byzantine Orthodox Christian mentality is quintessentially European. It is, indeed, the seedbed of European Christian civilization; not some debased “oriental” variation on it. The Byzantines (first called such by eighteenth-century English historians) always called themselves Romaioi, the Romans. Greece is not (by any stretch of a non-colonial imagination) the Orient. And would anyone (pace Huntington) still care to argue that Russia's “distinctive difference” lies in its “orientalizing” margins? These old and worn-out slippers have to be laid aside. If there are reasons why many contemporary Orthodox church leaders seem to have problems with modern human rights philosophy, they need to be exegeted from other bases.