The church and her deposit of truth once for all delivered to the saints cannot (ultimately) be corrupted or annihilated. She will endure whether or not her storehouse of moral law and eternal first principles are heeded. She is a perfect society, without external dependence for the fulfillment of her final end.

American Christianity, in certain intellectual quadrants at least, is undergoing a reassessment of established conceptions of church and state. The Gelasian analogy (from Duo Sunt) of church and state, now carried on by contemporary integralists but also by many more before them, is that of soul and body. The former represents the spiritual power and the latter the temporal.

This is a proper analogy that, in various forms, was invoked by the magisterial reformers (like Zwingli) and post-Reformation Protestants as well, not just Catholics. It accomplishes its intended end, viz., an expression of the independent integrity (and distinct immediate ends) of each power but also their harmony.

But I would like to proffer an additional, complimentary analogy that draws on the moral faculties of the human soul and further illuminates the proper, and to some extent inevitable, dynamic between church and state: that of conscience, the power of practical judgment in the soul, and synteresis, the part of the soul that preserves moral principles (As I have said, Catholics need not have all the fun.) Among other things, this analogy gets at the shared final end of each power—though this shared final end is mediated through different competencies and jurisdiction: the glory of God. This analogy also emphasizes the decidedly moral character of each power, their coordinate operations, and interrelation of the same.

Most importantly, however, whilst a body might be dead without a soul—and the two being separated, man would cease to be man—the conscience continues to operate even absent right adherence to the synteresis. A seared conscience, in zombie-like form, will execute practical judgments unreasonably and aimlessly but, often, with no less certainty because that is what the conscience does. The disconnect between conscience and synteresis is unnatural but does not enact mutual annihilation. Indeed, the two endure as an estranged couple within the soul of man, wreaking all kind of havoc. All this to say, the conscience-synteresis analogy is descriptive of our present moment.

Now to explain this rather archaic language of synteresis—the uninitiated reader will likely have some common notion of conscience—and its potential contribution to the discussion.

In a recent piece at Modern Reformation, I mentioned that John Calvin and many others before and after him referred to magistrates as God’s “vicegerents.” This designation is noteworthy because the same title was just as frequently applied to the conscience. John Flavel, for example, said in his Pneumatologia (1698), “The voice of conscience is the voice of God; for it is his vicegerent and representative.”

In this way, then, the title of vicegerent given to magistrates situates them as the conscience of the commonwealth. They assess actions and execute moral judgments for the common good, albeit they do not, in the first instance, do so on the basis of a self-derived moral framework. Good government cannot be arbitrary.

If this is the case, what then is the church? I suggest that she is to be known as the synteresis (or synderesis). And what is the synteresis anyway? Christopher St. Germain, in Doctor and Student (1523), defined the synteresis as “a natural Power or motive force of the rational Soul set in the highest Part thereof, moving it to Good, and abhorring Evil.” And again, “synderesis is sometimes called a spark of reason, and aptly so; for just as a spark is a mere fragment flying out of the fire, so this virtue is but a fragmentary participation in intelligence.” Feeble as this spark may be it “may not wholly be extinguished neither in men nor yet in damned souls.”

By contrast, the conscience is an act of practical judgment, “applying any Science of Knowledge to some particular Act of Man.” The conscience is not the power by which man knows, but by which he applies what he knows to a particular case and subsequently judges said application as good or bad. It is through the synteresis that all men have knowledge of the natural law and through the conscience that they are compelled to apply it—a process that, obviously, then requires the operation of the will and intellect too. Some seventeenth-century commentators like Ephraim Huit (i.e., Anatomy of Conscience (1626)), introduced also the “syneidesis” as this practical judging power to compliment the synteresis. The tradition of the synteresis was never completely stable, it must be admitted, but the basic sense of it endured beyond Doctor and Student. St. Germain himself was, of course, borrowing heavily from Aquinas. (See Brian McCall’s Architecture of Law, pp. 86-101). For example, as Thomas says in the Summa (I-II, 79, 12), “the principles our nature imparts to us in practical matters do not belong to a special power but to a special habit there by nature, synderesis.” This synderesis, for Aquinas, was something like an instinctual habit in the practical reason separate from the judging power of the conscience proper. St. Bonaventure too distinguished between the conscientia and the synderesis. The former, he said in his Breviloquium,  “only names judgment” whereas the latter urges the soul to turn to “good things which are honorable.” It was a sort of natural weight (pondus) toward the good.

The term, if not the idea itself, originates with Jerome’s commentary on Ezekiel and his use of Plato’s tripartite soul (a use begun by Origen). For Jerome, the synteresis was “that spark of conscience which was not even extinguished in the breast of Cain after he was turned out of Paradise.” In this sense, it is bound up in what it means to be human. In the Orations, Gregory Nazianzus defined synteresis etymologically (i.e., preservation) and as the link between body and soul. (This is significant for the case being asserted here.)

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