On the Guarding and Examination of Conscience

With all your keeping, brother, guard your conscience pure—in thoughts, in words, and in deeds—so that it may always be blameless and may never condemn or gnaw at you for anything. If you do this, it will acquire great power both in your inner life and in your outward conduct, and, becoming mistress over all, will govern your life well. A pure conscience will also make your life blameless, for then it will be sensitive and strong for good and against evil. It is the law inscribed by God in the hearts of men, to illuminate their paths and guide them in everything that is right and proper, as the Apostle Paul teaches, calling it “the work of the law written in their hearts” (Rom. 2:15); on this basis St. Nilus gives each person the following lesson: “In all your affairs, use the guidance of conscience as a lamp.”

In four respects must you keep your conscience blameless: in relation to God, to yourself, to your neighbors, and to all the things that are in your hands.

All of this is known to you; yet let me remind you of what is most essential. In your “relation to God”—abide in the remembrance of God and walk in his presence; acknowledge yourself as carried and preserved by the power of God and led toward the end for which he called you into being; dedicate yourself and all that is yours to the service of God and to the glory of his name; live in him, hope in him, and commit your destiny to him, both temporal and eternal.

In your “relation to yourself”—be just toward yourself and give what is due to each part of your nature: your spirit, which seeks God, the heavenly and the eternal, must rule over soul and body, whose calling is to order temporal life; the “soul,” submitting to the directives of the spirit, must bow the neck of the mind to God-revealed truth and by it illuminate all the domain of its knowledge; it must keep the will within the order of God’s commandments, not permitting it, in opposition to them, to incline toward its own desires; it must teach the heart to find pleasure only in divine things and in whatever bears the imprint of and serves as an expression of the divine, and in this spirit to conduct its daily and social affairs; give the “body” what it needs, and maintaining strict moderation in this, hold as your law—never in anything ”to make provision for the flesh to fulfill its lusts” (Rom. 13:14). By keeping to this, you will be a good ruler of yourself and a true benefactor to yourself.

In your “relation to your neighbors”—honor all people as images of God; wish well to all and do good to all according to your ability; humble yourself before all and oblige all within the bounds of what is good; rejoice with those who rejoice and grieve with those who grieve; judge no one and despise no one, not even in thought or feeling; do not conceal the truth from those who seek your counsel and guidance, when you know it; yet do not thrust yourself upon anyone as a teacher; and above all—preserve peace and harmony with everyone, with readiness to make every sacrifice for this on your own part, and avoid as much as possible giving scandal to anyone.

In your “relation to things”—treat all things with respect, as creations of God given to you for stewardship; guard and use them for the glory of God; be content with whatever measure of them you have and give thanks to God for them; do not become attached to anything and regard everything as outward means and instruments, so as to dispose of them freely without finding in them bonds or hindrances to your good intentions; do not allow yourself to rest upon them as upon brittle supports; do not boast of your own things; do not envy others’ things; and be neither miserly nor wasteful on things unworthy.

All of this must be carried out by everyone each day in one form or another, at almost every step. If you thus live ”well,” you will also have a ”good” conscience, following the example of St. Paul (Heb. 13:18).

“Those who desire to live well” — zealots for salvation—all act in this way, striving in everything not to transgress in any of these areas and not to stain their conscience in any way. Yet for all that, thoughts and feelings, words, and sometimes even deeds that are wrong slip through, at times unnoticed and at times noticed, and dust over the clean face of conscience, so that by the end of the day few are unlike a traveler who has walked along a dusty road and has dust everywhere—in his nose, in his mouth, in his hair—covering his entire face. For this reason it is prescribed for every zealot for salvation to examine his conscience in the evening and, having clarified all the wrongs he has committed during the day in thoughts, words, and deeds, to cleanse them through repentance—to do, in other words, what a dust-covered traveler does: the traveler washes with water, while the zealot for salvation cleanses himself through repentance, contrition, and tears.

The examination must investigate everything: the good and the bad, the right and the wrong, in all the respects mentioned above. Whatever you find to be right in substance, examine whether it is right in its motive and intention, right in its manner of execution, and whether you looked at it rightly after the fact—whether you did it for show or out of people-pleasing or self-pleasing, whether it was done at the fitting place, time, and for the fitting person, and whether afterward you trumpeted it before yourself, indulging in self-conceit without rendering glory to God. A right deed is truly right when it is done out of submission to God’s will and for the glory of God, with complete self-denial and self-forgetfulness.

Whatever you find to be wrong, consider how it came about that you did it, when you constantly hold the desire to do only what is right; what were the occasions and causes, both inward and outward; how you ought to have governed yourself in the given situation so as not to go wrong; and why you did not do so. Then, having judged yourself—and no one and nothing else—wisely determine how you ought to conduct yourself in the future so as not to go wrong in the same or similar circumstances, and prescribe this to yourself as law, with a resolve to fulfill it without deviation or self-indulgence or people-pleasing, thus turning even your failings to the enrichment of the field of your heart.

When you have finished the examination, give thanks to God for everything that proved to be in order, attributing no part of it to yourself, for truly “it is He who works in us both to will and to do” (Phil. 2:13), and without him we can do nothing good (John 15:5). And having given thanks to God, forget it—following the example of St. Paul—in order that, like him, you may with greater ardor ”press forward toward what lies ahead” (Phil. 3:13). For everything that proved to be in disorder, repent and be contrite before the Lord, lamenting to yourself that on the table of your offering you never bring him entirely pure bread—always with chaff and rubbish mixed in—and firmly resolving to keep strict watch over yourself the following day so that nothing improper slips through, not only in deeds and words but even in thoughts and feelings.

Those who are attentive to themselves perform all of this—both the examination and the concluding action just described—in the midst of the day’s activities, so that the evening examination of conscience is for them only a repetition of the day’s examination, a correction and completion of it. And one cannot but agree that such a manner of proceeding is better and more natural. Nothing that is wrong will be hidden from the conscience; and having noticed it, the conscience at once begins to be troubled. Is it not more natural to set it at rest immediately through self-condemnation, contrition, and a resolve to be more correct in the future, rather than leaving this until evening?

Let me add one or two more observations on this subject.

Examine your deeds as strictly as possible, going deep into their workings, and then pass a merciless judgment upon yourself. The more deeply you penetrate into everything that happens in you and from you—removing what is wrong and establishing yourself in what is right—the more quickly your conscience will be purified; just as the deeper one digs in sinking a well, the cleaner the water in it becomes.

The conscience, once it knows what is right and what is wrong, will not cease to require action in accord with the former and to pursue with judgment and remorse whatever departs from the latter. But until it reaches a full knowledge of both, or until it has acquired a ”faculty trained… to distinguish good from evil” (Heb. 5:14) and thus comes to have sight in itself—it remains in a certain dependence in this respect upon the other powers of the soul, and especially upon reason. Reason, however, while the heart is not yet cleansed from the passions, is often suborned by them and surrounds deeds with many excuses, which, clouding the eye of conscience, lead it into error, so that it sometimes calls black white. Therefore, while you are still engaged in the struggle against the passions, hold up your deeds in self-examination before the mirror of God’s word and be guided by it in assessing their quality and worth; and do not be ashamed or too lazy to go frequently to your spiritual father.

Begin and end the examination of your deeds with fervent prayer, that the Lord may grant you eyes to see the hidden things of your heart, for ”the heart is deep above all things, and who can know it?” (Jer. 17:9). No one but God, who ”is greater… than our heart and knows all things” (1 John 3:20), he who ”alone knows the hearts of all the sons of men” (1 Kings 8:39). There are wrongful feelings concealed deep in the heart, which at times flit briefly into deeds, and at times—without having been noticed—suffuse them with the stench of sin. Pray, therefore, with the prophet David: ”Cleanse me from my secret faults” (Ps. 18:13).