King Lear and the Power of Conscience

by Peter A. Kwasniewski

In the end, all roads lead to Rome. But people travel there by different routes. In the earliest years of the Church, most converts were Jewish. Later, most converts were pagan. Now converts come from today’s major religious (or irreligious) groups.

    Conscience is spoken of as a kind of inner sight or voice within, moving us towards the good and restraining us from evil. “Moral conscience, present at the heart of the person, enjoins him at the appropriate moment to do good and to avoid evil,” we read in the Catechism. “It bears witness to the authority of truth in reference to the supreme Good to which the human person is drawn, and it welcomes the commandments.”1

    One of the earliest English translations proposed for the Latin word conscientia was “inwit.” A person of “wit” was originally a person of knowledge, even though the term now means cleverness. “Inwit” is something quite different from mere wit: the awareness of good and evil planted in us by our divine Maker. God gave the rudiments of this knowledge to us so that we might be able to see into the motives and consequences of our deeds. In the words of Gaudium et Spes: “Deep within his conscience man discovers a law which he has not laid upon himself but which he must obey. Its voice, ever calling him to love and to do what is good and to avoid evil, sounds in his heart at the right moment. . . For man has in his heart a law inscribed by God.”2 For this reason, “when he listens to his conscience, the prudent man can hear God speaking.”3 “There he is alone with God whose voice echoes in his depths.”4 To hear this voice, one must “turn inward,” says St. Augustine, “and in everything you do, see God as your witness.”5 Newman characterized the conscience as “a messenger of Him, who, both in nature and in grace, speaks to us behind a veil, and teaches and rules us by His representatives.”6

[Man] has within his breast a certain commanding dictate, not a mere sentiment, not a mere opinion, or impression, or view of things, but a law, an authoritative voice, bidding him do certain things and avoid others. I do not say that its particular injunctions are always clear, or that they are always consistent with each other; but what I am insisting on here is this, that is commands,—that it praises, it blames, it promises, it threatens, it implies a future, and it witnesses the unseen. It is more than a man’s own self. The man himself has not power over it, or only with extreme difficulty; he did not make it, he cannot destroy it. He may silence it in particular cases or directions, he may distort its enunciations, but he cannot, or it is quite the exception if he can, he cannot emancipate himself from it. He can disobey it, he may refuse to use it; but it remains.7

Tragedy of conscience unheard

    Although the debate in literary circles over whether or not he was a Catholic will probably go on until the end of time, William Shakespeare surely knew these age-old truths when he wrote what some consider to be his greatest tragedy, King Lear. Concealed within the play is a profound meditation on conscience, on one man’s discovery of his own sinfulness and ignorance, his coming to grips with moral faults and their devastating consequences. With a masterful subtlety, Shakespeare throughout the drama uses imagery of eyes and sight to show King Lear’s initial blindness to the virtues and love of his youngest daughter, Cordelia, and the ultimate restoration of his vision through purgatorial suffering.8 By illustrating the loss and gain of inner vision, Shakespeare interlaces allegory with tragedy and teaches us to assess reality not in terms of mere appearances but by the truth hidden within the heart. By taking as its central theme Lear’s moral transformation from self-absorbed pride to self-abandoning love, Shakespeare’s play parallels the spiritual journey recounted in Dante’s Divine Comedy, where the poet is presented at the start as having lost his way, and by the end as having found it after a visionary ascent from hell through purgatory to paradise. For Shakespeare as for Dante, it is not love that is blind, but selfishness.

    Prior to Lear’s fateful banishment of Cordelia, we know that she was his most beloved daughter, his favorite child. But when the aging king decides to divide up his kingdom among his daughters and their husbands, his pride incites him to seek praise and glorification from them. Cordelia refuses to pay him the false and exaggerated homage that her ambitious and hypocritical sisters Regan and Goneril had already done; she wants only to speak the truth, no more and no less. The king, enraged by her modest words—which ill-suited his royal merit, so he thought—casts her away as an ingrate, an impious child of weak affection. In reality, of course, Cordelia is the only daughter who truly loves her father with filial piety, in accordance with his proper place in her life. Nevertheless, once “the dragon’s wrath” is awakened in Lear, he urges their expulsion from his sight.9 In the king’s furious speeches to Cordelia and Kent, a nobleman faithful to Lear, we notice his insistence that the two of them leave immediately. Two questions arise: why did Lear act with such unbecoming haste, and why, having so acted, could he not tolerate even a moment’s further sight of Cordelia and Kent?

    We can answer these questions if we recollect the archetypal meaning of the imagery of sight. The eye is traditionally regarded as the window of the soul and the symbol of conscience. Where sight-related imagery occurs, a connection is often being made between the physical sense by which we direct our steps in the outer world and the “metaphysical sense” of justice or right judgment according to which we ought to guide our lives. A man who “sees straight” is someone unencumbered by false judgment; a man who is “blind to the truth,” “dim-witted,” or “in the dark” suffers from a defect of vision and is unable to judge correctly, or judges inconsistently. Recall that “myopia,” derived from the Greek words muo (“shut”) and ops (“eye”), is often used to describe moral or intellectual blindness to consequences. If we look more closely at the allegory of King Lear, we shall see that Lear himself is a figure of Adam, the father of mankind, confronted with a choice between the heavenly Cordelia (who, like God, will not flatter man but will only state the simple truth of obedience to divine law) and the earthly Regan and Goneril (who, like the serpent, insinuate their evil plans with words of false praise). I am reminded of a saying of the Desert Fathers:

When the eyes of an ox or mule are covered, then he goes round and round turning the mill wheel: but if his eyes are uncovered he will not go around in the circle of the mill wheel. So too the devil if he manages to cover the eyes of a man, he can humiliate him in every sin. But if that man’s eyes are not closed, he can easily escape from the devil.10

    The King’s great fault is his excessive hunger for approval or adulation, which he seeks to obtain by asking his three daughters to show the extent of their love for him—to show that which, if it is genuine, cannot be fully shown. He is asking for the kind of single-hearted worship properly given to God alone. The two elder daughters speak with self-serving exaggeration, providing Lear with what his soul craves: a show of reverence, servitude, worship. This untruthful role is precisely what Cordelia refuses to act out; like thickly-applied cosmetics, it would mask her true beauty. Conscious that her love is more that flattering platitudes, she sets before Lear her “plain” love, characterized by modesty and foresight. Essentially a good and noble man, Lear nevertheless allows his pride to overcome him completely and desires that the painful truth about himself—a truth embodied in Cordelia and Kent—be banished from his presence. The anger he feels and the punishment he inflicts are a failure of vision, a blindness to truth. Lear cannot foresee the evil consequences of his actions, for he does not realize that his sight is flawed. It’s the old “fly in the eye” catch: the defect in Lear’s eye causes him to see a defect in Cordelia’s love. He is therefore doubly mistaken: he falsely sees virtue in Regal and Goneril and vice in Cordelia, where they do not exist; and he fails to see the disease of vainglory in his own soul. “Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye” (Mt. 7:5).

    If Cordelia and Kent represent the truth, we no longer have to seek the reason why Lear wants them quickly out of sight: his soul cannot bear the sting of reproach or the yoke of honesty. Finding Cordelia’s honesty a painful reproach, he exercises his royal power (ironically divided up and distributed away moments before) and, ignoring the demands of truth, enforces a false truth whereby Cordelia and Kent are the villains and Regan and Goneril the heroines.

    In Acts IV and V, the imagery of sight relating to Lear and Cordelia reaches its deepest level. In the intervening space of time he has become all too well aware that his other daughters are treacherous and that Cordelia alone is loyal to him. At last reunited with his long-suffering Cordelia, whom he calls “a soul in bliss,” Lear confesses his spiritual agony: “I am bound / Upon a wheel of fire, that mine own tears / Do scald like molten lead.” Cordelia begs her father to “look upon me,” to see again the face that he unjustly condemned, in order to be redeemed through her forgiveness and benediction. (The role of parent and child is reversed at the end of the play; it is Cordelia, now a married woman and an adult in her own right, who cares for and blesses Lear in his second childhood. Cordelia becomes a mother to him in his senescence.) During this tender scene, Lear is being asked to face his fault before Cordelia, in the presence of her whom he banished, that his vision might be purified. “I’ll kneel down / And ask of thee forgiveness,” Lear tells his daughter, who clearly feels nothing but wordless love and pity for him.
    It is only when Cordelia dies, however, that her father at last sees clearly: “Lend me a looking glass,” he says. He places the looking glass near Cordelia’s mouth to see if she is still alive, to see if she can leave the mark of her breath upon it. But the further significance of this mirror must not be overlooked. Lear, holding it, now has the power to see himself, to know his own soul. St. Paul compares the soul that knows God imperfectly to the soul that actually sees Him: “For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall understand fully, even as I have been fully understood” (1 Cor. 13:12). Beholding his flesh and blood through the dark mirror of death, Lear in the final moments of his life at last “comes to himself” by pouring out his soul in grief-filled love for the daughter he has wronged. In this way—in the way of love, which both convicts and forgives—Lear attains liberation from the source of the tragedy, his sin, his “tragic flaw.” On the verge of his own death, he restores the goodness of his soul by losing himself in love for another, as if Shakespeare were saying: the truest king, the most just ruler, is not the one who wields worldly power but he who surrenders his life in love for another. As soon as his soul is released from the tyranny of pride and vanity, Lear becomes a king in truth and not in title alone. As long as he remained wrapped up in a false image of who he was, he was fated to falter, for no man can trace his outward steps aright until he first looks inward and upward, examining his soul in the light of divine truth. “What can we gain by sailing to the moon,” Thomas Merton wrote in 1960, “if we are not able to cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves? This is the most important of all voyages of discovery, and without it all the rest are not only useless but disastrous.”11

    King Lear is a portrait of sin conquered by love, guilt undone by repentance, folly purged through suffering. At the center of the human drama—a perpetual drama of which this play is an intensified reflection—lies the discovery of the self, the unveiling of one’s own moral infirmity and need for redemption.

The Law Inscribed in Man’s Heart

    The Creator bestows on all human beings a moral sense of right and wrong, which even the greatest sins do not entirely extinguish; hence all who are possessed of their wits look upon the murderer or robber with horror, and there is a kind of honor even among thieves. In this sense, conscience is nothing other than the conscious recognition of the natural law as expressed in the Ten Commandments. To the degree that one’s soul is pure and open to the values God has etched upon His creation, one will feel the wrongness of adultery or avarice, and feel the rightness of respecting a neighbor’s goods. If, on the contrary, a man indulges himself constantly with wine and women, the voice of his conscience cannot be expected to roar; it may subside to a whisper, or vanish altogether. Through the prophet Moses, Yahweh revealed His law to the chosen people so that they might walk in holiness before Him. But an external law was not enough. Jesus promised to inscribe God’s law upon the tablets of the heart so that the Kingdom of God could be something within us and not merely outside and above us. Jesus would restore the original power of conscience in the Christian who partakes of His grace.

    The Jews were told that their God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, would heal the rupture between heaven and earth, between man and his Maker, in such a way that the tablets of the law would be inscribed upon their hearts. Although conscience is natural to the human being, original sin, whose effects are amplified by personal sins, tends to darken it far more than the will tends to obey it. When it has not been smothered, the voice of conscience itself cries out that we are sick and want healing. As Newman argues, more often than not it simply reveals to us that we are doing something wrong or not quite right, that we have gone astray and do not know the path we should follow. On top of this bewilderment, we discern within ourselves a tendency opposed to the conscience, an inclination St. Paul refers to as “another law,” a law of sin, of stubborn behavior in opposition to God’s will. The healing of the heart’s rebellion against God (and against itself) requires divine assistance. This aid is grace, a sharing in the life of God, by which the soul of man is cleansed of evil and guided to a blessed destiny. When God grants us a share in His life, the observance of the commandments—nothing more than a paper scroll if it does not reside in the temple of the heart—becomes desirable and attainable in daily life. By grace, the stony tablets turn into fleshy tablets and the voice of conscience translates the voice of God. Thus conscience, dead or dying because of its own failed works, is resurrected and restored to fullness of life by the mercy of God. Enraptured by the beauty of this divine remedy, St. Gertrude declares:

O thrice blessed, thrice happy, and, if I may speak so, a hundred times holy, is he who allows himself to be guided by this grace; and who, having clean hands and a pure heart and spotless lips, merits to be thus united to and incorporated with his God! What does he not see and hear and feel and taste? How can my stammering tongue speak of it?12

Without God’s merciful grace, people slide further into faults and guilt, the “outermost darkness” of which the New Testament threateningly speaks. Because few men in our times take pains to implore the mercy of God, and fewer still seek entrance into His kingdom, there are many who struggle in vain to discover a goodness that can satiate their hearts, truth to feed their minds, beauty to fill their souls with light. Not having the life of God within them to discipline their urges and sustain their good intentions, they lack access to the font of all beauty, goodness, and truth. Lacking the will to choose and the knowledge of what to choose, they frantically rush from pleasure to pleasure, unable to find true peace or lasting joy.

    The Catechism teaches us much about how to develop a greater obedience to the truth, a deeper sensitivity to goodness, and a more refined perception of moral beauty. “The education of conscience is indispensable for human beings who are subjected to negative influences and tempted by sin to prefer their own judgment and to reject authoritative teachings.”13 Noting that “the dignity of the human person implies and requires uprightness of moral conscience,”14 the Catechism goes on to speak of some of the ways we can educate our consciences rightly. First there is the need to cultivate silence and a receptive disposition. “It is important for every person to be sufficiently present to himself in order to hear and follow the voice of his conscience. This requirement of interiority is all the more necessary as life often distracts us from any reflection, self-examination, or introspection.”15 Because conscience witnesses to a higher power that instructs us in the differences between good and evil, we have to make ourselves receptive to illumination from this divine source, chiefly through prayer. The most important exercise in forming moral sensibility is attentive and regular reading of Sacred Scripture: “the word of God is the light for our path (Ps. 119:105), we must assimilate it in faith and prayer and put it into practice.” But the Catechism suggests a further step which will strengthen our grasp of the message of Scripture: “We must also examine our conscience before the Lord’s Cross. We are assisted by the gifts of the Holy Spirit, aided by the witness or advice of others, and guided by the authoritative teaching of the Church.”16

    Those who have responded to God with an earnest effort to adhere to the truth and a resolute desire to seek holiness must help carry the burden of others who have lost their way in life or do not want to tread the right path. The person who strives to live in accordance with an eternal rule, a godly law, is at the same time perfecting his own conscience and awakening others to the reality of the image of God impressed within them. The well-formed conscience is a furnace where unworthy motives are burned away and the glory of our vocation is revealed. Because we are free to act or refrain from acting, to cooperate with God or oppose Him, the work of igniting this interior fire and replenishing its fuel is as much a matter of human sweat as of divine grace. A lesson for all of us, sinners that we are, comes from the desert father Abbot Syncletica:

There is labour and great struggle for the impious who are converted to God, but after that comes inexpressible joy. A man who wants to light a fire first is plagued by smoke, and the smoke drives him to tears, yet finally he gets the fire that he wants. So also it is written: Our God is a consuming fire. Hence we ought to light the divine fire in ourselves with labor and with tears.17

    Cardinal Newman composed a beautiful prayer that contains the lesson of King Lear, the warning of Merton, the joy of St. Gertrude, and the counsel of Abbot Syncletica all at once. We should pray it on occasion, especially in difficult moments when painful decisions are thrust upon us and the path we should follow is unclear.

Give me, O Lord, that purity of conscience which alone can receive, which alone can improve Thy inspirations. My ears are dull, so that I cannot hear Thy voice. My eyes are dim, so that I cannot see Thy tokens. Thou alone canst quicken my hearing, and purge my sight, and cleanse and renew my heart. Teach me, like Mary, to sit at Thy feet, and to hear Thy word. Give me that true wisdom which seeks Thy will by prayer and meditation, by direct intercourse with Thee, more than by reading and reasoning. Give me the discernment to know Thy voice from the voice of strangers, and to rest upon it and to seek it in the first place, as something external to myself; and answer me through my own mind, if I worship and rely on Thee as above and beyond it.18

Peter A. Kwasniewski is an Instructor in Philosophy at the International Theological Institute in Gaming, Austria.

End Notes

1    CCC 1777.
2    GS 16, quoted in CCC 1776.
3    CCC 1777.
4    GS 16.
5    Quoted in CCC 1779.
6    From “Letter to the Duke of Norfolk,” quoted in CCC 1778.
7    From Sermons Preached on Various Occasions, in Erich Przywara, S.J., The Heart of Newman (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1997), 45-46.
8    See especially Act I, scene i: 157-159, 234, 265-267; Act IV, scene vii: 46-48, 53-55, 57-58, 71; Act V, scene iii: 7, 16-17, 23-25, 259-265, 281, 283, 289.
9    “Peace, Kent! / Come not between the dragon and his wrath. / I lov’d her most, and thought to set my rest / On her kind nursery. Hence, and avoid my sight!” (Act I, scene i: 123-126).
10    The Wisdom of the Desert: Sayings from the Desert Fathers of the Fourth Century, trans. Thomas Merton (New York: New Directions, 1960), 48.
11    Wisdom of the Desert, Introduction, 11.
30.. The Life and Revelations of Saint Gertrude (Westminster, Maryland: The Newman Press, 1949), 90.
12    CCC 1783.
13    CCC 1780.
14    CCC 1779.
15    CCC 1785.
16    Wisdom of the Desert, 55. St. Teresa of Avila expressed the same truth when she wrote: “Nothing worldly has warmth enough left in it to induce us to cling to it unless it is something which increases this fire [of sanctity], the nature of which is not to be easily satisfied, but, if possible, to enkindle the entire world.”
17    From Meditations and Devotions, in Przywara, 227.

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