Date: c. 65 A.D.

"He is the true freeman who has escaped from bondage to self. That slavery is constant, from it there is no deliverance."

— Seneca, Lucius Annaeus (c. 4 B.C. - A.D. 65)

Date: 387-8 or 391-5

"Our next subject is whether reason judges the inner sense."

— St. Augustine (354-430)

Date: 387-8 or 391-5

"I think so because I know that the inner sense is a kind of controller or judge of the bodily sense."

— St. Augustine (354-430)

Date: 395

"And also the same teacher of the Gentiles cries aloud, 'I take pleasure together with the law of God after the inner man: but I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind.'"

— St. Augustine (354-430)

Date: 416

"And then at times a man's slave, worn out by the commands of an unfeeling master, finds rest in flight. Whither can the servant of sin flee? Himself he carries with him wherever he flees. An evil conscience flees not from itself; it has no place to go to; it follows itself."

— St. Augustine (354-430)

Date: 413-427

"Does not Tully, disputing of the difference of governments, ... say, that we command our bodily members as sons, they are so obedient, and that we must keep a harder form of rule over our mind's vicious parts, as our slaves?"

— St. Augustine (354-430)

Date: c. 421

The soul "commands the body as a king commands his subjects or a parent his children. It commands lust as a master commands a slave, since it coerces and breaks it. Kings, emperors, magistrates, fathers, peoples rule their subjects and associates as the soul rules the body. Masters harass their s...

— St. Augustine (354-430)

Date: 1257

"By subject, I mean obedient to the soul without rebellion, reproducing and reproducible without lust, functioning without defect, wholly exempt from the changes of decay, impervious to death."

— St. Bonaventure [born Giovanni di Fidanza] (1217-1274)

Date: 1273

"According to the Philosopher (Ethic. ix, 8), a thing seems to be chiefly what is principle in it; thus what the governor of a state does, the state is said to do. In this way sometimes what is principle in man is said to be man; sometimes, indeed, the intellectual part which, in accordance with ...

— St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274)

Date: 1273

"But since habit is a principle of act, sometimes the name conscience is given to the first natural habit--namely, 'synderesis': thus Jerome calls 'synderesis' conscience (Gloss. Ezech. 1:6); Basil, the 'natural power of judgment,' and Damascene says that it is the 'law of our intellect.'"

— St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274)