Whatsoever is sold in the meat market, that eat, asking no question for conscience's sake:
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Clement Of Alexandria
AD 215
Similarly he has enjoined to purchase "what is sold in the shambles "without curious questioning.
Should they say, "Whatsoever is sold in the shambles, ought that to be bought? "adding, by way of interrogation, "asking no questions"
Whatsoever is sold in the shambles, that eat, asking no question. Eat indifferently everything, whether offered to idols or not. Asking no question, i.e, making no difference, or according to S. Ambrose, making no inquiry; according to Theophylact, without hesitation.
Herodotus tells us, as well as S. Augustine in the commentary he commenced on the Epistle to the Romans (c78), that the heathen custom was to send t the shambles whatever remained over of the sacrificed meats after the feast, and to give the priests the proceeds. In the shambles, therefore, they were looked upon as any other meats, as having returned to secular and common use. S. Augustine says: "Some weaker brethren at that time abstained from flesh and wine, lest they should unknowingly partake of things offered to idols; for all kinds of sacrificial flesh were offered for sale in the shambles, and the heathens used to pour out libations of wine to their images, and even to offer sacrifices at their wine-presses." Henc...
Ignorance is bliss. The food is not unclean in itself; only human intentions might make it unclean. Those who do not know what those intentions are can therefore eat it with a good conscience.
Having said that they could not drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of the devils, and having once for all led them away from those tables, by Jewish examples, by human reasonings, by the tremendous Mysteries, by the rites solemnized among the idols ; and having filled them with great fear; that he might not by this fear drive again to another extreme, and they be forced, exercising a greater scrupulosity than was necessary, to feel alarm, lest possibly even without their knowledge there might come in some such thing either from the market or from some other quarter; to release them from this strait, he says, Whatsoever is sold in the shambles, eat, asking no question. For, says he, if you eat in ignorance and not knowingly, you are not subject to the punishment: it being thenceforth a matter not of greediness, but of ignorance.
Nor does he free the man only from this anxiety, but also from another, establishing them in thorough security and liberty. For he does not even suffer th...
The conscience referred to here is not the conscience of the one who knows that idols do not exist but the conscience of the one who sees somebody else buying food which has been sacrificed to idols and thinks that it is wrong for that reason. .
A great argument for another god is the permission to eat of all kinds of meats, contrary to the law.
Owes no abstinence from particular meats to the Jewish Law even, admitted as it has been by the apostle once for all to the whole range of the meat-market
