“As they did not see fit to have God in knowledge.” To have God in knowledge means to remember Him, to keep Him in mind and consciousness, with corresponding religious feelings and dispositions. It also means to have sound concepts of Him, to think truly about Him, and to keep the true confession of faith.
Ἐν ἐπιγνώσει can mean both. At first the Gentiles, because of vanity, began to forget God. In forgetting Him, they also became darkened in their concepts of Him. Darkened concepts produced still greater forgetfulness of God, and greater forgetfulness of God led to still more false concepts of Him.
“They did not see fit,” οὐκ ἐδοκίμασαν, means they did not test it, did not know how, and even more, they did not make attempts, did not strive, did not set this as the goal of their life. That is, they did not strive to remember God, to care about pleasing Him, and to preserve true knowledge of Him.
“For this reason God gave them over.” Again, “gave them over.” First He gave them over to the lusts of their hearts; see Rom 1:24. Then He gave them over to dishonorable passions; see Rom 1:26. Here He gave them over “to an unfit mind, to do what is improper.”
What a gradual descent! It proceeded according to a natural order. Yet since even this order of overthrow is rooted in the laws of nature, which are from God, the Apostle directly refers it to God, as to His immediately active cause, or to His punishing justice.
Blessed Theophylact writes: “Here for the third time he repeats the same thought and uses the same word, saying, ‘He gave them over.’ Everywhere he presents the impiety of men as the cause of their being abandoned by God, as he does now.”
“He says that the insult inflicted on God was not a sin of ignorance, but intentional. He did not say, ‘because they did not know,’ but, ‘as they did not see fit,’ that is, they resolved not to have God in knowledge and voluntarily chose impiety.”
“Therefore their sins are not sins of the flesh, as certain heretics assert, not of the body or material organism, as the Manichaeans thought, but of false judgments. First they rejected the knowledge of God, and only afterward did God permit them to fall into a perverse mind.”
“For God’s turning away and His abandonment are called ‘giving over’ in Scripture. God gave them over. Why? Because they did not know Him. And why did they not know Him? Because they did not judge and decide to know Him.”
“For if they had wished to know Him,” let us continue in Theodoret’s words, “they would have followed the divine laws. But since they denied the Creator, they were completely deprived of His providence. Therefore they fearlessly dared vices of every kind.”
“He gave them over to an unfit mind, to do what is improper.” An unfit mind is one that does not know how to act as it ought. Since it cannot avoid acting, it acts as it ought not, or does improper things.
By nature the mind knows what is good and what is evil, what is right and what is wrong, and it knows how to act accordingly. But sensual life overturned it, and it began to call good evil and evil good. Among the Gentiles many crying injustices even entered into legislation.
Thus the mind became unfit. “They did not see fit” and “unfit” are not wordplay, but a simultaneous correspondence of consequence to cause, or of punishment to sin.
Νοῦς, the ruling power, is the same as the spirit, the reflector of the image of God breathed into the face of man. In it are rooted the feelings of the Godhead and of His righteousness, or the fear of God and conscience.
The fear of God is maintained by true knowledge of God and by remembrance of God. It gives life to conscience, the knowledge of God’s will, and imparts energy to it.
When remembrance of God leaves the mind, and the knowledge of God is darkened by falsehood, the fear of God weakens. With the weakening of the fear of God, conscience also weakens.
As a result, sensuality raises its voice and draws the man after itself. At first conscience rises up, but it is not heeded. It has no strength to compel obedience, because the fear of God, in which its life consists, is absent.
Then it falls silent. In its place sensuality, guided by selfhood, begins to write laws. Every kind of impropriety followed.
Finally the ruling mind inclines to this as well, and only devises false foundations to justify the wrongs of life. In antiquity captive kings were used as a footstool when someone mounted a horse. This very well depicts the state of mind that has been shown.
Saint Chrysostom says: “Since their mind became perverted, everything came into disorder and confusion under an unskilled rider.”
Having expressed this general thought about how the improper life developed, the Apostle then shows in what actions it was expressed. He enumerates the very vices that governed the patterns of life.
Saint Paul makes a similar enumeration in the Epistle to the Galatians; see Gal 5:19-21. He also does so in the Second Epistle to Saint Timothy; see 2 Tim 3:2-5. In both places he derives them from the predominance of sensuality.
No order is visible in the enumeration. One may think that the Apostle chiefly sets forth what the Romans saw with their own eyes among their fellow citizens, and what some of them, perhaps, were guilty of before their conversion.
THEOSIS