The Dark Box: A Secret History of Confession (29 page)

The capital sins worthy of God’s anger and punishment were the Ten Commandments of the Bible, or the Seven Deadly Sins of the Desert Fathers. But from the Middle Ages on, moralists increasingly encouraged preoccupation with those subtle sins of interiority and the fine gradations of motives and intentions. The least ‘impure thought’ was a mortal sin, an offence against God and one’s soul. Human failings were categorised into checklists of imperfections disconnected from circumstances and relationships.

The era of the Enlightenment tended to revive and reinforce the separation of the conscious inward soul from the world. Moral and ascetical theology emphasised those ‘virtues’ proper to a medieval cloister—as advocated, for example, by Thomas à Kempis’s early fifteenth-century
The Imitation of
Christ
. Here is a typical passage from
Imitation
illustrating this intense preoccupation with self:

Rest from inordinate desire of knowledge, for therein is found much distraction and deceit. Those who have knowledge desire to appear learned, and to be called wise. Many things there are to know which profiteth little or nothing to the soul. And foolish out of measure is he who attendeth upon other things rather than those which serve to his soul’s health. Many words satisfy not the soul, but a good life refresheth the mind, and a pure conscience giveth great confidence towards God.
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The highest virtue consisted in the individual soul’s union with God, involving aspirations to perfect recollection, detachment, poverty of spirit, purity of heart, humility, and obedience to spiritual authority.

The idea of virtue as the pursuit of the common good, however, had also been active in Christianity. Its intellectual origins date back to ancient Greece and the ethics of Aristotle. Humans, according to his philosophy, are communal animals. Virtue, wholeness, is the nurturing of one’s true purpose or goal in everyday life, whether in trade, husbandry, manual skills, education, or medicine—that is, to be of service to one’s community. Aristotle’s ethics, adopted and adapted by the Christian philosopher Thomas Aquinas, have been a feature, albeit subterranean, of Catholic moral philosophy to this day. Its revival in recent decades has been a
central dynamic for groups that seek to express Catholicism’s social dimension. The philosophical foundations for this restoration have been provided by moral philosophers such as Alasdair MacIntyre, the Aristotelian and Thomist scholar. In parallel, the idea of sin as ‘social’ rather than interior finds expression alongside the liberation theologies developed and practised in the third world—for example, by Leonardo Boff in Latin America.
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The tensions within the Catholic Church between inwardly preoccupied virtue, on the one hand, and liberation virtue, on the other, are well known. Borrowing from the history of science, some liberal theologians have described their distance from ‘traditionalist’ theology as being comparable to the so-called paradigm shift in the natural sciences. In other words, Catholic teaching is no longer seen as immutable, patriarchal, exclusive, defensive, and militant, but as open to historical, cultural, and social factors, willing to engage society and the non-Catholic world. This perspective has been given practical impetus by younger generations of lay Catholics who find in Christianity a duty to combat social, economic, and political injustice. Their moral concerns focus not on the exquisite state of their souls, but on the alleviation of poverty, homelessness, hunger, and disease; care for the environment; and peace building. They seek to combat the ‘sins’ of racism, sexism, child abuse, and the oppression of minorities.
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In the meantime, an ancient and enduring idea of sin, unfamiliar to the catechists of my childhood, but widely accepted today, declares that if there is a Hell it consists not
in a physical place of torture but in a person’s deliberate abandonment of God’s love through the sin of self-idolatry. It is not God who rejects and punishes the ‘sinner’, but the self-adulator who turns away from God’s unconditional love.

The notion finds expression in the Book of Genesis. In Hebrew, the word
yetzer
is often employed to denote sin. It is related, however, to the word for ‘creation’,
yetzirah
, and to the word for ‘imagine’ (which is another form of creation—making something out of nothing). In Genesis the power of imagination is synonymous with the sin of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Satan tempts our first parents to acquire ‘the Knowledge of Good and Evil’, which sets them on the path to rivalling God. ‘For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil’, Satan tells Eve. But it is the power of imagination that makes a moral life possible. It makes possible the recollection of past actions, options taken or rejected. Imagination is the capacity to envision future choices and weigh their comparative consequences. The power of imagination thus becomes both the source of freedom and a potential curse. For at the heart of the Genesis myth is a powerful metaphor for the human capacity to supplant God in a life of self-love.
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Self-adulation has been explored down the centuries in works of religious and artistic imagination: from Narcissus in Greek mythology, to Sophocles’ Electra, to the sins of avarice, pride, and envy in Dante’s
Divine Comedy
. Two kinds of narcissism are portrayed in Shakespeare’s
Othello
—that of the
Moor and the diabolical Iago. Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus barters earthly self-aggrandisement for an eternity of punishment. John Milton’s Satan is the archetype of supreme pride and God-envy. And in Oscar Wilde’s
Picture of Dorian Gray
, Gray’s vanity is matched by his selfishness in everyday life.

A powerful example of the predicament of grotesque self-centredness in mid-twentieth-century literature is to be found in William Golding’s novel
Pincher Martin
. Martin is shipwrecked in the Atlantic. The action of the novel takes place, one eventually understands, at the moment of Martin’s death. Martin cannot accept death, however, because he cannot surrender his voracious ego. We are given to believe that he is stranded on a rock. In fact, as he drowns, he is exploring a missing jagged tooth in his mouth, to which he clings as his final vestige of ownership, colonising it and subjecting it to his will. If there is a Hell, according to Golding, it is in the inability to accept one’s creatureliness, one’s finitude—one’s consciousness of a creator on the horizon of existence. In the course of the novel we are told of Martin’s legendary lifelong selfishness: ‘This painted bastard here takes anything he can lay his hands on. Not food . . . that’s far too simple. He takes the best part, the best seat, the most money, the best notice, the best woman. He was born with his mouth and his flies open and both hands out to grab. He’s a cosmic case of the bugger who gets his penny and someone else’s bun.’ In Martin’s life, self-idolatry manifests itself in acquisitiveness, possessing, and having.
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There are flashes of a mysterious black lightning, suggestive of divine influence, seeking to distract Martin from his inward egotistic insistence on being the very centre and meaning of life and the universe. The play of the lightning is reminiscent of the water snakes in Coleridge’s
Ancient Mariner
: it seeks to find a chink in the carapace of Martin’s egotism, even as he draws his self-protective claws in ever tighter: ‘There was nothing but the centre and the claws. They were huge and strong and inflamed to red. They closed on each other. They contracted.’
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We never know whether Martin finally yields his inexorable narcissism to the divinity of black lightning. Some commentators suggest that Martin finally submits, and that the novel is a portrait of Purgatory rather than Hell.
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T
HE POINT OF
C
HRISTIANITY
, according to a constituency of theologians of the ‘new paradigm’, is to teach by example the virtues of spiritual community in contrast to the sin of self-adulation. Christianity is essentially, therefore, a community, a ‘school of prayer and friendship’, rather than a hierarchical reformatory of top-down dogma. The Catholic Church, however, has been a community in conflict with itself on this issue, with far-reaching implications for the sacrament of confession.
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During the recent celebrations for the half-century that has elapsed since the beginning of the Second Vatican Coun
cil, that momentous event for the world’s Catholics has been explained in several different ways. Whatever else its goals, the Council attempted to overturn much of the legalistic, centralising, Anti-Modernist tendencies of the Church of the Piuses (Pius X, XI, and XII). The Council was not entirely successful in achieving that aim, however, and where it succeeded there have been gradual, inexorable processes of retrenchment by recent popes. The society that invokes Pius X’s name—the Society of Pius X—demonstrates the discontent of those who regret the loss of that former, patriarchal, citadel Church of immutable truths, dictatorial rulings, and a punitive God.

The Second Vatican Council declared in two key documents that confession, or the sacrament of penance, was a reconciliation that took place not only between God and the individual soul, but between the fellowship of the people of God and each individual Christian as a member of the congregation and the community at large. The decision of Council Fathers to emphasise the long-neglected social nature of the sacrament, and the social nature of sin, had much to do with their determination to recover aspects of practice and doctrine that had been lost down the centuries. Exploring the communal rather than the purely private and devotional aspect of confession’s past traditions, the French theologian Henri de Lubac offered this insight: ‘The reconciliation of the sinner is in the first place a reconciliation with the Church, this latter constituting an efficacious sign of reconciliation with God.’ The Council, in turn, stressed the need for the
Church to engage with society and with other Christians, other religions, and the world. Its final decree, which found much resistance from conservatives, proclaimed freedom of religion and conscience. The Council, finally, acknowledged that salvation is not a monopoly of Catholics, and that the moral life of religion is communitarian, rather than private and interior.
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It has been argued by Church historians that, in its conflict with the Protestant reformers John Wycliffe, John Hus, and Martin Luther, Catholicism came to emphasise its controlling, legal, and juridical structures over its communitarian fellowship. As the Catholic theologian Karl Rahner put it: ‘The individualism of modern times, the origin of which can already be found in the late Middle Ages’, meant that ‘grace became more and more something which is worked out between God and the individual alone and taken in isolation.’ The Second Vatican Council sought to rectify this emphasis by recovering the idea of communal reconciliation practised in the early Church.
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This background explains in part why the rite of congregational or general confession and absolution was so popular through the 1970s, and why it brought so many people back to the faith who had been lapsed for years. It appeared to strike a chord in many Catholics, consistent with the spirit of renewal of the times. The majority of my respondents lamented the banning of this rite, and pastors had reasons to lament it, too.

The Second Vatican Council prompted a re-examination, moreover, of that essential Greek term
metanoia
—meaning
transformation, or change of heart and mind—which had created such fierce divisions over the understanding of the sacrament of confession at the time of the Reformation.
Metanoia
is neither the doing of penance nor the judgement and sacramental operation of the minister, conciliar theologians concluded, but a person’s rejection of self-centredness, and an inclination of the heart towards God. Thus the Council sought to advocate both individual and communal virtues in the subordination of self to God and to the community. Does a ‘sinner’ require the absolution of a priest to return to God? The view of many theologians and lay Catholics today is that a penitent is reconciled with God
before
going to confession, not as a result of it. Were the Church officially and clearly to expound this teaching, many Catholics would be released from lingering guilt that keeps them from practice. It should also reduce the dangerous clerical assumption of unearthly power so aptly encapsulated in James Joyce’s portrayal of the temptation of Stephen Dedalus in
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man:
‘He would hold his secret knowledge and secret power, being as sinless as the innocent . . .’ Stephen’s temptation to priestly supremacy involved, as well, the masculine power of the confessor over the submissive female penitent, and the unequal power relationship of a confessor over a child. Stephen fantasises that he would know the ‘sinful longings and sinful thoughts and sinful acts . . . murmured into his ears . . . by the lips of women and girls: but rendered immune mysteriously at his ordination by the imposition of hands his soul would pass again uncontaminated to the white peace of the altar.’
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