The Dark Box: A Secret History of Confession (4 page)

The evolution of ritual was not without problems. There were early rigorist groups who insisted that lapsed Christians should never be allowed re-entry. Casuistic arguments arose, especially over the circumstances of sexual sin—a focus of obsessive anxiety among early Christians. The influential second-century writer Tertullian, a lawyer by profession and a keen disciplinarian by temperament, was convinced that sex even between married couples polluted both body and soul. Women, moreover, constituted a permanent provocation to chastity. He saw them as indeterminate human beings. They were, as he expressed it in
his
De Cultu Feminarum
, the ‘Devil’s Gateway’, a breach in the citadel of the Church through which the secular world would enter to poison the chaste assemblies of male saints. Perpetual virginity in a woman was the highest virtue, in his view; even second marriage after widowhood was for him a kind of adultery. The delight of orgasm, he insisted, was shameful. ‘In that final release of pleasure, do we not sense a loss of our very souls?’ Tertullian argued that the principal sins—apostasy, idolatry, adultery, and homicide—were unforgivable, setting the scene not only for increasing exclusions from reconciliation, despite contrition, but debates about the extent and limits of adultery. So we find Bishop Cyprian of Carthage in 259 asking whether a consecrated virgin (a woman who had taken a vow of lifetime celibacy), guilty of a sin against chastity, was truly an adulteress, since she was not married. He concluded after much debate that she should suffer the same penalties as an authentic adulterer, as she had committed the sin against her spiritual spouse, Jesus Christ.
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O
N A WINDSWEPT ROCK
rising sheer out of the Atlantic some eight miles off the coast of Kerry, Ireland, stand the remains of a primitive monastery known as Skellig Michael, believed to have been founded in the sixth century. On this forbidding island, a community of monks lived a life of isolation, prayer, and penance for centuries. In such places, at the far-flung
limits of Christendom, an early form of confession, as it would come to be known, was first practised.

With the invasions of the Visigoths and the Franks beginning in the fifth century, and the resulting breakdown of civil societies, the once-in-a-lifetime exclusions and elaborate reconciliations went into decline. Yet a form of repetitive, private contrition was emerging within monastic communities in Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, conducted by elders, abbots, and abbesses. The practice gradually spread outside the monastic setting as missionary monks from the north travelled south. This was the practice of ‘auricular’ confession in the making—confession ‘into the ear of the confessor’. Hence the idea of sin as requiring the forgiveness of the community gave way to the confession of sins through the private ministrations of a confessor who might be a monk or a nun. A crucial difference between the old reconciliation and the new was the practice of confessing lesser, ‘venial’ sins as well as the grave, ‘mortal’ ones. The penances were no less harsh than in the past, but they became more systematic as bishops, abbots, and leading missionaries developed sets of penitential ‘tariffs’, including sleep deprivation, fasts, exile, and pilgrimages (alone or in groups), for a range of sins. Christian fast days today, the Catholic tradition of not eating meat (but welcoming fish) on Fridays, and the popularity of pilgrimages echo the penitential practices of the second half of the first millennium of Christianity. At St. Patrick’s Purgatory Island in Donegal, Ireland, pilgrims to this day practise self-mortifications reminiscent of the penances of the sixth century. They pray all
night in the island’s church; the next day, they walk barefoot on beds of rock, praying as they go. They eat only a single meal, dry toast washed down with black tea, in the course of three days and nights.

Manuals of these early tariffs came to be known as the ‘penitential books’. Among the most influential was
The Penitential of St. Columbanus
, who founded monastic communities in France, Switzerland, and Italy to become one of the great European missionaries of his age. Writing in about 600, Columbanus emphasised not only the sins of action and omission, and offences against others and the community, but also mental sins. Even if one had only desired ‘in thought’ to kill, to commit fornication, to steal, to feast in secret and be drunken, or to strike someone, he said, ‘let him do penance for the great ones half a year, for the lesser ones forty days on bread and water.’ He warned, moreover, ‘just as we must beware of mortal and fleshly sins’ before approaching the Eucharist, ‘so we must refrain, and cleanse ourselves from interior vices and the sicknesses of the ailing soul before the covenant of true peace and the bond of eternal salvation.’
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As in the early centuries of the Church, the penitentials focused on sins of the flesh, which merited abstinence from intercourse for the married. In Columbanus’s penitential, expiation of the sin of adultery in which a layman had begotten a child by another’s wife required ‘three years refraining from the more appetizing foods and from his own wife’. If a layman committed fornication ‘in a sodomite fashion, that is, has sinned by effeminate intercourse with a male’, the penance
was seven years: ‘for the three first on bread and water and salt and dry produce of the garden, for the remaining four let him refrain from wine and meat’. The regard for modesty in the teaching of Columbanus was extreme: ‘. . . if anyone, even while sitting in the bath, has uncovered his knees or arms, without need for washing dirt, let him not wash for six days, that is, let that immodest bather not wash his feet until the following Lord’s Day.’
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The writer of the
Bigotian Penitential
of the eighth century was preoccupied with masturbation. If a priest by sinful thoughts ‘has caused his sperm to flow’, he must fast for a week. If he ‘touches his member with his hand’, he shall do penance for three weeks. ‘He who often causes his sperm to flow by passionate thoughts’, wrote the author, ‘shall do penance for twenty days.’ And there is more: ‘He whose sperm flows whilst he is sleeping in church, shall do penance for three days. If he stimulates himself, for the first offence twenty days, for the second one, forty; if more often, fasts shall be added.’
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Women were to suffer exclusions in certain circumstances. ‘During their monthly period women should not enter a church nor receive communion’, states the
Bigotian Penitential
. ‘He who has intercourse with his wife during her monthly period shall do penance for twenty days.’ A pregnant woman, moreover, ‘must abstain from her husband for three months before childbirth, and during the period of purgation afterwards: that is, forty days and nights.’
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As the penitentials multiplied, so did attention to the role of the confessor. One penitential warns of the crime of
telling tales outside of the confessing relationship. Categories of sins were also developed, drawing not only on the Ten Commandments but also the Book of Leviticus, the Letters of St. Paul, and the wisdom of the individual author of the penitential. The Seven Deadly Sins, those capital sins categorised in the early Christian period as symptomatic of the Fall, were constantly invoked: anger, avarice, sloth, pride, lust, envy, and gluttony. Intentional acts were contrasted with unintentional ones: if the desire to sin was frustrated only by lack of opportunity, it was deemed equivalent to the act itself. Premeditated crimes carried greater penances than those done rashly. For example, a murderer who had planned his crime would be exiled for ten years, whereas one who killed in the heat of the moment suffered exile for six. A sin that had become a habit was punished more severely than a single instance.

The status of the sinner was also considered, based on degrees of responsibility, privilege, and education. A bishop, for example, was deemed to carry more guilt than a priest or layperson committing the same sin. Allowances were made for the sick, the unemployed, and the poor. A rich penitent was allowed to pay a substitute to do his penance for him.

Pilgrimage, an increasingly popular penance, was based on a belief in the power and presence of the relics of saints. The bones of Sts. Peter and Paul attracted the faithful to Rome as the centre of Christendom, although the Eternal City would also vie with Jerusalem. But whereas Muslims are obliged to journey to one destination, Mecca, for the fulfilment of their pilgrimage, Christians from the earliest era had a variety of
holy destinations, including not only supposed burial places of saints but sites of supernatural apparitions and occurrences.
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For example, it was believed that St. Michael the Archangel had manifested himself in a mountain cave on Italy’s Gargano Peninsula in 490. St. John Chrysostom, the early Christian Father, recommended the shrine of Job’s dunghill, where ‘many undertake a long pilgrimage, even across the sea, hastening from the extremities of the earth, as far as Arabia, that they may . . . kiss . . . the ground of such a victor’. The site of the burning bush beneath Mount Sinai was also popular. By the ninth century, one of the principal pilgrim destinations after Rome and Jerusalem was Compostela in Galicia, where, according to legend, the headless body of St. James the Greater had been miraculously transported from Jaffa in a stone ship. From the many accounts of pilgrimage, these journeys created not only an occasion of penance, but a rich experience of diversion, merriment, and sexual adventure. In the spiritual trade-off of the times, pilgrims could expect to be offered food and comfort from the locals along the way in exchange for special graces and blessings. For many, pilgrimage became a way of life.

The penances imposed on kings and princes tell a story of conflict between throne and altar. William the Conqueror was ordered by Pope Alexander II to build the abbey at Battle to expiate the killing of King Harold in 1066. A spectacular imperial penance was performed in 1077 by Henry IV, Holy Roman Emperor. In a titanic political struggle between Pope Gregory VII and Henry over who took ultimate precedence
in Latin Christendom, Gregory, one of the greatest reforming popes of history, took the awful step of excommunicating Henry, thus undermining his secular authority among the German princes, bishops, and people. Finding his situation as excommunicate ruler untenable, Henry travelled in the depths of winter to confront Gregory, who was lodged in the castle of Canossa in a high valley of the Apennines. For three days and nights, Henry knelt in the snow outside the castle, barefoot and dressed in a rough wool shirt, pleading for absolution and reconciliation in a self-imposed act of penance and contrition. As Gregory noted, the emperor’s lamentations ‘provoked all who were there or who had been brought news of what was happening to such great mercy, and such pitying compassion, that they began to intercede for him with prayers and tears of their own.’
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The pope finally acquiesced, opened the gates, and absolved Henry with the kiss of peace.

In the following century, England’s Henry II was obliged to do penance to expiate the murder of Thomas à Becket. On 12 July 1174 he publicly confessed his part in the crime and submitted himself to receiving blows across the back from all eighty monks of Canterbury Cathedral.

With the spread of auricular confession came supplements to the penitential books to help priests in their pastoral duties towards penitents. The writings of Peter Abelard, the French eleventh-century theologian and philosopher, provide insight into the discussions and debates over confession in the early Middle Ages. He complained of the ignorance of confessors
who did not understand the nature of the sacrament, or who failed to inform the penitent of the grounds of forgiveness, and thereby deceived them. Anticipating the corrupt practices of the high and late Middle Ages, he lambasted those bishops who tended to waive the penances in exchange for alms. The seriousness of confession, involving the destiny of individual souls, raised questions about the spiritual status of confessors—their suitability to guide souls.
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Another figure who wrote compellingly on this theme during the eleventh century was Peter Damian of Ravenna, an ascetic Benedictine monk who became a bishop and cardinal. Although known to be gentle on penitents, he was severe in his criticism of lax clergy, excoriating bishops for such pastimes as playing chess, and denouncing heads of monastic houses for their luxurious lifestyles. In his
Book of Gomorrah
, he drew attention to the clerical sexual abuse of adolescent boys. From the context it is clear that he was speaking of religious houses and monasteries where boys were housed as oblates and novices. He also paid significant attention to the suffering of victims of sodomy. He advocated celibacy for all priests while attacking homosexuality, mutual masturbation, the practice of sexual acts between the thighs, and anal intercourse. He believed that unbridled lust was a cause of lunacy.
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