The Dark Box: A Secret History of Confession (5 page)

Two

Confession into Its Own

Full swetely herde he confessioun.

—Geoffrey Chaucer’s Friar Huberd,
The Canterbury Tales

I
N THE YEAR 1191
C
ARDINAL
-D
EACON
L
OTARIO DEI
C
ONTI
di Segni was elected pope at the age of thirty-seven, taking the name Innocent III. His initiatives to encourage confession would shape the sacrament and its influence for centuries to come. He would make confession obligatory under pain of mortal sin.

Innocent, born into a wealthy patrician family, was a skilled canonist who had studied law in Paris and Bologna. He announced from the outset that he would exert the spiritual rather than temporal powers of his office, but he had ambitions in both spheres. He brought into constant use the epithet ‘Vicar of Christ’—a role, as he put it, ‘set midway
between God and Man’—signalling his determination to elevate the rule of the papacy over both altar and throne. His political weapons of choice were the interdict (censure) and excommunication. In his quarrels with King John of England over ecclesiastical and monarchical authority, he declared the country’s celebrated Magna Carta null and void.

Innocent centralised Church authority, downgrading the authority of bishops. He sought to improve the discipline of the clergy both within and outside of monasticism, and he guardedly encouraged the activities of the preaching orders—the Franciscans and Dominicans. He called a Fourth Crusade, which resulted in the sack of Constantinople and the collapse of any hope of reconciliation between Latin and Byzantine Christendom. He initiated a military crusade against the heretic Cathars of southern France. They were anticlerical and had declared that the sacrament of penance was a false doctrine. They taught that Mary was conceived of Jesus through her right ear. Pope Innocent’s attempts to coax the Cathars out of their heresies through eloquent preaching failed; nor could they simply be ignored, since a central theme of their beliefs was the evils of the papacy. Innocent’s campaign against the Cathars led to the slaughter of many thousands and made way for the expansion of the Inquisition in subsequent pontificates.

Innocent was nevertheless convinced that the Cathar heresies indicated a thirst for religious revival which he believed he could satisfy with a tranche of devotional reforms. In 1215 he convoked the Fourth Lateran Council. Among
its provisions was the decree that all the faithful must attend confession and receive Holy Communion once a year. First confession should be made ‘on reaching the age of discernment’ by all members of the faithful ‘of either sex’. Those who failed to do their Easter sacramental duties were to be ‘barred from entering the church in their lifetime and to be deprived of Christian burial at death’. A familiar verdict of history is that Innocent was exploiting confession to seek out heretics. Yet he also hoped to encourage spiritual renewal and to establish the role of the priest as spiritual director of individual souls.
¹

The Lateran Council had additional recommendations about the adequate supply of skilled confessors. Innocent sought to implement these by appointing ‘masters of theology’ in every diocese. Bishops were ordered to oversee the formation of good confessors: ‘If a blind man leads a blind man’, he reminded his flock, echoing the words of Christ in Matthew 15.14, ‘both will slip into a ditch.’ Innocent’s initiatives resulted in a flurry of activity at local levels, but there was a gulf from the outset between the ideals he advocated and the realities on the ground. The establishment of an educated priesthood would take generations, and there were many bad habits to be eradicated. Poorly paid holders of benefices all too often absconded, leaving their parishioners in the care of inadequate substitutes.

Whatever the spiritual advantages, the obligation to go to confession or risk excommunication meant that the Church had created a new grave sin, a new way in which individual
souls could be excluded from the Christian community and merit Hell. But the requirement of annual confession also saw the decline of the old penitential tariffs, which were now giving way to more benign penances, such as prayers, special devotions, and payment of Mass stipends. Auricular confession became the norm in the Latin West. Examination of conscience and repeated contrition for daily failures became an essential feature of the devout soul’s journey to God. And with this shift came a new genre of handbooks, treatises, and
summas
for confessors, setting out the subtle gradations of sins, dimensions of intention, motives, levels of contrition, and authentic purposes of amendment.
²

A typical consideration in such work was the threefold distinction between types of sorrow. A penitent, for example, might repine for having spurned God’s love; or for shame at having sinned; or merely for fear of Hell. Theologians were now wont to mull over the degrees and efficacy of these contrasting motives for repentance, querying whether the less commendable motive—fear of punishment in Hell—was sufficient for absolution. The disputes on this score would lead to a clash between the two great philosopher-theologians, Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus. Both agreed that the priest in valid orders had a central role in confession. But whereas Aquinas argued that genuine contrition was as necessary for absolution as the priest’s verbal formula, Duns Scotus insisted that the efficacy of the sacrament was dependent on the confessor’s words alone.
³

Theologians argued about the spirit, letter, and intention of Innocent’s decrees. Was it necessary, for example, to attend
confession if one had not committed a mortal, or grave, sin? And who was to judge whether a sin was venial or mortal? Some scholars insisted that the very raising of such questions demonstrated the crucial importance of obligatory annual confession. The confessor could thereby ‘enquire diligently’, as the Fourth Lateran Council had put it, into the state of the penitent’s soul. Aquinas opined that while it should not be necessary, according to God’s law, to attend confession when one was not in a state of mortal sin, there was nevertheless an obligation to satisfy Church law. But disobedience to Church law, he intimated, did not involve turning away from God—the
sine qua non
basis of mortal sin.

An issue of major importance, and a source of debate both at the time and in subsequent centuries, was the age at which first confession and communion should be made. Experts in canon law in France and Italy argued that the age of discretion was at puberty or thereabouts; most pastors, in practice, were not prepared to administer the sacraments to the members of their flock until they had reached ‘marriage age’. This was generally taken to be at about fourteen, with minor local variations.
⁴

Attendance at confession, even annually, was subject to many adaptations and exceptions across Western Christendom, depending on local traditions, the prejudices and convictions of pastors and bishops, and the existence of religious houses. Complying with the new rule was hardest in rural parishes with a single pastor. The parish priest’s workload increased exponentially with the new decrees, especially during late Lent and Holy Week, since many parishioners left their
sacramental duties to the last minute. Priests complained of having to hear as many as three hundred confessions in a single day, hardly an ideal circumstance for a good confession. The priest usually sat on a chair in the sanctuary, the penitent kneeling beside him or in front of him. There were unruly scenes when people refused to wait their turn, and there was a tendency among penitents to eavesdrop. Overwhelmed by the numbers attempting to avoid excommunication as Easter approached, some priests would simply give general absolution to the entire congregation without hearing their sins. The stipulation that the faithful should confess solely to their own parish priest proved problematic. The better-educated parishioners refused to be confessed by an ignorant local priest, preferring to go to a monastic confessor of good reputation. Many were reluctant to confess to a priest who was known to them within their tightknit community. In some villages parishioners refused to attend confession despite the levying of fines, the threat of imprisonment, and the risk of excommunication.
⁵

Confession as an instrument of enforced secular and spiritual regulation had by the early Middle Ages become a dominant feature of Western Christianity. In 1199, Innocent had established the tribunals of the Inquisition, which obliged those suspected of heresy to answer, under oath, every question put to them. Failure to take the oath indicated guilt. The period saw a decline, moreover, in trials by combat or ordeal in criminal cases, with greater faith placed in the efficacy of investigatory confessions (as opposed to sacramental ones) to
reach a verdict of guilt or innocence. Under both secular and canon law (where heresy was involved), torture was allowed in order to extract confessions in quest of evidence.

Within sacramental confession, confessors were being taught to quiz their penitents rather than simply listen. Confessional manuals reveal that priests in the medieval period were expected to cross-examine penitents in a forensic manner, especially where adultery, incest, and masturbation were suspected. Masturbation, the single greatest obsession of the confessional manuals, was judged a more serious sin than the abduction and rape of a virgin, or straightforward adultery with a married woman. The theory of its evils was based on the idea that sperm contained homunculi; to spill human seed was therefore tantamount to homicide. Male penitents who failed to admit to masturbating were to be relentlessly challenged.

Jean Charlier de Gerson, chancellor of the University of Paris, writing in the early fifteenth century, counselled confessors to say to a penitent: ‘Friend, do you remember when you were young, about ten or twelve years old, your rod or virile member ever stood erect?’ And the confessor should pursue the matter, he advised, with further questions: ‘What did you do, therefore, so that it wouldn’t stand erect?’ Finally, the confessor might say: ‘Friend, didn’t you touch or rub your member the way boys usually do?’ It occurred, of course, to some insightful writers of the confessional
summas
that such officious questions might actually put ideas into the heads of penitents, leading them into sin. Yet the risks, according
to other pastoral theologians, were worth taking to save all those who were hiding that vicious secret sin to their eternal damnation. One of the tricks of the trade, according to Gerson, was to affect a nonchalance when suggesting the dreaded sin of self-abuse, as if it were not sinful, in order to extract the confession, and only then to condemn that behaviour as abominable.
⁶

Handbooks for confessors proliferated, offering obsessional analysis on the hierarchies, divisions, and subdivisions of sins. Under the sin of lust, for example, the penitent was invited to ponder at which points on the rising scale of sinfulness they might have offended: from kissing and touching right through to the rape or abduction of a nun—a sin of fornication aggravated by sacrilege. The encouragement of this subtle inward scrutiny of faults prompted anxieties in penitents that they might make inadequate confessions, committing, in consequence, the dire sin of sacrilege. Epidemics of ‘scruples’ (obsessive anxiety over minor imperfections) broke out in some religious communities, particularly among younger religious. In his
Imitation of Christ
, Thomas à Kempis has a tendency to both encourage and repudiate scrupulosity: ‘Often also a person is hindered by too great a solicitude for devotion, and by some anxiety or other about his confessions. . . . Do not abandon Holy Communion for every trifling perturbation[;] . . . spit out the poison quickly, and then make haste to take the antidote’. While many laypeople were finding it difficult to submit themselves to confession once a year, there were those in the religious life who, under
the tyranny of scruples, a spiritual condition comparable to hypochondria in medicine, were resorting to the sacrament with morbid frequency. There were even moralists who declared that scrupulosity was a sin, thus leading the sensitive soul to a never-ending spiral of further scrupulosity.
⁷

Obedience and submission to authority were emphasised in the manuals of ascetical theology: ‘If one does not freely and gladly submit himself to his superior, it is a sign that his flesh is not yet perfectly under control; for it often rebels and murmurs’, wrote one. Or, again: ‘Never think you have made any progress, unless you esteem yourself inferior to all.’ The principle of the submission and obedience of the wife to the authority of her husband had parallels with obedience to superiors in the religious life. A husband was entitled, without sinning, to beat his wife in moderation, but she sinned if she attempted to correct or thwart him. A disobedient wife was guilty of mortal sin. Drawing parallels with the obedience owed by children towards their parents, submission to authority was obligatory in professional and public life even if one’s superiors were sinners. Hatred expressed towards a superior was deemed a mortal sin.
⁸