[Asceticism and Mystical Theology.doc]

 

 

8. PENITENTIAL ASCETICISM
 

 

 

8.1 Excommunication

The disappointing discovery that Christians remain capable of serious sin even after baptism necessitated the creation in the early church of a formal process of penance and restoration of which there are hints in the New Testament (1 Cor. 5.5).  At first such formal repentance after a serious lapse was permitted only once (Shepherd of Hermas 2.1 / 29.8; Crombie 1885: 21-22) following serious sins such as murder, apostasy, and adultery. It entailed an extended period of excommunication lasting a variable number of years, depending on the judgment of the bishop who imposed the sentence according the seriousness and circumstances of the offense.  The formal process included public acknowledgement of the sin followed by ritual exclusion from the most sacred parts of the Sunday liturgy, together with abstinence from holy communion for the duration of the sentence.  In the fourth century Basil of Caesarea codified this practice in a series of canonical letters that list offenses and prescribe a corresponding period of excommunication (Basil, Letters 188, 199, 217; Jackson 1895: 223-228; 236-240, 255-259).  These canonical letters are still revered and applied in some eastern churches today.

8.2. Substituted Penances

        The relatively passive, if humiliating, practice of excommunication slowly gave way to a more active approach, influenced by the monastic custom of confession to a revered elder who would recommend a healing remedy. Also influential in the West were models of justice drawn from Celtic and Germanic legal practice. These permitted “tariffed” or fixed but negotiable penalties.  Instead of a protracted period of excommunication, arduous ascetical tasks could be undertaken by the penitent, or even performed by a community or person who agreed to shoulder some part of the penitent’s burden.  Penitential manuals of the fifth through the eighth centuries compiled and standardized substitutions for specific intervals of excommunication.  The ascetical practices enjoined in these earliest handbooks are often severe and appear masochistic to modern sensibilities. They include long fasts, exposure to freezing weather, immersion in cold water for long periods, and spending nights on painful surfaces or in repugnant settings such as graves or tombs.  These substituted penances also entailed protracted prayers, such as multiple recitations of the whole psalter and extended prayer in exaggerated, uncomfortable postures.  Such extreme practices had been prefigured in the fifth and sixth century Syriac monastic asceticism of the stylites (pillar-dwellers) dendrites (tree-dwellers) and wandering “grazers” (Knowles 1969: 21; Chitty 1966:16,76).  In the medieval West this tendency towards extreme penances often took the form of private or public flagellation, encouraged especially by the monastic reformer Peter Damien (d.1073).

8.3. A Sacrament of Penance and Reconciliation

        Although initially reluctant to delegate their office to “bind and loose” from sin (Mt 16.19), bishops in both East and West gradually accorded their priests the faculty of absolving penitents in a repeatable sacrament of penance and reconciliation.  In the medieval West new handbooks appeared that encouraged milder penances adapted to the particular circumstances of the penitent.  By 1214 annual confession to one’s parish priest had become mandatory.  Western theologians struggled to explain how the Pauline doctrine of unmerited grace and salvation could coexist with the developing tradition of the penitent’s ascetical expiation of sin.  Distinctions were made between original and actual sin, between temporal and eternal punishment, variously apportioning the merits of Christ, the saints, and the penitent’s own ascetical efforts to one category or the other.  The practice of indulgences, criticized by some even from its inception, invited the penitent to rely on the prayers and merits of the whole Communion of Saints rather than one one’s own efforts.  This had the positive effect of highlighting the role of the whole Christian community, living and dead, in the ascetical enterprise of expiating sin.  However the protestant reformers of the sixteenth century at first questioned then vehemently rejected the whole concept of indulgences and substituted penances, insisting that sincere repentance and faith in Christ are sufficient for full forgiveness, leaving no residue that needs to be dispelled through ascetical effort.

        While theologically understandable, this dismantling of the penitential system necessarily resulted in a devaluation of the human effort involved in repentance and change.  It neglects a truth embedded within the ascetical tradition: namely that just as vice is acquired through repeated choices and actions that destabilize inner balance and freedom, so virtue or spiritual healing requires both the grace of God and the deliberate choices and repeated actions of the penitent.

 

 

 


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