Communio 31 (Winter 2004).

“The freedom of the believer is set free, and so enabled to confess freely, only through confession.”

IT is not easy to grasp the Christian meaning of the sacrament of confession. What is more, this meaning cannot help but challenge human thought. The reason for this double state of affairs is that understanding the meaning of confession is impossible outside of the existential nexus that links together, and mutually orders to each other, “confession,” “penance,” and “reconciliation.” As we will suggest at the conclusion of the present article, this connection points us directly to the mystery of the Nazarene’s response, of his full and complete “Yes.” This “Yes” clearly, if not immediately, brings to the fore the christological horizon within which the believer at one and the same time confesses his sins and finds himself going beyond them (in the act of confessing them, he has always‑ already put them behind him). The ease with which the believer can take this step has to be understood as the most immediate and surprising effect of the fulfilment of Christ’s promise and, for the same reason, of the reconciliation that he has already brought about. There is, however, a further difficulty. The history of salvation is directed towards fulfilment in Christ. For this reason, we cannot read the sacrament of confession outside of the flow of meaning that makes the Psalmist’s cry (“against you, you alone have I sinned and have done what it evil in your sight”: Ps 50) and the Last Judgment depicted in Matthew 25 (“whenever you did it to the least of my brethren, you did it to me”) converge in a single scene. Matthew 25, in fact, should be understood as the correct interpretation, and definitive revelation, of what Psalm 50 calls, without further specification, “that which is evil in your sight.” In Christian terms, the one who confesses is always involved in this scene, and he can never hope, delusively, to stand before either the divine Thou alone or the Thou of his fellow men alone. Because of Christ he stands, after all, always before the Father and before his brothers, he is always called to respond to the Father of his brethren. But how is such a response to be understood?

1. Confession and penance

        Taken in its most general sense, confession is not at all the same thing that Christian faith endeavors to think and practice as the sacrament having the same name. We must, then, acknowledge an obvious truth: confession can exist without repentance and reconciliation, but, so it would seem, it can never exist generally speaking without penance. The necessary connection between confession and penance has to do with a very definite conception of what guilt is. Guilt introduces a disturbance into the order of the cosmos and of society, and so has to be made up for by an equal, opposite, action aimed at restoring the balance of the whole. In this approach, there is no need for the guilty party to repent, whereas he absolutely must pay for what he has done. To do something wrong means to contract a debt that one has to cancel as soon as possible in order to keep the cosmos from lapsing into complete chaos. The offender, especially where he is conceived, or conceives himself, as an actor on a stage governed by supra-individual forces, is aware of the urgent need to balance the books, and he even knows that he ought to confess his wrongdoing (which, in the end, cannot go unnoticed anyway) as soon as he can, since it is not unreasonable to think that his alacrity and/or sincerity in confessing may earn him a less severe punishment. Penance thus takes the form of “reparation,” where reparation has to be understood in absolutely “material” terms. What has to be done, after all, is “sew up” a tear, “fill” a hole, “wash” a stain, “balance” an unforeseen expenditure with a new contribution. The really urgently necessary thing, then, is penance by cancelling the debt through punishment. For the same reason, the call to repentance looks like an elegant spiritualism, desirable, perhaps, but not really necessary.

        It has often been pointed out that the conception we have just sketched has two “positive” characteristics that a Christian account of the sacrament of reconciliation has to take seriously. First of all, we should adopt its emphasis on the “concrete,” “material,” or “immanent” dimension of guilt and, by extension, of the ensuing punishment. We must avoid every form of abstraction, especially when it comes from a mistaken interpretation of the Psalmist’s exclamation—”against you only have I sinned”—that would separate the Creator from his creation, forgetting than an offense to the least of creatures is, in some sense, an offense against the Most High Creator as well. This dizzy enthusiasm for heaven, this passion for the Creator that tends to forget, or be indifferent to, the creature is checked, unequivocally and insistently, by Matthew 25, which recalls us to earth and urges us to take care of the least of our brethren.

        The second point of emphasis we should adopt is the inseparable link between the guilt of the individual and the order of the whole, whether cosmic or social, in which the individual happens to act. Here, too, we need to avoid all abstraction. At the same time, we need to keep in mind something surprising: the danger of abstractness arises precisely within the way in which the immanence of guilt is understood. Although evil is always done by someone to something/someone else, and in that sense is eminently personal, “personal” does not mean “private.” Evil is never a private matter—personal, yes, but not private. By the same token, it would be the height of abstraction to think of the irreducible immanence of guilt as a merely private affair.

        Walter Kasper—among others—underscores the two aspects we have just sketched:

Notwithstanding the critique of the Prophets, [the conception of penance that is conventionally termed cultic-ritual] is partly present in the Old Testament, too, and by this means has continued to influence the religious and ethical behavior of many Christians, mostly unconsciously, until the present. Eliade sees this sacral, cultic-ritual understanding as the reflection of an archaic ontology that seems outdated to the enlightened man of today. Ricceur speaks of a cosmo-biological order whose violation results in the transgressor’s impurity, almost physically infected with a stain of guilt. This cultic-ritual way of looking at the world has to do with an economy of fear: man does not act out of responsibility or love, but out of fear that some anonymous sacred order might exact revenge if violated. Taboo is an anticipated, preventive punishment, the power of the forbidden in a prior fear. Ritual purification, by contrast, aims at restoring an outraged order by means of substitutionary actions (burning, removing, crushing, washing, throwing away, spraying, covering, burying). Like the Prophets before him, Jesus critiques this cultic-ritual understanding of guilt and penance. True conversion is a matter of rending one’s heart, not one’s garments (Joel 2:13). For it is not what goes into a man from the outside, but what comes out of him from the inside, from the heart, from the center of the person, that contaminates a man (Mk 7:14-23). Of course, this personalization is not a spiritualization for the Bible. It has nothing to do with a “great withdrawal into interiority.” The Bible preserves “the idea of a solid anchoring of salvation in objective reality,” an idea that reflects “Yahweh’s will to immanence”. . . . The Bible has thus retained the particula veri of the cultic-ritual understanding of penance, inasmuch as it remains aware of the corporeal and cosmic dimensions of guilt and conversion.1

2. Reconciliation and penance

        If we could separate what really never ought to be separated, we would have to say that the Christian sense of the sacrament of confession always places the accent on the relationship between reconciliation and penance more than on the relationship between confession and penance. But perhaps it would be more correct to say this: the link between confession and penance always has to be read as part of the larger scenario in which the believer is called to look more broadly beyond the specific wrong he has done—even if he always has to look through his acknowledgment of his wrongdoing—towards a reconciliation that both precedes and follows his act of confession. When this happens, it is as if the sacrament itself confessed that the heart of its own interest, what ought to be understood as the innermost content of its concern, is never simply about safeguarding a legal order, or about maintaining the order—even the cosmic order—that the sinner threatens to undo by his sin. Rather, it is also about—and here is the surprising good news—the sinner himself. The fulcrum and focus of the sacrament of reconciliation and penance is never just sin, but always primarily the sinner and his God. Perhaps, we are tempted to ask, some awareness of this fact echoes in the Psalmist’s declaration “against you, you alone have I sinned.” In the same way, we are tempted to ask whether this might not be the “refocusing on the essential” that Jesus, as we saw above, calls us to: “so are you, too, without understanding? Do you not realize that everything that goes into a man from the outside cannot pollute him. . . . What comes out of a man—that is what pollutes him” (Mk 7:18-20).

        We saw above that there seems to be a clear and necessary relationship between confession and penance. This relation is now caught up—which of course means confirmed, yet only by also being radically deconstructed—in a drama of freedom and truth that no legal order can ever completely comprehend or measure, much less regulate. The signs of this deconstruction of the legal order—which, it is worth repeating, should in no way be interpreted as its destruction or negation—are easy to recognize. In the first place, the believer is called upon to confess omissions, thoughts, and even intentions, all of those things that, at least from the point of view of a strictly legal sensibility, have not yet made any “real” rent in the fabric of the cosmos or of society. In this respect, we can be perfectly certain that intentions are not (because they cannot be) tried in court. And yet, that is exactly what happens in the sacrament of confession. There is an emphasis on the idea of guilt, a supercharging of the subject with responsibility at work here that we should recognize as an extreme valorization of the sinner, an insistence on him, on the totality of his person. It is as if just this “absurdity” provided the context in which the irreplaceable singularity of the sinner could stand forth beyond the universality of the law, revealed, as if by a sudden shaft of lightning, to look very different from what that universality would have led us to expect. It is no accident that, whenever Jesus says things like “you have heard that it was said ‘do not commit adultery,’ but I say to you, whoever looks at a woman to lust after her has already committed adultery with her in his heart” (Mt 5:27f), even his disciples often respond with the sort of reluctance that reflects a certain realism: “but how can this be?” Chapter 5 of Matthew ends by making perfectly explicit the “exaltation” of man, of every single man, that Jesus’ “absurd” statement betokens. The last words, in fact, are these: “be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Mt 5:48).

        Secondly, the believer is also invited to live the sacrament of reconciliation as the place where he is called to confess, which means to acknowledge, in some sense, even the sins that he does not remember or know that he has committed. This call places the believer before the evident fact that his very penitent freedom is never perfect, that it is never completely free, and that, because of this, at the very moment he confesses freely, he has to confess that he has never been free enough to be able to confess fully. There is a “forcing” at work here that surely helps unmask a naive understanding of the subject’s freedom and consciousness, while at the same time denouncing the sin of pride that might creep into his very decision to confess. Above all, however, it unveils the deepest nature of this gesture, whose meaning can never be exhausted within the limits of a judicial action (the logic of which requires, indeed, makes obligatory the itemization of each and every wrong done; on this level, the list must always be complete and definitive, at least in principle). No, the meaning of the sacrament, in the end, is always relative, a “place of spiritual healing”—this is the formula we find in Reconciliatio et poenitentia—which has to do, not only with definite individual faults, but with the believer’s attitude towards reality as a whole (God, others, oneself, and creation in general). The idea of “spiritual healing” is, so to say, light-footed enough to move quickly over individual sins without for all that losing its pertinence (it liberates, then, from the pathological attraction to “sins,” to a calculus of sins and sinning), just as it is sharp-eyed enough to go, boldly and surely, even to sins that the believer has forgotten or has been unfree to acknowledge.

3. “What for?” or “For whom?”

        If we follow out the logic of the foregoing argument, we will avoid becoming scandalized over something that, at first blush, and probably after that, might seem totally paradoxical.

        In the Confessions, Augustine wonders what it means to confess to God what he obviously already knows. We cannot deal with such a huge question here. Nevertheless, the answer probably lies in the direction of the singularity of the sinner which we talked about just now. It should be obvious by now, in fact, that what belongs at the center of the sacrament of reconciliation is not so much sin as it is the face of the sinner that sin has disfigured. In this sense, it is not so much God who needs to be reconciled through the cancellation of the debt by means of punishment—he is always a Father, always and definitively man’s ally, and is never so offended that he ceases to be the Father—as it is man who needs to become reconciled with God and his brothers. He has to do this with God’s help, but he cannot avoid involving his own, singular human freedom. With God’s help, of course, but also through his own personal confession. So it seems that man’s free confession is necessary, in large measure, because of the uniqueness of the believer, because of an essential concern for this uniqueness—even though it is addressed to a Judge who already knows everything. The sacrament of confession can be called the sacrament of reconciliation because it is essentially concerned with the salvation and truth of the believer by means of the law, and not with the safeguarding of the law by means of the believer. Here the Judge is always the Savior.

        From this point of view, we have to acknowledge that it is already by freely deciding to confess, and so even before actually confessing, that the believer begins to experience a reconciliation already underway. It is as if he suddenly received, by way of anticipation, the gift of being reconciled, so that he might then become reconciled with greater seriousness and truth. Let it be clear that this “anticipated reconciliation” in no way makes confession superfluous. On the contrary, it is exactly what makes confession possible in its deepest authenticity. Only a freedom that is somehow and to some extent already reconciled can choose to reconcile himself definitively.

        At the same time, it is also true that the freedom of the believer is set free, and so enabled to confess freely, only through confession. It is as if, once again, the first and most surprising fruit of confession were not so much the forgiveness of individual sins as the very possibility of confessing; that is, of returning to the Father with repentance and sorrow, but without embarrassment and, above all, without fear. Here, too, the offer of the chance to come home to the Father once more in spite of everything has to be understood as part of the irreducible drama that takes place between the sinner, sin, and God. It has to be welcomed as the extreme call by which the Father confesses his unchanged love for the sinner, while also setting him free—last aid and ultimate grace—from the hypocrisy that likes to hide in sins without acknowledging Sin, and from the death wish that, almost mechanically and necessarily, tends to turn every sin into Sin. Against this hypocrisy and this temptation, the sacrament of confession, made possible by Christ, ceaselessly and ever more insistently calls to the freedom of the sinner, ensuring him the time and space in which, once again, beyond everything, and always anew, he can repeat to the Father, in his own way and in his own accent, the Son’s “Yes.”

        Paradoxical? Well, that is how Jesus’ contemporaries—and not just they—must have thought of him.

He then said to those Jews who had believed in him: “If you remain faithful to my word, you will truly be my disciples, you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.” They answered: “We are descendants of Abraham, and we have never been slaves of anyone. How can you say ‘You will become free?” Jesus answered: “Amen, amen I tell you; whoever commits sin is a slave of sin. Now the slave does not always remain in the house, but the son always remains in the house; so if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed.” On 8:31-35)

—Translated by Adrian Walker.

Silvano Petrosino teaches semiotics and theoretical philosophy at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan.

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