Part One: The Rise of Protected Confession

Shame And Guilt

Ruth Benedict, in The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, popularized a distinction between shame cultures and guilt cultures, distinguishing the extent to which a culture controls the conduct of its members by social repercussions versus individual conscience. She created this distinction to explain differences in the psyches of Japanese and Americans in the context of the Second World War, but its explanatory power reaches far beyond that. In places with strong continuity of community and where individuals are readily forced to account for themselves to the community, shame is a powerful motivator. South Asian microfinance pioneers build a successful business model around shame: New loans could not be given out until existing borrowers were shamed into repaying. The only problem with this business model was that shame was potentially too powerful, resulting in numerous suicide clusters when people could not repay their debts.(1) When social shame is not as functionally capable for the control of conduct due to possibilities of privacy, disintegration of community, or other social practices that limit the tyranny of the village, guilt culture develops as an alternative to maintain control over individual behavior. The individual conscience - a self, a mental component of the individual, the super-ego, becomes a stand-in for the panchayati raj. The individual learns to subject their own future and past conduct to critical examination. Common to the development of guilt culture is the idea that, through being accountable to the self, one reaches a higher plane of moral development(2) than Oliver Wendell Holmes's "bad man" who merely fears the social and legal consequences of his actions.(3) When properly functioning, guilt reduces the need for law and shame by allowing individuals, acting in private, to regulate their own conduct.

The first objection of econodwarfs and scoundrels to the operation of guilt in society was immortalized by Plato in his telling of the Ring of Gyges story in The Republic - someone truly immune to unwanted consequences, someone with magical privacy that operated perfectly and inviolably, would be a thief and a rapist and probably even a murderer.(4). This criticism was later echoed by English materialist Thomas Hobbes, in his work Leviathan, in 1651. What Hobbes implicitly revealed is that guilt was reinforced through England's Christianity - the social shame internalized into the conscience is re-externalized, not into the community, but into a divine and omnipotent being who ensures final justice for all actions, causing a Holmesian bad man to abide by the dictates of morality so long as he believes, regardless of his innate inclinations. But, in the tradition of Aristotle's golden mean, and akin to its cousin shame, guilt may be too strong as well as too weak. When the guilt response towards a part of ourselves becomes too powerful, a paralyzing non-acceptance of that self results, preventing the integration of multiple personality states, and with consequences potentially no less destructive than severe shame. Christianity centers not on the prevention of moral guilt through upright conduct, a position more closely associated with Judaism and Islam, but rather on the absolution of guilt which is declared to exist in everyone.

The Rise of the Box

In a Europe where Christianity was principally governed by one holy catholic and apostolic church with its associated canon law, the priesthood created power for itself by requiring its presence and participation in the sacraments. The marking points of human life, birth, marriage, and death, were not to take place without a member of the priesthood - the Catholic sacraments of Baptism, Marriage, and Last Rites. But the most powerful and most frequent of the miracles performed by the priesthood involved the twin sacraments of guilt - Confession and the Eucharist itself. By going into a box with the priest and confessing one's sins, the priest had the power to grant penance, which, when completed, resulted in one's absolution, purified once again and free to accept the body and blood of Christ through the Eucharist. During English power struggles between the Church and the Saxon throne, the tightrope between ecclesiastical forgiveness and secular punishment was carefully navigated. King Alfred's laws declare "If any man seek a cloak for those offenses which have not yet been revealed, and then confess himself in God's name, let it be half forgiven," creating a weak secular parallel to the the idea of forgiveness and penance through self-initiated confession. At the same time, because of the immense psychological and religious importance of absolution, access to the confession became a sacrosanct matter guaranteed to even the worst villains of England. In conjunction with the English synod and the Archbishop, King of the Anglo-Saxons Edward the Elder, Son of Alfred the Great declared around 921 A.D. that "If a man guilty of death desires confession, let it never be denied him"(5)

However, for the priesthood to manifest distinct power over the miracle, and for the higher moral plane of guilt to continue to operate as intended, a confession to a priest must possess secrecy. The Ecclesiastical Council of Durham in 1220 declared " "A priest shall not reveal a confession-let none dare from anger or hatred or fear of the Church or of death, in any way to reveal confessions, by sign or word, general or special, as (for instance), by saying 'I know what manner of men ye are' under peril of his Order and Benefice, and if he shall be convicted thereof he shall be degraded without mercy." As a protection against a centralizing state and a guarantee of a unique role for priests as purveyors of absolution, the power of the priest to grant holy absolution and hear confession must be protected from outside interference.(6) In this way, the genesis for a parallel system of penance and absolution outside of the King's Justice allowed for a specific domain of power for the priesthood even amidst English centralization of law and secular power.

Part Two: Confession's Fall And Conspicuous Continuing Absence

-- JoeBruner - 06 Apr 20

Notes

1 : http://www.thehindu.com/business/Rising-suicides-force-AP-ordinance-to-check-microfinance-firms/article15780132.ece

2 : Revisiting Shame and Guilt Cultures: A Forty-Year Pilgrimage, Millie R. Creighton, Ethos, p. 280

3 : Oliver Wendell Holmes, Path of the Law, passim. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2373/2373-h/2373-h.htm

4 : Republic, 2:359a–2:360d

5 : Reeves's History of the English Law, p. 51

6 : Wilkins, "Concilia", I, 577, 595