above all a construction of the organized church, let us now focus on a
much later text— the Dies Irae, the medieval poem that records Christian views about the Last Judgment and that held for centuries a central place
in the Requiem Mass (prior to Vatican II, when it was removed).32 The
Dies Irae is just one of many ritual texts about penance and forgiveness.
More or less all of its structure is already present in Tertullian’s second
century CE De Paenitentia. 33 But its imagery has been common pedagogical currency in many places and times. (For example, more or less all
of it is in the sermon delivered to the Dublin schoolboys imagined in
Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man [1916], a sermon that clearly tracks closely a sermon or sermons heard by Joyce in his youth.) And it
neatly encapsulates a widespread set of ideas and practices in Christian
forgiveness.
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Anger and Forgiveness
The Dies Irae, “Day of Anger,” depicts a world suffused by divine
anger, human fear of divine anger, and humble pleas for forgiveness. Part
of the idea behind the hymn is that the person who sings or hears it never
knows whether actual forgiveness will occur, since if one is singing or
hearing that hymn, one is not yet dead and may always sin again. One
can only hope, and continue imploring.
The day of wrath is a day of universal cataclysm: the whole world is
in flames and ashes. A trumpet calls the dead to judgment. The judge is
arriving, to judge everything strictly. A book is brought out, containing
the entire record from which judgment will take place. “Whatever is hid-
den will appear, nothing will remain unavenged.” The transgressor (still
alive, the singer of the hymn) then wonders what on earth he will say
on that day. Guilty, like a criminal, he imagines himself blushing before
the throne of judgment. He knows that his prayers are unworthy. Still,
he hopes for a totally unjustified forgiveness. He implores, low and in
suppliant posture, his heart as contrite as ashes. When the damned are
burned up, he asks to be forgiven and thus spared, citing Jesus’ incarna-
tion for the sake of humanity.
In many respects, this is the teshuvah process in (anticipatory) postmortem form. Confession, apology, pleas, contrition, a chronicle of one’s
bad acts— all are here. Even the determination to change and not to
repeat the sin, although hard to inject into the postmortem context, is still present theologically, in classic depictions of Purgatory, where the souls,
once saved by divine forgiveness, must learn by painstaking labors and
eons of habituation to undo their attachment to their besetting sins. And
God is depicted, as in Judaism, as a demanding and an angry God, who,
nonetheless, if sufficiently supplicated, may opt for forgiveness, in the
sense of turning from anger and not exacting the merited punishment.
As in Judaism, again, the primary relationship is that with God, and the
primary victim and forgiver is God.
The Catholic sacrament of penance (virtually unchanged since
Tertullian’s De Paenitentia) makes the continuity with Jewish teshuvah especially clear, with its precise analogues to each stage of the teshuvah process.34 Penance requires verbal confession, then contrition (defined by
the sixteenth- century Council of Trent as “sorrow of heart and detesta-
tion for sin committed, with the resolve to sin no more”). Thus, penance
is void if the transgressor is simply going through the motions. Following
contrition and confession— if the priest is satisfied that these are complete enough— is absolution, accompanied by the assignment of a penance,
“usually in the form of certain prayers which he is to say, or of certain
actions which he is to perform, such as visits to a church, the Stations of
the Cross, etc. Alms deeds, fasting, and prayer are the chief means of sat-
isfaction, but other penitential works may also be required.”35 Restitution
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to the human victim or to the community may also be commanded at the
discretion of the priest, although these human compensations are less
frequently assigned than forms of prayer.
The penance ritual is thus continuous with teshuvah. In a good deal of mainstream Protestantism, things are less structured, and yet not fundamentally dissimilar. There is no anointed intermediary to hear the confes-
sion and assign the penitential tasks, but transgressors are still urged to
confession, contrition, and penance. The Anglican Church has a commu-
nally recited confession, and other denominations have other analogues.
In evangelical Christianity, it is common for a public confession of sin,
accompanied by contrition and self- abasement, to be followed by a com-
munal invocation of divine forgiveness.
Another striking similarity between the two traditions is the incor-
poration of a ritualized type of forgiveness at periodic intervals. The sins
against God that one sincerely repents at Yom Kippur are moot. Even
Maimonides, who urges that the transgressor confess them again, does
so only as a device of warning and memory. With transgressions against
other people too, teshuvah mandates a determinate ending. So it is, as well, in the Catholic ritual: one should confess at regular intervals, and
if one has been sincere and exhaustive, one receives forgiveness for all
the sins committed during that interval. This guarantee is less secure in
Protestantism, which leaves the business of forgiveness to the relation-
ship between transgressor and God. Still, there is a communal form of
absolution in Anglican ritual; similar forms exist in other denominations.
The evangelical idea of being “born again” is a variant of the idea of
absolution.
In the transition from Judaism to Christianity, however, several
important changes in the forgiveness process have taken place.
First, the independent human- human forgiveness process, already
de- emphasized in Judaism, simply drops away: all forgiveness is really
from God (sometimes mediated by clergy). If you square your rela-
tionship with God, then the other person is by definition satisfied, and
you do not need to engage in separate negotiations with that person.36
Catholic confession makes this explicit: the priest, in God’s name, can
absolve you from an interpersonal transgression, and you do not need to
do or say anything to the other person, unless the priest tells you to do
so. Usually, however, penance is not very other- directed, but takes place
primarily through prayer. The eschatology of Purgatory is again instruc-
tive here: people who are habitually stingy, or imperious, or deceitful, but
who manage to get into Purgatory through absolution, can have eternity
to work on their character and improve it, without having to interact with
the real living people whom their acts have harmed. Thus, unlike teshuvah, Christian forgiveness is essentially a God- directed process, whether in
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Anger and Forgiveness
the form of the Catholic sacrament or in some other form. Humans do not
face humans (apart from clergy) directly; they turn to God.
A second difference concerns the scope of sin. In Jewish teshuvah, the site of sin is an ext
ernal act or omission to act. Desire is relevant as a cause of good or bad action, but is not in and of itself an act to be judged.37 In
the Christian tradition, it is famously otherwise. Jesus indicts the Jewish
tradition for its narrow focus on acts. “You have heard, ‘You shall not
commit adultery.’ But I say to you that anyone who looks at a woman
in such a way as to desire her has already committed adultery in his
heart” (Matthew 5:27). The inner world is now open to view as a site of
recalcitrant quasi- acts,38 to be excavated through memory and confessed.
Indeed, in Tertullian’s De Paenitentia sins are divided into two basic categories: sins of the body and sins of thought or mind. Both require pen-
ance, but the latter are held to be more fundamental.39
At this point, we can introduce the important philosophical account
of penance and confession by Michel Foucault that has recently been
published as Mal faire, dire vrai, based on lectures that Foucault presented in Louvain in 1981.40 Foucault’s historical account of the confessional has
a number of defects, among which is its complete neglect of the Jewish
tradition; but it has undoubted insight and importance. Whereas my
account has been largely synchronic, Foucault argues that it is worth
studying these practices diachronically. Passing rapidly over Tertullian
and other early developments,41 he locates the primary development of
confessional practices in a fourth- to fifth- century monastic tradition,
arguing that it is this tradition that later gets codified and legalized.42
His developmental inquiry dovetails with my synoptic account in
emphasizing certain features of the monastic tradition as pivotal. First, he
emphasizes the asymmetry of power relations: the listener has the upper
hand, and the speaker is abased. Second, he stresses the endlessness of
confession: there is no exhausting it; one never reaches a point at which
one can be confident that one has ferreted out and truthfully confessed
every hidden sin. Third and most important, he insists, persuasively, that
the whole process is a practice of self- abasement, self- obliteration, and
shaming, as the inner world is exposed to the community (or, later, the
confessor).
If through such practices Christianity expanded our awareness of
the inner world, as is often said (especially with reference to Augustine’s
Confessions), it is also true, as Foucault rightly emphasizes, that obsessive awareness of the inner world greatly magnifies the occasions for sin, and
extends sin, too, into the domain of the uncontrollable. Augustine’s tor-
ment over his nocturnal emissions is not simply torment over an impure
act; it is torment over inclination itself, which burrows down into the
depths of the personality. Similarly, souls in Purgatory atone not for an
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71
unabsolved act— if there were such, they would be in hell instead— but
for standing flaws of desire and inclination: for being lustful, gluttonous,
etc.43 The inner realm, however, is messy and ungovernable; to the extent
that confession and apology focus on that, they focus on something that
is unlikely ever to be brought into a satisfactory ordering. Thus the mood
of Christian confession is always one of intense sorrow and terrible fear
and shame, and the shame pertains to one’s whole being, not just to a set
of bad practices.
One marvelous depiction of the terrifying nature of this process is
Joyce’s, describing sixteen- year- old Stephen’s reaction to the sermon
he hears:
Every word of it was for him. Against his sin, foul and secret,
the whole wrath of God was aimed. The preacher’s knife had
probed deeply into his disclosed conscience and he felt now that
his soul was festering in sin. Yes, the preacher was right. God’s
turn had come. Like a beast in its lair his soul had lain down
in its own filth but the blasts of the angel’s trumpet had driven
him forth from the darkness of sin into the light. The words of
doom cried by the angel shattered in an instant his presumptu-
ous peace. The wind of the last day blew through his mind, his
sins, the jewel- eyed harlots of his imagination, fled before the
hurricane, squeaking like mice in their terror and huddled under
a mane of hair.
The horrendous sins are sexual fantasies (as well as acts of masturbation
and, occasionally, intercourse with prostitutes). The extraordinary cru-
elty of giving teenage boys such lectures about their ungovernable men-
tal lives is combined with a type of prurience all too real.44 A key to the
disciplinary power of the church, indeed, is its fixation on fantasy, which
cannot be governed, which is always disobedient. As the preacher con-
tinues (of Lucifer): “He offended the majesty of God by the sinful thought
of one instant and God cast him out of heaven into hell for ever.” The
quest for forgiveness that sends Stephen ultimately to a priest to confess
is born of abject terror and intense self- loathing. He vomits, just thinking of his own mind. The account makes us wonder— as is its intent— how
anyone who grew up in that tradition could become able to love any-
one, much less a woman. ( Ulysses, and particularly its final chapter, are Joyce’s answer to that question, since if Joyce is Stephen Daedalus he is
also Leopold Bloom.)
Finally, by comparison to the standard picture of transactional for-
giveness in Judaism, the Christian transactional forgiveness process
places a far greater accent on humility and lowness, as essential features
of the human condition. Jewish teshuvah urges worry and discourages
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pride and confidence; but the tradition never claims that the human being
as such is low and base and has no worth. A core of human self- respect
remains intact, and perhaps even, with it, a love of the body.45 These atti-
tudes dissolve utterly beneath the keen gaze of a certain sort of Christian
self- scrutiny. Yes, flesh is indeed worthless, and you are consequently
worthless. This theme is prominent from the very beginning of the trans-
actional forgiveness tradition. Thus much of Tertullian’s De Paenitentia is spent describing the process of exomologēsis, a discipline in which the penitent outwardly acknowledges his lowness by self- mortifying practices,
including fasting, weeping, groaning, self- prostration, filthy clothes, and
a commitment to sorrow.46 Exomologēsis is held to be a necessary condition of restoration to God.
Where is interpersonal forgiveness in this set of transactions?
Although the Christian transactional tradition, like the Jewish trans-
actional tradition, makes all forgiveness essentially God- directed, the
process of penance is also widely understood to offer a model of interper-
sonal relations, based on confession, apology, and ultimate forgiveness.
The countless thinkers in this tradition who offer the penance process as
a model for interpersonal reconciliation are following indications in the
text, as well as applying the general idea that we are to model our own
conduct on the conduct and teachings of Jesus. Nor is it surprising that
the attitudes of
shame, self- disgust, and apology that we’ve encountered
in human relations to God would turn up in interpersonal relations, shap-
ing ways of dealing with sexuality and other important human matters.
As in Judaism, then, we have forgiveness, but at the end of a process
involving abasement, confession, contrition, and penance. In contrast
to Judaism, the process requires acknowledging that one is fundamen-
tally low and of little worth and putting oneself, imaginatively, into the
midst of a spectacle of the most savage retribution. It also requires open-
ing the most hidden recesses of desire and thought to the searching eye
of another, whether priest, congregation, wronged party, or only the eye
of God.
It’s no news to say, as I have, that this strand of Christianity (only
one among many, but a prominent one) juxtaposes an ethic of forgiveness
with an ethic of spectacular retribution. One can see this same combina-
tion in the book of Revelation, where the triumph of the mild lamb is
immediately followed by visions of horrible torment for the lamb’s ene-
mies. Usually, however, the two aspects are held to be in tension with one
another. Rarely are they taken to be complementary. What my genealogy
suggests, however, is that the forgiveness process itself is violent toward
the self. Forgiveness is an elusive and usually quite temporary prize held
out at the end of a traumatic and profoundly intrusive process of self-
denigration. To engage in it with another person (playing, in effect, the
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role of the confessor) intrudes into that person’s inner world in a way that
is both controlling and potentially violent toward the other person’s self.
It’s like the old story about child abuse: the abused all too often becomes
an abuser. In this case, the inquisitorial role is given strong normative
support, in the idea that this is how God acts toward us.
Could one avoid this problem by simply adopting a more limited
account of sin? This is like the question whether Jewish teshuvah would lose its life- enclosing character if there were just not so many commandments. The answer is not yet clear, and we must later return to this pos-
sibility. But what changes, exactly, would one introduce? Would one
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