“The Secret Sin That One Commits by Thought Alone”: Confession as Private and Public in Seventeenth-Century France

Abstract

Investigating the theological implications of confessions as private conversations, this chapter delves into the debate between the Jesuit Denis Pétau (1583–1652) and Antoine Arnauld (1612–1694). In response to Arnauld’s work De la fréquente communion, Pétau voiced criticism of the understanding that modern-day Christians should practise public penitence like the ancient church fathers. The response to Arnauld, entitled De la Penitence publique et de la préparation à la communion, opts for a much more limited sense of penitence in public and insists that some forms of penitence require more private modes of confession and more personal acts of satisfaction. By focusing on this appeal to the private sphere of confession in Pétau and in Arnauld, Nørgaard shows how these two works offered different responses to the new attitudes towards private confession.

This chapter deals with penitence as a personal state and a public act. This distinction traverses Western Christendom, but my contribution focuses on a debate that unfolded during the 1640 s and pitted the Jansenist Antoine Arnauld (1612–1694) against the Jesuit Denis Pétau (1583–1652). I show how Arnauld’s De la fréquente communion¹ collapses the distinction between the internal state of being penitent and the external act of performing penitence. This distinction is defended vehemently in Pétau’s critical response.² Specifically, this seventeenth-century debate centres on an age-old question concerning worthiness that is posited in 1 Corinthians 11:17–34.³ However, Arnauld and Pétau offer us with different reconstructions of penitence as an interior state and as an exterior act encompassed by the sacrament of penance. It is these competing notions that I shall engage with. How did Arnauld and Pétau represent the private state of penitence in the interior and how did they relate this state to penitential acts in public?

First, I offer a historical background for the early modern debates on penitence, focusing on how medieval developments illuminate later controversies. Next, I outline the historical context for the conflict between Arnauld and Pétau, turning hereafter to le grand Arnauld and his analysis of private confession and public penitence. On his analysis, verbalisation of sins in confession is either redundant or must translate into public acts of penitence; the state of being penitent is constrained by the act of doing penitence. Finally, I turn to Pétau’s criticism of this stance and the strong limitations it imposes upon auricular confession. By evoking this criticism, the chapter demonstrates that the confessional speech-act—in secret and in public—played a central role in the early modern history of privacy.

Medieval Penitence

Theologians of the third and fourth centuries wrestled with the problem that, although believers had been baptised, they continued to sin. Public penitence offered them a solution. Different transgressions could be taxed with different punishments. Penitence in public combated the manifold manifestation of post-baptismal sin. As an example, we might recall the famous story of Ambrose (c. 339–397) who, after the Massacre of Thessalonica (390), banned Theodosius the Great (347–395) from participating in the Eucharist. The bishop of Milan required that the Emperor performed public penitence in response to his sinful act. This type of penitence was understood to be repeatable. A member of the community could be submitted to this public ritual several times. Post-baptismal sin was perceived as a fact of life, and penitence hereby reinforced the community and its beliefs. Public penitence could also refer to the ritual acts whereby somebody was temporarily or permanently excluded from the community. These ritual acts performed the external boundaries of the community, symbolically transferring somebody from the inside to the outside.⁴

Sometime after the ninth century, a new terminology emerged. Henceforth, penitence could be classified as solemn, public, or secret. These classifications constitute a crucial moment in the history of privacy because secret penitence supported a personal devotion that was modelled on the repeatable type of public penitence and eventually took on a life of its own. To elucidate what secret penitence signified, I would like to draw attention to the stational liturgy. During the period between the pontificates of Leo the Great (r. 440–461) and Gregory the Great (r. 590–604), a particular Roman church could be chosen as a statio, and the Pope would thereafter move in solemn procession from the Lateran palace to this location where Mass would be celebrated. This liturgy was adopted from Jerusalem, where it had centred on holy sites, and from Constantinople, where John Chrysostom (c. 347–407) promoted it. Collectively, the Roman stational liturgy performed the cityscape as a Christian cityscape. Such performances, headed by bishops, continued to be performed throughout the medieval and early modern periods. However, these public performances were supplemented by a more personal liturgy. Thus, monastic churches of the tenth and eleventh centuries became equipped with side chapels and altars where lay believers could perform their faith. Put differently, these places inside particular churches became stationes that plotted a personal topography of spirituality. In many cases, this personal mode of a stational liturgy was penitential.⁵ By reciting a specific number of prayers at a saint’s chapel, believers paid a tariff imposed upon them for sinful behaviour. In this sense, penitence was imposed individually but continued to take place inside a church, never entirely eclipsing the communal structure of medieval societies.⁶

Indeed, confessions did not at this time take place in a confessional but in the open space of the church where the priest would sit. Bowing his head or kneeling down, the penitent was to avoid direct eye contact with the priest. This gesture of deference was supported by the priest wearing a cowl or a hood: this garment created a distance and made their conversation appear as more than an everyday exchange. After a greeting, the priest would make inquiries into the faith of the penitent. Once this had been established, the sincere contrition of the penitent had to be determined. On the basis of this calculation, sins could be confessed. The actual act of confession could follow a ritual sequence or it could take a more free-flowing and spontaneous form. Hereafter, the priest would elaborate upon what he had heard, using the examples of the Seven Deadly Sins, the Ten Commandments, or another template . The aim of this response was to assist the penitent in giving a more comprehensive account: it probed deeper into the nature of the type of sins. During the medieval period, this conversation was perceived as private, although it unfolded in public. Confessional conversations also aimed to impose a punishment upon the sinner that would not remain entirely hidden but, to varying degrees, publicise sinfulness.

Further conceptual clarification began in the twelfth century⁷ and it was Gratian’s Decretum (c. 1140) that defined the parameters of this conceptualisation. Initially, the Decretum stipulates that “it is as clear as day that sins are forgiven by heartfelt contrition and not by confession of the mouth”.⁸ This distinction between contrition of the heart (contritio cordis) and confession of the mouth (confessio oris) is based upon an earlier argument according to which guilt of sin does not always require an action. Guilt can be a matter exclusively of the will (voluntas). Put differently, one can be guilty of sin without realising one’s evil wishes: intentions that never become actions can be crimes and, accordingly, worthy of punishment. This conception of the voluntas has important implications for the Decretum’s understanding of penitence. If evil intentions already merit punishment, then we might also imagine that sinners, in their voluntas, can fight against and actively suppress their sinfulness. Without ever engaging with the external world, the evil plotting of the voluntas can be tempered, and the person who performs this level of self-regulation is not worthy of punishment. Forgiveness, then, can take place without confessing sins to a figure of authority. Secret penitence can take the form of a contrition of the heart and a silent confession, understood as an internal conversation between the sinner and God. Gratian confirms the validity of such interior penitence (penitentia interior).

Somewhat surprisingly, a cluster of canons later in the Decretum stipulates what seems to be the opposite view.⁹ After quoting a number of sources, Gratian remarks: “By these authorities, it is asserted that no one can be cleansed from sins without penance and the confession of his own mouth. Hence, the formerly mentioned authorities, by which it appeared to be proven that mercy is offered by contrition of the heart alone, are to be interpreted in a manner other than they are explained by them [the proponents of the interior penitence]”.¹⁰ Thus, it is concluded that the Decretum has presented “the authorities and the arguments for both views of confession and satisfaction. It is left to the judgement of the reader which side he will prefer”.¹¹ Closely following Gratian’s dual framework, Peter Lombard (1100–1160) included penitence among the sacraments but also remarked that unlike the other sacraments (such as, for instance, baptism), pentience “is called both a sacrament and a virtue of the mind”.¹² In the latter sense, where penitence unfolds inside the mind (mens), contrition is a sufficient reason for the forgiveness of sin. Again, the external confession of sins and the accomplishment of external acts of satisfaction are not always required. Sins are forgiven neither because they are confessed nor because acts of satisfaction are carried out. These external features are not the root of forgiveness. Rather, God forgives when sinners are truly sorry—that is, when they are in a state of contrition of the heart. Nevertheless, Peter Lombard maintains the importance of confession of the mouth—where sins are verbalised to a priest—as well as satisfaction—that is, the external acts imposed as punishment for the confessed sins. In some cases, the priest may be better at measuring the depth of sins and identifying the best remedy. In other cases, confession can make the sinner think twice before sinning again. Thus, Lombard follows the Decretum in not deciding. In both of these influential textbooks, penitence pertains both to an internal state and to exterior acts—it is both secret and public.

This picture of penitence also emerges in Peter Comestor (†1178) according to whom not every sin requires the undertaking of the sacrament of penance. Instead, the sacrament is reserved for grave sins that necessitate an exterior display of satisfaction—that is, an act of public penitence.¹³ By comparison, interior penitence is a type of contrition that targets minor sins and unfolds in the heart (cor) where it activates the mental faculties. Thus, “for contrition to be true, three things [must] coincide: the mind should be illuminated, memory should grieve for the past, [and] the will should make a pledge for the future”.¹⁴ In sum, penitence had two significations in the twelfth century. On the one hand, it referred to a sequence of acts that involved contrition, but also, by necessity, confession of sins to a priest and the subsequent imposition of acts to satisfy the wrongdoing. On the other hand, penitence could also be used to designate heartfelt contrition alone: for such penitence as an emotional state, theologians and jurists could refer to interior penitence (penitentia interior). Here, we might view penitence as a silent or internal conversation. The sinner was to verbalise their transgression before God, and this verbalisation, when it sprang from a truly contrite heart, was seen as a sufficient reason for forgiveness.¹⁵ In this latter sense, the terminology that theologians and jurists developed in the twelfth century used the terms privatus and secretus to define penitence as an internal state of contritio.

The duality of public and private penitence remained in place until the late-fifteenth century. By this time, theology had changed its way of producing knowledge. During the early decades of the thirteenth century, disputations had become the preferred medium for debating. This scholastic culture of knowledge had been institutionalised with the emergence of universities and disseminated through the growing influence of mendicant orders. Techniques of debating were popularised far beyond the relatively insular networks of scholars working in the twelfth century. Following this scholarly practice, Martin Luther proposed his famous theses in 1517, where, echoing critical theological voices from the 1480s, he questioned the efficacy of indulgences and, in more general terms, the validity of penitential punishments meted out by the priesthood. Eventually, Luther and his followers would deny the existence of purgatory and also the sacramental status of penitence, thereby abandoning public penitence while wholeheartedly endorsing a new form of private confession.¹⁶ One of the hallmarks of Lutheranism became such private sessions, where the priest could enculturate believers with the need to prepare themselves for hardship and death, essentially teaching them to become their own pastors.¹⁷

Although we might suspect the Council of Trent to have offered a clear response to the Protestant position, this holds true only for the rejection of purgatory. By comparison, the decrees and canons of the fourteenth Tridentine session (held on 25 November 1551) that engaged precisely with penitence seem almost intentionally ambiguous:

For the rest, with regard to the manner of confessing secretly to a priest alone, although Christ has not forbidden anyone to confess his sins publicly—in expiation for his offences and in self-humiliation, both as an example to others and for the edification of the church which has been offended—this is not commanded by divine precept, nor would it be very well-considered to enjoin by human law that sins, especially secret ones, must be revealed by public confession.¹⁸

This statement locates the confession of sins in two different arenas. Confession can take place in public, where it serves a positive purpose by reaffirming the normative space that sinful behaviours transgress. Such acts of confession are exemplary and edifying for other Christians. Sins on display support the codes by which the community abides. However, sins can also be confessed in secret—that is, apud solem sacerdotem (in the presence of a single priest).¹⁹ Here, the adjective solus designates a space that is not public. Significantly, the relationship between the non-public space and the public space of confession is left open to interpretation. It is not forbidden to confess sins in public, but the decrees de reformatione that enact the provisions of the canons leave it entirely to the local bishop’s discretion to decide when secret confession is allowed.²⁰ Furthermore, public penitence cannot be imposed by reference to divine law. The decree quoted above warns against having formulations in civil law which prescribe acts of penitence. Accordingly, the proceedings from the Council of Trent, in their convoluted formulation, facilitate the undertaking of secret confession of sins when and where this is deemed preferable. The relationship between secretus and publicus, understood as different fora of confession, is not regulated on a general level. On the explicit suggestion of the French delegates, the issue of public penitence was therefore debated again by the council in 1563. As a result, the twenty-fourth session stipulates:

The Apostle warns against the fact that public sinners should be openly rebuked. Therefore, when someone commits a crime publicly and in the view of many, by which others are offended and scandalised and disturbed, then without a doubt a fitting penitence for the crime in question should be publicly imposed on such a person, so that one who has incited others to evil by his example should recall them to an upright life by the evidence of his penitence. A bishop may, however, commute this kind of public penitence into another one that is secret when he considers this more profitable.²¹

This canon reaffirms public penitence as a fitting sanction for public offences while simultaneously allowing bishops to opt for a different solution when circumstances require it. Secret penitence can be imposed as an alternative, and this reveals what we might call a hesitation towards public penitence. We must infer that in certain situations, although sins could cause public damage, satisfaction could be performed in secret. As a result, the private space of confession and the verbalisation of trespasses took on a place of prominence, and the stipulations of the Council of Trent anchored this understanding in tradition. This invited subsequent authors to re-examine the patristic sources on penitence and, in some cases, question the validity of private confession. The debate between Arnauld and Pétau can be situated within this climate of a return to the patristic sources. However, there are also more specific circumstances that motivated Arnauld’s De la fréquente communion and Pétau’s critical response, and it is to these that I now turn.

Debating Penitence in the Early Modern Period

In 1588, the Spanish Jesuit Luis de Molina (1535–1600) published his Concordia liberi arbitrii cum gratiae donis where he argued that God had bestowed sufficient grace to humans for them to be able to perform good deeds. The divine will could be accomplished in the lives of humans, even though their will remained completely free; grace was, therefore, a sufficient—not a determining—condition for salvation. Inspired by the teachings of the Jesuit Pedro de Fonseca (1528–1599), Molinism caused immediate debate: the Dominicans rejected the Jesuits’ interpretation as irreconcilable with the Thomistic framework.²² Pope Clement VII (r. 1592–1605) attempted to settle these conflicts by inaugurating the Congregatio de Auxiliis but to no avail. Upon its closing on 28 August 1607, no common ground had been reached. The Dominicans and the Jesuits were therefore allowed to continue debating their difference of opinion as long as they refrained from accusing each other of heresy and fundamental mistakes.

Cornelius Jansen (1585–1638) and Jean Duvergier de Hauranne (1581–1643), known as the abbot of Saint-Cyran from the abbey he held in commendam, ignored this papal injunction.²³ In their joint efforts between 1609 and 1616, they approached the question of grace from a stoutly Augustinian perspective, explicitly opposing the Jesuit understanding of grace and thereby reopening the debates. Twenty years later, in 1635, Jansen was appointed Dean of the University of Leuven and consecrated as Bishop of Ypres. When he died three years later, the abbot of Saint-Cyran was back in France where his teachings were causing controversy. He was connected to the Cistercian monasteries of Port-Royal de Paris and Port-Royal de Champs, but it was his understanding of contrition that initially caused conflict.²⁴ On 15 May 1638, Richelieu had the abbot arrested on suspicions of heresy. He remained imprisoned until 6 February 1643, but this did not settle the controversy. Saint-Cyran had already won strong support among the powerful, including members of the Arnauld family. Antoine Arnauld’s older sister, Jacqueline-Marie-Angélique Arnauld (1591–1661) was the abbess of the Cistercian nuns at Port-Royal, while his older brother, Robert Arnauld d’Andilly (1589–1674), had gravitated towards Saint-Cyran since the 1620s. Robert’s daughter, Angélique de Saint-Jean Arnauld d’Andilly (1624–1684) took holy vows at Port-Royal in 1644, and Louis-Isaac Lemaistre de Sacy (1613–1684), the son of Catherine Arnauld (1590–1651) and thereby Antoine’s cousin, became another important promoter of what (though initially used as a derogatory term) would eventually come to be known as Jansenism. On the level of dogma, this branch of French spirituality referred to Jansen’s Augustinus which was first published in 1640.²⁵ This work cut open the old wound that Clement VII had attempted to suture: the conflict between the Jesuits and the Dominicans was supplemented by a third alternative—the Jansenist position and its strong promotion of an Augustinian anthropology. With the publication of the monumental De la fréquente communion, this position was communicated to a larger public. Arnauld’s work explicitly identified itself as critical of the Jesuits and triggered the so-called Dispute concerning Grace (Querelle de Grâce) in France. Accordingly, Pétau’s criticism and his view on penitence must be seen as part of a larger theological story that began in the late sixteenth century and that would not be concluded until the late eighteenth century.²⁶ While Arnauld’s and Pétau’s works specifically constitute a disputation over the historical foundations that bestowed normativity to practices of penitence, the authors were also pitted against each other because their camps, within the context of post-Tridentine Catholicism, supported different theological ideas.

Arnauld’s work takes the form of a polemical dialogue with a Jesuit interlocutor who remains anonymous.²⁷ However, his identity was not difficult to determine. In 1639, Anne de Rohan, the Princesse de Guémené (1604–1685) had experienced a religious awakening and turned away from the world. In this process, she left her Jesuit directors and instead relied upon the advice of Jacqueline-Marie-Angélique Arnauld, Robert Arnauld d’Andilly, and Antoine Arnauld. In addition, she was closely associated with Antoine Singlin (1607–1664) who, during the imprisonment of the abbot of Saint-Cyran, held a position of authority at Port-Royal de Champs. In response to the new company that the Princesse was keeping, the Jesuits Étienne Bauny (1564–1649) and Michel Rabardeau (1572–1649) voiced criticism. These critical voices were seconded by Pierre de Sesmaisons (1588–1648) who had been Anne’s personal director of conscience.

From his prison cell, Saint-Cyran had addressed an instruction abrégée to the Princesse de Guémené: this small text dealt with the use of the sacraments and was disseminated to Madeleine de Souvré, the Marquise de Sablé (1599–1678), who, in turn, shared it with Sesmaisons. Soon after receiving this work, the Jesuit responded and although we no longer know the content of this response, its general contours can be inferred from Arnauld’s De la fréquente communion. This work was initiated in late 1640 or early 1641 and it outrightly rejected and openly mocked Sesmaisons’ teachings.²⁸ During the following years, the debates between Arnauld and the Jesuits would continue, notably the immediate conflicts with Pétau and Jacques Nouet (1605–1680).²⁹ These conflicts would also resurface during a later phase, when Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) got involved.³⁰ The following section will show how Arnauld, in his criticism of Sesmaisons, warns against secrecy. On the one hand, he admits that internal penitence can be accomplished. On the other hand, Arnauld remains sceptical about the understanding that confession, in itself, can be counted as an act of penitence: the secret conversation must manifest itself in subsequent acts of satisfaction. As such, confession remains secret—it stipulates a space of private conversation—but this secrecy must translate into physical manifestations that, by nature, are not secret but visible to other members of the community. Private confession without public satisfaction is ruled out.

Against Secrecy

In the second part of De la fréquente communion, Arnauld asks if members of the ancient church, who felt guilty of mortal sins when approaching the altar, were excluded and submitted to a penitential regime.³¹ Historically, what was considered the proper course of action when the communicant himself felt the guilt of mortal sin? Was this personal experience sufficient ground for not approaching the altar? According to Arnauld, his Jesuit opponent (referring to Sesmaisons, who is not explicitly named) rejected almost every kind of public penitence, claiming that, for instance, during the time of the early church no sustained periods of penitence were required before communion. The evidence that contradicts this claim is, according to Arnauld, clearer than the brightest sun; in fact, it is even stronger than Hercules as the poets imagine him. Rhetorically, Arnauld asks if public penitence would not be the correct course of action in the case of “murders, acts of adultery, acts of fornication, profanities, lies” (les homicides, les adultères, les fornications, les sacrilèges, les perjures), and “blasphemies” (les blasphèmes).³² Given that such offences have only escalated in contemporary society, would it not, Arnauld asks, be correct to exclude perpetrators of such sinful actions from the altar and submit them to a regime of penitence? Neglecting such cases, the implicit adversary seems unbelievably ignorant to Arnauld and completely stuck in his theological ways. Thus, the nameless Jesuit invokes Saint Fabiola (d. 400) and her public act of penitence as Jerome (c. 347–420) recounts it in his epitaph for this Roman matron. The implicit opponent in Arnauld’s discourse presents this text as an act of public penitence that is undertaken as satisfaction for the grave sin of divorce: it is thus an exceptional case that calls for an exceptional measure. However, the true sin is much more personal and its satisfaction, according to Arnauld, is Saint Fabiola’s personal recognition of having acted imprudently.³³ Implicitly, Arnauld deflates the category of extraordinary wrongdoings to which acts of public penitence could be reserved: Saint Fabiola did not engage with sack-clothed penitents and prostrate herself before all of Rome because she had done something extraordinarily wrong—that is, because she had divorced her husband who was (Arnauld is quick to add) a notorious adulterer and fornicator. Instead, the saint undertook this public display because she realised that she had acted imprudently and had made a mistake. Public penitence is not an exception to the rule—it is the rule.

Arnauld proceeds in his line of argument by remarking that reserving public penitence for exceptional cases carries an added danger: if we entertain this notion, the common believer might “pride himself in his sins, although they are substantial because he does not believe them to be among those that should be punished by public penitence”.³⁴ Here, Arnauld writes with vertigo of psychological depth but nevertheless subjects the secrets of the self to a public space of demonstration. The suspicion towards the private space of secret confession is telling. Talking in private cannot stand alone, and the interior experience of contrition must become visible—an emotional state must impact the faculty of the will and cause an action to be performed. However, such demonstrations must not be mistaken for sure signs of virtuousness. Indeed, early modern Augustinianism called such signs into question, and Arnauld’s work is not presenting public displays as windows into the soul. In his preparatory work for De la fréquente communion, Saint-Cyran thus opens: “the true penitence does not consist in words but in an upright renewal of the heart by grace that, continually, produces the real fruits of penitence, which are the renouncement of the world and sufferings”.³⁵ This interior focus goes hand-in-hand with an insistence upon exterior manifestations: a private and entirely secret penitence is completely rejected because “the church has never allowed anybody, not even the highborn, to dispense with accomplishing public penitence.”³⁶ Thus, Arnauld and Saint-Cyran entertain a position according to which penitence is an entirely interior state—we might recognise this as the state of being penitent—although this interiority must make itself manifest: the appropriate knowledge of sinfulness cannot remain secret but must make itself public; it must turn into an act of doing penitence.

Within the history of Western European privacy, this position seems to keep together what would later become separated: the personal, experiential domain is constrained by the communal.³⁷ However, Arnauld admits that public satisfaction can be accomplished without words: the public verbalisation of sins, where the sinner professes his sins to the community, is reserved for exceptional sins. In the discussion above, we have seen how public penitence cannot be reserved for exceptional cases—the state of being penitent must be followed by a secret confession of this state and by an act of doing penitence. However, this act need not necessarily be verbal. Arnuald remarks that historically, members of the church have never been universally obligated to perform such public speech-acts.³⁸ Moreover, the identification of public penitence with a public admission of guilt is not only a mistake, but can also support the misconception that public penitence is exceptional and, as such, should be reserved for the gravest of sins—a postulation which is true for the public admission of guilt but not for public acts of penitence. In support of this claim, Arnauld invokes the words of the bishop of Orléans, Gabriel de l’Aubespine (r. 1604–1630) as well as the Church Fathers Ambrose (c. 339–397) and specifically Tertullian (c. 155–220), who “recognises no other type of penitence than public penitence to lift sinners back up from their falls”.³⁹ The attack on secrecy should therefore not be seen as an unrestricted appeal to openness about sinful behaviour. The Jansenists did not endorse public admission of sins as part of the believer’s everyday practice. However, they did maintain a strong relationship between secret sins and acts of penitence: the latter would be public but not necessarily verbal.

Based on Tertullian’s De Paenitentia, Arnauld thus draws a distinction between confession of the mouth and confession by exterior actions, and this distinction allows him to maintain that confession of sins always requires a public act of satisfaction. The latter cannot be achieved through private conversation ad auriculam—satisfaction must be public. However, Arnauld recognises the potentially troublesome nature of verbalising sinful acts in public, although his solution is not to praise the affordance of auricular confession. Instead, he maintains his conviction about a private space where sins are confessed, but he will not entertain the idea of a purely private act of penitence—a theology of private penitence is, for him, an impossibility. We further learn from Arnauld that Tertullian’s De Paenitentia does not aim “to speak solely about public sins that are not hidden from humans”.⁴⁰ Rather, its aim is to speak about every kind of mortal sin, and the “the only implication of his discourse is to make plain that he proposes [public] penitence, which he speaks of as a necessary remedy for all mortal sins”.⁴¹ This stance seems to limit the space of secret confession and to make smaller the axis of pastoral veridiction. Sins require public penitence, and if they do not meet this requirement, it is because they are lesser sins and simply a salient feature of human nature in its postlapsarian state. Combating these desires of the flesh—important as this struggle is—remains irrelevant to issues of confession. What remains of secret confession is a passage from the secrets of the self to the public sphere of the community:

“It is enough”, states Saint Leo, “to disclose to the priests the content of one’s conscience by a secret confession”, and consequently it was up to the priest to reduce the sinner to the standing of the penitents, to separate the sinner from the communion of the just, as is done [in separating] the sick from the healthy, prescribing for them the cures appropriate to their wounds, and chiefly [to prescribe for the penitent] the time that he must remain in the troublesome state of penitence before he is entitled [again] to the joy of participating in the mysteries.⁴²

In sum, Arnauld views secret confession as a part of the penitential sequence. The verbal exchange between sinner and priest secures the transition from contrition—a state of being—to satisfaction—a course of action. The secret domain of confession seems entirely circumscribed by the public, and private penitence is a contradiction in terms. Unlike the humanists of the fifteenth century and the Lutherans of the sixteenth, Arnauld and his fellow Jansenists were not satisfied with emphasising the inward nature of penitence. Following the Council of Trent, they recognised the sacramental status of penitence, stressing not simply the pastoral utility but the theological necessity of public acts of satisfaction.⁴³

In Defence of Secrecy

Denis Pétau’s work on public penitence seeks out its enemy—Arnauld—in his own camp. The Jesuit engages at a historiographical level and attempts to rebut the argument that the early church considered public penitence a universal obligation. As stated above, it is not our aim to reconstruct the sources that Pétau and Arnauld invoke, but rather to tease out their different understandings of secret confession, public penitence, and the relationship between the two. However (and somewhat unsurprisingly), we should mention that Pétau attacks Arnauld’s stronghold—that is, Augustine (354–430). Referring to a sermon by the Bishop of Hippo, Pétau mentions the example of a woman who had denounced her husband’s adultery to the bishop. Despite her confession, however, Augustine does not impose upon her a public act of penitence. Instead, he:

[…] takes care to learn about [the sin] and is content to repeat it in private. It is thus safe to assume that everything, except this correction, was done in secret out of fear of revealing a hidden sin. Likewise, penitence took place in private for fear that the secret be betrayed.⁴⁴

Pétau defends the legitimacy of this secret mode of confession, away from the public gaze, and he views Arnauld’s work as compromising this level of secrecy. In this respect, Tertullian is a key reference point because this early Christian author seems to confirm that penitence is not private but public. However, Pétau observes that Arnauld’s focus on Tertullian overlooks the fact that, in the fourth and fifth centuries, theologians had neatly distinguished between “two kinds of penitence, one public, and the other private”.⁴⁵ To put this another way, the historical reconstruction presented by the Jansenist is one-sided in its approach and contradicted by evidence from the later history of the church. Furthermore, Pétau remarks that Arnauld simply rehearses views already stated by the former Bishop of Orléans, who also seems to have chosen Tertullian to deny the validity of secret confession: the early centuries of the church knew only one type of penitence, and the distinction between two types, according to the Bishop of Orléans, was a later invention. Historically, the church recognised “a secret penitence for secret sins”,⁴⁶ but this was simply developed later than Arnauld and other authors suggested.

In addition to this historiographical critique, Pétau also addresses Tertullian’s observations on penitence in greater detail. He argues that Arnauld systematically misrepresents the Tertullian framework. Arnauld, according to Pétau, presents no real arguments and his reasoning is weak. Quoting Tertullian’s tenth chapter,⁴⁷ Pétau states that these formulations have made his opponent believe that public penitence is required even for sins “that are hidden and secret”.⁴⁸ Proposing an alternative framework for interpreting De Paenitentia, Pétau argues that:

[…] secret sins that are committed by thought alone could for good reason be exempted from this transition [into an act of public satisfaction], even if we take this [public satisfaction] on your understanding of it, according to which public penitence would have to be done for secret sins. The author [Tertullian] does not say that this type of penitence, generally, would be done for all [sins] of this nature. Therefore, and to substantiate this, it will suffice to agree with you that some secret sins—but not all of them!—were charged with this public satisfaction. One will answer you that only those sins among the secret [sins] that had been produced in the outside world suffer this pain [of public penitence], but not those that had remained in the interiority of thought without causing an effect.⁴⁹

With further reference to canon law, Tertullian is interpreted as distinguishing between secret sins that are committed in public and secret sins that produce no effect and therefore remain properly secret. The latter kind of sins do not, according to Pétau, require an act of public penitence, and he argues that this is the true sense (le vrai sens) of Tertullian’s chapters. Regarding the Greek term ἐξομολόγησις, Pétau defines this as “public satisfaction” (satisfaction publique) and he renders the Greek using the French word confession. Moreover, this confession “was not only or primarily oral, but rather in practice, and it consisted of obligations and exterior acts of penitence”.⁵⁰ It turned out, however, that such confessions in public were “a subject of shame and confusion that turned many away for the fear and terror that they had of this publicising of themselves, as Tertullian calls it”.⁵¹ Here, Pétau has distinguished a set of secret sins which, in his interpretation, are not subject to public penitence. His argument, with reference to Tertullian’s text, is an argument from absence and with reference to what seems reasonable: he invites us to think that Tertullian would not have thought that sins without manifest effect—sins of the mind—must be publicised for the world to see. Indeed, Pétau insists that public penitence was already controversial at the time of Tertullian. He calls public penitence an act and exercise of cleansing and annihilation (de ravallement et d’anéantissement). This kind of penitence is not secret but is known by many—even the public (mais connu de plusieurs et même public). Pétau understands secrecy as a necessary space where sins are not published but documented. This documentation of self makes known something that was formerly hidden, and the process of private confession is thus a process of self-knowledge. We might say that as a phase of discovery, the sinner confesses himself to a priest in words, and this secret confession in words constitutes a revelation of thoughts and actions that are wrong. Pétau’s estimation is that these revelations need not be public but can remain within the space that penitent and priest share.

Pétau’s defence of secrecy dovetails neatly with the Jesuits’ promotion of the art of spiritual direction⁵²—that is, a personal relationship between a member of the laity and a priest. In conversations between such couples (which often unfolded through letter writing), religious practices were transferred from a communal setting to a personal domain. Shared practices could be reinterpreted in the light of individual tastes and particular circumstances. Of course, spiritual direction had for centuries been part of monastic communities, and members of the laity—not the least those members who belonged to the upper echelons of society—had sought spiritual advice from prominent members of religious orders. However, in seventeenth-century France, the scope of these practices was extended. Spiritual direction was secularised and made available to the general public.⁵³ During the 1620s and 1630s, this secularisation had become a permanent fixture of devotional culture in early modern France. In 1631, Jean-Pierre Camus (1584–1652) published Le Directeur spiritual déinteréssé, and while this work offered a defence of secular priesthood and the right of priests to govern the souls of their parishioners,⁵⁴ it also outlined the potential pitfalls of following the advice of a spiritual director. These worries connected with specific gender expectations and reappeared in works such as Boileau’s Satire X (1694) and La Bruyère’s Les Charactères (1687). Indeed, we also find such anxieties articulated in the satirical works of Louis Petit (1615–1693) where, for instance, women are portrayed as especially eager for spiritual direction because they love to engage in conversation. Thus, the art of direction becomes a time-consuming and worldly interaction “where one speaks about the latest news, without ever forgetting the secrecy of the salons”.⁵⁵ The reservation about secret confession, articulated by Arnauld, resonates with these later suspicions: it questions the validity of this space of private conversation that was increasingly imposing itself on the religious domain.

Concluding Remarks

In 1667, Nicolas Pavillion (1597–1677), the Bishop of Alet, issued the Rituel d’Alet. This prescriptive text outlined a catechetical programme that Pavillion had created in collaboration with a group of Jansenist theologians. The text addressed the laity and their consciences which should be subjugated to the clergy. This effort—like Arnauld’s treatise—was congruent with the ambitions of a learned clergy that sought to recover the ‘original’ liturgical traditions of the Galican church and to renew French spirituality by returning to its original forms.⁵⁶ The Rituel d’Alet spiked controversy, and this controversy escalated not least because the text endorsed public penitence. Following the post-Tridentine impetus, this support was formulated by historical reference:

During the first centuries of the church, the laity would be subjected to public penitence not only for public and scandalous sins, but also for secret sins that were judged definitively to cause the loss of baptismal innocence. Public penitence here refers to a penitence that was carried out before the church that joined her prayers and tears with those of the penitents in order to secure from God the remission of their wrongdoings.⁵⁷

As we have seen, such a historical claim was not uncontested. Early modern societies, unlike medieval societies, seem to have passed a threshold where the model of the ancient church could not be implemented. Jean-Louis Quantin has identified several ambiguities that unfolded across different confessional cultures in the early modern era.⁵⁸ On the one hand, confessional teachings had to be integrated into the interior: the imperative of such integration was a direct consequence of the Reformation, and the charting of the internal landscape—symbolised in devotional literature by the heart—intensified during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.⁵⁹ On the other hand, interior states had to be translated into exterior action. The profound depth of the heart should not eclipse the space of social normativity. Striking the right balance between the secrets of the heart and social mores was, however, not easy. Across confessional divides, devotional practices such as penitence spiked controversy because the relationship between interior integration and exterior manifestation was not given but open to interpretation. The Jesuit position and its affirmation of auricular confession would play a central in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; the modern sense of the self owes as much (if not more) to the Jesuit imagination as to Augustinian suspicions.⁶⁰ In fact, the rigour proposed by Arnauld seems almost utopian, and a model of communal identity—one where the private is submitted to the public—increasingly lost its validity. Indeed, the semantics of terms such as ‘private’—in French, privé(e) and particulier(ère)—were changing,⁶¹ and Pétau’s criticism of Arnauld precisely ascribes a more substantial meaning to the private. Auricular confession safeguarded the sinful secrets of the self. This confidentiality was presented as an instrumental part of the struggle against a will in revolt. For this struggle to be successful, sin had to be analysed on the level of the individual. This idea resurfaced in the nineteenth century when confession of the truth about oneself migrated from the religious domain to penal theories and to medical practices. To mention a specific instance of migration, the French psychiatrist François Lauret (1797–1851) would use cold showers to make patients confess that their personal experiences were not real but manifestations of an underlying mental illness.⁶² This confession, however, was not understood as a cure. Rather, confession had to be continually secured if madness was to be counteracted. Thus, the truth did not automatically set the self-free from madness. It situated the patient within a medical history that was not clearly organised but collated anything and everything as possible signs of illness—this was a performance of the self as mentally ill.⁶³ Here, nineteenth-century confession in the asylum seems structurally parallel to Christian confession. In both instances, the self needs to know, as exactly as possible, who he or she is, even though access to this type of knowledge is only possible by telling about oneself to some other person.⁶⁴ Nineteenth-century psychiatry transformed the individual into an object of scientific inquiry, but it did so by reproducing ancient ideas about private states, confession, truth, and coercion. To confess oneself—even under the coercion of cold showers—was seen as a statement of fact and thereby as an act of saying something true.⁶⁵ In this complex web of practices of medical healing, like in the conquest of Christian souls, verbalising the truth about oneself—putting private states into words—remained the name of the game.