“Skazki about confession”: on the question of the confessional practice of the monks of the Olonets uezd in the Peter the Great era

The article deals with the "skazki" (documents) about the confessions of the monks of Olonets Uyezd (County) for the first time. These are special documents compiled by the superiors of male and female monasteries of the region and contain information about how the procedure for confessing monks was organized in the Peter the Great era. The study is preceded by a brief overview of the legislation regulating the terms of confession of sins and choosing a confessor in the Russian Orthodox Church. The conclusion is made about the important informational significance of the presented documents for studying the features of monastic confessional practice in Olonets Uezd (County) in the first quarter of the XVIII century.

Foucault’s Concept of Confession

Setting out from the difficulty of translating the Foucauldian notion of aveu, this paper proposes an account of Foucault’s concept of confession in the years 1979-1983 surrounding the writing of Confessions of the Flesh. I focus on Foucault’s relative failure to bring together the complementary dimensions of confession as confession of sins and confession of faith in early Christianity. Foucault’s attempts to tackle this challenge nonetheless reveal a number of crucial aspects of his thought throughout the 1970s, e.g., the critique of the notion of ideology and the role that critique played in the setting of Foucault’s “critical philosophy of veridictions”. A comparison with the lectures given at Louvain and the Collège de France suggests that Foucault took an original and rather solitary path in Confessions of the Flesh, which may explain the surprises awaiting the reader. Finally, I propose an explanation of Foucault’s final shift away from Christian confession towards Greek parrhesia, pointing to the key role of the idea of a “duty of truth”. This idea led Foucault to an original approach to confession and the illocutionary force of statements.

Rituals of Reintegration

In early Christianity, conflict resolution that involved decisions about exclusion and reintegration of community members was often ritualized as excommunication, penance, confession of sins, and intercession. Mediation of divine forgiveness of sin was central to the rituals that reintegrated transgressing community members and reconciled them with the community. This chapter discusses the experience of ritual forgiveness of sins, the reintegrative shame of penance and confession, confession as costly signalling of commitment, and confession and intercession as social identity maintenance.

The Confessional Seal

The chapter demonstrates how Catholic sacramental confession influenced the American legal system and expanded the notion of religious liberty in the United States. It describes a precedent-setting legal decision in New York City in 1813 on the confessional seal—that is, the priest’s canonical obligation to preserve the secrecy of a penitent’s confession of sins. A New York court in People v. Phillips declared that a priest who had learned of a crime through a penitent’s confession of sins was not obliged to reveal that information in a court trial. That legal decision was periodically cited in subsequent court cases in the United States and laid the grounds for subsequent statutory laws in various states that protected in particular the confessional seal and more generally clerical confidentiality. The legal case also became the occasion for the first major American Catholic apologetical attempt to defend the Catholic understanding of sacramental confession.

Sin, Repentance, and Confession in Nineteenth-Century American Protestant Polemics

This chapter describes the American Protestant reactions to the Catholic understanding of sacramental confession. That reaction is analyzed within the context of the heritage of the Protestant Reformation’s understandings of sin, repentance, and confession. The chapter demonstrates how the Protestant Episcopal Church in the late eighteenth century and American Lutherans in the early nineteenth century transformed the inherited Anglican and Lutheran traditions on the confession of sins to a priest or pastor. In the nineteenth century, sacramental confession became a central polemic issue, because for American Protestants that doctrine seemed to violate the Protestant understanding of justification by faith alone. The Protestant polemic was based on biblical, theological, legal, disciplinary, and historical issues. But, in some cases, the polemic made sensational charges on the immoral and evil political and social consequences of the practice of sacramental confession. Salacious accounts of confessional practice became a part of the polemical record.

Trent and Penance in the Colonial Period

The Catholic penitential tradition in colonial America was influenced by the Council of Trent (1545–63), which was itself affected in part by the polemics of the Protestant Reformation. The entire penitential tradition that colonial Catholics inherited from Trent included special days of prayer and fasting, abstinence from meat on Fridays, and the yearly sacramental practice of confessing one’s personal sins to a priest. Trent declared, in opposition to Protestant reformers, that penance was one of the sacraments ordained by Christ. The sacrament included the penitents’ acts of contrition, confession, and satisfaction (penance) and the priest’s act of absolution. Sacramental confession became a special bone of contention between Protestants and Catholics, especially in the nineteenth century. The polemics, though, preserved something of the biblical language and made the confession of sins to a priest a major part of the Catholic experience in the United States until the mid-1960s.

Céli Dé—Ascetics or Mystics? Máelrúain of Tallaght and Óengus Céle Dé as Case Studies

The Céli Dé monks as we see them in the texts associated with their monasteries had a reputation for extreme asceticism. Following their leader, MáelRúain, who had an especially stern reputation for rigorous observance, they believed heaven had to be earned by saying many prayers, by penitential practices and by intense personal effort and striving on the part of each individual monk. To this end, they engaged in such practices as rigorous fasting, long vigils, confession of sins, strict Sabbath observance and devotional practices involving many prayers. Their view of humanity and of creation generally was negative and they saw God as a stern judge. However, there was another aspect to Céli Dé monasticism which we see in the Félire Óengusso, the metrical martyrology compiled by Óengus the Culdee, a monk of Tallaght. We see from his Félire that he understood holiness as a gift of God’s grace, both for the saints in heaven, whom he describes as ‘radiant’ and ‘shining like the sun’, and for those still on earth, through the mercy and graciousness of God himself. His Félire was compiled as an act of devotion to Jesus and the saints, whom he addresses in terms of great warmth, tenderness and intimacy, in expressions which prefigure the language of the medieval mystics. So by studying the lives of these two monks, MáelRúain and Óengus, his protégée, as case studies, we can see that for the Céli Dé, holiness was less a matter of ‘either asceticism or mysticism’, but rather ‘both and’.