2

Rites of Forgiveness

Several critics have recently explored the idea that the idioms of Shakespearean theater are eucharistic. Anthony Dawson sees the actor’s body shared and given, offered up to spectators, as a version of real presence; worthy reception is participation in theater and communion alike, and the actor’s sharing of his flesh with spectators is a “secular enactment of eucharistic community.”1 Likewise Jeffrey Knapp suggests that Shakespeare frames Henry V as a sacrament whose “real power lay in the minds of its spectators” and thus represented his theater as a means not to “fight against [God’s] word, but to save it from papists and preachers.”2 Thomas Bishop has also persuasively argued that “all through Shakespeare’s career, questions of ‘embodiment’ framed in relation to the sacramental model are central to his thinking-through of the meaning of theatrical performance.”3 And Regina Schwarz in a full-blown nostalgia for the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation has claimed that the theater became the first truly Protestant church where a community convenes and remembers sacrifice “without the operatum of the church.”4 Whereas there is no consensus among these critics about theologies of the sacrament, or the ways in which such understandings inform Shakespearean theater, there is a growing body of opinion that explores the resources of a sacramental culture, moreover a culture that has radically reformed the sacraments, for the new idiom of Shakespearean theater. Yet, I argue, these resources are better understood when we see eucharist as intrinsically connected to penance and its histories, for it is in the rituals surrounding communion that the community is made and remade out of acts of forgiveness. Issues of moral and ecclesiastical discipline and issues of justice centered on the sacrament are incomprehensible unless eucharist and penance are seen in relationship. For the eucharist is the entire forgiven community.5

In the second and third parts of this book I will be examining aspects of penance, sin, and reconciliation in a variety of individual plays, and there I will be exploring further aspects of the speech act of confession, forgiveness, restitution as an aspect of penitential justice, and remorse. This chapter rehearses some of the attempts to redefine the nature of forgiveness in the peculiar English settlement, when penance is abolished as a sacrament, yet when some of the institutions and speech acts connected with it are still an integral part of the economy of salvation.

Bud Welch’s daughter died in the Oklahoma bombings of the Murrah Federal Building in April 1995. “About a year before the execution,” he says, “I found it in my heart to forgive Tim McVeigh. It was a release for me rather than for him.”

Mary Kayitesi Blewitt lost fifty members of her family in the Rwandan massacre of Tutsi in 1994:

I met a woman who, after watching her husband and son being killed, was raped alongside one of her daughters. Her other daughters were killed at roadblocks. She was on the run for 100 days, meeting different people on the way, and was repeatedly raped. Finally she went mad and ended up in a mental hospital where she discovered she had AIDS. Now, if there was one person who had done all this and that person was found and apologized, perhaps you could forgive. But if there are hundreds who have hurt you, how can you forgive?… You can’t heal without feeling that justice has been done.

Simon Wilson was permanently disabled in a hit-and-run accident. Afterwards, he trained for the ministry:

Some people within the church believe you can’t forgive unless the other person repents but to me repentance isn’t a condition of forgiveness because ultimately forgiveness comes from within. Only I know whether I can forgive or not…. Some people think I’m being pious telling people to forgive but actually I don’t tell anyone to do anything. I simply tell people that the place I’ve reached is better than the place I was before.

These comments are all taken from The Forgiveness Project, a charity which explores forgiveness through the telling of stories. They rehearse—painfully and particularly—the moral, social, spiritual, and legal dimensions of forgiveness.6 Who is to be the agent of forgiveness, which is an act of release as well as judgment? Each of the people I quote struggles with the extraordinary demands and possibilities of forgiveness. Each of them is confronted with questions of justice, with the terrible logic of the reciprocity of the hurt and the hurter in the same irrevocable act. Mary Blewitt would agree with Hannah Arendt: we can only forgive what we can punish. For Simon Wilson and Bud Welch, their own forgiveness cannot wait on the acknowledgment of the other no matter how desirable that act would be. They might agree with Avishai Margalit: forgiveness is not a voluntary mental act but rather a mental change.7

In medieval culture all these elements—the moral, social, spiritual, legal, and juridical dimensions—of forgiveness were bound together in the sacrament of penance, and medieval penitential and pastoral theology provides an extraordinarily capacious meditation on the social and psychic effects of sin and the remedies for sin. In this thinking it is impossible to separate the idea that sin is an offense against God, self, and neighbor at one and the same time. The charity whereby we love our neighbor is a participation in Divine charity.8 The sacrament of penance is fundamentally concerned with justice and therefore with the machinery of punishment and correction in the cure of souls, but it is also profoundly concerned with friendship. Penance, suggests Thomas Aquinas, is concerned with justice, but it differs from vindictive justice

because in vindictive justice the atonement is made according to the judge’s decision, and not according to the discretion of the offender and the person offended; whereas, in Penance, the offense is atoned according to the will of the sinner, and the judgment of God against whom the sin was committed, because in the latter case we seek not only the restoration of the equality of justice, as in vindictive justice, but also and still more the reconciliation of friendship.9

The Reformation was an argument about the very nature of forgiveness. “If there is anything in the whole of religion that we should most certainly know, we ought most surely to grasp by what reason, with what law, under what condition, with what ease or difficulty, forgiveness of sins may be obtained!” declares Calvin in the Institutes.10 Luther declared that no word had been as bitter to him as penitence; now, after he had formulated his understanding of man as justified by God, “nothing sounds sweeter or more agreeable to me than penitence.”11 Sins had been counted and classified in the massive encyclopedic compilations of the pastoral manuals of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries; they were the subject of recounting in the mandatory practice of annual auricular confession before communion at Easter. In the reformed doctrine of justification, sins were no longer counted against the sinner, and it was in virtue alone of Christ’s imputation of righteousness to the undeserving sinner that sin was gratuitously, graciously, divinely forgiven. The eleventh of the Thirty-Nine Articles (1563, revised 1571) proclaimed it as an article of faith that: “We are accounted righteous before God only for the merit of our Lord and saviour Jesus Christ by faith, and not for our own works or deservings. Wherefore, that we are justified by faith only, is a most wholesome doctrine, and very full of comfort.”12 These huge changes in the understanding of the state of being forgiven transformed the offices, institutions, and practices of forgiveness. I shall begin by examining the office of forgiveness and the doctrine of the keys as they work themselves out in the oddness of the English context; I then parse out some of the changing languages of confession and absolution after the sacerdotal role is radically diminished in the office of forgiveness, examine the intense epistemological anxieties accruing to penance in pre- and post-reformed practices, and the questions around human and divine agency there entailed.

The Office and Keys of Forgiveness

Can there be an office of forgiveness? Don’t we learn the meaning of forgiveness (if not how to do it) when we learn how to speak? Surely there can be no special office into which the forgiver is formally initiated? It is a speech act that must be risked or not in individual encounters.13 This kind of talk is unobjectionable if we forget that the forgiveness under discussion is forgiveness for sin. Sin is an ontological category; it stains the soul, alienates it from its maker. It is, as I have suggested, inseparably an offense against God, self, and neighbor. How is that offense to each party to be rectified, how mended? And who will or can judge such offenses? It is precisely in virtue of the category of sin that there is an office of forgiveness and a rite of initiation into that office. The sacerdotal office and its transformation in the English Reformation turns out to be an integral part of the history of forgiveness and the landscape of penitential practice when it is sin and not merely crime or wrong-doing that is at issue.

The power of the keys and the sacrament of penance were concepts whose history is intimately intertwined. The medieval understanding of the keys circulated around a number of key texts, chiefly Matthew 16.18–19, Matthew 18.15–18, and John 20.21–23. At Philippi, Christ had addressed Peter:

And I say also unto thee, that thou art Peter, and upon this rocke will I buylde my Church: and the gates of hell shal not overcome it. And I will give thee the keyes of the kingdome of heaven, and whatsoever thou shalt binde upon earth, shalbe bound in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt lose on earth, shalbe be losed in heaven.14

The power to bind and loose, to forgive sin on behalf of God, was understood to be bestowed with the indelible seal of ordination.15 By the act of ordination, which was also a sacramental act, priests became officers and spokesmen for the Church and dispensed forgiveness not in their own person but through the very voice of Christ, or in the preferred ecclesial formulation, “in persona Christi.”16 Christ, through the Holy Spirit, made the sacraments holy; this was why no wicked priest could mar their efficacy for it was objective, not dependent on the subjectivity of the priest.17 As we shall see below, this question of authorization and ventriloquism was extremely vexed when it came to the words of absolution. Was it possible to say “Ego te absolvo?” when the agent of action was God himself? It was the doctrine of the keys and the jurisdiction thereby claimed that made the priest the indispensable means of sacramental absolution.

The keys were conventionally divided between the key of order (potestas ordinis) and the key of jurisdiction (potestas jurisdictionis). The key of order was reserved for those in orders, and it linked the sacramental action of penance with the sacramental action, the indelible seal, of ordination. The key of jurisdiction could be delegated; thus deacons and even laymen could have this authority and could pronounce the words of absolution in the ecclesiastical courts. Indeed the ecclesiastical courts themselves constituted a further subdivision of the powers of jurisdiction; they were part of the exterior forum as opposed to the internal forum of the confessional, and these formed two parallel, overlapping jurisdictions. The internal forum was understood to be sacramental: it concerned the penitent’s voluntary acts of contrition and confession; the external forum was part of the governance, and it could compel and pronounce on those in its jurisdiction. The forums were then formally distinct and performed by different authorities.18 The pastoral reason for the division was understandable. It may have arisen from the desire to save penitents from the inevitable shame of exposure that public penance entailed, a shame that might keep them away from the practice of confession altogether. Richard Hooker suggests that the idea was to protect people “whose crimes were unknown [unless they] should blaze their own faults as it were on a stage acquainting all people with what they had done amiss.”19 The priest could administer penances and preserve the secrecy of the penitent and the seal of the confessional, and this seemed vital in trying to persuade people to come to confession in the first place. Indeed confessional manuals are full of advice to the priest about how to preserve the secrecy of the confessional in the administration of penances. Nevertheless the splitting of the two forums led to a theologically incoherent division; sin as an interior matter was “to be radically distinguished from the matters of exterior social readjustments to be dealt with in the external forum.”20 The split threatened the whole idea of sin as social, as simultaneously a sin against self, neighbor, and God in the idea of the body of Christ. Offenses against God could be taken up in the confessional, and public offenses against neighbor could be taken up in the exterior forum.21 The doctrine of the keys and the related understanding of the sacramentality of penance gave a secure sense that God was working through the office of priesthood; after all he had through Christ given Peter the keys to the kingdom. When priests absolved sin, they did so in the name of God. Nevertheless, there was a clear sense that such absolutions were declaratory. God forgave sin; but priests declared that forgiveness on his behalf: “God alone absolves from sin and forgives sins authoritatively, yet priests do both ministerially, because the words of the priest in this sacrament (of the altar) work as instruments of the Divine power, as in the other sacraments: because it is the Divine power that works inwardly in all the sacramental signs.”22 The Holy Spirit could confer grace even through a wicked priest because it was Christ’s words that were being spoken and not the priest’s. The sacraments worked objectively, and so forgiveness through their agency was assured. The Council of Trent unequivocally affirmed the full juridical force of absolution. Absolution in the Tridentine understanding was not declaratory but a judicial act whereby a sentence is “pronounced by the priest as by a judge.” In the 6th Session on Justification at the Council of Trent the dangerous notion that justification could be subjective was anathematized. “Against the vain confidence of heretics,” Chapter IX declares:

…neither is this to be asserted, that they who are truly justified must needs without any doubting whatsoever, settle within themselves that they are justified and that no one is absolved from sins and justified, but he that believes for certain that he is absolved and justified and that absolution and justification are effected by this faith alone….23

During the course of the Reformation in England, penance was no longer understood to be a sacrament. For one thing, only two sacraments were regarded as scriptural: eucharist and baptism. Penance, extreme unction, ordination, confirmation, and marriage were discounted because they were not mandated by Christ. Furthermore, the reformed understanding of sacraments as the seals and confirmation of God’s promises utterly transformed the Aristotelian underpinnings of sacramental theology. In Hugh of St. Victor’s definition a sacrament was a “physical or material object admitted to the perception of the external senses, representing a reality beyond itself by virtue of having been instituted as a sign of it, and containing within it some invisible and spiritual grace in virtue of having been consecrated.”24 In reformed logic, forgiveness had already happened: there was no possibility that human action itself could provide the “matter” of the sacrament as in the medieval understanding. Furthermore to bind the actions of God to the law of man was an obscenity. Medieval thinkers had in fact never understood God to be bound by sacraments, but, as Alistair McGrath has said, “the tendency to emphasize the reliability of the established order of salvation, of which the sacramental system is part, can only have served to convey the impression that the sinner who wishes to be reconciled to God must, de facto, seek the assistance of a priest.”25 For the reformers sacraments no longer worked objectively “ex opere operato” but rather were moral and spiritual instruments of reform. Thus the tripartite component parts of penance in contrition, confession, and satisfaction were transformed and dismantled.

What happens when penance is abolished as a sacrament and when the keys are fundamentally redefined in the Reformation? For Thomas Becon, chaplain to Archbishop Cranmer, in his book The Castle of Comfort, the very notion that men could forgive sins was obscene. Glossing over the careful distinctions made in the medieval treatises about the declaratory as opposed to judicial nature of absolution, he declares that men in so doing are taking upon themselves the office of God:

First, I will prove with manifest scriptures that God alone forgiveth sin. Secondly, that the priest is but a minister appointeth of God, to declare free remission of sins to the truly penitent, to declare, I say, and not forgive.26

It is epistemological questions that come to the fore here, as I shall go on to show:

Seeing that none can search the heart, whether it be faithful or unfaithful, but God alone; seeing also that the absolution beareth no strength but where faith is, it followeth that none can absolve me of my sins, but that Lord alone which searcheth the veins and the heart.27

The “shaven nation” have grossly usurped their prerogative and arrogated to themselves the very power of God. God’s ministers are there to “publish” the benefit of our salvation. Absolution is the preaching of the remission of sins in the name of Christ. Becon thus, along with many of his contemporaries, redefines the keys:

They loosen, that is to say, they preach to the faithful the remission of sins by Christ. They also bind, that is, they declare to the unfaithful damnation.28

The key of remission is in fact the key of knowledge, and where there is no knowledge there is no key.

John Jewel, Bishop of Salisbury, redefines the keys too. The medieval doctrine of the keys gave us many keys, he suggests: the key of knowledge; the key of order; the key of power; the key of discretion; the key of sacraments. Yet the key is the “word of the gospel and the expounding of the law and scriptures.” When the word is not preached, there is no “key.”29

Luther assimilates the key that binds to the law which reveals the nature of sin to the sinner, and the gospel which liberates and looses sin:

Both these keys are absolutely central to Christianity, and God can be fully thanked for them. The strong, iron key which binds is for pious Christians a mighty shield, wall and stronghold against evil-doers. But it is also an effective, useful and holy medicine for evil-doers, though terrifying and frightening to the flesh.30

Even though the keys had been comprehensively redefined by Protestant reformers, and the office of forgiveness thereby revolutionized, the speech act of absolution remained controversial. The precise words of absolution had long been subject to controversy. Peter Lombard had argued that the words of absolution were declarative, not juridical; sacramental efficacy lay in contrition, not absolution. And the declaratory formula held sway until the thirteenth century. Should the form be “ego te absolvo” or should it be preccatory (“May God forgive you”), making it obvious that it was not sacerdotal power but the delegated authority of the church that was at issue? Such arguments never disappeared. In the Book of Common Prayer the words of absolution are retained in the Visitation for the Sick and in the general absolution following general confession. Here the form is deprecatory: “By his authority committed, I hereby absolve thee.” In fact there is remarkable continuity between the prayer book uses of absolution and the medieval services except that there is no absolution after auricular confession and no formal restoration to the sacraments of the church. At the Hampton Court conference the form of absolution in the prayer book came up for continuing discussion. Some objected to the word in itself because it is a “forensical and judicial word importing more than a declaration,” and they desired to have it corrected. The words of absolution could be even more controversial in the case of the ecclesiastical courts. There they might be pronounced by a layman much to the disgust of nonconformists and to the occasional embarrassment of the defenders of the courts.31

The Epistemology of Penance

When Harding argues with John Jewel in their debates of the 1560s and early ’70s, he is very aware of the epistemological effects of the changing understanding of the keys. If the key was the word, how could Jewel be qualified out of his mere human resources to discern whether his preaching was effective?

Preach ye never so much, the conscience of man being so secret a thing as it is, how can ye judge who inwardly and thoroughly repenteth and who repenteth not; and though, one repent and be sorry, and have remorse of his former life, though he look unto the light of the gospel, as ye say, and believe in Christ, what then? How can ye judge of such a person? Do you know his heart by looking in his face?32

If John Jewel wanted to redefine the keys as preaching rather than binding and loosing, how could one possibly be certain of forgiveness and salvation? The sacrament of penance as it was conventionally understood had been divided up into three parts: contrition of the heart (compunctio cordis), confession of the mouth (confessio oris), and satisfaction of works (satisfactio operis).33 Epistemological anxieties haunted each stage of penance. If, as early scholastic theology would have it, “contritus fit contritior,” how can the contrite sinner be sure of the purity of his contrition or its adequacy?34 Yet, if not content with contrition, he confessed to a priest as was mandated annually according to Canon 21 of the Fourth Lateran Council, how could he be sure that the priest would be able to calculate the appropriate penance? It was precisely because of such plaguing uncertainties that Duns Scotus evolved his two ways of justification. Attrition, deriving less from the love of God than the fear of hell and punishment, could (per modum meriti de congruo), if long enough or intense enough, attain the goal of God’s grace. Yet because there could be no surety here, the safer way is the way of absolution, granted in the power of the keys wherein the true efficacy of the sacrament lay. Contrition lacked a sensible sign, but Scotus located both form and matter in the priestly absolution, and this was the path to certainty. Here was room for the practices of indulgence and purgatory. These epistemological questions are then fully available in the complex, capacious medieval theologies of penance, yet it was a general medieval teaching that no one can know beyond doubt whether he is in a state of grace.35 In the reformed discourse the epistemological questions are deeply driven, even compulsive.

This compulsion can be seen in the “Homily of the Worthy Receiving and Reverent Esteeming of the Sacrament of the Body and Blood of Christ.” One of the chief reasons why Cranmer and other reformers rejected transubstantiation was that they believed it negated the act of repentance and reception. If the body of Christ was ex opere operato produced by a confecting priesthood, then all could receive worthily at their hands. In the official book of homilies the two-part “Homily of the Worthy Receiving and Reverent Esteeming of the Sacrament of the Body and Blood of Christ” also has as one of its central texts I Corinthians 29.11. Here Paul was addressing the divisions among the Corinthians.

When you come together, he says, it is not to eat the Lord’s Supper. “For when the time comes to eat, each of you goes ahead with your own supper, and one goes hungry and another one becomes drunk.” But according to Paul, it is impossible to worthily receive the body, to participate in the feast if some go hungry, if some are humiliated. This is “not discerning the body.” So the homilist begins with an understanding of eucharist as memory and participation against private eating and sacrifice.36 Yet as he goes on to address proper discernment of the body, there are emergent signs that the participation so enjoined is undercut by the very techniques encouraged to reach it. They are subtle, unwitting, yet retrospectively, in the contexts of later developments, invidious. The first is that there is a tendency to render too cognitive the mode of participation. One of the claims made in the homily is that “the ignorant cannot without fruit and profit, exercise himself in the Lord’s sacraments.” This seems unproblematic. But the author then claims that the Corinthian problem was ignorance: “St Paul, blaming the Corinthians for the profaning of the Lord’s Supper, concludeth that ignorance, both of the thing itself, and the signification thereof, was the cause of their abuse; for they came irreverently, not discerning the Lord’s body.”37 Paul actually writes, however, in reprimand of the greed and individualism that made a mockery of the body of Christ. The implication in the Reformation homily is epistemological: an epistemological problem here can have an epistemological cure. Those Corinthians did not know what the Lord’s body was, just as Catholics think that the bread actually is the literal body of Christ. “For what hath been the cause of the ruin of God’s religion but the ignorance therof?”38 This constitutes a bewilderingly optimistic assessment of the situation—as if knowledge and right doctrine might dispel malice, hatred, vainglory, and contempt, as if Augustine and Calvin had never contested stoic accounts of virtue for their superficial sense of the resources of the human will. This kind of epistemological confidence was not shared by allegorists such as Langland and Spenser or by Shakespeare, who understood that knowledge was bound up with acknowledgment and recognition and plumbed the bewildering complexity of this process, including as it did the sheer opacity of things in the world as well as in our own minds.

Secondly, in trying to insist that there will be no surrogation in worship, no sacrificing of the priesthood on behalf of others (“no dumb massing”) the homilist comes to insist that “every one of us ought to celebrate the same, at his table, in our own persons.”39 So the notion of “in our own persons” becomes stressed to such an extent that the Pauline interdependencies of the body of Christ are underdeveloped, even unwittingly undermined, at least in the first part of the homily. The effect is to atomize the body even against the explicit desire and aim, as well as the theology of the supper: “make Christ thine own, apply his merits to thyself. Herein thou needest no other man’s help, no other sacrifice or oblation, or sacrificing priest, no mass, no means established by man’s invention.”40

Finally, the homilist stresses how important it is “to prove, and try ourselves unfeignedly, without flattering ourselves, whether we be plants of that fruitful olive, living branches of the true vine.”41 Thus our feeding, our sustenance becomes dependent not so much on the participation in the supper and our enaction of the body of Christ together but on a process of introspection whereby we could check our own worthiness. It is just this eradication of a receiving community in the very act of self-knowledge and self-recognition that becomes so exceedingly problematical in this homily and where its confident tones of dispelling the darkness of ignorance only intensify and undermine its most heart-felt aims. Self-scrutiny that has lost its pastoral context in the specter of popish abuse is subject to relentlessly circular intensifications, restless anxieties of uncertainty, cravings for an impossible assurance. The religious subject begins to be gripped by an interminable problem of knowledge. It leads several of the subjects of John Stachniewski’s fascinating book into suicides that guarantee certainty at the cost of damnation itself.42 Despite the currents of resistance to these trajectories within the Church of England from the 1590s,43 these powerful currents radically refigured the whole way in which human agency was conceived in relation to divine agency and significantly affected ways of conceiving self and the social.

The search for certainty, the impossibility of living with uncertainty, threatens to take over the subject completely as if knowledge can be surer than trust. Indeed what seemed to be a massive drive and determining factor in the reformed account of sin was the desperate sense of the sheer untrustworthiness of human action and human judgment. If forgiveness of sins depends on the conditions that the “Scholastic sophists” attach to it, then one will never be certain about forgiveness, and this is intolerable. “They make contrition the first step in obtaining pardon, and they require it to be a due contrition, that is just and full. But at the same time they do not determine when a man can have assurance that he has in just measure carried out his contrition,” says Calvin.44 The scholastic formulation that doing what we are capable of is enough, that God will not deny grace to the man who does what is in him (“Facienti quod in se est Deus non denegat gratiam”) was seen to be redundantly circular and utterly incommensurable with a picture of sin as rats ravening down their poison, as horror and depravity.45 On this issue it is indeed hard to argue with Calvin’s hard logic: “If they say that we must do what is in us, we are always brought back to the same point. For when will anyone dare assure himself that he has applied all of his powers to lament his sins?”46 When it came to confession, how was one to know if one had confessed all one’s sins? What of the ones one had forgotten? There was no consolation in the “Facere quod.” “Therefore that dread voice always presses and resounds in his ears: ‘Confess all your sins.’ And this terror cannot be allayed except by a sure consolation.”47 Furthermore there are other epistemological concerns in the whole area of binding and loosing—how do you know if you are absolved, for example?48 Anxiety besets the sacrament of penance at every point of its medieval tripartite components: contrition, confession, and absolution. “These two things elude the knowledge of a man when he has to pass sentence upon another man. Therefore, it follows that certainty of binding and loosing does not lie within the competence of earthly judgment because the minister of the word, when he duly performs his function, can absolve only conditionally.”49 The problems are relentlessly circular: “not to know what is to be bound and loosed, yet not to be able to bind or loose unless you know”?50 In Calvin’s treatment of this question, he comes back over and over again to the question of certainty. “Why then do they say they absolve by the authority given them, when their absolution is uncertain?”51 When it came to “satisfaction,” when can he be certain of the measure of that satisfaction? “Then he will always doubt whether he has a merciful God: he will always be troubled, and always tremble.”52

These questions of uncertainty had also famously haunted Luther. In On the Bondage of the Will he had asked: “What is more miserable than uncertainty?”53 As Lee Wandell Palmer puts it: “Luther rejected all efforts to subsume the words of God to human sensibility and reason.”54 The words of man and the words of God were utterly opposed: “Human statutes cannot be observed together with the Word of God, because they bind consciences, while the Word sets them free.”55

All uncertainties were meant to be swept away by the doctrine of justification. For under this doctrine we are justified because we are sinners, but our sins are not counted against us. In this deeply forensic model of sin, justification is the “declaration that the Christian is righteous, rather than the process by which he is made righteous, involving a change in his status before God, rather than his nature.”56

Yet what is the agency of justification? Who declares it? The force of the priest’s declarations had been rendered explicit in the ritual formulations of absolution in the confessional. Although it is plain that absolution cannot be assimilated to forgiveness, it is clear that the changed understanding of priest and sacrament has the most decisive pastoral effect on an entire cultural understanding of forgiveness.

The Eradication of the Human

The circular, painful epistemological drives for certainty in the reformed tradition are also directly linked to what I want to call “the eradication of the human” in reformed discourse. Jennifer Herdt has recently proposed that Luther demands as a starting point the utter bankruptcy of human agency.57 In the Lutheran and Calvinistic understanding of justification, man is seen not as an ethical subject capable of growth but rather as he is seen by God, coram Deo. He is realized by Christ and through Christ, and the intrusion of any human agency into this picture threatens the certainty of salvation. There is to be no involvement of human virtues and habits, human laws or traditions; these could only traduce and impinge on the graceful sovereignty of God. For Luther, as he developed this perspective in his lectures on the Psalms and above all on Romans, it was a vitiating problem of scholasticism that it had viewed man from the point of view of man and not from the point of view of God. It was only if all human effort in salvation were completely obliterated as worthless that the certainty of salvation could be assured. As long as salvation depended in any degree on his own efforts, man could never be sure he had done enough, and this was an intolerable burden: “My conscience would never give me certainty. But I always doubted and said, ‘You did not perform that correctly. You were not contrite enough. You left that out of your confession.’”58 As the 4th of the Wittenberg articles puts it:

For if, to God’s judgment against sin, we were to oppose our worthiness and our merits (as a satisfaction) for sin, the promise of reconciliation would become uncertain for us, and our consciences would be driven to despair, as Paul says. (Ro. 4.15)59

It is not just that works were pointless and could not in any way mitigate sin or placate the righteousness of God. All forms of human action and mediation were suspect, utterly tainted. Indeed it becomes characteristic of Luther’s prose that he scornfully adds the designator “human” to all kind of nouns: human traditions, human ceremonies, human inventions. He has forgotten what Thomas Aquinas said: sacraments are for humans, they speak to our embodied fleshly nature, constituting the means of grace precisely for human beings. For Luther all are worthless, and this makes any hermeneutics of human agency impossible. Berndt Hamm puts it the following way: “Luther experienced in a shattering way the deep cleft between divine and human possibilities before God—in every respect: both as an epistemological subject and as an ethical agent.”60 His sense of the chasm separating the sin of man from the goodness of God meant that he had to abandon a whole tradition of thinking about human praxis and action, one which relied on the Aristotelian notion of habitus. No human habit could ameliorate human sin, and love could no longer be the central concept in Christian life.61 Faith alone (sola fide) becomes a partner in justification because if forgiveness depended on our worthiness we could never be certain of it. Justification can have consequences in human action, but it can never have causes in it.62 This is an astonishing, impossible obliteration of the world of human action, and of the human conditions of feeling, acting, and doing. It proves paralyzing as reformed discourse binds itself in the hopeless, intensifying languages of assurance.

The Performance of Penance

In the Lutheran church confession was retained; in the reformed church the model of the consistory was put into practice, though more successfully in Scotland and Geneva than in France or the Netherlands. In this model elders of particular congregations took on the work of reconciliation in settling disputes, and were able to use the final sanction of exclusion from communion until the sinner was reconciled. Recent historians of the consistory system suggest that, at its best, the discipline could function as the medieval guilds had once done in arbitrating disputes, with the goal of charity and peace. In England, however, although reformers ardently desired to put into effect a consistory model along Scottish or Genevan lines, it was clear by the 1590s that this initiative was dead in the water. “Church discipline,” while not strictly speaking a mark of the true church, was nevertheless regarded as essential to the forgiven community as the body of Christ. Diarmaid MacCulloch has recently suggested that the “lack of proper Reformed discipline was as significant as the survival of cathedrals in differentiating the English Church from the other Reformed churches of Europe.”63

What the reformed model offered to its adherents and advocates was a system of reconciliation and justice that worked off the notion of sin as fully social, as damaging to the individual and to the community at large. Elders worked to bring the sinner to repentance and reconciliation with the whole body of the church. Where an elder could not effect a reconciliation by private admonition, the sinner was enjoined to confess to the whole church. Margo Todd’s fascinating book about the discipline as practiced by the kirk in Scotland in fact discovers the greatest continuities with the medieval practices of penance.64 She claims that the public confession of sin and the declaration of repentance expanded to become the central ritual act of Protestant worship in Scotland.

In the rites of the Scottish kirk, the penitent’s performance is carefully choreographed; he or she is told exactly where to process, and the entire fabric of the church is part of the material of performance. The public confessions of penitents to the congregation were carefully coached and rehearsed because Scottish ministers had learned to their cost that it was best not to allow completely ex tempore performances of confession. In the reformed kirk the penitent would sit on the penitent’s stool until “absolved off the stool.” This was thus a “tangible, visible performance before the whole community and it made it impossible for those reconciled to violate the peace without loss of faith as well as loss of face.”65 Margo Todd claims that “the suggestion of an earlier generation that protestantism gave rise to modern individualism is given the lie by the Scottish penitential rite.”

In the English context reforming ministers had to make do as best they could with the practices of the Book of Common Prayer. Indeed, even the Book of Common Prayer itself appears to lament the “open penance” of the primitive church. It suggests in the “Commination against Sinners” that the “general sentences of God’s cursing against impenitent sinners gathered out of the twenty-seventh chapter of Deuteronomy, and other places of scripture” will have to suffice “until the said discipline be restored again.”66 For some reformed ministers this meant that their hands were tied in the fight against sin. They worried that their congregations were irredeemably contaminated. Stephen Denison, minister of St. Katherine Cree in London, maintained that the godly and the ungodly must take communion together, yet attempted to reassure the godly that the unworthy could not pollute the sacrament: “his being there shall not prejudice thee: he eateth and drinketh damnation only to himself.”67 Since as Peter Lake comments, “this was to introduce the mutual hostility of the godly and the ungodly into the very act of reception,” this represented a manifest failure of communion as a forgiven community whose forgiveness showed them forth as part of the body of Christ.

In the half-reformed Church of England penance was also a public performance.68 The penitent was part of the choreography of service, with his or her confession taking place usually at morning or evening service at the sinner’s parish church between the first and second lessons.69 The penitent was to perform his penance in his own parish church, and his props and costume were seen as appropriate to the drama of his sin. Henry Collin of Moze who was indicted for drunken behavior, for example, was required “to sit on his knees in the church porch with three empty pots before him till the second lesson with a white wand and then to come to the church to the minister and there to speak such words of penance after the minister as shall be delivered to him in writing.”70 Sometimes the penitential performances were in marketplace and church, as in the case of William Cock in Dedham in 1581:

Upon Saturday next he shall in a white sheet about him, bareheaded and barefooted, about 11’o’clock in the forenoon, walk the length of the market place, holding a white rod in his hand a paper on his head describing the cause, and then stand so apparelled at the Moot Hall door (Colchester) by the space of an hour, viz, till 12 of the clock, and then confess openly his fault of fornication with Alice Chase, and shall likewise appareled stand in the middle alley of Dedham church the Sunday following by the time of the morning prayer, and after that shall meekly kneeling on his knees confess the said fault of fornication, desiring God to forgive him.71

These practices seem remarkably continuous from the medieval to the reformed era. However, as I go on to explore in chapter 3, the difference lies in the fact that sins that might have hitherto been adjudicated in the interior forum of the confessional now found their way to the public, juridical setting of the ecclesiastical courts. Indeed the crucial discontinuities between medieval and reformed practices concerned the relation of the internal to the external forum of penance.

England abolished auricular confession as a compulsory annual practice, yet maintained the structure of the ecclesiastical courts. The internal, sacramental forum administered by priests disappeared; but the external forum, the juridical structure remained. The abolition of confession entailed that only public penances, not private ones (such as fasting or the recitation of prayers or psalms), were allowed. Confession was of course allowed, even encouraged in the Book of Common Prayer—in both the general confession in the liturgies of Morning and Evening Prayer, in the Litany, and in the general confession for the service of Holy Communion. It was also a possible implication of the injunctions to the parish priest to ensure that parishioners were in charity before communing, injunctions that might have entailed sufficient pastoral mediation including, perhaps, confession, but that also often resulted in exclusion altogether from the communion.72 But such confessions were no longer enjoined on all and shared by all. As Richard Hooker put it:

The Church of England hitherto hath thought it the safer way, to referre mens hidden crimes unto God and themselves only howbeit not without specially caution, for the admonition of such as come to the Holy Sacrament and for the comfort of such as are readie to depart the world.73

From a practice that was mandatory at Easter, and woven into the penitential season of the liturgical year, confession was essentially relegated to the last dying speech of the criminal penitent in the context of punishment and execution.74 Without question, the abolition of mandatory auricular confession reduced the complexity and indeed the permeability of the boundary between private and public adjudicated by the parish priest. In hardening that boundary—and in the absence of a system of discipline where admonition might work through different levels of rebuke—the abolition of auricular confession in the internal forum assured that penance would also be automatically shameful and humiliating because the resort to public exposure was unmitigated and unmediated by any prior stages of private penance. “Nothing,” says Patrick Collinson, “can have made a greater negative impact than the lapse of the universal obligation to confess to a priest, as the condition both of receiving the sacrament and of remaining an acceptable part of what was still a compulsory Christian society.”75 From its original and pastoral function in the cure of souls, penance became more exclusively the means of the punishment and exposure of souls and bodies. Paradoxically, and as an unintended effect, ecclesiastical authority was further externalized. The faculty of canon law was itself ended by royal injunction by Henry VIII in 1535.76 The reform of ecclesiastical law promised in the Reformatio Legum Ecclesiasticarum, a comprehensive revision of the canon law for the English polity, never took place and in the event civil lawyers took over canon law by authority of another act of Parliament in 1545, which allowed them to exercise ecclesiastical jurisdiction.77 Thus canon law was administered often by lay officials, cut off from the living body of the law in Rome and without a university faculty trained in the continuing study of such law. The Crown in Parliament was the ultimate arbiter of ecclesiastical discipline, and loyalty to the church and to the state were indistinguishable as a result of the Erastian path taken in the English Reformation.

The abolition of auricular confession had far-reaching ramifications. Even those who thought that the precise enumeration of sins there demanded and the obligatory nature of the practice were wrong regretted its loss in the cure of souls. The early reformers such as Latimer and Ridley publicly declared the usefulness of confession, and it is clear from the Visitation records of some of the avant-garde conformist bishops that the practice was encouraged. Given that, as John Bossy has argued, it was one of the chief functions of the priesthood both before and after the Reformation to be a settler of disputes, mediating conflict and reconciling those at odds in preparation for holy communion, it was of the utmost significance that the abolition of auricular confession closed down the internal forum of the confessional. R. H. Helmholz records that canon law had in effect depended on the internal forum regulating much of men’s lives. Now it was the case that conflict that had once been sorted out privately gave rise to public authority. Helmholz records that there was a great increase in numbers appearing before the ecclesiastical courts of those failing to receive communion: he thinks this is an example of the kind of issue once dealt with in the internal forum that now became the business of the ecclesiastical courts.

Confessing and Absolving

In suggesting that “men’s hidden crimes” were to be referred to “God and themselves only,” Hooker differentiates English liturgical practices from both the Genevan and the Roman models.78 Quoting Tertullian, he advocates not a “theater or open court of many of your fellow servants,” but rather a disclosure of the conscience before God. Every man can represent “his own particulars” in the general confession of the Book of Common Prayer and receive a general absolution from them.79 It was still possible to confess to the minister privately if your conscience was troubled, but as T. W. Drury has observed: “what was habitual and what was exceptional had changed places.”80 And even that invitation is watered down in the changes from 1549 to 1552: “Let him confess and open his synne and griefe secretly” becomes “let him open his griefe.” In 1549 the sinner might receive “comfort and absolution” from “us, (as of the ministers of GOD and of the churche”; in 1552 and in 1559 he might receive “the benefit of absolution, to the quieting of his conscience, and auoiding of all Scruple and doubtfulness” by the ministry of God’s word.81 Confession to a minister was thus regarded as exceptional rather than routine, and for those in special need, rather than for everyone.

The words of absolution in the Visitation of the Sick are also very carefully qualified: “by his authority committed to me, I absolve thee from all thy sins, in the name of the Father, and the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.”82 Here there was none of the confidence by which the medieval priest was understood to confess and absolve not as man, but as God. The priest in the Thomistic understanding declares man absolved of sin “not only significatorily but also effectively” because he is speaking as the church, not as an individual.83 The priest is in effect protected from his own intentions for he speaks the intention of the church.84 In the radical redefinition of the keys as preaching or as knowledge that follows reform, there can be no institutional surety of absolution. I will have much more to say about the general absolution and general confession of sin (in chapter 5), but it is apparent that when the office of priesthood changes so do the rites of forgiveness.

Shakespearean theater is everywhere marked by the transformation of confession and absolution. When people confess and forgive in the absence of an office of forgiveness they are newly exposed in their words. For if, as I suggested in chapter 1, the work of ritual is to make explicit what the force of an utterance is, then absent the ritual assurance that makes explicit the force of a performative, conferred in the precisely detailed conventions of the rites of confession, the act of forgiveness is both no one’s and everyone’s to bestow. It is no one’s because the priesthood is no longer authorized to speak in God’s name and a priest’s intention is no longer “covered” by the intention of the church. And it is everyone’s for the same reason. But precisely because priestly authority is contested there can no longer be a clear-cut distinction between what words do in the act of speaking and by the act of speaking, between the conventional and the consequential effects of the words, or in Austin’s parlance, between illocutionary force and perlocutionary effect.85

Supposing you are a priest and you confess and absolve me. Your absolution might make me cry with relief and joy, or perhaps I resent your authority but require its effect, in which case my relief will be tinged with resentment. In either case you will have absolved me regardless of the perlocutionary effects your words have on me. But supposing you are not a priest, but you care about me. You think that I have been making some egregious and harmful decisions and you want to bring me to an awareness of them. You will, in short, be trying to confess me. But now because you have no authority to do this except for the authority I grant you in this particular instance, your attempts to confess me cannot be isolated in the same way from my response to you; there is no longer any conventional procedure whose conditions can be satisfied. We are both “singled out” in this exchange, exposed in our words to each other. Our judgment of each other is laid bare. We will be improvising, and the words we choose to address to each other will be loaded with consequence: the future of our relationship might depend on them. I might refuse the position you are assuming in speaking with me and tell you that you have no right to set yourself up as judge; you might feel that our friendship is thereby shallower and frailer that you had thought. This might be called a “rediscovery of speech,” and it is the essential medium of Shakespeare’s theater.86 Cavell, drawing on the implications of J. L. Austin’s work, wants to call this “passionate utterance,” open to the improvisations of desire rather than the order of law. The rest of this book rehearses the implications of some of these statements, but here I will draw on a very famous Shakespearean example.

Let us turn to another conversation between Hamlet and Gertrude which I call “Hamlet’s Confession” to see how questions of responsibility in meaning crowd into the scene in the absence of the office of confessor. The closet scene begins in mutual accusation as each attempts to claim moral authority and the right to name the offense:

Queen. Hamlet, thou hast thy father much offended.

Ham. Mother, you have my father much offended.

(3.4.9–10)

These accusations involve an attempt to reposition themselves in relation to each other. Gertrude speaks as Claudius’s wife, Hamlet as King Hamlet’s son; both claim the name of father. When Hamlet sets up a “glass / Where you may see the (inmost) part of you” (3.4.19–20), he is laying title to the role of confessor: his task is to bring Gertrude to shame and contrition, and then to confession: “Confess yourself to heaven, / Repent what’s past, avoid what is to come” (3.4.149–50). Hamlet has not been formally invested with the role of confessor; there has been no ordination. He claims the role by virtue of what he has seen, by the burden of his knowledge: that the king is a murderous usurper. So his claim is deeply revelatory of his desires for justice, his own inheritance, and moral authority, claims that can at any point be rebuffed and refused by Gertrude. Whether or not she will grant him the role of confessor on this particular occasion is precisely what is at issue, and it will involve her in the most painful revelations about herself: that she is colluding with the murderer of her husband, supping at his table and sleeping in his bed, sharing the fruits of usurpation. Hamlet as “ghostly father” (a common word for priest or friar) rests the authority for the confession of Gertrude on his own “Ghostly father,” the ghost of King Hamlet whose provenance is notoriously unknown, and who now interrupts the scene. But not before the confession has been punctuated by the killing of Polonius behind the arras; the confessor is now guilty of a bloody deed “almost as bad, good mother, / As kill a king, and marry with his brother” (3.4. 27–28). Where is Hamlet’s moral authority now? In this scene, the “ghostly father” is one that he alone can see; as far as Gertrude is concerned he is staring fixedly into the vacant air and he looks like a madman. As he catechizes Gertrude about her congress with Claudius, it seems as if his object is now not so much to soul-search Gertrude as to evince his own appalled disgust at her sexual depravity.

I am not so much claiming that Hamlet can confess Gertrude but not absolve her, nor that they inhabit a culture that has lost the rites of confession, as of mourning and marriage. Such accounts tend to posit too straightforward and too functionalist a relation between ritual and theater.87 Rather I want to show that in the claims to confession as a language in which they are not formally invested as priest and confessee, they have constantly to take up their responsibility in assuming these constantly changing roles. In that endless and uncertain terrain, there is a constant struggle over where authority might lie, and who can lay claim to the “ghostly father” is constantly in play. In such play each character is newly and continually exposed to the other, and to his or her own judgment of the other.

In the complex transformations from penance to repentance, some of whose contours I have attempted to trace here, there can be no simple model of replacement, no blanket functionalism which defines and adjudicates cultural losses. Rather, as J. L. Austin says, “the total speech act in the total speech situation is the only actual phenomenon which…we are engaged in elucidating.”88 This kind of an approach requires a sensitivity to occasion; it entails that ethics pervades every act of speech.89