God Knows

" ‘ We Speak to God with Our Thoughts’: Abelard and the Implications of Private Communication with God" by Susan R. Kramer, in Church History (Mar. 2000), Divinity School, Duke Univ., Box 90975, Durham, N.C. 27708–0975.

During the "renaissance" of the 12th cen-gian who is best known to nonscholars for tury, religious thinkers such as Peter Abelard his tragic love affair with Héloïse—proposed (1079–1142?)—the famous French theolo-a new purpose for penance, one that reflected the age’s heightened interest in the self, writes Kramer, a graduate student in history at Columbia University.

In his classic Renaissance of the Twelfth Century (1927), medievalist Charles Homer Haskins argued that the century’s cultural and scientific flowering gave birth to modern Western civilization. More recent scholars, Kramer notes, have also examined religious thought in the period, finding "a new level of self-awareness or concern with the inner life."

Before the 12th century, Kramer says, the purpose of penance was to reconcile the sinner to the Catholic Church, "which then mediated with God on the sinner’s behalf." In Abelard’s influential interpretation, however, the object became the sinner’s direct reconciliation to God.

Abelard—whose theological thinking twice won him condemnations for heresy from ecclesiastical councils—accepted the prevailing doctrine that a sinner’s reconciliation to God had three parts: repentance, confession, and satisfaction. But he regarded oral confession to a priest or others as, in a sense, superfluous: God, being omniscient, already knew the sinner’s mind. "[W]ith the sigh and contrition of the heart which we call true repentance...we are instantly reconciled to God and we gain pardon for the preceding sin," he maintained.

Even so, confession—which was generally regarded as obligatory by the early-12th-century schoolmen (and which was mandated by the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 as an annual duty for Christians)—still was useful, Abelard maintained.

In his Ethics, Kramer says, Abelard "explains that the faithful confess their sins to one another in order to obtain prayers from one another and ‘because in the humility of confession a large part of satisfaction is performed and we obtain a greater indulgence in the relaxation of our penance.’ Confession to priests is also instrumental for the imposition of appropriate satisfaction, although we may punish our sins sufficiently according to our own sentencing. Thus, the primary purpose of confession is to make known what had been hidden." Though God alone could truly judge that hidden, inner self, "shame and its expiation are human matters."