Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 18.djvu/509

PENANCE 487 penance at the hands of the local authorities, and betook themselves to Rome, where they stated their case in their own way, with no evidence to check them, so that they were enabled either to evade the canonical penances altogether or to get them much lightened. This abuse was combated by various councils, notably that of Seligen- stadt in 1022, which decreed in its eighteenth canon " that no indulgences obtained from the Roman pontiff should avail for penitents, unless they had first fulfilled the penances set them by their own priests according to the degree of their offence ; and, if they chose to go then to Rome, they must procure a permit from their own bishop, and letters on the matter in question to be carried to the pope." But this attempt to check the practice was unsuccessful, and it became established that, just as certain cases of conscience were reserved to the bishop, and could not be dealt with by ordinary parish priests, so certain other cases were withdrawn from the cognizance of the bishops themselves, and reserved for the hearing and decision of the pope alone. Many alterations in the nature and incidence of penances were made in the course of the later Middle Ages, but the details are unimportant except for specialists ; it will suffice to mention such ex amples as imprisonment in monasteries, penitential pil grimages, and flagellations, the last having been introduced by the hermit Dominic the Cuirassier (died 1060). It is time to speak of the position occupied by penance in the theological systems of the Latin and Greek Churches. Both of them account penance, taken in its widest sense of the method of dealing spiritually with sins by confession, discipline, and absolution, as a sacrament, but there are various differences in their theories and methods. The Greek and Armenian Churches are in full agreement with the Latin Church in regarding confession as an integral and essential part of penance, of which they consider it the outward and visible sign, while the spiritual part of the sacrament consists in the form of absolution, whether precatory or declaratory, pronounced by the priest. And they lay down that the external acts of asceticism per formed by the penitent are not strictly part of the sacra ment itself, but merely the fulfilment of the church s injunctions, and tokens of that repentance which should attend the confession of sins. And confession, though recommended as a religious observance, is not a matter of formal ecclesiastical precept in the Eastern Church, but is left to the individual conscience, though it is usual to practise it at least once a year, prior to the Easter communion. There are also certain public penances some times enjoined in the East for sins of exceptional gravity, publicly or legally proved, but they do not form part of the normal system, one part of which, in strict agreement with ancient usage, consists in suspending heinous offenders from communion for some years, during which they can receive only the dvriSwpov or blessed bread. And in all cases the Easterns deny that penances are in any sense satisfactions or expiations of sins made to appease divine justice. In the Latin Church the first noticeable divergence from Oriental usage is that the old public form of penance, technically known as " solennis," still survives in a docu mentary fashion in the Pontifical, though it has dropped into virtual abeyance. It consists of two distinct and correlative parts, the public expulsion of penitents from church on Ash Wednesday and their reconciliation and readmission on Maundy Thursday following. As these rites preserve in essentials the traditions of very early Western usage, it is well to give some account of them here. On Ash Wednesday, then, those penitents whose names are written down on a list for the purpose assemble, in coarse raiment and barefoot, at the cathedral of their diocese at nine o clock A.M. Their penances are then assigned them severally by the penitentiary, or some other officer deputed for the purpose, after which they are sent out of the church, and bidden to wait at the doors. The bishop, attended by the clergy and choir, takes his seat in the middle of the nave, facing the doors, having previously blessed ashes for the coming rite. The penitents are next admitted, and, kneeling before the bishop, have ashes sprinkled on their heads by him or by some other dignitary present, and sackcloth is also laid upon them in similar fashion. The penitential psalms and the litanies are then said, all kneeling ; after this the penitents stand up to hear a sermon from the bishop, at the close of which he takes one of them by the right hand, and leads him towards the doors, followed by all the other penitents, each grasping another s hand, and also holding lighted tapers, when they are ejected in a body. They kneel outside, and are again addressed by the bishop, enjoining them to spend the time of penance in prayers, fastings, almsdeeds, and pilgrimages, and to return on Maundy Thursday for reconcilia tion. The church-doors are then shut in their faces, and the bishop proceeds to celebrate mass. The office on Maundy Thursday begins with the penitential psalms and the litanies, said by the bishop and clergy in church, while the penitents wait, barefoot and with unlighted tapers, out side the doors. After some preliminary ceremonies, a deacon goes to the penitents with a lighted candle, and kindles their tapers. The bishop then seats himself, as in the former rite, and the peni tents are presented to him collectively by the archdeacon with a formal address. The bishop then rises, and with his immediate attendants advances to the doors, where he delivers a short address to the penitents, which ended, he returns into the church, still keeping near the doors, and, while a psalm is sung, the penitents enter and kneel before him ; then the archdeacon or archpriest petitions for their reconciliation, and, having replied to the bishop s question as to their fitness, recites certain versicles and responses alternately with the choir, while the bishop takes " of one of the penitents, who in his turn takes that of another, till all form a chain, and thus they are led by the bishop to the middle of the church, where he recites a form of absolution over them. Psalms and prayers, closing with another absolutory form and a benediction, end the office, after which the penitents resume their ordinary dress, laying aside that which they had worn during Lent. A further difference between the Eastern and Latin Churches is that the latter has made confession a formal precept ever since the canon of the Lateran council under Innocent III. in 1215, Omnis utriusque sexus, which enjoins all those arrived at years of discretion to confess at least once a year to their own parish priest, or to another priest with consent of the parish priest, the act being no longer left optional. And the choice of a confessor is limited also by the rule that absolution is not accounted valid unless pronounced by a priest having local jurisdiction and faculties. The chief divergence, however, between East and West on the sacrament of penance is due to the remarkable developments both in the doctrinal and the disciplinary aspects of the rite which took place in Latin Christendom during the Middle Ages. The former of these is mainly concerned with the new application, in the 12th century, of the system of indulgences, from its original character of a relaxation of the duration or severity of the temporal penalties annexed to offences by the canons to the remission of purgatorial chastisement of departed souls in the intermediate state a tenet which seems to have been first developed by Hugh and Richard of St Victor which gave rise to the practice of penitential observances by persons not lying under any censure, with the aim of acquiring the advantages thus held out to them for themselves or others, living or departed, to whom they are at liberty to transfer them. The latter is due to the legal, methodizing, and codifying temper which forms such a marked peculiarity of the Latin mind, in contrast with the more speculative Greek. Hence has arisen a copious literature, beginning with those Penitentials, or codes of disciplinary canons, already mentioned, but amplified at a later time into a vast system of moral theology and casuistry, mainly elaborated in the 1 6th and 1 7th centuries (see LIGUORI), whereby the whole modern administration of penance in the Latin Church is regulated. The Oriental churches have no corresponding system or text -books, and continue to observe the less