The Irish church’s major innovation, measured in terms of its impact on the larger Latin church, was its approach to penitence.

Sin in the Early Church

To understand what happened, we need to step back and look at how the church had been dealing with sin.

For minor sins, people were expected to do good works to make up for their lapses. But when a believer committed a serious sin, the church imposed public penitence to restore the fallen to fellowship with the church, to make it clear that the church did not condone the action, and to warn others against committing similar sins.

Penance could not be repeated: if you lapsed into serious sin again, you could not be forgiven and reconciled to the church.

The best-known example of this approach to penance was Bishop Ambrose of Milan informing Emperor Theodosius I that he would not serve him Communion until he had done at least semi-public penitence for a massacre in Thessalonica. Theodosius complied.

Penance in the Irish Church

The Irish church approached the issue differently. Particularly in the monasteries, the church held to what Ian Bradley described as puritanical perfectionism, an extreme asceticism that involved severe forms of mortifying the flesh to focus on the spiritual life. At the same time, the Irish saints were well aware of the sin in their lives. Given the rigor of their practice and the high expectations they set for themselves, a different approach to penitence was needed.

This is where the anam chara, or soul friend, came in. As we saw in a previous post, the anam chara was an older, more experienced monk who acted as a confidant, mentor, and confessor to a younger monk. The young monk would confess his sins privately to his anam chara, who would then assign a penance as a medicine to heal the soul of the sin and the sinful tendencies that led to it.

Medicine for the Soul

To put it differently, penance was intended not only as punishment but as a corrective for the sin. As a result, the Irish developed Penitentials, books with extensive lists of sins and the appropriate “medicine” for each. More Penitentials survive from the Irish church than any other type of document, showing how widely they were used.

Not surprisingly given the Irish monks’ “puritanical perfectionism,” the penances were severe. For example, exile from one’s homeland was a common penance, either for a period of years or a lifetime. One of the stories of St. Columba says that after causing a war, he was exiled from Ireland until he had saved as many souls as were lost in the battle.

The Irish approach to penance and penitential manuals spread to the continent and developed into the Roman Catholic sacrament of Confession. Private confession and penance, repeated regularly, became the norm. The theology of penance would change over time, but the basic practice of the Irish church remains.

Confession in Scripture

Underlying this system are several theological points that are worth noting. The scriptural foundation for confessing sins to a priest comes from James 5:13-16. The passage is worth quoting:

Is anyone among you suffering? Let him pray. Is anyone cheerful? Let him sing praise. Is anyone among you sick? Let him call for the elders of the church, and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord. And the prayer of faith will save the one who is sick, and the Lord will raise him up. And if he has committed sins, he will be forgiven. Therefore, confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person has great power as it is working.

The passage is used to support the Roman Catholic sacrament of Anointing the Sick (Extreme Unction). It says the sick should to call the elders (Greek presbyteroi, from which we get the word priest) to anoint the sick and pray, with the result that the person will be “raised up” and his sins will be forgiven. From there it moves to confessing to one another to be healed. Although “one another” does not necessarily mean the elders, they are part of the context of the passage and so it has been interpreted in Catholic settings as confession to a priest.

Repentence, Penance, and the Atonement

Another point worth noting is that the Latin word poenitentia can be translated either repentence, which is closer to the Greek word metanoia used in the New Testament, or penitence. The New Testament call to repent was interpreted in the early church as a call to “do penitence.”

I suspect the reason for this interpretation had to do with theories of the atonement. Jesus’ death was understood to be the source of our salvation, but this was not understood in forensic terms. Instead, it was seen primarily as Christ’s victory over sin, death and the devil, a view known today as Christus Victor. Since Christ’s death was not understood as taking the punishment due for our sins, we need to do penance to satisfy in some measure the demands of divine justice.

Once forensic ideas of the atonement become the accepted view in the West in the twelfth century, the theology of penance had to evolve in new directions. Explaining that would take us too far afield, however. I cover it in A Brief Introduction to the Reformation (or the earlier version with cartoons, The Reformation for Armchair Theologians).

With the Reformation, forensic justification reaches its logical conclusion in the penal substitution theory of the atonement and double imputation. These theories were far from the theology of the early church, however.

Conclusion

The Irish church’s contribution to the Latin church’s understanding of sin and forgiveness was an important step forward. It deepened the church’s understanding of the pervasiveness of sin and the constant need for forgiveness. And ironically, given the ascetic rigor and high demands for holiness in the Irish church, it also softened the approach to penance by making it private and repeatable.