Proving Woman (6 page)

Naturally, these casuistic projections of practical difficulties would be of intense interest to the authors of confessors’
manuals. Angelo Carletti (d. 1495) will give a summary list of six motives that were widely acknowledged for revealing a confession:
when the priest needed counsel about the nature of the sin or the appropriate penance to be assigned (although the penitent
should remain anonymous); with the permission of the person confessing; when a person confesses that he or she intends to
do something evil that will harm others; when the priest either has already heard or will subsequently hear of the sin through
an independent source; if the priest learns of a conspiracy against his life; when the content of a confession involves neither
a sin, nor the circumstances surrounding a sin, nor the betrayal of a secret.
¹³¹
Moreover, Angelo also recognizes the distinction between the seal of confession and the seal of secrecy arising in the course
of a confession, the taboos protecting the latter being considerably less rigid.
¹³²

A number of these distinctions were, of course, hotly contested or in need of refinement. The rights to privacy of the person
intending to do evil would remain controversial.
¹³³
But other authorities challenged what seem to be more banal categories. Antoninus of Florence, although providing an important
source for Angelo’s
Summa
, was extremely reluctant to permit the revelation of a confession, even with the penitent’s authorization. Citing Peter of
Palude (d. 1342), Antoninus—all too aware of how a judge might pressure a captive into authorizing a disclosure that would
contribute to his own incrimination—insists that such a revelation should be made only if the confessor is absolutely certain
this will benefit the penitent. If the penitent’s coerced authorization acts to his own detriment, however, the confessor
should remain silent: “Because the two fora, namely, the penitential forum and the contentious forum, ought not to be mixed
up.”
¹³⁴

But it was not enough to state emphatically that the different tribunals must invariably remain separate, since there were
compelling reasons why they should not. One such argument for the commonweal appeals to the responsibilities priests shared
with other members of society. Indeed, even the work of Aquinas himself could be used to frame a powerful argument for the
individual’s obligation to denounce certain malefactors. The heretic is perhaps the most compelling case in point, since Aquinas
regards heresy as the most harmful of sins—personally and communally.
¹³⁵
From the perspective of the community’s health, Aquinas argues forcefully against the toleration of heretics, enlisting the
medicinal imagery of surgical amputation as a justification for the death penalty.
¹³⁶
In addition, Aquinas posited generally that the individual was bound to accuse those guilty of crimes that were harmful to
society—a view that is heartily endorsed in the confessors’ manuals like that of Bartholomew of Pisa (d. 1347).
¹³⁷
Nor were such denunciations restricted to the community’s well-being. In keeping with the spirit of Matt. 18.15–17, Aquinas
substantially treats the subject of fraternal correction, demonstrating that it is a part of a Christian’s responsibility
to denounce his or her neighbor to the appropriate authority, provided that this be done in charity and only if the offender
has ignored earlier admonitions to repent.
¹³⁸
Such denunciations could assist in another’s salvation, since Aquinas argued that the perpetrator of such a crime was sinning
mortally by not making a public confession—a view cited by the
Summa angelica
.
¹³⁹

Finally, there is the priest’s moral integrity to consider. A priest may well be interrogated as to his knowledge about a
crime, and even required to take an oath, which was nothing less than invoking God as witness. Perjury, understood as lying
under oath, was, by its very nature, a mortal sin because it implied a contempt of God.
¹⁴⁰
Nor does one escape the taint of sin if one swears under compulsion.
¹⁴¹
Raymond of PeÑafort raises the question of the potential culpability of an individual who is compelled by his lord to swear,
although he knows that he is committing perjury. His answer is implacable: “I say that both are perjured, and sin mortally—the
lord, because he ordered, the knight or servant because he loved his temporal lord more than God.” Even the more theologically
inflected John of Freiburg is in basic agreement with this position.
¹⁴²
Moreover, in a culture the very social fabric of which was dependent on the oath for validation of a given utterance, and
where all portentous assertions or undertakings were sealed by an oath, the reliability of a person’s word was paramount.
Even if an exception were to be made in the case of a priest pursuing his sacramental responsibilities, this could not but
fail to impair his probity from a certain perspective. Must the confessor be expected to perjure himself in order to safeguard
the seal of confession?

In this period of multiplying tribunals, and the concommitant splintering of allegiances, what was needed was a formula that
would secure the integrity of the seal and the confessor alike. And one soon emerged. In the course of the
quaestio
“whether in any case one should be permitted to reveal a confession,” which was posed precisely to contest the position upheld
by Raymond of PeÑafort, Bonaventure argues that the penitent does not reveal his sins to a man, but to God—a position illustrated
by recourse to a “great miracle” taken directly from the exemplum tradition. A man during a life-threatening storm at sea
confessed his sins aloud. When the wind desisted, nobody remembered what he had said: “Wherefore the priest in like manner
ought not to know, as if he had not heard and did not know.”
¹⁴³
In the face of the contention that people should never lie or perjure themselves, even to avoid scandal, Bonaventure unflinchingly
defends the confessor’s obligation to secrecy: “With regard to taking an oath, [the confessor] can safely say: I don’t know.
Nor does he perjure himself, because the oath binds him to say only what he knows as man, not as God.”
¹⁴⁴
Similarly, a priest should plead ignorance regarding his penitent’s sins, even under oath, saying only “what he knows as man,
not as God” (
quod novit ut homo, non ut Deus
).
¹⁴⁵
Thomas Aquinas will likewise adopt this formula.
¹⁴⁶
Even if a confessor is directly interrogated by a superior, under pain of excommunication, as to whether he possesses knowledge
of a certain sin, he should not say. Nor should the embattled cleric be excommunicated, “because he is not subject to his
superior, except as a man; this, however, he does not know as man, but as God.”
¹⁴⁷

The priest’s bifurcated knowledge as man and God became a standard defense of the seal among the theologically oriented pastoral
manuals. Hence when John of Freiburg transmits the standard casuistic tropes—the prelate attempting to pry a confession out
of a subordinate, a malicious judge inquiring about a crime, or an abbot who learns of one of his monks’ abuse of office through
confession—the same answer is repeated at regular intervals: the priest does not know as man, but as God.
¹⁴⁸
Indeed, John likens the “judge who maliciously harasses and inquires of the priest if he knows something of the case through
confession or some other way” to a tyrant attempting to force another to idolatry or to the perpetration of a mortal sin,
thereby casting the priest into the role of martyr.
¹⁴⁹
This rationale even spreads to canonical circles, where it is optimistically embraced by Panormitanus to demonstrate that
the seal of confession “is likewise proved by reason.”
¹⁵⁰

Despite the gradual penetration of the inquisition into lay tribunals, the seal of confession would find no correlative in
the secular world. Nor did secular authorities participate in the priest’s quasi-divine function. In a certain sense, when
Lateran IV outlawed the ordeal, it simultaneously stripped the secular world of its window into the human conscience, its
ability to perceive guilt and innocence as God did, and reallocated it, in augmented form, to the priesthood alone. This priestly
prerogative and the exclusivity of the seal, particularly when viewed in conjunction with the hypothetical scenario of a tyrannical
secular judge attempting to pressure a priest into betraying the confession, seem to pit the two penal systems—ecclesiastical
and secular—against one another. But if occasionally in opposition, the two systems were always proximate and usually complementary.
Many sins were crimes as well, in which case penance and punishment might correspond closely. Even the fact that exculpation
before the heavenly tribunal could lead to incrimination and punishment on earth could be construed as a sign that, for good
or for ill, it was impossible to extricate sacramental confession from its secular counterpart.

The propinquity of overlapping tribunals is even more apparent with respect to sacramental confession and confession of heresy,
thus rendering sacramental confession a potentially hazardous proposition, sometimes for the priest, but more often for the
penitent—a realization that was hardly lost upon the laity. The epigraph from the Fournier register recounts a shepherd’s
flip contention that the only good of confession is the mirth it affords the priest and his cronies. While this comment could
masquerade as simple irony, it is also consistent with a muted awareness of danger. There are numerous explicit testimonies
in the same register where the fear of sacerdotal betrayal is no laughing matter. Individuals testified explicitly that they
refrained from sacramental confession out of fear of denunciation.
¹⁵¹
This is what motivated the quasi-heretical priest Petrus Clericus of Montaillou (better known as Pierre Clergue, himself an
informer against his erstwhile heretical friends) to urge his former lover Beatrix not to confess, assuring her that confession
to God was sufficient. 152 Moreover, the seal could be subverted by any number of specious exceptions, as, for example, when
several priests testified that a suspected heretic merely feigned confession, never bothering to confess any sins at all when
he ostensibly presented himself for this purpose.
¹⁵³
But then such a performance was, arguably, not protected by the seal.

These apprehensions could never be entirely dispelled. But they could be mitigated with the right kind of promotion, one that
made the strongest case possible for the spiritual benefits of the sacrament. Ideally, this impetus should come from the laity.
Moreover, it should not merely justify the act of confessing but embrace the entire penitential system—including the agents
responsible for the administration of penance in any of its many diverse forms. This propagandistic task would be assumed
by women. As one might expect, however, the affirmation of penitential culture proved every bit as fluid as confession itself.
Any endorsement of sacramental justice in penance would inevitably be shared not only with its antiheretical double but also
with its secular counterpart.

¹
Constance, Session 15, arts. 9–11, Tanner, 1:422–23.

²
See Stephen of Bourbon,
Anecdotes historiques, légendes et apologues tirés nr recueil inédit
d’Etienne de Bourbon
, ed. A. Lecoy de la Marche (Paris: Librairie Renouard, 1877), no. 343, pp. 296, 297. Cf. the contritionist position of Abelard,
which also challenged the necessity of oral confession (Paul Anciaux,
La Théologie nn sacrement de pénitence au XIIe si[egrave]cle
, Universitas Catholica Lovaniensis, ser. 2, vol. 4 [Louvain: Publications Universitaires de Louvain; Gembloux: J. Duculot,
1949], pp. 176–207, 223–31). See Raymond of Peñafort’s summary of these views in
Summa de poenitentia et matrimonio
3.4.11 (Rome: Joannes Tallini, 1603), pp. 446–47.

³
John of Pouilly’s difficulties reflect tensions between secular priests and the mendicant orders, whose members he claimed
had cast aspersions on him (Denifle, 2:245, no. 798, n. 2). For the process against John, see Joseph Koch, “Der Prozess gegen
den Magister Johannes de Polliaco und seine Vorgeschichte (1312–1321),”
Recherches de théologie ancienne et médiévale
5 (1933): 391–422. For John’s clarification of his views and recantation, see Denifle, 2:245–46, no. 799. See J.M.M.H. Thijssen,
Censure and Heresy at the University of Paris
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), p. 174. John had been involved in his own set of condemnations, censuring
Marguerite Porete’s work as well as the subsequent heresy of the Free Spirit (see chap. 4, n. 208, below, and chap. 7, n.
19, below).

⁴
Panormitanus,
Commentaria in quartum et quintum Decretalium Librum
(London: Cum privilegio regis Philippo Tinghio, 1586), vol. 3, fol. 256r, ad X.5.38.12,
Omnis utriusque
(= Lat. IV, c. 21). See, however, Pierre-Marie Gy’s analysis of the theological tendency to assimilate Lateran IV with divine
law (“Le précepte de la confession annuelle et la nécessitéde la confession,”
Revue
des sciences philosophiques et th é
ologiques
63 [1979]: 529–47).

⁵
Lea,
Confession
, 1:171–89.

⁶
Raymond of Peñafort implies divine origin in his interpretation of Christ’s command “Do penance” (Matt. 4.17, see
Summa de poenitentia
3.34.4, p. 448). Bonaventure posits that while Christ instituted the power of the keys—the formal part of the sacrament—he
merely hinted at (
insinuavit
) the material part of the sacrament, confession, to the apostles, to whom it was left to institute (in
Commentaria in quatuor libros sententiarum Magistri Petri Lombardi
bk. 4, dist. 17, pt. ii, art. 1, q. 3, resp., in
Opera omnia
, ed. Fathers of the College of Saint Bonaventure [Florence: College of Saint Bonaventure, 1898], 4:441 (hereafter cited as
Sent
.). Aquinas was the first to suggest divine authorization (
Scriptum super libros sententiarum Magistri Petri Lombardi
bk. 4, dist. 17, q. 3, art. 1, resp. ad 3, ed. Maria Fabianus Moos [Paris: P. Lethielleux, 1947], 4:371 (hereafter cited as
Sent
.). This view was disseminated in pastoral circles by Thomas’s popularizers, such as John of Freiburg (see
Summa confessorum
bk. 3, tit. 34, q. 31 [Rome: n.p., 1518], fol. 187r). See Lea,
Confession
, 1:168–69, and Gy, “Le précept . . . et la nécessité,” esp. pp. 536 ff.