Chapter III. The Sacrament of Penance the Means of Perfecting our Contrition
We have seen how the Sacrament of Penance requires, and infuses, and perfects the knowledge of ourselves, and next I wish to show how in like manner it requires, and infuses, and perfects our contrition. It is not only true that they who are least contrite go less often to confession, but also that they who go often become most contrite, and that their contrition is elevated and matured by frequenting the Sacrament of Penance.
Now it is hardly necessary to state here in words that contrition is of two kinds, the contrition of fear and the contrition of love. But in the production of this sorrow there are many distinct motives, progressive in their operation, and ascending in their kind from the lowest sorrow which is necessary to the Sacrament to the highest, which is a special gift of God.
- And first, there is a sorrow which springs from the knowledge of our sins. This is the first and lowest motive of contrition, the deadliness and baseness of our sins seen in the light of the presence of God.
But at the outset of our conversion, or life of penance, our sins, though they be so many, all seem as one. They are all mingled in confusion, and they conceal each other and themselves by their multitude and their complication. A mountain of sand and a heap of stones seem to us at first to be but one object. It is only as we draw near to them, and begin to look into them, and to separate the grains and the stones, that we begin to find their number. Moreover, so long as the effects of a sinful or of a worldly life are upon the heart, it is stunned and dim-sighted. It is only gradually that we begin to see the innumerable multitude of our sins, and then they seem to us to surpass all number. As we draw near to them, they disengage themselves and stand out one by one, and what we once thought from a distance to be but one, separates itself into an infinity of particles. So our sins stand out, each one in its distinctness of kind, of number, and of circumstance.
And as this process is advancing, so also our sorrow is increasing. We had in the beginning a sorrow for the sins of our life, seen in the tangle and confusion of our first conversion. But now we feel a sorrow for each as we remember them one by one; and a greater sorrow it may be for each, one by one, than before we felt for all together. I have already attempted to describe this process of growing illumination, by which we gradually attain a more adequate perception of our state before God. I say a more adequate, because, after all, it is but a small part of the great and complex multitude of the sins of our life, which we ever see in this world. They were all present one by one, in their distinctness and in their guilt, before the Divine vision of
Jesus, in the garden of His agony: they are all written in the Book of His remembrance: they will all be revived before our eyes in the particular judgment, but now our fullest perception of them is inadequate, and falls far short of these true and Divine revelations of what we are. Still as they come out more and more into the light, so they become each one a subject of sorrow. Though our Lord does not require of us a separate act of sorrow for each separate sin, yet each separate sin as it comes to mind will be a new motive to sorrow, and though the act of sorrow be but one, the motives will be many. But all this may be no more than the sorrow of holy fear, awakened by the deadliness and the baseness of our sins, as they stand out before the conscience illuminated by the Spirit of God.
- There is then another kind of sorrow, more pure and generous, which springs from a sense of the love of God.
He loved us while we were yet in sin. The Prodigal in the far country remembered his father, and his father's love. The consciousness that his father loved him still, moved him to return, and to accuse himself with a profound humility. The sense of his unworthiness and of his ingratitude, was sharpened by the sense of his father's tenderness. The sunshine of his childhood and of his boyhood, and the light of his father's countenance, rose full upon him once more, and he knew that although he was all changed, his father was still the same; that though his heart was hardened, his father's heart was yet full of loving-kindness. All this he felt while he was still far off in his misery. How much more when his father fell upon his neck, gave him the kiss of peace, and arrayed him once more in the raiment and the ring of sonship. Then the consciousness of his own selfishness and ingratitude deepened all his contrition. It was keen while he was yet trembling in his sins, but keener far when his sins had been forgiven. The absolution of his father's love elevated him to a higher, and to a more generous, because a more loving sorrow. So it is in the Sacrament of Penance, when we have indeed "tasted that the Lord is sweet," and have been made the subjects of His miraculous love. When we have received from Him the pledge that " when as yet we were sinners, Christ died for us,"1 arid while we were yet in our sins, our Heavenly Father loved us with an everlasting love, then we begin to understand the words of the Holy Ghost, " God so loved the world as to give His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him may not perish, but have life everlasting."! "In this is charity: not as though we had loved God, but because He hath first loved us, and sent His Son to be a propitiation for our sins."J Then we see that but for this changeless love we should long since have died eternally; that by it He bore with us in childhood, in the times of our ignorance; in youth, in the time of our sin; and in manhood, in the time of our cool and deliberate self-love. It is "the mercies of the Lord that we are not consumed: because2
His tender mercies have not failed."3 We wake up to know that we have been encompassed and enveloped in the love of God, that we have been borne up and sustained by it, even when we thought nothing of Him, nay, even when we were provoking Him every day, as if the Prodigal after his return had begun to carry himself loftily, and to forget his past unworthiness, and even to relapse, and after his relapse to be once more forgiven. For such is our state. Again and again we have sinned like the Prodigal, and again and again our Heavenly Father has received us, as He did at the first time, with the kiss of peace and perfect absolution. It was this thought that made Saint Catherine of Genoa so profoundly contrite. In the progress of her repentance, a ray of God's love so intensely burning and piercing was infused into her soul, that all appeared to her in a new light, her past and her present life, her sins of thought, word, and deed, her sins of commission and omission, all bore a new meaning, and received a new interpretation.
- Again, there is another motive of sorrow, that is, the special sense of our personal sinfulness. I have already spoken of the sorrow arising from the knowledge of our sins, but this sorrow for our personal sinfulness is different in kind. Many who are covered with a multitude of sins have little of it. Some have most of it, whose sins are lightest and fewest, for it is a perception depending upon what we are. And the most saintly hearts are the most illuminated. I have already quoted St. Clare, St. Vincent Ferrar, and St. Francis Borgia as proofs. I might take one more example, and that from St. Paul, who says, "that Christ Jesus came into this world to save sinners, of whom I am the chief;"4 and this he said not by way of a pious exaggeration, but because of the knowledge he had ot himself. It is no rash and rhetorical over-statement, but the true expression of his inward consciousness, as the following reasons will show: First of all, we do not know so much formal evil of any one as we know of ourselves. We may, indeed, know more material evil of many, that is, we may know of many who have fallen into sins more glaring and scandalous, from which we have been preserved. But the formal evil of actions is to be estimated by the internal acts, and these by the light we possess, and by the operations of the Holy Spirit, against whom we have sinned. It is certain, therefore, that lesser sins against greater light are more formally sinful than greater sins against lesser light. And it is this we may know of ourselves, but we cannot know of any other. Our Lord one day said to St. Mechtildis: " Come and see the least in the kingdom of Heaven, and thou shalt know the fountain of loving kindness. And she saw a man clothed in a green garment, with smooth hair, of middle stature, and very beautiful countenance. She asked, Who art thou? and he said, I was upon earth a robber and a malefactor, and never did I anything good. She asked, How didst thou enter into this joy? He answered, All the evils I did were done not out of wickedness, but as by custom; and because I knew no better, because I was reared up in them by my parents, wherefore by penance I found mercy with God."5
Again, we do not know of any one who has received so great graces as we have. Others may have received more, but we do not know it. We are able to measure in some degree, but that most imperfectly, the numberless gifts which God has bestowed upon each one of us; that is, in our Baptism, Confirmation, Communions, and Penance, in our childhood, youth, and manhood; the lights, inspirations, stings of conscience, and impulses of heart, which have perpetually moved and sustained us. All this inner world of our own God knows, and so does each one for himself. But of another no man can judge. Even the nearest do not know how much grace God has bestowed upon others. How much less can we know and judge those who are afar off.
We are conscious not only of the abundance of Sacramental graces, but of the graces out of the Sacraments, which have filled the atmosphere in which we breathe, and pervade every moment of our lives. So far as we know, none have ever received so many, none have ever been so followed and sustained, so invited and solicited, so warned and so encouraged. All the wonderful long-suffering and patience, the delicacy and generosity of the Holy Spirit with us from our Baptism, we know. It is like the continuous beat of our heart, which we have felt from our earliest childhood. We are per. sonally conscious of our own spiritual life, but we can only know that of another by hearsay, and a most imperfect and fragmentary observation. And as we know of no one who has received so many graces as we have, so we know of no one who has so little corresponded with them. Out of many lights we have followed few, and out of many invitations we have accepted only a scanty number. Many graces we have altogether lost by resistance, and many with which we ought to have corresponded generously and adequately we have hardly answered at all, or with an ungenerous reserve. What might we not have been now, if we had been true to our baptismal grace? How soon it was soiled, how wantonly it was squandered; how tardily and reluctantly we answered to the grace of conversion, which led us back to penance; how little time we retained our first absolution, or the fervour of our first communion, or the strength of our confirmation, or the spirit of holy fear which came upon us in our chastisements, or the spirit of praise which sprung up within us in the days of consolation. All our whole life has been a long series of graces given profusely and little used, of Divine generosity and human illiberality, of inexhaustible mercy on God's part and niggardly returns on ours. It is not only then the sight of our sins, of which I spoke first, but the sight of ourselves, and of our sins as committed in the midst of such graces, and by one who has been singled out for such endless and countless mercies, that ought to deepen our sorrow with a new motive, and to soften us with a peculiar sense of our own personal sinfulness.
- But there is still another kind of sorrow less personal, and more generous than the last, and that is, the sorrow which springs from the passion of Jesus: "They shall look upon Me, whom they have pierced: and they shall mourn for Him."6 With the marvellous precision of thought which marks the Theology of the Church, a distinction is made between the imperfect and the perfect contrition, that is, between attrition and contrition, properly so called. The word attrition signifies the bruising of the heart, as by a fall, or by a blow; but contrition signifies the bruising to powder, the perfect breaking up of the hardness of the heart. The former expresses well the action of grace, but the latter the action which love alone can accomplish; and such is the distinction I have tried to mark between a sorrow for our sins and a sorrow for our personal sinfulness.
There is, however, another word in common use, still more expressive, and with a distinction more clearly and finely marked, and that is, compunction. This signifies a piercing, and a piercing together with our Lord Jesus Christ, a partaking in His wounds, as compassion is partaking in His sufferings. As contrition, then, is the perfection of attrition, compunction is the perfection of contrition. It is its mature and ultimate form, and stands to the previous kinds of sorrow as the Beatitudes to the gifts and graces of the Holy Ghost. After the sorrow and shame which spring from contemplating the guilt, and baseness, and deadliness of sin, comes the sorrow which springs from God's love and our own ingratitude, and then from the sufferings of the Sacred Heart in Gethsemani and on Calvary, and from our personal guilt towards Him who loved us so much, and has been loved by us so little. The motives of this sorrow are specially, the Bloody Sweat, the five Sacred Wounds, the wounds of the Sacred Countenance, and the Divine Sorrow of the Sacred Heart. " All the day long have I spread forth My hands to a people that belie veth not and contradicteth Me."7 And in His outstretched palms, the print of the nails reproaches us with the sharpness of death, which He overcame for us, and for the hardness of heart with which we have crucified Him again and again unto ourselves. He is always before our eyes set forth crucified among us,t and crying to us from the Cross, " 0 all ye that pass by the way, attend and see if there be any sorrow like to My sorrow: for He hath made a vintage of Me, as the Lord spoke in the day of His fierce anger. "t Truly we pass by and leave Him to hang all alone upon His Cross for us; we pass by, and pass on to our pleasure, our forgetfulness, our ease; and the remembrance of His ineffable sorrow leaves no impression upon our lives, and casts no shadow over our careless hearts. We go all the day without remembering Him. We look upon the Crucifix, without accusing ourselves of having caused His great sorrow, and of robbing His Cross of its fruit in ourselves, and of renewing His Passion, by returning to the sins for which He died. Now this sorrow, once conceived, is a sorrow which will grow as long as life lasts, for the contemplation of the Passion of Jesus is inexhaustible, and at every new manifestation of His love and of His sufferings casts a new light upon our sins. And here we have the key to what we have already seen, namely, that the greatest Saints have sorrowed most for sin. They have sorrowed most, because they have known most of His love and Passion, and because they were most like Him, in His hatred for sin, and His zeal for the glory of His Father. Such then, was the illuminated compunction of St. Paul, when he called himself the chief of sinners. It is the perfection of such sorrow to be self-forgetting. As it is purified of self, it remembers only Jesus. St. Mary Magdalen, when she hurried to the Pharisee's house, and stood behind our Divine Redeemer, weeping, was full of sorrow and of love; and yet what was her contrition then, compared with her sorrow when she stood by the Cross of Jesus on Calvary, or when she lingered all alone and weeping at the empty Sepulchre, and knew not where they had laid Him?8 What made this change in her sorrow, but the Passion of Jesus, the true and Divine Crucifix on which she had gazed on Calvary? We read in the writings of B. Angela of Foligno, that she passed through eighteen degrees of compunction, beginning with aconfession in which, through natural shame, she concealed her sins, and ending in the sorrow of the Saints. After she had made many steps in the way of contrition, she tells us that one day, at the sight of the Crucifix, a flood of sorrow and self-accusation came upon her, with a sense of her ingratitude to Him whom her sins had pierced, so that she was overwhelmed with a grief beyond control. And ever afterwards the sight of a Crucifix was enough to throw her into a tumult of sorrow, insomuch that her companions were forced to hide it from her. Such is the contrition of a soul pierced with the consciousness of the wounds of Jesus, and wounded itself by them. It says, with St. Paul, " With Christ I am nailed to the Cross,"9 and with Him it sorrows, and for His sake.
- Lastly, there is a sorrow which crowns all, and is the special gift of the Holy Ghost, a sorrow which St. Paul calls " the sorrow that is according to God, working penance steadfast unto salvation.''^ Our Lord promised this sorrow, when He said, " When He," that is the Holy Ghost, " is come, He will convince the world of sin."} We have seen how a penitent who brings nothing but the sorrow of Faith and Hope to the Sacrament of Penance, receives therein the sanctifying grace of the Holy Ghost, and Charity; and by the infusion of Charity is raised once more to the life of God, and elevated to union with Him. Thenceforth he is able to make acts of perfect contrition. Though perhaps at the time of his absolution he may not do so, yet he is thereby placed in a state of habitual power so to do. And all the motives of contrition of which I have spoken, begin to work upon his heart, and his whole disposition of soul towards God becomes more filial, loving, and generous; and the vision of God, and of himself, grows more clear and abiding, and his sense of the love and of the Passion of Jesus more vivid and subduing, so that day by day his sorrow is purified of servile fear and of selfish desires. In the measure in which the sanctificationof the soul is deepened and enlarged, the sorrow for sin is increased. That which hinders sorrow for sin is sin itself. The more sin is cast out, the more sorrow enters. Therefore, as we have seen, the greatest Saints have always had the greatest sorrow for their own sins, and also for the sins of others. They have lamented all their life long, with a vehemence of self-accusation, for acts which others, perhaps, would have hardly confessed at all. St. Teresa speaks of herself in a language which would make us suppose her guilty of great and grave sins, when from her confessors we know that she never committed a mortal sin. The cause of this is the supernatural light in which she estimated sin, as in the light of God Himself. The consciousness that in sinning we have grieved and resisted the Holy Ghost our Sanctifier, our patient Guide, and our Helper, who from our Baptism has never left us for a moment, unless we have forsaken Him, and at the first relenting of our hearts has returned to us, to inhabit our whole soul in all its power of action and affection, is the last perfection of a contrite heart.
We have seen how the sorrows of St. Mary Magdalen increased in purity and intensity as she drew nearer to the Passion and Cross of Jesus; but there were others with her on Calvary, whose sorrow for sin was deeper and more profound than hers. The Beloved Disciple knew even more profoundly the deadliness of sin, and the Divine hatred against it. In the heart of the Immaculate Mother of God, seven dolours; like the currents of seven seas, met together. She who was without sin knew best of all creatures the baseness and deadliness of sin, the love of God, the personal sinfulness of men, the passion of her Divine Son for sinners; and because she had no sin, therefore her sorrow was according to God, profound, supernatural, and intense, to the full measure of which a creature is capable.
There was then never any sorrow greater than hers, except one, the sorrow of Jesus Himself. His sorrow in Gethsemani is the type of perfect contrition. It was a sorrow for sin, and for the love of God, free, pure, and generous. " Yelut mare contritio tua."10 His contrition was as the sea, profound, overwhelming, and immense: and in proportion as we are conformed to His Sacred Heart, our contrition will be like His great sorrow. The thought of God, of His glory, of His love, rises over everything else. As St. Catherine of Genoa says of Purgatory, it is not so much the remembrance of sin, as the love of God, which causes the pain of the holy souls. For their sorrow ascending to God is like His own sorrow. It is like the Divine displeasure with which the Holy
Ghost looks upon our sins, when, as St. Paul says, we " grieve Him;"11 it is the grief of God Himself. The sorrow of Jesus is the sorrow also of a human heart, but the grief of the Holy Ghost is altogether and alone Divine.
Such is the universal and efficacious, the supernatural and tranquil sorrow, which the Church calls perfect contrition, raised from motive to motive, and matured by the presence and operations of the Holy Ghost in the soul.
And now, although such a sorrow is the gift of God, yet it is to be sought and to be obtained in and through the Sacrament of Penance. I have already shown to whom it is necessary, and to whom it is beneficial. Some confessions, therefore, are of obligation, and some of devotion. We may leave aside the confessions of necessity and of obligation, for I am now chiefly speaking of confessions of devotion. I desire to show that frequent confession is a great and manifold benefit, even to those to whom it is not necessary.
I have shown how it exacts and sustains the habit of a stated reckoning with ourselves, how it renews our absolution and our peace with God, how it infuses a new Sacramental grace every time we receive it, and how it continually elevates and perfects our attrition, changing it into contrition; and our contrition, illuminating it and changing it into compunction. And all these benefits are obtained by those who come worthily to the Sacrament of Penance week by week, even though they bring only venial sins, or even nothing but a renewed accusation and contrition for mortal sins long ago confessed and forgiven.
And in order that frequent confession may be neither a mere habit, nor a too familiar act, we shall do well to keep alive the habit of making acts of contrition not only day by day, but often every day. It is a good and useful practice to make a list of the sins by which we have displeased God, or to which we are most tempted, and to repeat them name by name every morning, together with a list of the graces most opposed to them,
F and to ask them of the Holy Spirit, with acts of sorrow for the many times we have grieved Him by the faults for which we have been guilty. In this way we may renew our sorrow for the mortal sins already confessed and absolved, for the venial sins not yet confessed, and for the entanglement and confusion of thoughts, words, deeds, and omissions which make up our daily life. If we need an act of contrition, we can find none better than the Name of Jesus: as, " Jesus, I am sorry for the baseness and the multitude of my sins. Jesus I am sorry, because of the goodness of Thy Father and my Father, whom I have offended. Make Thou my sorrow to be deeper, more loving, and more fervent until the hour of my death.
Footnotes
Chapter 4 of 6