Regret

A Theology

Paul J. Griffiths

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780268200268, 9780268200251
• eBook ISBN: 9780268200275
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

In this brilliant theological essay, Paul J. Griffiths takes the reader through all the stages of regret.

To various degrees, all human beings experience regret. In this concise theological grammar, Paul J. Griffiths analyzes this attitude toward the past and distinguishes its various kinds. He examines attitudes encapsulated in the phrase, "I would it were otherwise," including regret, contrition, remorse, compunction, lament, and repentance. By using literature (especially poetry) and Christian theology, Griffiths shows both what is good about regret and what can be destructive about it. Griffiths argues that on the one hand regret can take the form of remorse—an agony produced by obsessive and ceaseless examination of the errors, sins, and omissions of the past. This kind of regret accomplishes nothing and produces only pain. On the other hand, when regret is coupled with contrition and genuine sorrow for past errors, it has the capacity both to transfigure the past—which is never merely past—and to open the future. Moreover, in thinking about the phenomenon of regret in the context of Christian theology, Griffiths focuses especially on the notion of the LORD's regret. Is it even reasonable to claim that the LORD regrets? Griffiths shows not only that it is but also that the LORD's regret should structure how we regret as human beings.

Griffiths investigates the work of Henry James, Emily Dickinson, Tomas Tranströmer, Paul Celan, Jane Austen, George Herbert, and Robert Frost to show how regret is not a negative feature of human life but rather is essential for human flourishing and ultimately is to be patterned on the LORD's regret. Regret: A Theology will be of interest to scholars and students of philosophy, theology, and literature, as well as to literate readers who want to understand the phenomenon of regret more deeply.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Confession

EVERY UTTERANCE DOES SOMETHING TO THE UTTERER AND TO the world. At a minimum, when you say something—the weather’s fine today, I’m worried that I might lose my job, the United States is a dysfunctional democracy, last night I slept unusually badly—you become what you weren’t before, which is someone who’s now said what you said. Correspondingly, the world becomes a world in which you’ve now said what you said. Those are novelties, even if uninteresting ones. Sometimes, though, an utterance does more: it at once binds together and mutually transforms the utterer and the object or addressee of the utterance. When I make a promise, or sign my name to a contract, or confess my faith in the LORD before the LORD’s face, I do something with words that binds me, and in some cases also binds the one to whom I say (or write) the words. A contract between us, sealed with words, binds in both directions, as, though differently, does a promise. It’s not that the bonds created in these ways can’t be broken; obviously, they can. But even when they are, there’s something, word-made, that needs to have effort directed at it sufficient to break it. When the LORD says fiat lux, that’s the same as light’s coming to be; there’s no gap between the word and the deed because—for the LORD—the word is the deed. To speak is to make. It’s not ordinarily so for us but sometimes we can, verbally, approach that degree of creative power. “I love you” isn’t only, or even principally, a description of how I feel about you, it’s an instance of that feeling-attitude, performing what it represents as the sacraments also do. The same is true of “I hate you”—that form of words is a blow, as the other is a caress.

“Avowal” is a good enough word for these peculiar utterances. The word contains the thought and sound of the vow, a weighty and performative promise that binds those who make it. To make an avowal is at least to take seriously the content of what you’re saying (it’s no light matter) and to understand yourself to be bound by and to what you’re saying. Once you’ve avowed something, both you and the world are differently ordered: you’ve brought a new and weighty set of relations into being. That is a serious matter, and so avowals are taken seriously and typically flagged as serious. It’s part of the ordinary texture of language—of all human natural languages, that is—to separate avowals syntactically and lexically from quotidian and lightweight utterances by the use of special words and forms. It’s also common to mark them with ritualized gestures and to give them solemnity by the place in which and the people before whom they’re uttered. When I was married in a medium-sized English city in 1975, I went with my spouse-to-be and members of our respective families, dressed more formally and groomed with more care than usual, to a place set aside for the performance of civil marriages, there to repeat, after a man with particular, legally defined, powers in this sphere, words of high-formal diction, and afterward to sign my name on paper to a form of those same words. That was an avowal, and all the elements of its occurrence framed and indicated it as such. What I avowed then was (something like) lifelong love for, loyalty to, and support of my spouse, and in doing that I constituted, as she also did, a new set of rights and obligations between us of such weight that their lifting many years later in the process of civil divorce in another country required the help of lawyers and the expenditure of money and time. A similarly well-marked set of words was in play when, in 1994, I took on the rights and duties of citizenship in the USA; there, too, was an avowal, framed and ornamented by a high secular liturgy (a Marine color guard; a representative of the Daughters of the American Revolution; a federal judge, etc.), and it was clear in the very form of the words used (“I hereby renounce allegiance to all foreign powers . . .”—consider that “hereby”) that those words, and I in uttering them, were doing something, performing something, unusual and significant and transformative.

On this understanding of what it is to confess, I confess that the English have not infrequently shown genocidal tendencies toward the Irish. . . . I confess that from time to time I’ve offended against the strict requirement to tell the truth. . . . I confess that humans are contributing to the devastation of the planet’s ecosystems. . . . I confess that I’ve never managed to finish Robert Musil’s Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften or William Gass’s The Tunnel, and so on. Confession, understood as the act of confessing, is intimate, therefore, with lament and remorse and contrition, sharing with them, to some or another degree, the thought, “I would it were otherwise.” It differs from them in being necessarily public: they can remain inward, and most often do. The rat bite of remorse is typically a matter of feeling rather than expression; it can remain unexpressed (perhaps it most often does), and when it is expressed or delineated, the act of showing it is one of confession rather than one of remorse. Remorse is typically identified in its portrayals exactly as something that should be otherwise. It is, in that way, an object of confession. Contrition is closer to confession than are lament and remorse, but even it can be felt without being confessed.

In English, and in Christian theology, the verb “to confess” isn’t used only for things you would rather not have done. You can confess Christ, or your love for the LORD, or your desire and affection for another human being, or your delight in the music of Mozart, or your American citizenship, without suggesting thereby that you regret any of these things. There is, in Christian talk, confession of praise and of faith as well as of sin, and a similar range of uses of the word is found, though more diffusely, in secular English as well. But here I’ll use “confession” to indicate regretful avowals, avowals of states of affairs contritely wished otherwise by the one avowing.

All confessions are fictive in the sense that they’re formed by artifice. They belong to the sphere of what’s indicated, in Latin and English, as the carefully fashioned (from fingere) and elegantly made. They’re prepared and polished and worked over as is the text of a novel, or a poem, or the polished silver of the chalice into which wine is poured for consecration. They’re the place, the word-chalice, for the contrite identification of what ought to be otherwise, and just as the wine of the crucified one’s blood is poured and given and received with precise and structured care, without spontaneity or naturalness (the crucifixion is the antithesis of a natural event, as are the vessels for the containment and sharing of what’s been crucified, and as is the liturgy in which the crucified one is celebrated most intimately), so the matter of a confession is spoken and communicated and received with just such fictive care.

Confessions have, that is to say, a form, and it’s the form of a fiction. This doesn’t mean they aren’t true, even though that has come to be one of the overtones of “fiction.” It means that they’re prepared and worked over, that they belong to a genre, and that they have their place in the sacramental economy as a pivotal moment in the identification and transfiguration of what isn’t the way it’s supposed to be. There’s a rough but not useless analogy between the words of a confession and the words of institution: the former show, in public and by way of words, what becomes of damage by speaking of it as such with contrition (that is, transfiguration and release); the latter show, in public and by way of words, what becomes of bread and wine by speaking its participation in the flesh and blood of Jesus (that is, transubstantiation and healing). What makes a confession true, though fictional, is double: it should, in identifying states of affairs that ought to be otherwise, do so rightly; and it should be accompanied by contrition, a sense that those states of affairs are detestable, vacantly horrifying, and therefore lamentable. When those conditions are met, confessions are made.

IF CONFESSION IS UNDERSTOOD AS A PARTICULAR KIND OF AVOWAL, it must bring something about. What is that? What do contrite avowals perform and effect that contrition by itself (in this like its close cousins, remorse and lament) can’t? Since the difference between contrition and confession is utterance, the answer to this question must have to do with utterance: what does contrite utterance do that contrition’s sorrow and regret (dolor ac detestatio) don’t? A first-blush answer might be that the confessional avowal’s performativity is located in the fact that it communicates something to those who hear it—after all, utterances communicate while attitudes don’t, or at any rate they don’t do so in the same way. But there are good reasons for thinking that this commonsense answer isn’t the right one, or at least doesn’t suffice.

Augustine (among the most subtle theorizers and users of confessio and its cognates in the Christian archive and the first in that archive, and perhaps anywhere, to compose a work with that title) begins to show why and to indicate where a better answer might be found. At the beginning of the fifth book of his Confessions he writes:

Accept the sacrifices of my confessions from my tongue’s hand, which you created and enlivened so that it might confess your name. Also, heal all my bones so that they might say, “LORD, who is like you?”. For those who confess to you don’t teach you what’s going on inside them. That’s because neither does a closed heart shut out your gaze nor human hardness repel your touch. Rather, you shatter that hardness when you like, whether mercifully or punitively, and there is no one who can hide from your heat. Instead, then, my soul should praise you so that it might love you, and should confess your mercies to you so that it might praise you . . . re-making and true strength are there. (Augustine, Confessions, 5.1.1)

Augustine is here explicit in his denial that confession to the LORD communicates anything. It can’t do that because the LORD always already knows quid in se agatur (what’s going on with you) inside and out, no matter how extensive and intensive your efforts might be to hide this or that. Confession does not, therefore, communicate about your actions, intentions, affects, desires, or what have you. But confession does something. The key sentence in specifying what it does is: “Instead, then, my soul should praise you so that it might love you, and should confess your mercies to you so that it might praise you.” Grammatically, each half of the sentence says that Augustine’s soul—by which he means himself—ought do x so that it might do y. The verbs (laudet . . . amet . . . confiteatur) are in the subjunctive, which is a mood that indicates potential, whether weakly (can, may, might) or more strongly (ought, should, must). At one end of that spectrum the subjunctive shades toward the imperative and at the other it shades toward the indicative, and there are many stopping places in between. My rendering indicates a strongly subjunctive meaning for the first verb in each half of the sentence (“should praise” for laudet, “should confess” for confiteatur) and a weaker subjunctive meaning for the second verb in each (“might love” for amet, “might praise” for laudet). Other renderings are certainly possible, but this one focuses the reader’s mind on the key point, which is that x is a necessary condition for y, so that if you want y, you ought to or must do x.

What, then, are x and y? There are three kinds of action indicated in the sentence: confession (confiteri), praise (laudare), and love (amare). Augustine’s claim is that you need to confess if you’re going to be able to praise, and that you need to praise if you’re going to be able to love. And the object of all these activities is the LORD—indirect (tibi) in the case of confession, direct (te) in the case of praise and love. This pattern of thought shows what confession does: it removes an obstacle, or perhaps an agglomeration of obstacles, to intimacy with the LORD, and it locates these obstructions within the confessor. Confession does something to the confessor, not to the LORD.

It’s a verbal performance that changes the performer, and it does so by re-making (refectio), as is written at the end of the quoted passage. That’s a strong, indeed a radical, claim. The confession-praise-love sequence relates those who perform it to the LORD in such a way that they’re newly made. Whatever the obstructions were that confession is the first step in removing, they must be weighty in order for this to be the result of removing them. The language Augustine uses here echoes that in Genesis, where facere, “to make,” is used alongside creare, “to create,” for what the LORD does in order to bring humans into being. That act—giving us being ex nihilo—is recapitulated by the sequence that begins with confession, and the almost-unavoidable thought this suggests is that the obstructions removed by confession and so on are as nothing, turning those weighed down by them away from what is—paradigmatically the LORD, the one who is—and toward what is not the LORD, which is always and exactly nothing. What confession does is serve as a necessary condition for the praise-love that, when given to the LORD, results in the regifting to us of the being that made us in the first place, and that makes it possible for us to confess and praise and love now. The agent in all this, as Augustine sees it, is the LORD rather than us. What we do when we confess, therefore, isn’t done by us apart from the LORD; it is, rather, what our agency looks like when it’s rightly ordered, which is to say directed toward the LORD in harmony with and in response to what the LORD has given. This is a point of great importance for Augustine in his later polemic against what he took to be Pelagius’s views on these matters; in his best moments he sees that what this must mean is that human and divine agency aren’t competitors—that when we act rightly the LORD also acts fully in what we do, which is just what it means for us to act rightly. But it would be a diversion from the question at hand to explore those matters. That question at hand here is: how, exactly, does confession remove obstacles between us and the LORD in such a way as to permit our remaking? In now providing a speculative answer to this question, I leave behind explicit engagement with Augustine, although most of what follows is suggested to me by reading him and is concordant with what he writes.

We have a number of models for understanding how an avowal works on and changes the one making it even when its content is already fully known to its recipient. Most of these models are legal-performative: judges present at naturalization ceremonies already know that those gathered there intend citizenship. Why else would they be there? When the citizens-to-be raise their right hands and swear the oath of allegiance the judges learn nothing new. But those who say the words of the oath change their relation to the judge before whom they say them, and through her to the USA, for whom she, in the ceremony, stands proxy. Augustine would say: “My soul should confess allegiance so that it might vote.” This kind of example is familiar enough.

There are also nonlegal and noninstitutional models of how a noncommunicative avowal can change someone making it, even when its content is already, and fully, known to its recipient. Consider the apology, certainly a kind of avowal. Imagine that I’ve done you some harm—I’ve slandered you, let’s say, as you see it, making false claims about you to others in such a way that your reputation and prospects are damaged. Suppose, too, that we have a close mutual friend, and you learn from this friend that I’ve repented of my slander—I’ve come to see, the mutual friend tells you, that what I’ve been saying about you is false and that I assumed it to be true because of my ideological commitments and biases. I don’t like you, the mutual friend tells you, because I don’t like what I take you to stand for, and so I was pleased, eager even, to pass on a damaging rumor about you as truth without assessing it. You’re convinced by our mutual friend; I have indeed, you’ve come to think, changed my mind and conduct. Your conviction of this is deepened when you hear me on a talk show repudiating my slander of you. Now, you can see, I’ve showed my repentance, and my penitence, to the world.

But something is still missing. I haven’t avowed my penitence directly to you, the one I harmed by my slander. You’re glad to know that I’ve stopped slandering and that I’m sorry I did it. But there remains, as you see it, a barrier between us. It’s one thing for me to avow my mistake to others; it would be another for me to avow it to you. But then, one day, I do just that: I come to you, humbly apologize for the wrong I’ve done you, and ask whether there’s anything further I can do to make good the damage. By that avowal, I’ve removed an obstacle between us. It’s not that there’s anything new I need tell you: you already know that I’m sorry, that I no longer take the slander to be true, and that I’ve stopped spreading it. What’s changed isn’t your knowledge of me—in this my confession to you is like Augustine’s analysis of confession to the LORD—rather, it’s the removal of an obstacle. My apologetic confession has removed whatever it was that stood in the way of forgiveness—your offer of it and my acceptance of it.

It’s not so easy to say just what the obstacle was that my apology removed. Formally speaking, it was just the absence of a face-to-face apology. That way of putting it, though hardly illuminating at first blush, does indicate something important: apologies, like confessions to the LORD, don’t remove something positive and real and responsive to heavy earthmoving machinery. They remove a refusal, which is absence rather than presence, silence rather than speech, denial rather than affirmation. If I can’t bring myself to face you and apologize to you, it’s because I’m looking somewhere else (at myself, usually) and can’t bring myself to look at you. All that’s needed is for me to turn my face toward yours and say the words that accompany such a turning. Then the obstacle is removed. Ordinarily it’s enough in the person-to-person case, as in the penitent-before-the-LORD case, to make the turn and say the words from Luke 18:13, propitius esto mihi peccatori (“have mercy on me, a sinner”); specification of the sin in question may, but need not, be involved. There, Augustine would say, is remaking, which is a graceful move from the absence that was the refusal to confess toward the presence that is the confession. In avowing my sins to the LORD or to you, I make myself present as what I am, which is the foremost among sinners (1 Timothy 1:15).

CONFESSION AS RECOMMENDED AND PRACTISED IN THE LITURGIES of the Catholic Church is, for the most part, first-personal and in the singular. That is, those who confess, whether in a communal liturgy (Mass, some or another of the liturgies of the hours, a communal liturgy of penance) or to the ears of o...

Table of contents

• Title
• Copyrights
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• One The LORD’s Regrets
• Two Faults
• Three Time
• Four Lament
• Five Remorse
• Six Contrition
• Seven Confession
• Eight Penance
• Bibliography
• Index