Masculinity, Confession, Modernity: François de Sales and the Penitent Gentleman

Masculinity, Confession, Modernity: François de Sales and the Penitent Gentleman Gary Ferguson IN THE FIRST VOLUME OF THE HISTOIRE DE LA SEXUALITÉ, Michel Foucault famously posited the centrality of avowal to the creation of the modern individual, organized around what he would later term a "hermeneutics of the self: L'herméneutique de soi se fonde sur l'idée qu'il y a en nous quelque chose de caché, et que nous vivons toujours dans l'illusion de nous-mêmes, une illusion qui masque le secret.1 Foucault's story in the Histoire de la sexualité is also, of course, about the emergence of sexuality as the privileged index to the truth of the individual, that on which the process of introspection will focus in its search for self: how sexuality becomes, in an expression used elsewhere, "le sismographe de notre subjectivité."2 It is about the tracking and regulation, the policing and selfpolicing , of sexual desire. Within the process of the development of the introspective sexual subject, particularly its early stages, Foucault notes the importance of ecclesiastical confession, as practiced in the sacrament of penance. Two moments in particular receive attention: first, 1215, the date at which the Fourth Lateran Council made annual confession obligatory for all Catholics with the use of reason; second, the seventeenth century, which saw the general application of a monastic preoccupation not only with actual infringements of the law, but with the endless interior motions of desire: Un impératif est posé: non pas seulement confesser les actes contraires à la loi, mais chercher à faire de son désir, de tout son désir, discours. ... Ce projet d'une "mise en discours" du sexe, il s'était formé, il y a bien longtemps, dans une tradition ascétique et monastique. Le XVIIe siècle en a fait une règle pour tous.' In illustration of his argument, Foucault might well have cited François de Sales, the early seventeenth-century Bishop of Geneva, to whom I shall turn later. Francois's Avertissements aux confesseurs (1603 or 1604) direct priest and penitent to "esplucher les mauvaises pensées," since if the body does not sin in thought, the heart and the soul do.4 The introspection to which confession gives form is subject to a high degree of constraint: it is both required and overdetermined, as the individual 16 Fall 2003 Ferguson is compelled to measure his or her self within and against the "master-code" of Christian moral theology.5 Thus, almost all recent studies of the theory and practice of confession have stressed its dual nature: it serves both to discipline and to console, to police and to reassure, to create guilt as well as to assuage it. They have also reiterated and developed the idea of confession's crucial role in the elaboration of techniques of introspection and the creation of the modern individual.6 The following from Peter Brooks's Troubling Confessions : Speaking Guilt in Law and Literature will serve as example: The requirement of confession imposed by the Church in the thirteenth century both reflects and instigates the emergence of the modern sense of selfhood and the individual's responsibility for his or her actions, intentions, thoughts—and for the acts of speech that lay them bare. . . . What we are today—the entire conception of the self, its relation to its interiority and to others—is largely tributary of the confessional requirement. . . . Without the requirement of confessionone may overstate the issue—there might be nothing inward to examine. In other words, the very notion of inwardness is consubstantial with the requirement to explore and examine it.7 Foucault is not alone in identifying the early modern period as a watershed in the history of confession. Slightly earlier, John Bossy had argued that, between the fifteenth and the seventeenth centuries, confession became increasingly "psychologized," focused on the personal and spiritual aspects of sin, rather than on its social dimension. While this view was developed by the Scholastics, Bossy argues, it is reflected in general attitudes and practices only in the later period.8 At the same time, such an evolution should not be assumed to have proceeded in an...