Sin, Interiority, and Selfhood in the Twelfth-Century West by Susan R. Kramer (review)

While historians will likely never agree about what, precisely, the twelfth century "discovered" about the individual, recent scholarship has left no doubt that religious thinkers of the era developed new and ever more probing ways to discuss selfhood and interiority. While some scholars like Colin Morris have argued that the twelfth-century "self" arose from a new emphasis on inner reflection, others have seen the self as a "fiction" imposed by an increasingly assertive Church as it tried to control and discipline the behavior of Christians (pp. 15–16). In an attempt to situate interiority into the larger history of Christian thought and action, Susan Kramer's erudite new book delineates the concept of self that informed Lateran IV's call for confession.

In chapter one, "Secrecy of Conscience," Kramer explores how theologians and clerics approached internal sins that had no obvious external manifestation. During Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages, thinkers like Augustine and Bede used biblical examples of Jesus raising the dead to demonstrate that God Himself granted forgiveness for these sins directly. For Augustine, "verbal signs" were simply inadequate to express the secrets of the heart, but by the twelfth century theologians such as Richard of St. Victor were insisting that such secrets had to be confessed verbally, in private, and to a priest. Thus, "the heart canbe made transparent," and the self becomes an object of priestly scrutiny (p. 53, author's emphasis).

Kramer's remarkable second chapter, "Tears and the Articulation of Authority," further explores the triumph of oral confession, examining how tears gave way to words as the necessary means of expressing contrition. While some early exegetes argued that Peter's tears upon denying Christ indicated that they were sufficient to express his contrition, twelfth-century writers such as Hugh of St. Victor determined that, in Kramer's words, "tears are not a substitute for spoken language" (p. 66). Because a sinner could choose to deceive through words, verbal utterances to a priest in the twelfth century revealed volitional acts by an autonomous soul.

Chapter 3, "Sin and the Autonomous Soul," discusses how this soul could coexist with humanity's collective responsibility for sin, which prevailing theories of original sin required. According to much twelfth-century theology, autonomy springs from the conjunction of body and soul, which gives people the ability to turn away from God, who is blameless for the actions of those who knowingly reject His will. Thus, "the experiences articulated through oral confession were fundamental to the origins of the person as a union of body and soul" (p. 109). The 1215 requirement for oral confession was not simply an assertion of disciplinary authority, but rather an extension of complex discussions on the nature of body and soul.

Kramer again pursues the body-soul dichotomy, this time through metaphor, in the fourth chapter on "Sin, Contamination, and Consent." Oral confession here cleanses the soul's blemishes, often represented as a kind of disease. Indeed, disease became a metaphor for an individual's moral failings, and therefore "internal actions were … vital to determining the individual's status as healthy or contaminated" (p. 133); the sacramental system, under the guidance of the literate clergy, served to cleanse the ecclesiastical community. In this way, Kramer deftly integrates individual autonomy into a model of selfhood that recognized the disciplinary authority of the Church.

Kramer's book is short, and some scholars will find a few loose ends here and there. Those who have been chipping away at the privileged place of the twelfth century in medieval intellectual and ecclesiastical history might be troubled by the scant attention paid here to the period between Bede and Anselm. There is also little acknowledgment here of scholarship that has sought to minimize what I call the "teleology of 1215": Kramer takes a very traditional position as...