Abstract
This chapter explores confession’s role in the religious and cultural imaginary of Protestantism. No longer considered a sacrament by most reformers, the confessional rite was detached from its liturgical context to take on an array of civic and political functions, anchoring the dream for a community of free desire. Far from a diminution, this change allowed confession to pass from discrete speech-act to discursive form, a medium through which the Christian citizen addressed God and her conscience, but also the secular world. Appreciating the medial character of early Protestant discourse offers a new backdrop to view the formation of confession as a political and literary genre in Goethe, Rousseau, and others, and allows us to bring contemporary concerns about transparency into historical and theological relief.
So soon as man declares himself to be free he at once feels bound by circumstances. If he dares to declare himself bound, he feels himself free.
(Goethe [ 1809 ] 1999: 151)
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Notes
- 1.
“It will be found that Protestants have too few sacraments, and indeed only one in which they actively participate, the Lord’s Supper, for they see only baptism performed on others and are not personally benefited by it. The sacraments are the most sublime part of religion, the physical symbol of extraordinary divine grace and favor…[The Christian] must be accustomed to view the inner religion of the heart as completely one with that of the visible church, as the great universal sacrament, which is divided again into a multitude of others, but communicates to each of these parts its holiness, indestructibility, and eternity” (Goethe [1811–1833] 1994: 218–219).
- 2.
The title of the present essay derives from Spengler’s discussion of Pythagoras, Mohammad, and Cromwell: “And as the need of the soul to be relieved of its past and to be redirected remained urgent as ever, all the higher forms of communication were transmuted, and in Protestant countries music and painting, letter-writing and memoirs, from being modes of description became modes of self-denunciation, penance, and unbounded confession” (Spengler [1918–1923] 1947: 2, 295).
- 3.
- 4.
John Bossy offers a crisp study of the spread of the Borromean technology across other Catholic lands in the ensuing years, and particularly on the relation of this new technology to conditions of privacy (Bossy 1975).
- 5.
For an important set of tools to rethink the distinction between public and private at the heart of this narrative, see Michael Warner’s Publics and Counterpublics (Warner 2002).
- 6.
Klueting offers helpful, synthetic overview of how a “confessionalizing process [Prozeß der Konfessionalisierung]” defined this period (Klueting 1989: esp. ch. 1).
- 7.
Brooke Conti has made a compelling argument for the connection between the self-revealing discourse of confession tied to autobiography and repentance with the social and polemical confessionalizing discourse in early modern England, noting in her introduction that these senses have often been seen as distinct or even incompatible. She focuses on the polyvalence and instability of the autobiographical genre to make this case (Conti 2014).
- 8.
Barth likely has Thurneysen’s speech in mind when he notes that the requirement that confession be polemical need not mean it be voiced. “Confession may also be a being-silent,” he specifies, before citing Zwingli’s final hour as an eminent example (Barth 1935: 8).
- 9.
Dorothea E. von Mücke offers a compelling new version of the Rousseau -Goethe genealogy, pointing to the two figures not as the origin of a certain style of literature but of a certain style of publicity: “Together with the birth of the celebrity author such as Rousseau or Goethe, the eighteenth century witnessed the emergence of the concept of an active, critical public” (von Mücke 2015: xiii).
- 10.
Derrida uses the stolen fruit parallel in particular to illustrate what he calls the “délicat et abyssal problème d’archivation—consciente ou inconsciente,” which emphasizes how a text, autobiographical or not, always exceeds its author. Far from an intentional pact between author and reader (as Philippe Lejeune would read Rousseau’s Confessions around the same time), what the Confessions demonstrate is how the referential arena of a text multiplies without clear boundaries (Derrida 2001: 48ff). See also Derrida [1967] 1976.
- 11.
In this remark we can hear the closing bell of a particular history of intentionality, one which comes to grief, as Sartre theorized some decades before de Man , in the recognition of finitude as the ultimate inability to distinguish between a reason and a pretext.
- 12.
Coetzee makes a related point about de Man : “Though de Man errs in asserting that the truth one confesses must in principle be verifiable (one can confess impure thoughts, for example), his distinction between confession proper and excuse does allow one to see why confessions of the kind we encounter in Rousseau raise problems of certainty not raised by confessions of fact” (Coetzee 1985: 207).
- 13.
Starobinski cites a passage from the Annales at this point: “Il faudrait pour ce que j’ai à dire inventer un langage aussi nouveau que mon projet: car quel ton, quel style prendre pour débrouiller ce chaos immense de sentiments si divers, si contradictoires, souvent si vils et quelquefois si sublimes dont je fus sans cesse agité?” (Starobinski [1957] 1971: 229). We see the idea here that will appear throughout Romantic preoccupations with authenticity and expressive singularity, culminating in Schlegel’s infamous apology for the style of the Athenæum, which declares an isomorphism between truth and incomprehensibility (Schlegel [1800] 1971).
- 14.
Starobinski is here quoting from Rousseau’s “First Letter to Malesherbes.”
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Khawaja, N. (2018). The Unbounded Confession. In: Alloa, E., Thomä, D. (eds) Transparency, Society and Subjectivity. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77161-8_6
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