Privacy, Interiority and Confession: A Historical Perspective

Abstract

Privacy, Interiority and Confession: A Historical Perspective Yelena Mazour‐Matusevich Introduction This historical inquiry focuses on the connection between the increasing interiority of a religious experience, confession, and the development of privacy, and aims to demonstrate how certain innovations in pastoral care and new approaches to contemplative practices led to the emergence of privacy as a condition of confession and penance, and, therefore, of salvation itself. Using Michel Foucault's theoretical framework, as well as primary historical sources from the late fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries, this essay argues that developments in introspection and a more personalized approach to confessional practices in late medieval‐early modern times resulted in a tension between privacy and safety, which is highly relevant today. The major difficulty in exploring the connection between interiority and privacy results from a lack of a clear definition of either concept. There is no generally accepted definition of interiority, which is sometimes called interiorization, subjectivization, individualization, individuation,1. or “un certain movement intériorisant dans le christianisme,” according to the expression of Jacques Derrida.2. The same goes for privacy, which can be understood in judicial, psychological, economic, political, ethical, and other terms. However, as important as it is to formulate these concepts' meanings, the lack of mathematical precision in their definitions should not hinder the discussion undertaken in this volume, for, as Aristotle rightly put it, in human affairs “we must be satisfied with the broad outline of the truth […]”3. For our purposes, the examination of privacy from the judicial point of view, as presented by Dr. Theresa E. Miedema in her article in this volume,4. offers a sufficient starting point, since some contemporary definitions and insights into this issue turn out to be surprisingly relevant for contextualizing late medieval‐early modern pastoral concerns for the modern reader. Thus, Dean Prosser’s analysis of the case law related to privacy,5. which “was adopted by the Restatement (Second) of Torts (2010), and has been widely endorsed in Canadian and American jurisprudence,”6. is fairly applicable to the late medieval‐early modern concerns with privacy examined in this essay. Among the four torts related to the privacy case and examined by Prosser, two—public disclosure of embarrassing private facts and publicity that puts the plaintiff in a false light in the public eye—are not only relatable to the historical period in question, but also, as we shall see, correspond to apprehensions concerning privacy of confession as articulated by clergy at the time. By the same token, in a leading UK case related to the tort of breach of confidence Campbell v. MGN Ltd, Lord Nicholls' observation that “[a] proper degree of privacy is essential for the [well‐being] and development of an individual”7. is remarkably consistent with both the early modern assessment of the issue and historical anthropology’s view of privacy as a precondition to personhood. The turn inward The spirituality of the late medieval‐early modern period is commonly associated with the “turn inward,” which gradually became synonymous with the beginning of self‐formation in what Foucault identified as the “genealogy of the modern subject."8. Both the Protestant and Catholic faiths came to place a greater emphasis on interiority, testifying to a “massive subjective turn of modern culture, a new form of inwardness, in which we come to think of ourselves as beings with inner depths.”9. While this process remains “all but clear‐cut and easily comprehensible,”10. scholars have recognized several criteria, or triggers formative for future developments, of introspection in late medieval Christianity. Among them are innovations in pastoral care, creative approaches to contemplative practices, the transfer of monastic methods to laity, and the reworking of earlier historical models of auto‐exteriorization.11. Auto‐exteriorization is understood as the process of consciously and voluntarily (not under duress) expressing, in oral or written form, in public or in private, thoughts and feelings, which were up until this point known only to their beholder. Michel Foucault identified three historical models of auto‐exteriorization in the Western world: the classical Greco‐Roman “gnomic self,” from the Greek gnomé, meaning coincidence of will and knowledge;12. the dramatic public exteriorization of sins called...