and bases our primary ethical conceptions on individual doing and not typical behaviour. Faustian responsiblity instead of Magian resignedness, the individual instead of the consensus; relief from, instead of submissiveness under, burdens — that is the difference between the most active and the most passive of all sacraments, and at the back of it again lies the difference between the world-cavern and infinity-dynamics. Baptism is something done upon one, Contrition something done by oneself within oneself. And, moreover, this conscientious searching of one's own past is both the earliest evidence of, and the finest training for, the historical sense of Faustian mankind. There is no other Culture in which the personal life of the living man, the conscientious tracing of each feature, has been so important, for this alone has required the accounts to be rendered in words. If historical research and biography are characteristic of the spirit of the West from its beginnings; if both in the last resort are self-examination and confession; if our lives are led with an assuredness and conscious reference to the historic background that nowhere else has been even imagined as possible or tolerable; if, lastly, we habitually look at history in terms of millennia, not rhapsodically or decoratively as in the Classical World and in China, but directionally and with the almost sacramental formula "Tout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner" ever in our minds — we have this sacrament of the Gothic Church, this continual unburdening of the Ego by historical test and justification to thank for it. Every confession is an autobiography. This peculiar liberation of the will is to us so necessary that the refusal of absolution drives to despair, even to destruction. Only he who senses the bliss of such an inward acquittal can comprehend the old name of the sacramentum resurgentium, the sacrament of those who are risen again.[1]
When in this heaviest of decisions the soul is left to its own resources, something unresolved remains hanging over it like a perpetual cloud. It may be said, therefore, that perhaps no institution in any religion has brought so much happiness into the world as this. The whole inwardness and heavenly love of the Gothic rests upon the certainty of full absolution through the power invested in the priest. In the insecurity that ensued from the decline of this sacrament, both Gothic joy of life and the Mary-world of the light faded out. Only the Devil's world, with its grim all-presentness, remained. And then, in place of the blissfulness irrecoverably lost, came the Protestant, and especially
- ↑ Hence it is that this sacrament has conferred a position of such immense power upon the Western priest. He receives the personal confession, and speaks personally, in the name of the Infinite, the absolution, without which life would be unbearable.
The notion of confession as a duty, which was finally established in 1215, first arose in England, whence came also the first confession-books (Penitentials). In England, too, originated, the idea of the Immaculate Conception, and even the idea of the Papacy — at a time when Rome itself thought of it as a question of power and precedence. It is evidence of the independence of Faustian Christianity from Magian that its decisive ideas grew up in those remote parts of its field which lay beyond the Frankish Empire.
