A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

When missionaries from Ireland and Scotland started spreading their faith in northern and central Europe in the seventh century, they brought tariff books with them; these were the first ‘penitentials’ or manuals of penance for clergy to use with their flocks. The idea was hugely popular – who would not jump at the chance of being able to do something concrete and specified, however hard, in order to lift a burden of guilt? It became the basis of the medieval Western Church’s centuries-long system of penance: a practice whereby everyone repeatedly confessed their sins to a priest, who then consulted his book or his memory and awarded the necessary penance. Despite its success and acceptance into the Church’s pastoral practice, the whole system directly contradicted Augustine’s theology of grace, and that was to become an issue which helped permanently to split the Western Church in the sixteenth century Reformation, as we will see.