Penitential

A penitential is a book or set of church rules concerning the Christian sacrament of penance, used for regular private confession with a confessor-priest, a "new manner of reconciliation with God"[1] that was promoted by Celtic monks in Ireland in the sixth century AD, under the Egyptian monastic influence of St John Cassian.

The earliest important penitentials were those by the Irish abbots Cummean (who based his work on a sixth-century Celtic monastic text known as the Paenitentiale Ambrosianum)[2] and Columbanus, and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Theodore of Tarsus.

Woods holds that "over time the penitential books helped suppress homicide, personal violence, theft, and other offences that damaged the community and made the offender a target for revenge.

[9] The list of various penitential acts imposed on the sinner to ensure reparation included more or less rigorous fasts, prostrations, deprivation of things otherwise allowable; also alms, prayers, and pilgrimages.

[7] Gildas lists the penance for an inebriated monk, "If any one because of drunkenness is unable to sing the Psalms, being stupefied and without speech, he is deprived of dinner.

[11] Those who could not fast were obliged instead to recite daily a certain number of psalms, to give alms, or perform some other penitential exercise as determined by the confessor.

While the sanctions in early penitentials, such as that of Gildas, were primarily acts of mortification or in some cases excommunication, the inclusion of fines in later compilations derive from secular law, and indicate a church becoming assimilated into the larger society.

As the canon law was codified in the second millennium,[13] a form with a different basis and emphasis, the confessors' manual (or handbook), was developed.