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The Logic and Lyric of Contrition
By Robert C. Roberts

"[T]aken quite literally, the phrase, 'there is no health in us' exaggerates. There must be some spiritual health in us for us even to notice that we are sinners, and still more for us to care about that fact (contrition is a Christian virtue). But the lyric of contrition, like any other lyric, affords a certain license, having a poetic quality, good prayers do not have to be precise theology at every turn. However uncomfortable we may feel with it, the phrase expresses quite excellently that we have fallen very far short of the glorious life to which God has called us-that we are badly spoiled, even if not quite completely."

Isaac Singer's Joseph Shapiro¹ is a man suspended in agony between two worlds, the fast, modern world of money, pleasure, and sexual promiscuity, and the timeless world of ancient Jewish holiness. He is thereby suspended between two selves, two sets of passions that bid to define him as a person: the lusts of the flesh and ambition on the one side, and the love of God and God's eternal law on the other. His agony consists in the difficulty of identifying decisively with one of these incompatible selves. There is no real doubt, at any point in the novel, that the real Joseph Shapiro is the ancient Jew, the one who looks with revulsion upon that other, New World self; but there is doubt whether the ancient Jew in him will ever be actualized, will ever win out over the tawdriness, stupidity, and sickness of American "civilization" and its corresponding "character."

When Joseph goes to buy a prayer shawl and phylacteries, the shopkeeper asks, "Have you become a penitent?" and his answer is "I want to be one."² The mere fact of being torn between these worlds, of feeling the pain and confusion, even the guilt, the regret, the fear, the sorrow, is not enough to make him a penitent. Needed is a solid identification with the new self that will be nurtured by earlocks and phylacteries that proclaim to the world that he is not of it, but allied to a different order of things. Penitence is a solidity of character nurtured by action after action, insight after insight, that consolidate the self in

Robert C. Roberts teaches philosophy and psychology at Wheaton College in Wheaton, Illinois. He is author of Taking the Word to Heart: Self and Other in an Age of Therapies (1993).

¹ In The Penitent (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1983).
² Ibid., p. 131.

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the terms of contrition. Shapiro's experience makes painfully clear that the feeling of emotion, however finely tuned it is in itself, and however dramatic may be the actions that issue from it, is no guarantee of genuine penitence. And yet an emotion (I call it contrition) is the centerpiece and moving force of the process of repentance and the formation of a new self. I aim to clarify the concept of this emotion so as to make some suggestions for the Christian practice of confession. My central illustration will be a fanciful reading of the encounter between King David and the prophet Nathan in 2 Samuel 12.

I argue that contrition has both a "lyric" and a "logic" that must be respected if the church is to prosecute responsibly its calling to form selves fit for the kingdom, souls genuinely transformed by the gospel of grace. As to its logic, contrition is not just any old feeling that one may have on the occasion of thinking about the improprieties of one's own life.³ It is, in quite definite ways, related to and distinguishable from such neighbor emotions as fear, regret, embarrassment, and guilt. (Some of these neighboring emotions are enough like contrition, in one respect or another, that we may think of them as aspects of contrition; but none of them is contrition, and I think it is not, finally, quite right to regard contrition as made up of other emotions like regret, guilt, and hope. I shall try to indicate a way of thinking about emotions which makes it unnecessary for us to think of some emotions as made up of more basic ones.) By specifying these features and limits of the concept, we "define" contrition and, thus, a central phenomenon of the Christian spiritual life. The concept of contrition must be kept definite, and definitely Christian, by preserving the logic of the language in which we express and teach contrition in the church. Prayers of confession are an important instance of such language. But it is not enough just to get contrition's logic right. If people are to be positively moved with it, our language of contrition must be properly affecting, and that is to say it must display an appropriate poetic, rhetorical, or lyrical quality, one fitting the fact that contrition is an emotion.

I

The Lord sends the prophet to King David after he has impregnated Bathsheba, the wife of Uriah, and, then, proving unable to conceal his sin, has arranged for Uriah's death on the battlefield. As the writer tells the story, David seems remarkably ruthless in his actions and

³ "...emotion which is Christian is checked by the definition of concepts, and when emotion is transposed or expressed in words in order to be communicated, this transposition must occur constantly within the definition of the concepts.... In order to express oneself Christianly there is required, besides the more universal language of the heart, also skill and schooling in the definition of Christian concepts, while at the same time it is of course assumed that the emotion is of a specific, qualitative sort, the Christian emotion.... For a Christian awakening what is required, on the one hand, is being grasped in a Christian sense and, on the other hand, conceptual and terminological firmness and definiteness." Søren Kierkegaard, On Authority and Revelation, (New York: Harper and Row, 1966), pp. 163, 164, 165.

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insensitive to his immorality. Perhaps he half believes such behavior to be a prerogative of the king. To awaken David to his sin, Nathan does two things. First, he tells the story of an atrocity that elicits the king's indignation and surprises him by pointing out that David himself is the offender in the story. And second, he prophesies the punishments that David's sin will bring him.

A rich man with many flocks, says Nathan, gets a visitor, but doesn't want to use up one of his own lambs for hospitality. Instead, he takes a lamb from a poor neighbor, indeed, the only lamb the neighbor has, which "grew up with him and his children; it used to eat of his morsel, and drink from his cup, and lie in his bosom, and it was like a daughter to him." And he slaughters the neighbor's lamb and hosts his visitor with it. David responds to the story with strong anger: "As the Lord lives, the man who has done this deserves to die." Nathan invites David to turn that anger on himself: "You are the man." Furthermore, says the prophet, you will have continual military troubles with neighboring nations, and someone will disgrace you by having intercourse with your wives in public, and the child you have engendered in this affair will die.

David responds to Nathan's prophecy of the child's death by beseeching God, fasting, and lying all night on the ground, but, as soon as the child dies, he gets up, washes and anoints himself, dresses, worships, and then goes home and has a meal. Surprised at David's sudden recovery when the child is dead, the servants ask,

"What is this thing that you have done? You fasted and wept for the child while it was alive; but when the child died, you arose and ate food." He said, "While the child was still alive, I fasted and wept; for I said, "Who knows whether the Lord will be gracious to me, that the child may live?" (vv. 2lb-22)

David's behavior bespeaks fear of punishment more than contrition. The concern characteristic of contrition is not aversion to punishment (indeed, the contrite person may welcome punishment), but aversion to turpitude. Since the death of the child does not decrease David's turpitude, we would not expect it to affect his behavior, insofar as it expresses contrition.⁴ So the quick change in behavior suggests that it expressed some other emotion.

One can imagine that, upon learning of Bathsheba's pregnancy, David regretted that he had yielded to his urge. To regret an action is to see it as a mistake, an action that would have been better left undone, most likely because of its untoward consequences, as in the present imagined case.⁵ To be contrite, by contrast, requires seeing

⁴ We will, of course, expect him to start grieving for the child; that is, his anxiety for the child turns to grief when the child dies. This is what the servants expect from David (vv. 2lb-22), and so they are surprised by his equanimity.
⁵ One can, however, easily imagine cases of non-consequentialist regret that are not cases of contrition either. For example, I regret having put a point in a certain way in conversation, not because it was misunderstood, but because it was inelegant, even though my interlocutor did not notice the inelegance.

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one's action as a culpable offense.⁶ If David were contrite about lying with Bathsheba, he would not only wish that he hadn't; he would wish this for a particular kind of reason, namely that in doing so he offended against God, her, and Uriah. Nathan's parable is calculated to arouse David's anger against the rich man, to bring this man into focus not as one who has made a regrettable mistake but as one who has culpably wronged the poor man; and contrition is like anger in this respect, except that the penitent takes himself to be the offender.

We regret specific misdeeds, such as an illicit sexual union, but it is not quite right to say we are contrite about specific deeds. Whatever the writer of Psalm 51 has done, his emotion goes beyond his action to grasp his very being as a person:

Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity,
and in sin did my mother conceive me. (v. 5)

He begs God to create in him a new heart, a new center, a new spirit (v. 10). Feeling sullied by what he has done, he asks God to wash him clean of his iniquity (v. 2). It's a mark of contrition that its object is not directly the illicit deed or thought, but the self. It generalizes from the sinful action to the sinful person, feeling the sin as a condition or state of the self; the sinful deed or thought is that in terms of which the self is construed, a symbol of the broken-boned self.

We have discussed two emotions, fear of punishment and regret, and have distinguished them from contrition. Our latest comment, that contrition takes the whole self as object, suggests another neighbor-emotion to contrition, namely embarrassment. Embarrassment is also an uncomfortable awareness of oneself, often occasioned by something one has done. Imagine, for a moment, that King David is chiefly embarrassed in his encounter with Nathan. He doesn't take seriously the prophecies of punishment, nor care about having wronged God, Bathsheba, and Uriah. But he doesn't want to be thought of as a spoiled adolescent who can't keep his pants up, or as so panicky as not to stop even at murder to cover up his mistakes. So, he is alarmed to discover that his adultery and homicide are known. His chief concern is to make sure that the news does not get beyond the present walls. He will swear Nathan to secrecy. He will avoid Nathan's company in the future, for whenever he is with Nathan, or thinks about him, he sees himself through Nathan's eyes: I am a king known to have done unseemly things; I look small and foolish to my people.

The concern characteristic of embarrassment is to avoid being seen⁷

⁶ In the paradigm cases, the offense is against another person, either a human being or God. It is just possible, however, for the offense to be against something nonpersonal. For example, an atheist who spoils a beautiful natural landscape might feel contrite, without supposing that he has thereby wronged other human beings. He construes himself as having offended against something great (a forest, a mountain), something that is due respect even if it is not a person.
⁷ Gabriele Taylor points out the centrality, to the emotion of embarrassment, of the issue of being seen, and responds, successfully I think, to some apparent counterexamples. See Pride, Shame, and Guilt: Emotions of Self-Assessment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), pp. 69-76.

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in an uncomplimentary light. Thus embarrassment differs from contrition, whose characteristic concern⁸ is to be righteous, to have a "clean heart." Yet contrition and embarrassment resemble one another in a certain respect. In general, the paradigm cases of feeling guilt are those in which we stand face to face with the one we have wronged, stared at, as it were, by our victim, in his status of victim-accuser. Guilt is enhanced by a sense of the accuser's presence, and thus tends to beget dreams and imaginings of it; but these are not necessary for guilt, as the sense of the other's observing presence is for embarrassment. If David feels guilty about murdering Uriah, he may still feel so even if no one knows that he has done it. But if David is really only embarrassed about the incident, then when he satisfies himself that no one knows, his embarrassment will disappear.

Jewish and Christian contrition, however, is more than guilt. It is a perception that one has offended against God:

Against thee, thee only, have I sinned,
and done that which is evil in thy sight. (Psalm 51:4)

The Christian and the Jew feel their contrition most sensibly in the moment of prayer, when they are actually in fellowship with the God they have offended. And they remind themselves that there is, in reality, no escape from the seeing eye of God: "Almighty God, to whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid: Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of thy

⁸ If in the interest of symmetry we ask what the characteristic concern of regret is, it seems clear that regret does not have one. Regret can involve the contravention of any concern. If I regret I didn't apply to Harvard, it is probably because I am concerned to have attended a slick school; if David regrets that he got involved with Bathsheba, it is because he is concerned to stay out of the kind of trouble he got into with her; and so forth. By contrast, the characteristic concerns of contrition and embarrassment can be specified in a general way. We might say that regret has a less definite logic than these other two emotions; at least it is less definite with respect to the concern on which it is based. One can regret having done something because it leads to embarrassment; our embarrassed David is in this condition. Whether he becomes regretful in addition to being embarrassed depends on how he thinks of the episode. Regret will be generated by his construing his present situation in terms of its causal antecedents, especially though not exclusively the ones over which he presided, as it were. On the other hand, if he does not reflect about these antecedents, he may experience embarrassment without feeling regret. Though we must admit that he is "set up" for regret; he only needs to focus the situation in a quite obvious and available way. If he experiences contrition in connection with his involvement with Bathsheba, he may also be said to regret his action; so, even the concern for righteousness can be the basis for regret. Here, I think it is not so much that a new emotion goes with the regret epithet; rather, it is just contrition under a less precise name. For just as regret focuses on the genesis of the aversive situation, contrition focuses on the genesis of the occasion for contrition. In the contrition case, the proposition ascribing agency to the subject of the emotion is strictly necessary, while it is not in the case of regret: I can regret that my child insulted a visitor, but I cannot be contrite about it, unless I can somehow make myself out to be the agent of the insult.

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Holy Spirit ..."⁹

Whither shall I go from thy Spirit?
   Or whither shall I flee from thy presence?
If I say, "Let only darkness cover me,
   and the light about me be night,"
even the darkness is not dark to thee,
   the night is bright as the day;
   for darkness is as light with thee. (Psalm 139:7, 11-12)

Shall we say, then, that Jewish and Christian contrition, unlike ordinary humanistic guilt, is really just a form of embarrassment? Perhaps it is a more primitive emotion than guilt, in the sense of more infantile, indicative of a lower stage of moral development, a greater degree of dependency and less of autonomy? Are religious people unable to be serious unless they think God is watching?

We must affirm that Christianity does not have the same ideal of autonomy as many modern virtues systems. Christian ethics and psychology affirm that we are ontologically dependent on God and that maturity is a certain kind of dependence on God, rather than some radical autonomy. So, it should not embarrass us that Christian ethics involves, in a very basic way, a sense of being watched by God. But this admission does not imply that contrition is a form of embarrassment in the sense of embarrassment that I have been contrasting with guilt. First, God is not accidentally privy to the actions and thoughts of the contrite person, in the way that other human beings are to the actions and thoughts of the embarrassed person. It is in the very concept of the God of Jewish and Christian faith that God sees in secret and with unavoidable gaze. Second, to have a sense of standing in the presence of the Holy One is already a major spiritual achievement, requiring unusual self-denial, courage, purity, honesty, and love. Being embarrassed, by contrast, requires only the most minimal, ordinary, and undifficult sense of the eyes of some other human beings, plus concern for what others think. Embarrassment does not, in itself, discriminate along lines of holiness, righteousness, and goodness. By contrast, it is of contrition's essence that the One before whom the penitent is contrite is holy, the very standard of righteousness and goodness. So contrition is a properly "moral" perception, while embarrassment is not.

Another couple of emotions in the neighborhood of contrition, which by their contrast will help us to locate contrition on the logical map, are hatred of sin and dismay at sin. When the psalmist addresses the "mighty man," saying

All the day you are plotting destruction.
Your tongue is like a sharp razor,
   you worker of treachery, (52:2)

he expresses hatred of sin, but of course not contrition: He hates

⁹ The Book of Common Prayer (New York: The Church Pension Fund, 1945), p. 67.

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somebody else's sin; contrition is hatred of one's own. But this last remark is not precise enough to distinguish hatred of sin from contrition. The Apostle Paul says

I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin which dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! (Romans 7:23-24a)

He expresses hatred of his own sin (or perhaps more precisely, dismay at his sin), but not contrition. To distinguish these emotions we must sharpen the concept of "one's own" sin that operates in the two self-construals. St. Paul sees the sin that he laments as "his" in the sense that it is in his "members." That is, it is not somebody else's sin; it is attached to him, hindering him from doing the good that he wants to do. But in this passage, he insists that it is not his in what we might call a moral sense: "It is no longer I that do it, but sin which dwells within me" (vv. 17, 20). We might say that his sin belongs to one of Paul's selves, but not to the one with which Paul himself morally identifies-the self that loves Jesus and identifies with him. The sin belongs to "the flesh," "the old man," to a besetting "body of death" from which Paul dissociates himself. This is understandable in light of the intensity with which Paul identifies with the crucified and risen Christ: "I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me" (Galatians 2:19b-20). But this seeing of his sin as something alien, to the point of seeing it as something that he does not even do, prevents his emotion from being contrition, however dismayed he may be.

But the matter is more complicated than this. It is not as though just any dissociation from one's sinful self precludes contrition. After all, something of a dissociation from sin is required for contrition. Joseph Shapiro hates his fast, loose American self, and, as he becomes more solidly contrite, he sees it as more and more alien. And yet, contrition requires that he take responsibility for that self, that he own up to being its author, that he construe that modern self (which is more and more a self of his past) as morally continuous with the present Joseph Shapiro, who is more and more an ancient Jew. Even as Joseph Shapiro becomes a new man, he must be and experience himself as the old man-not a person with the traits of the old man, but as the agent of those traits and the actions that sprang from them. Thus contrition requires an application of humility that we do not see in Romans 7, and do not often see in the Apostle Paul¹⁰-a willingness to acknowledge that, however different I may now be, and however hateful I may find my former sinful self, I am responsible for the actions, the thoughts, and the personality of that former self. In most of Paul's writings, the perception of being a new creation in Christ Jesus is so strong that it mitigates Paul's impression of himself as the agent of that former life.

¹⁰ 1 Timothy 1:15b-16 might be an exception to this, if the sentences originated with Paul.

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His indomitable sense of being a new creation is a rare and beautiful thing in the history of Christian spirituality, and was strategically essential, no doubt, for the development of the church. But if contrition is a Christian virtue, then the sense of discontinuity with the old self's character must be integrated with an equally strong sense of the continuity of agency between old and new.

In contrasting the logic of contrition with that of fear of punishment, regret, embarrassment, and hatred of sin, I have sometimes used the word "guilt" to indicate contrition. This is possible because contrition is like guilt¹¹ in a number of significant ways. I want to bring my discussion of contrition's logic to a close by contrasting it with what we may call "plain guilt." It is highly characteristic of Christian and Jewish prayers of confession to begin with an acknowledgment of God's mercy, love, and forgiveness: "Have mercy on me, O God, according to thy steadfast love" (Psalm 51:1). "Almighty and most merciful Father; We have erred, and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep."¹²

We might say that contrition, as contrasted with plain guilt, is characterized by confident hope in God's mercy-in other words, the construal of oneself as not lost because of one's guilt, the construal of God as benevolent and a source of help, as well as angry and offended. Contrition can even shade into joy, the full perception of God's goodness to oneself, acceptance, forgiveness. Indeed, the difference in emotion during the prayer of confession and during the absolution is a matter of shading. Prior to the absolution, the penitent perceives God as well-disposed (though the dominant content of the emotion is the perception of self as offender), while during and after the absolution, the penitent does not lose sight of being an offender, though the dominant content of the perception is forgiveness, approval, and acceptance by God.

Nothing like this sense of mercy is ingredient in the emotion that I am calling plain guilt. It is simply a perception of oneself as sullied and offensive through one's own responsible agency; if God is involved, it is a perception of God as simply angry. Being without joy and hope, plain guilt is an emotion, eminently to be shunned, that urgently invites repression and self-deception. Contrition, by contrast, while it is certainly uncomfortable and may even be agonizing, is not without its lighter side. It is essentially a gracious affection, a gospel emotion. Jews and Christians see themselves not only as sullied by their own responsible agency, and not only as standing before an angry and

¹¹ Of course I am using "guilt" as the somewhat awkward name of an emotion-something we might call the feeling of guilt. I am obviously not talking about guilt as a moral status-say, being guilty of wantonly insulting a colleague-because one could be guilty of such a crime without feeling at all guilty about it. I also hesitate to use the expression "feeling guilty" for this emotion, first because it is a little bit awkward, but more importantly because very often people have the emotion that I am calling guilt without feeling guilty: that is, they do have the emotion, which shows up in all sorts of behavior and in the form of other, felt emotions, such as discontent and anxiety, but they are not conscious of it as guilt, and so do not feel guilty.
¹² The Book of Common Prayer (New York: The Church Pension Fund, 1945), pp. 6,23.

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judging God, but equally, and even preveniently, as having the prospect of being cleansed and forgiven and as standing before a God who listens with love to those who call on him for mercy. The difference between Jewish and Christian contrition lies in the way of conceiving God's mercy. The Christian penitent construes God as one who, as the human Jesus of Nazareth, has mercifully stood in the place of all sinners before God and borne the suffering and alienation that attend sin. The mercy that the Christian presently prays for is, in a sense, that one act of me-CY that God has already performed. The Jew, by contrast, thinks of God's mercy as primarily exemplified in God's countless acts of mercy to Israel, the crowning one of which lies still in the future-the coming of Messiah. The mercy that is presently prayed for is a further example of this general disposition of God toward his people.

Many types of emotion motivate action by having what I call a "consequent desire," a desire that is catalyzed, by the terms of the construal, out of the concern on which the emotion is based. For example, anger is based on a concern that justice be done, either to oneself or to others. From this concern, transfigured in the construal of someone as having culpably offended against oneself or another, a consequent desire emerges "logically," the desire to see the offender punished (this action being a way to restore justice). Similarly, from the concern to be righteous, as it is transfigured in the construal of oneself as having offended against the holy God, spoiled oneself, and having nevertheless been made the object of God's mercy, there emerges a desire to amend one's life, to express one's allegiance to God in holy living. Note that whereas plain guilt, if very intense, may paralyse its subject motivationally by casting him into despair, the good news that is incorporated into Jewish and Christian contrition liberates the penitent by giving him "a way out," thus encouraging in him the formation of an intention to amend his life.

It may seem odd that one and the same emotion-the one I am calling contrition-can be both "painful" and "pleasant," that it can represent its object (oneself, or at any rate one's past self) as both aversive and attractive. The horror of one's offense against God and the beauty of one's reconcilitation to God seem to be so opposite as to require different emotions-perhaps what I have called plain guilt, on the one hand, and what we might call plain joy, on the other. Perhaps these alternate in the Christian's consciousness: feeling guilt (ideally) as one confesses sins, and then joy (ideally) as one receives absolution. A similar question is raised by my method of articulating the logic of contrition. Some of the emotions whose logic I have contrasted with contrition seem to be aspects of it. Would it not be better to think of contrition not as an emotion, but as a compound of several more basic emotions, such as regret, embarrassment, hatred of sin, and joy at forgiveness?

I cannot here answer this question fully, but let me offer a few

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considerations. As to the idea that contrition might be just the alternation of horrific guilt and pure joy, this description seems untrue to Christian experience. I have noted that prayers of confession often contain within them, prior to the words of absolution, an acknowledgment of God's love and forgiving disposition; forgiveness comes as no surprise with the words of absolution and has its effect on the experience of coming before God in confession. Similarly, the experience of joy that is especially tied, logically, to the words of absolution, does not dispel the penitent's aversion to the committed sin; rather, the aversion to that sin is presupposed by the distinctive character of this joy, which is joy about the forgiveness of one's sins. As to my method of articulating the logic of contrition, I would point out that the analysis has shown, not that contrition is a compound of other emotion-types in some pure and basic form, but that it bears some logical similarities to these other emotion-types. That a racoon bears some similarities to a fox, and some to a bear, and some to a monkey, does not imply that racoons are a compound of fox, bear, and monkey. I would also appeal to an account of the nature of emotion that I have developed elsewhere and presupposed in the foregoing analysis of contrition. Emotions are a special kind of "seeing as" (I call them "concern-based construals") and as such are perceptual states that synthesize propositions and imagery around concerns that are congruent with such content.¹³ The propositions that inform an emotion constitute a large part of its logic. Part of the idea of a construal is that these propositions are brought together in an experience of something (in the case of contrition, an experience of oneself or of God). A summary of the logical content of Christian contrition can now serve two purposes: to recapitulate the logic of contrition that I have outlined in this section and to illustrate what it is for an emotion to be a construal, and thus to capture rather diverse conceptual content in one perceptual experience.

The concern characteristic of contrition is for righteousness (not, for contrasts, the concern to avoid getting punished or looking foolish to others); contrition is based on a hunger and thirst for righteousness, a seeking for the kingdom. This concern can be characterized in various ways: as a desire to be a good person, as a hatred of turpitude, as a desire to be in proper fellowship with God the Holy One, and so forth. This concern can be expressed in a proposition: Righteousness is excellent, good, right for me. To be contrite is to see the action, thought, or feeling that occasions one's contrition not as a mere mistake (as in mere regret), but as a culpable offense. But the real

¹³ For an elaboration of this idea in several directions, see "What An Emotion Is: A Sketch," The Philosophical Review 97 (1988): pp. 183-209; "What Is Wrong With Wicked Feelings?" American Philosophical Quarterly 28 (1991): pp. 13-24; "Emotions as Access to Religious Truths," Faith and Philosophy 9 (1992): pp. 83-94; "Emotions Among the Virtues of the Christian Life," Journal of Religious Ethics 20 (1992): pp. 201-232; "Thomas Aquinas on the Morality of Emotions," History of Philosophy Quarterly 9 (1992):pp.287-305.

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object of one's contrition is not, as in regret, a particular action, but oneself: The psalmist of Psalm 51 construes himself as besmirched, sullied, compromised, spoiled. Contrite Jews and Christians experience ourselves as in the unavoidable presence of the Holy One. We see the actions, thoughts, or feelings that occasion our contrition, or the self about which we feel contrite, as alien to our true self, and yet as falling within our responsibility. However different in character we may now be than when we did, thought, or felt those things, still it was we who authored them. If I am contrite, rather than just feeling guilty, I experience myself as forgiven or having the prospect of forgiveness. That is, I construe the God in whose presence I stand as merciful, loving, forgiving. And last, desiring righteousness and seeing myself as sullied by sin but nevertheless loved and forgiven by God, I form the intention to amend my life.

If an emotion is a construal, an experience of something in some terms, then it is possible for it to synthesize in experience a fairly rich complexity of propositional content. And if, in the Christian view, it is both painfully true that we have sinned against God and spoiled ourselves, and pleasantly true that God has forgiven us and restored us to himself in Jesus Christ, it is the emotion of contrition which brings these truths together into perceptual focus. Thus the propositions in terms of which one construes oneself when contrite could be listed:

(1)Righteousness is good, excellent, and right for me.
(2)I have, with responsibility, done wrong.
(3)Thus I have spoiled myself.
(4)That spoiled self is not the real me.
(5)In doing wrong I have offended You.
(6)I cannot escape from Your gaze.
(7)You are merciful and will forgive (have forgiven) me.
(8)I must amend my life.

The logic of contrition is constituted of these propositions or thoughts.¹⁴ If my analysis has been correct, then none of the emotions that neighbor on contrition has quite the same logic, though they may share some of these propositions, or have closely analogous ones in their logic. Quite a lot of Christian theology is enfolded in the emotion of contrition, and if you get the theology wrong, you get the emotion's logic wrong, and if you get that wrong, you don't get the distinctively Christian emotion of contrition. And if the emotion is not right, then the Christian virtue of penitence disintegrates, along with many other Christian virtues that are interdependent on it-virtues like joy, hope, and gratitude.

¹⁴ These are of course not the particular thoughts a person thinks in feeling contrition, or would think, were one self-aware enough. In constituting the logic of contrition, they are as it were the propositional skeleton of any actual experience of contrition. The first might be instantiated by a judgment of some particular manifestation of righteousness that is excellent for me; the second would be instantiated with a mention of particular wrongs I have done, and so forth.

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Of course, I am not saying that whenever a person feels properly Christian or Jewish contrition, these propositions are all uttered, viva or sotto voce, in the auditorium of one's consciousness. Nor am I saying that all eight propositions will be equally prominent in the mind of each contrite person on each occasion of feeling contrition. I mean that these are the propositions that will come out when articulate Christians are called upon to explain what they are feeling in feeling contrition. They are the propositions in terms of which one experiences oneself in that peculiarly immediate, perceptual, quasi-sensory way that we call the emotion of contrition. In some instances, the most prominent thought will be that I have spoiled myself; in another that I cannot escape from God's gaze. But whatever thought may be most prominent phenomenologically, the others will need to be lurking in the background of the mind for the emotion to be, in the fullest sense, Christian contrition.

If the emotion does not imply the linguistic rehearsal of these propositions, neither does their rehearsal, even a sincere one, guarantee the occurrence of the emotion. The emotion is a "seeing-as" in terms of these propositions, and it is notorious that seeing-as, while partially and sometimes within the command of our will, is not always so. It sometimes comes unbidden, and sometimes, when bidden, does not come.¹⁵ But something can be done to promote contrition among those who are disposed to think about themselves in the terms of Christian theology.

II

A good prayer of confession will reflect, within itself as well as in its fairly immediate liturgical surroundings, the logic of contrition. Such prayers become in this way not only an aid in the expression of contrition, but also a device for the emotional/spiritual education of the congregation and, if the prayer is fixed, as in a book of worship, a norm of character for the congregation.

But it is not enough that a prayer reflect the logic of contrition. No one would think we could produce a good prayer of confession just by stringing together the eight statements I numbered above. In that bare logical form, a prayer would not be very "affecting," and thus would not bear the appropriate relationship to emotion, even if it displayed quite accurately the logic of contrition. The language of emotion is not just logical, but also rhetorical, lyrical, expressive.¹⁶ It is a language of

¹⁵ See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, translated by G.E.M. Anscombe (New York: Macmillan, 1953), Part 11, section xi, pp. 193-229.
¹⁶ Jonathan Edwards comments: "No other reason can be assigned, why we should express ourselves to God in verse, rather than in prose, and do it with music, but only, that such is our nature and frame, that these things have a tendency to move our affections....God hath appointed a particular and lively application of his Word, to men, in the preaching of it, as a fit means to affect sinners, with the importance of the things of religion, and their own misery, and necessity of a remedy, and the glory and sufficiency of a remedy provided; and to stir up the pure minds of the saints, and quicken their affections, by often bringing the great things of religion to their remembrance, and setting them before them in their proper colors, though they know them, and have been fully instructed in them already" (Religious Affections, edited by John E. Smith. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959, pp. 115-116).

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imagery as well as concepts, and must encourage the concrete reference to the speaker(s) that is characteristic of lyric poetry. The vocabulary must be dramatic enough to evoke more than the judgments specific to contrition; it must promote the construal, the perception with the eyes of the heart, that I have responsibly spoiled myself, that the spoiled self is not the real me, that God is merciful....

When the American Book of Common Prayer of 1928 was revised in the 1970s, two orders for Holy Eucharist were provided in place of the one earlier service. Rite One is reminiscent of the older prayer book, while Rite Two uses modern language and presumably appeals more to contemporary sensibilities. In the more modern service, the prayer of confession is replaced by a shorter and simpler prayer. The original eucharistic confession was rich in what I am calling the lyric of contrition:

We acknowledge and bewail our manifold sins and wickedness,
which we from time to time most grievously have committed,
by thought, word, and deed, against thy divine Majesty,
provoking most justly thy wrath and indignation against us.
We do earnestly repent,
and are heartily sorry for these our misdoings;
the remembrance of them is grievous unto us,
the burden of them is intolerable.¹⁷

Dramatic words like "bewail" and "grievously" and "intolerable burden" strongly express the pain and moral seriousness (frustrated love of righteousness) characteristic of contrition. The references to God's majesty, wrath, and indignation express the sense of having offended a holy God. By comparison with the colorful language of the older prayer, the replacement is simpler and prosaic-except for the last line, a minimalist statement of fact:

We confess that we have sinned against you
in thought, word, and deed,
by what we have done,
and by what we have left undone.
We have not loved you with our whole heart;
we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves.
We are truly sorry and we humbly repent.¹⁸

If we look at the 1928 confession for Morning and Evening Prayer, from which the new eucharistic confession derives, we see that what was left out is chiefly the emotionally expressive elements of the

¹⁷ The Book of Common Prayer (1945), p. 75.
¹⁸ The Book of Common Prayer (1977), p. 352.

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prayer:

We have erred, and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep.
We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts.
We have offended against thy holy laws.
We have left undone those things which we ought to have done;
And we have done those things which we ought not to have done;
And there is no health in us.
But thou, O Lord, have mercy upon us, miserable offenders.¹⁹

The metaphor of wandering, lost sheep, the reference to the violated laws as "holy," the acknowledgment of the damage that we have done ourselves in forfeiture of health and accrual of misery, these are all expressive of the regret, the guilt, and the grief characteristic of contrition. Without these elements, the prayer is less likely to convey and express the texture of contrition.

It does seem to us an exaggeration to confess that "there is no health in us" and to call ourselves "miserable offenders." There seems to be some health in us, after all; and even if we have offended, we may not really feel very miserable about it, and may prefer not to contribute further to whatever misery we may be experiencing, by making a point of it. If we must confess our sins, we prefer to do so calmly, factually, without melodrama and without heat. Why do we feel uneasy with a sumptuous rhetoric of contrition? In attempting to answer this question, I speak only for myself, with the assumption that some others may recognize my sentiments in themselves. I do not presume to speak for the revisers of the prayer book.

First, I think I am squeamish about full-blooded expressions of contrition because I have forgotten the holiness of God and the glory to which God has destined us. My god is a friendly little fellow, more indulgent than the God of the older prayer book. Not only the terms descriptive of us have changed from the 1928 prayers to the 1977; so also has the description of God. For the two conceptions-of what we have done, and of whom we have done it to; of who we are and of who God is-are inseparable. In the earlier prayers, our offense is characterized as "against thy divine Majesty, provoking most justly thy wrath and indignation against us." And we admit having offended "against thy holy laws." But in the more recent prayer, God's majesty, wrath, and holiness have all disappeared, and the only description of God is "merciful." The misery of my wickedness has become emotionally less sensible to me because God's majesty and holiness are reduced, along with the glory of the life to which this majestic and holy God has called me. Or shall we say that God's holiness is less visible to me because I've lost the full awareness of being a sinner?

Our society is very conscious of the demand to feel good and be functioning properly, and the sense of being sinners is anathema in a therapeutic society. It has become a matter of pride, even a pseudo-

¹⁹ The Book of Common Prayer (I 945), p. 6.

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morality, to avoid what is unhealthy. These days, people who want to smoke feel ashamed and do so on the sly. Guilt is disfavored by health freaks, but the Christian aggravation of guilt into manifold sins and wickedness before the face of a holy, righteous, and wrathful God is beyond contemplation to many people. Of course, taken quite literally, the phrase "there is no health in us" exaggerates. There must be some spiritual health in us for us even to notice that we are sinners, and still more for us to care about that fact (contrition is a Christian virtue). But the lyric of contrition, like any other lyric, affords a certain licence; having a poetic quality, good prayers do not have to be precise theology at every turn. However uncomfortable we may feel with it, the phrase expresses quite excellently that we have fallen very far short of the glorious life to which God has called us-that we are badly spoiled, even if not quite completely.

If people like me feel a certain morbidity in the phrase, or become morbid through thinking about themselves in its terms, I think the solution is not to excise the phrase, but to help us understand it. A bit of careful preaching on the prayer of confession may be in order. The God in whose presence the Christian feels contrition is not merely holy, righteous, and wrathful. That God is also "the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who desireth not the death of a sinner," as the words of absolution declare. When the Christian confesses to the "almighty and most merciful Father," she does so in the hope of the atonement. This is the distinctively Christian and Jewish way of keeping contrition from going morbid, and a good preacher, employing the lyric of Christian faith within the full scope of its logic, should be able to make God's loving mercy perceptible enough to the congregation that we can also perceive our misery in full color.

III

Most of us don't make as dramatic a change in personality as Joseph Shapiro, and so our "old self" is a less well defined thing to rue; many of us are cradle Christians who in outward ways do not stray very far from the path. Yet contrition is not, even for us, a minor virtue or incidental corner of the Christian life, something to be passed over perfunctorily on the way to joy; for we too like lost sheep have erred and strayed from God's ways. Contrition is that state of mind in which we perceive with the eyes of the heart, and thus in a truly spiritual way, the issues of our selfhood. We see that the self of our sin is not our real self and that we belong, through divine forgiveness, to God and God's kingdom. Contrition is that state of mind in which we appreciate with our spiritual viscera what God has done for us in Jesus Christ and in which we are "moved" to depart from our sin and consolidate ourselves in Christ. It is that state of proper pain, that experience of fitting misery, without which our joy is not a joy in our Redeemer. To nurture this emotion, I have argued, it is essential to pray prayers that reflect contrition's logic and express it lyrically.