Repentance is also known as the mystery of holy confession. English uses penance, reconciliation, and confession to signify repentance. None of them directly imply a “change” like the Koine Greek term metanoia, which means literally to change one’s mind or heart. Penance and repentance are the Latin words for legal punishment, feelings of sorrow, and pain from the verb poenitire. Penitent could have been related to the pain of sin, the penalty that weighs heavily on the soul, and its consequences. That sin ought to make us feel some sorrow isn’t a topic that Metropolitan Hilarion emphasizes here. But turning your mind toward a desire, a goal, and a new life with purpose and determination is another aspect of repentance, since sadness can be easily turned into despair, dejection, and sloth that blocks change. The word reconciliation that is often used by Roman Catholics today means to restore. Our confession is most like exomologesis. It indicated that a Christian confessed one’s sins before a priest or bishop or earlier in the assembly before baptism. It’s the term that the New Testament and the fathers of the Church who wrote in Greek used for this sacrament. Tertullian, who wrote in Latin, still used the term exomologesis, and he refers to this confession of sins to a priest as “the handmaiden of repentance.” There are many forms of repenting. Confession of sins helps us to become humble before the Name of God who secretly knows all our faults and sins already. His name heals our wounds and weaknesses from sin. It would seem unhelpful to view confession as sacrament only needed once in a lifetime. It would also seem harmful to view it as a complete restoration without also partaking of the other mysteries that cleanse us. Baptism removes sins, the Eucharist is purifying fire and light, and confession helps to restore us by humbling us back into our Adamic nature lost in Paradise. God gave us speech, words, language to communicate the hidden spiritual reality under our bodily image of God. And this expression of humility helps us to receive the Eucharist and the Eucharist helps us to change, and to turn our minds back to God, which is what our original nature is supposed to do – to understand with reason this material world but to live beyond it in our noetic home with the Holy Trinity. All will make a confession at the end of time at the universal resurrection. Whether we acknowledge God’s Name in joy and love, or, in sadness and pain is a spiritual work we must engage in completing during our earthily existence. In his writing On Repentance, Tertullian teaches that “the craters of volcanoes” vent in the habitation of our heart, where we ultimately confess His Name. He teaches that out of the heart blasts fiery passions. But since angels are not creatures with a physical body like ours, nor do we have a purely spiritual nature like theirs, the Hell for them might be different from the hell for humans who suffer from “repenting in vain” as some fathers taught. The fathers teach that the demonic creatures have immediate access to doing what they think unlike humans who live in time, space, and earthily bodies.
In the Old Testament, there is plenty of typology linking confession to the Orthodox mystery. The evil Babylonian King makes exomologesis and then he is restored. The parting of the Red Sea is a type of confession, and this tragic rejection of it is reflected in the event when the waves destroyed and collapsed on the pursuing Egyptians. The liturgical texts teach that, “Adam, restored by his confession to his own paradise, is not silent.” On the Day of Atonement, there was a confession of sins that the Jewish people made, “We have sinned.” The scapegoat was driven into the wilderness who bore the sins of Israel. If Christ is the scapegoat, the antitype to the type or the image of the reality, and Christ died for our sins, it would follow that we would need to confess our sins as much as we need to be cleansed by baptism. Protestants only view baptism as the required rite of entrance, however, they lack the full means of repentance during a lifetime. Metropolitan Hilarion writes that “the entire spiritual system” of repentance is found in the mysteries of baptism-chrismation and the eucharist. If the types of baptism are recognized by our brothers and sisters outside the Church, why wouldn’t confession and the Eucharist and holy orders also be equally recognizable? To prove that there isn’t anything “extra biblical” about Orthodox mysteries, we find it in Numbers 5:6-8, 2 Samuel 11-12, Psalm 51/50, and Isaiah 1:11-18. If we use the type without the reality (antitype), then there is no use of the type for one’s benefit.
The starting point of repentance is a change of mind, of confessing one’s brokenness and the loss of home, gifts, and the blessings of God. The preparation for Pascha is about focusing on exercising “the art form of repentance” and how to desire to “return to the Father’s house” — Alexander Schememann teaches. We do not merely admit we sin, but we confess that we need to change continually until our departure from this life. The Didache mentions confessing sins in church, and many New Testament passages speak of it as well (Matt. 3:6, Acts 19:18, 1 John 1:9, Luke 3:8-14). Some think that Christ’s Cross somehow replaces our need for confessing our sins and being remitted of them. The remission of sins is a sign of spiritual authority that was given as a gift to the apostles and then given to the elders and bishops to govern the Church and to heal us as well as “to bind and loose” that includes the remission of sins. God forgives the sins; the priests and bishops are witnesses to our confession directly to God. In the Six Books on the Priesthood, it teaches that “What priests do on earth, God ratifies above. The Master confirms the decision of his slaves.” God gives the power to forgive, and “they who have the Spirit of God … remit and retain sins.” To eliminate the mysteries of chrism, eucharist, holy orders and confession would be a denial that these types have been fulfilled in Christ, that the Old Testament types have failed to become a reality in our life through the Holy Spirit given to the apostles, given to the hierarchy, given to the people.
He outlines several layers of confession in the Church over the course of its history. Is confession required before receiving each communion? Metropolitan Hilarion notes that the 2nd - 3rd c. texts or later do not provide us with the view that it would be required or mandatory before each communion. We know that a “general confession” of prayers read by a priest preceded the Eucharist. It’s not a personal confession of what is committed in the heart or public denials of the Church. We know that there was a confession made at the “public assembly” before the bishops at baptism or after apostasy and other “serious sins.” This form seems to have existed when numbers of Christians hadn’t reached the same capacity as did under the Roman empire in Constantinople and the Mediterranean world. We also know that there was a “secret confession” that was revealed privately to a priest who had the authority and power of forgiveness to “absolve sins.” It is practical too because we ought to only tell trustworthy people our sins to protect ourselves and continue to seek healing. We know that sometimes “transgressors” would be summoned to a “tribunal of several presbyters [priests] or a bishop sitting in the presence of the presbyters.” So, there was general confession in liturgical prayers said regularly, public confession at baptism, private confession to reveal one’s thoughts and become healed before entering the new creation at our death, and tribunal confession that handled public, serious sins like apostasy, adultery, murder, extortion, heresy, etc. A rite or established, instituted order of confession probably didn’t yet form until later. But the typology has clearly existed in the Scriptures and Tradition of the Church’s history.
In the 3rd c. AD, many Christians apostatized under the persecutions of the Roman emperor Decius. When these Christians desired to be restored to the faith and confess their apostasy, the Church helped them by establishing “the office of penitentiary presbyter” for those who “fell after baptism.” Sozomenus teaches that “impeccability is a divine attribute, and belongs not to human nature; therefore, God has decreed that pardon should be extended to the penitent, even after many transgressions ….” The Church has shown itself to be loving and practical when it comes to confession. It realizes that we sin and need to make amends for it, we need humility, and that complete negligence and the forgetting our need to confess sins leads to a form of pride that the Orthodox ascetics constantly stress. Some priests were appointed to hearing confessions and helping Christians mend their life. Public confession became “irksome” with the growth of Christianity in the East. Over time it even caused scandals and divisions publicly. General confession through the reading of prayers by the priest wasn’t considered adequate for full healing of one’s private thoughts and sins. In Orthodoxy, repentance is about the change of heart. The revealing of one’s true self, who is the worldly pagan, the thief, the tax collector, the greedy money maker, the harlot, the exiled murderer, the unclean that lives within all of us, that needs to come out before God for our sake, but not for the sake of the priest’s power, not for our ego, and not for God’s obsession with our sins.
Orthodoxy usually does not focus on categorizing sins into “mortal and venial.” The former is required to be confessed before holy communion while the latter does not bar one from holy communion in modern Roman Catholicism. St. John Cassian, not mentioned in this chapter, reflecting the mindset of the Desert Fathers teaches that anger over small actions and situations and obsession over small amounts of possessions isn’t better than worrying over the larger matters, since one still has not gotten rid of the same attachments of the heart. Of course, it’s worth noting that there are references to grouping sins according to “smaller sins” versus “offenses” like apostasy, adultery, murder, sorcery, and extortion. So, private confession seems to have been for the revealing of “smaller sins” that are “nearly unavoidable” while the “office of penitentiary presbyter” was a kind of confession that helped restore Christians after certain serious, public lapses in faith. The last section of this chapter deals with the relationship between God, holy orders, and the power of forgiveness in the mystery of holy confession. The prayers of the Church are firm that “Christ Himself receives confession” while the priesthood witnesses our confession to God just as we do not baptize ourselves and the baptizer doesn’t own the power of the cleansing waters, but we trust in the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit to work within us a spiritual change. Another major reason we need an ordered, regular confession to a priest or spiritual father is because we ought not to try to evaluate our spiritual progress objectively, the priest Alexander Elchaninov teaches. The next chapter discusses the mystery of holy orders also called the hierarchy, since there is also great treasures and mystical meaning in the ordination of service to the Church.