Annotation CLXI

”And going forth, Peter wept bitterly.” — Luke 22:62

Whether penance profits without confession and satisfaction.

Ambrose, in the tenth commentary on Luke, so expounds this passage that he seems to exclude confession and satisfaction from true penance. For he uses these words: “Peter grieved and wept, because he erred as a man. I do not find what he said: I find that he wept. I read his tears; I do not read [his] satisfaction. But what cannot be defended, the tears wash away the offense — [that] which it is a shame to confess with the voice, the weeping provides for [both] pardon and modesty. Tears speak the fault without horror. Tears confess the crime without offense to modesty; tears do not ask for pardon, but merit [it].” The same opinion, and in almost the same words, he repeats in the sermon On the Penance of Peter — which is number 46 — where it is read thus: “Peter burst into tears, praying nothing with the voice. For I find that he wept: I do not find what he said. I read his tears: I do not read [his] satisfaction. Rightly, indeed, did Peter weep, and keep silence — because what is wont to be wept over is not wont to be excused; and what cannot be defended can be washed away. For a tear washes away the offense which it is a shame to confess with the voice. Tears, therefore, provide alike for modesty and for salvation; nor do they blush in asking, and they obtain in entreating. More profitable are the prayers of tears than of speech: because speech, in praying, perhaps deceives; a tear deceives not at all.”

This same [thing] Maximus, bishop of Turin, has in the sermon On Penance.

Gratian annotated this passage, in the first distinction On Penance, and Peter, bishop of Paris [Lombard], in book 4 of the Sentences, distinction 17. But each of them says that the words of Ambrose and Maximus are to be referred to public penance — for it is not necessary to disclose by public confession and satisfaction that which is hidden; but it suffices, by hidden tears and secret con-

-fession, to accuse the offense to the priest alone — that [offense] which it shames us to confess publicly. But as to what Ambrose wrote — that he read the tears of Peter, [but] did not read [his] confession and satisfaction — the Master of the Sentences says that [Ambrose] does not [thereby] explode either confession or satisfaction, because many [things] were done which are not written; and because, perhaps, the secret confession which we now use had not yet been instituted. Read above, Annotations 16 and 174 of book 5.