To be a Christian is to sign your own death warrant.
This was a reality in the Roman Empire from about the year A.D. 100 until ours became a legal religion in 313. In those bloody years, the concept of being conformed to Christ included a martyr’s death. This is how you became a saint. But suddenly, the persecutions stopped.
Ending the Roman persecutions was a cause for great joy. However, Christians were left with a question. If fidelity is tied to conformity to Christ, and perfect conformity to him means a martyr’s death, how, then, am I to get to heaven if I am not killed for the Faith? What do I do now?
This misunderstanding of fidelity probably reached its apex with the Circumcellion heresy. Look up that bit of madness when you get a moment. But, in answer to this question, the Church gave us the example of St. Martin of Tours, and with that, the idea of “white martyrdom” was born.
Martin demonstrated to the faithful that conformity to Christ could be accomplished through living for the gospel, not just dying for it. This was still a death—a death to self, through the heroic practice, by God’s grace, of the acquired virtues and living the Beatitudes. Amazing! Every non-martyr saint conforms to this model of heroic virtue. It was a revolution.
But the problem was the weakness of the human person, regenerated in baptism though he was, remaining tormented by the residual effects of original sin. Since grace perfects nature, as St. Augustine would articulate, the individual would need to cooperate with grace by working on growing in the virtues.
Building good habits is hard. However, encouragement was found in the writings of St. Paul, in his famous analogy of running the race of heavenly glory as the Olympian runs for worldly fame.
Gaining the skills necessary to be a top-tier athlete is hard. We must practice rigorously and discipline the body to overcome physical limitations. There is a saying: “Pain is weakness leaving the body.” Discipline is necessary to train the body away from weakness. Therefore, it stands to reason that if we desire to overcome the world, the flesh, and the pride of life, it is necessary to discipline ourselves like an athlete.
Out of this line of thinking came the various penitential movements that have existed since these early days. However, as with most things human, there were excesses.
As this idea of self-discipline was developing, there was a concurrent controversy in the Church about how often a Christian could receive the sacrament of the confession. Some people said only once. Others provided no limit.
Why does this matter? Well, in these early days, it was common to be assigned to the “Order of Penance” for a certain amount of time after your public confession of sins. This meant, in many places, that you would sit in the back of the church, wearing a hair shirt, covered in ashes, and unable to receive Holy Communion. In some places, it was customary for the penitents to prostrate themselves as the ministers entered to offer the liturgy, begging for prayers. In the harsher jurisdictions, one could be in this situation for years before being readmitted to full communion.
The question was eventually addressed at the Council of Nicaea, and the lenient position prevailed. However, making restitution remained an important part of the sacrament. So penance, as a form of restitution for one’s sins, remained (and remains) a thing. This, then, led to providential creativity.
Coming out of this context was the idea that a Christian could vow to live perpetually as a penitent so that access to Holy Communion would never be withheld. With that, religious life was born.
Religious life was created so that people could live a life of perfection through labor, penance, prayer, obedience, and proximity to the sacraments. It was an attempt to flee the world and mystically restore the Garden of Eden. This movement exploded in popularity with many people, mostly young, fleeing the cities to seek radical conversion. This was both romantic and serious. The monastery was the holy prison where you committed yourself to make reparation for sins committed.
To be fair, the history is more complicated. However, this summary should be sufficient to bring us to the present.
Ever since the establishment of religious life, and its exultation as the life of perfection, it became customary for people in other states of life—laymen, secular clergy, etc.—to model their lives after it. However, humanity is complicated. There was confusion, and there was conflation of penance as restitution and penance as discipline.
This is an easy error to make. The word is the same. It’s also confusing because the monastic, or religious, generally speaking, does both restitution and discipline at the same time. The idea also gets taken into different cultures with different attitudes about what constitutes “real” penance. There is a shift in many places from disciple “as an aid to virtue” to simply “do hard things.” This is probably why so many saints engage in extreme penances in their youth. However, as they matured in the spiritual life, they generally repented of these excesses as a form of pride.
Restitution, or as it is also known, satisfaction, is an essential part of the sacrament of confession. We make restitution in this life, and in the life to come, to satisfy justice. That is, in fact, why purgatory exists: to satisfy the needs of justice that are the result of the residual temporal effects of sin after death.
This sort of penance doesn’t need to be hard. It needs to be sincere. This is why the usual penances assigned by priests in confession tend to be easy and almost always an “act of religion.” Acts of religion are the most meritorious acts we can do, because these are how we satisfy the justice due God. It is where justice and mercy meet. The efficacy of the restitution made is proportionate to the love with which one does the act. This is penance as restitution.
Penance as a discipline is a different animal. This is properly called mortification. These mortifications, as the name implies, help facilitate that death to self that is necessary in disciplining the body for the sake of virtue. They are difficult because they deny the body some comfort.
But discipline is not sadistic. If an athlete is too hard on his body, he will injure himself. It’s the same with spiritual disciplines. As a professional athlete has a trainer, so too should the Christian who is engaging in more than the basic Lenten practices of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. This is necessary to avoid the sins of pride and vainglory. This could be a spiritual director, a religious superior, or an approved rule of a fraternity that governs the nature and extent of its members’ mortifications. It is generally ill advised for an individual to direct himself in such things.
Remember what I said earlier about how many of the most penitential saints considered their excess of mortifications to be pride? For the Gen Z folks who will read this, you can’t just be a based Chad to own the devil. Instead, as our Lord says, you must learn from him and become meek and humble of heart. That is the most difficult mortification of all.