Exomologesis (ex-oh-maw-low-JEE-sis), "public penance," a technical term in religious studies which was made famous in the twentieth century by the French cultural critic Michel Foucault. The word's etymology is found in the rather unwieldy Greek verb exomologeomai, meaning "to confess." The root of this verb, homologeo, means to declare or proclaim; the prefix ex- adds a further connotation of doing this outward, which is to say in front of an audience.

Starting in the third century, and continuing throughout the Middle Ages, Christians who had confessed to grave sins like murder, adultery, and idolatry were not permitted back into communion with the church until they had spent some time publically expressing their remorse for their crimes. Usually this meant sitting on the steps of the church, dressed in sackcloth and weeping loudly -- for this reason, penitents were sometimes called flentes, or "weepers." Christians who were still in good standing would be expected to pray for the penitents on their way into the church. After some time, the flens would be permitted into the building to listen to sermons, but he would not be allowed to partake in the Eucharist. Eventually, after the community was satisfied with the penitent's expressions of remorse, he would be welcomed fully back into communion. Just how long this whole process took depended on the sect -- some hardliners made penitents wait ten years for forgiveness, and some particularly guilt-ridden Christians almost certainly extended their penitence for much longer than was officially required of them. The practice seems to have died out sometime in the eleventh century.

Foucault, who was fascinated by systems of punishment, humiliation, and surveillance used by different cultures in history, found exomologesis a useful way to talk about the presentation of the self to one's community. Whether penance actually purified sinners was of little interest to Foucault; what he focused on was the way that it created a public image of the sinner. Both the sinner herself and the "good Christians" who brushed past her on their way into church were able to affirm and find comfort in their ideas of what a sinner "looked like."

Though Christian sinners are no longer required to sit on church steps and wail, Foucault believed that exomologesis still takes place in other arenas. He generalized the term to mean any act that publically distinguishes "good" people from "bad" people. To perform an exomologesis, Foucault argued, is not just to believe something, but to affirm the fact of that belief: "to make the act of affirmation an object of affirmation," in his memorable phrase. In this broader sense, exomologesis still exists on the playground, in the army, in the workplace, and anywhere else where people are expected to conform in a noisy, public way.

However, the situation is more complex than that. Later Christian tradition emphasized private, verbal confessions of sins -- what most modern people think of when they think of going to confession. Foucault called this exagoreusis ("telling"), and he did not necessarily think this was intrinsically better than the ostentatious penances of the ancient world. Where exomologesis created a part for the criminal to play, a "self outside the self" as it were, exagoreusis by contrast compresses the misbehaving self and the true self into one being who quietly obeys authority. We live in an exagoreutic culture, Foucault would say, which emphasizes mental and self-reflective ways of dealing with problems over ritualized and theatrical behaviour.

Further Reading:

Foucault is always a blast. Discipline and Punish is the best place to get a general introduction to his ideas on, well, discipline and punishment. On exomologesis specifically, see his essay "About the Beginnings of the Hermeneutics of the Self", which appeared in Political Theory in 1993.

For more on the early Christian material, see the Catholic Encylopedia's articles on Tertullian, found at http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/14520c.htm, and on penance itself, found at http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/11618c.htm. This material is somewhat outdated and has a very strong Roman Catholic bias, but it is a serviceable introduction to the literature.