The need for purity of heart.

Depending on how strong the feeling of guilt is in different religions, the need for purification is also expressed; the consciousness of human weakness then helps the emergence of purification rituals, ceremonies, mysteries. Proper purification from evil, of course, happens through virtuous living. The best penances are good works. For a man who knows his faults no longer trusts himself very much. After all, aren’t all people given enough opportunities to right all the wrongs they have done in life? Have they committed in life?
Even Christianity makes a demand for purity of soul. The perfect love of God is incompatible with a defiled heart. That is why we believe in purification even in death and, after death, in purgatory. All the more reason to purify ourselves here on earth. Those of the Eastern Fathers who see the goal of life in contemplation, contemplation, like to repeat the sentence of St. Isaac the Syrian: “The soul sees God by how pure the heart is.” They liken the soul to a well that reflects the sky if the water is clear. “What, then, leads to that goal which leads to purity of heart,” St. Cassian writes, “let us grasp with all our strength; what from that goal, let us flee from it as from danger and harm.” What are the means of purification in the Church?
They may be expressed in one word: conversion. It should be, of course, this word is to be taken in its broadest sense. Those who listened to the apostles’ preaching after Christ’s resurrection were converted and baptized. Baptism is a symbol of death and resurrection. Symbolically, the older man is buried underwater, and a new man emerges who has promised to live in Christ according to his commandments. In the earliest times, adults were baptized. It was not thought that they could fall back into the old errors. And yet, the experience of the very soon showed that even a Christian is weak. It was, therefore, necessary at once to reconcile the erring with the Church, and those who erred severely, e.g., apostates in times of persecution.
It was a matter of reconciliation with the Church in the first place, of readmittance into the community of believers. However, because it is loosed in heaven, what is released from the apostles on earth (Mt. 16,
19); this reconciliation with the Church also implies the forgiveness of sins before God. We are not surprised, then, that repentance was initially public. Remnants of it are still preserved today in monastic chapters. In the new age, attempts are being made here and there to revive the practice in the smaller circles of the faithful. No doubt that it corresponds to the spirit of the Gospel, to the structure of the Church, to the words of the Father: ‘Forgive us our trespasses, as one as we forgive our debtors. The saying is true that the better can be the greatest enemy of the good. We are not all on such a spiritual height that we are willing to confess everything out loud, honestly. The Church introduced early the so-called ear, or private confession. The name “private,” however, is not entirely correct. Admission is indeed made to one priest, bound by the confessional secret, but he is officially there to the place of the Church.

Confession takes the symbolic form of proper judgment. The accuser is the penitent himself. He sues upon himself the transgressions against the divine and ecclesiastical law. The priest, for the Church, condemns him to punishment, to penance. Fort hens, according to the words of the prophet Nahum (1:9), God does not punish a second time; sins are already condemned and atoned for in confession and before God by repentance. Confession, therefore, precedes Christ’s final judgment, putting even those who have been left behind, again after his right hand (cf. Mt 25:33), among those chosen for salvation.