Man is a sinful creature. Even in paradise man sinned by disobeying the command of his Lord. After the Fall, man not only sinned in thoughts, words, and deeds, but was also affected by original sin. Christian grace was able to dispense with original sin through the ritual of baptism, but although the average Christian may have wanted desperately to abide by divine rules, in practice he never succeeded completely in doing so. Only a handful of saints were able to avoid every kind of sin. Therefore, one had to decide how to deal with sin. In the period we are dealing with here – the period from the sixth to the twelfth century – we can discern important developments in the way Christians tried to handle this question.

When the Irish abbot Cummian (fl. c. 632), in the seventh century, wrote a preface to his collection of penitential decisions, he listed twelve remedies for sins, or “remedies of wounds,” as he called them. He presented these with biblical citations bolstering their effectiveness. The list of remedies starts with baptism, and continues with the virtue of love (caritas), the fruit of alms, the shedding of tears, the confession of crimes, the affliction of the heart and body, the emendations of one’s ways, the intercession of saints, the merits of mercy and faith, the conversion and salvation of others, pardoning others for their sins, and finally, the passion of martyrdom. Cummian did not invent this list of remedies, but based it on an earlier work, the Collationes of John Cassian (c. 360–430), one of the founding fathers of western monasticism.