Metropolitan Athanasios on not dwelling on confessed sins

Metropolitan Athanasios of Limassol addresses how Christians should relate to memories of past sins after repentance. He notes that before knowing Christ, every person carried various sins, various captivities, various bad behaviors, and bad ways of life. Upon entering the Church, these harmful habits are severed, or at minimum the believer struggles to sever them.

The metropolitan observes that when someone now living within the Gospel and the grace of God recalls specific things done in the past, a great shame arises internally. He then states decisively: those sins are done, they are finished. The person repented, confessed, and set life in order. It is sufficient to know that one has sinned before God.

The metropolitan warns against recalling sins "κατά είδος", in detail, specifically, or by kind, because this practice alone harms and pollutes the mind. The teaching draws a clear line: acknowledgment of having sinned is necessary and healthy; detailed rehearsal of confessed sins is spiritually damaging. The metropolitan uses a sequence of verbs, metanoēsamen (we repented), exomologēthēkamen (we confessed), taktōpisthēkamen (we put in order/regulated), to mark the completed action of reconciliation.

He presents the memory of shame as a present experience that must be answered with the objective reality of the sacraments already received. The directive is pastoral: the believer who feels shame over a past already brought to confession should not feed that shame by rehearsing particular sins, since doing so damages the nous, the spiritual faculty of perception.