COMPUNCTION (Lat. Compunctio, Unknown to the Classics; Gr. Biblical Κατάνυξις). - A feeling of sorrow and confusion caused by awareness of one's own moral unworthiness. The doctrine of compunction is one of the most important in the history of spirituality. The word is already found in Sacred Scripture, used metaphorically to signify repentance and keen sorrow for the offense of God and for sins committed (Acts 2:37; Rom. 11:8, "spirit of compunction" is equivalent to "stupefaction"). This has remained the fundamental sense, but in time various nuances were added to it, modifying it.
Thus to the sadness and tears for one's own sins were joined those provoked by the misery of this poor world, the "lacrimarum vallis," arousing in the soul of the fervent Christian contempt for its false pleasures but also fear of letting oneself be led astray from the path of true life. Then the fear of the divine judgment and a vivid desire for God, loved as the supreme good and the source of all happiness. In this state, the thought of heaven and of its true joys invades the soul and gathers it into itself far from the preoccupations of this world. The sadness, the sorrow of having offended a God so good and great, always remains the principal character of Christian compunction, but the other ideas of contempt for the world, of devotion and intense love of God and desire for eternal life are joined to it without difficulty, so that in the development of spirituality, in the first centuries, among the monks of the desert, in the Fathers of the Church, such as St. John Chrysostom, St. Augustine and above all St. Gregory the Great, and throughout the Middle Ages, compunction gathers within itself some of the essential ideas of Christian perfection.
From the 16th century onward there is much less speaking and writing about compunction; probably, as Fr. Pegna observes, because with the development and systematization of theology the various ideas aggregated around the primitive notion of compunction from a practical point of view have naturally disintegrated and gone on to form new complexes. Finally, although the use of the term compunction has become rarer, the ancient ideas that it gathered within itself have remained alive and even today come under other names (contrition, the idea of reparation, Christian humanism, etc.).