1 November 2014 A.D. Reformation Countdown Plus One: Remembering
Rome’s Indulgences
Indulgence
Indulgence, a distinctive feature of the penitential system of both the Western
medieval and the Roman Catholic church that granted full or partial remission
of the punishment of sin. The granting of indulgences was predicated on two
beliefs. First, in the sacrament of penance
it did not suffice to have the guilt (culpa)
of sin forgiven through absolution alone; one also needed to undergo temporal punishment (poena, from p[o]enitentia, “penance”)
because one had offended Almighty God. Second, indulgences rested on belief in purgatory,
a place in the next life where one could continue to cancel the accumulated
debt of one’s sins, another Western medieval conception not shared by the
Eastern Greek church.
From the early
church onward, bishops could reduce or dispense with the rigours of penances,
but indulgences emerged in only the 11th and 12th centuries when the idea of purgatory took widespread hold and when the popes became the activist leaders of the
reforming church. In their zeal, they promoted the militant reclamation of
once-Christian lands—first of Iberia in the Reconquista,
then of the Holy Land in the Crusades—offering
“full remission of sins,” the first indulgences, as inducements to
participation.
Papal
pronouncements, oral and written, were often vague, however, and raised many
questions among the pious. To clarify all these issues, the Scholastic theologians of the 12th and 13th centuries worked out a fully articulated
theory of penance. It consisted of three parts: contrition, confession,
and satisfaction. The debt of forgiven sin could be reduced through the
performance of good works in this life (pilgrimages, charitable acts, and the
like) or through suffering in purgatory. Indulgences could be granted only by
popes or, to a lesser extent, archbishops and bishops as ways of helping
ordinary people measure and amortize their remaining debt. “Plenary,”
or full, indulgences cancelled all the existing obligation, while “partial” indulgences remitted only a portion of it. People
naturally wanted to know how much debt was forgiven (just as modern students
want to know exactly what they need to study for examinations), so set periods
of days, months, and years came gradually to be attached to different kinds of
partial indulgences.
One did not,
however, have to do it all by oneself. Medieval Christianity was a vast community of mutual help through prayer and good works, uniting
the living and the dead in the Church Militant on earth, the Church Suffering
in purgatory, and the Church Triumphant in heaven. The good works of Jesus
Christ, the saints, and others could be drawn upon to liberate
souls from purgatory. In 1343 Pope
Clement VI decreed that all these good works were in the Treasury
of Merit, over which the pope had control.
This highly
complicated theological system, which was framed as a means to help people
achieve their eternal salvation, easily lent itself to misunderstanding and abuse as early as the 13th
century, much sooner than is usually thought. A principal contributing factor
was money. Paralleling the rise of indulgences, the Crusades, and the reforming papacy was the economic resurgence of Europe that began
in the 11th century. Part of this tremendous upsurge was the phenomenon of commutation, through which any services, obligations, or
goods could be converted into a corresponding monetary payment. Those eager to
gain plenary indulgences, but unable to go on pilgrimage to Jerusalem, wondered
whether they might perform an alternative good work or make an equivalent
offering to a charitable enterprise—for example, the building of a leprosarium
or a cathedral. Churchmen allowed such commutation, and the popes even
encouraged it, especially Innocent
III (reigned 1198–1216) in his various Crusading projects. From the
12th century onward the process of salvation was therefore increasingly bound
up with money. Reformers of the 14th and 15th centuries frequently complained
about the “sale” of indulgences by pardoners. And as the papacy weakened in
this period, secular governments increasingly allowed the granting of
indulgences only in return for a substantial share of the yield, often as much
as two-thirds. The princes got most of the money, and the popes got most of the
blame.
People also
wondered whether they could gain an indulgence for someone who had died and was
presumed to be in purgatory. If so, in acting out of charity for someone else,
were they then obliged to confess their own sins, as they would if they sought
to obtain an indulgence for themselves? Although these concerns were surfacing
as early as the 13th century, it was only in 1476 that Pope Sixtus
IV declared that one could indeed gain an indulgence for someone in
purgatory. Sixtus, however, left unanswered the problem of the necessity of
personal confession.
This profound uncertainty surrounding penance threatened to sever completely
the nexus between the confession of sin and the achievement of salvation.
That is precisely
what happened in the early 16th century. In northern Germany a Dominican friar,
Johann
Tetzel, was credited with hawking indulgences for the dead by
saying, “When a penny in the coffer rings, / A soul from Purgatory springs.” Aristotle was right: every “system,” natural or man-made, moves inexorably toward
corruption, degeneration, and death. The system was finally killed by a young
Augustinian friar in a neighbouring territory, Martin
Luther. He was not (as is widely thought) moved originally to a
critique of the system by these abuses but rather by his own terrible spiritual
suffering. In any case, he drew up a devastating document, the Ninety-five
Theses of October 1517. In number 82 he blew the lid off the system.
Cleverly reporting the “keen criticisms of the laity,” he vitiated papal
control of the Treasury
of Merit by writing that the laity
ask, for example: Why does not the pope liberate everyone
from Purgatory for the sake of love (a most holy thing) and because of the
supreme necessity of their souls? This would be morally the best of reasons.
Meanwhile he redeems innumerable souls for money, a most perishable thing, with
which to build St. Peter’s church, a very minor purpose.
With this blast,
Luther began to knock down the house of cards, and by 1520 he came to the full
realization of his immensely liberating theological message: salvation is free,
and one does not have to do anything, much less pay anything, to obtain it.
Virtually all forms of Protestantism would reject all or most of the penitential system, including indulgences.
The Roman Catholic
church conceded very few points to Luther or the other Reformers. One of the
points was justification by faith (but not by faith “alone,” as Luther insisted
in his misrendering of Paul), and another was the fateful connection between money and indulgences.
While reasserting the place of indulgences in the salvific process, the Council
of Trent condemned “all base gain for securing indulgences” in 1563,
and Pope Pius
V abolished the sale of indulgences in 1567. The system and its
underlying theology otherwise remained intact. Exactly 400 years later, in
1967, Pope Paul
VI modified it by shifting the stress away from the satisfaction of
punishment to the inducement of good works, greatly reducing the number of
plenary indulgences and eliminating the numerical system associated for so long
with partial indulgences.
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